Transparency bill worked on in the open

Publication: The Hill

Kevin Bogardus
May 1, 2008

Public interest groups far and wide want to pull back the curtain on the federal government. To make a point, they are drafting a transparency proposal online and allowing anyone with a computer to take part in the legislative process.

Drawing on several pieces of legislation already moving through Congress, the transparency measure will still find a tough time in passing. Many of those bills, such as releasing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports and providing more access to presidential records, have been gummed up for years and still have not become law.

The effort, led by the Sunlight Foundation , has also piqued the interest of Capitol Hill aides.

John Wonderlich, a program director at Sunlight, said odds are high for the whole package becoming law, even though about a third of the online draft is drawn from existing bills.

"We would love the whole thing to pass," said Wonderlich. "Even if the bill does not pass, we think it's valuable to have the conversation."

The groups' allies on the Hill are tempering expectations while at the same time doing their best to move the ideas along.

"In regard to some of these bills that are already introduced, they have already been very tough to pass," said a Senate aide. "We have not given up on any of these things, though. A lot of them have gained traction."

Congress has made some strides on this front in the last year, first with the signing of a new ethics and lobbying law and recently with last week's House passage of legislation expanding oversight of federal contractors.

Supporters say more changes are likely to follow.

"A lot of these provisions are already supported in spirit," said a House aide.

Situated at PublicMarkup.org , the legislation has attracted 120 comments since its release on March 31, an average of about four per day. The proposed bill targets a broad range of subjects, from amending the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to posting congressional committee schedules online. It targets both the legislative and executive branches for more disclosure and better record keeping.

The process of how the bill is coming together, however, is what has generated the most praise.

"It is going to revolutionize the way we look at legislation by creating this very simple and elegant structure," said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator for Taxpayers for Common Sense , a budget watchdog group that takes a more old-fashioned approach to ferreting out earmarks from thousand-page appropriations bills. Staffers there typically shared copies of legislation, writing in the margins and staining pages with coffee.

Sunlight's website provides a model for a much cleaner approach down the road.

"I can see us using this Intranet model in our office," said Ashdown.

Individuals can make general comments, or direct their attention to any one of the bill's nine titles.

"Ordinarily, public discussion of bills like this is quite broad, and limited to blanket assertions that the entire bill is either good or bad," said Tim Jones, activism and technology manager at the Electronic Frontier Foundation , in an e-mail. "But this system allows citizens to discuss specific bits of the bill at quite a detailed level, which isn't something that's happened before."

Opening the process up to the broader cyber audience has its drawbacks. Some of the initial comments described the online draft as "dumb" and "amateurish."

In response, Wonderlich himself posted that the website's purpose was to take the advice of ordinary people and "turn it into something effective and useful, since even amateurs without legislative drafting experience have valuable input, as is obvious by the value of the comments on this bill."

Also, people can comment anonymously on the bill. That's a weakness in the process, according to Wendell Cochran, a journalism professor at American University who has participated in the open process.

"On the Hill, I think these would be dismissed out of hand, just as form letters and faxes," Cochran said in an e-mail.

Wonderlich said Sunlight intentionally created the anonymous-comment feature with legislative aides in mind.

 "We found that staff and other experts appreciate the freedom to weigh in without attribution," he said.

Some of the bill's more administrative measures may have a better chance of becoming law. For example, one provision would make data on Senate votes much more accessible to users, who could then tally up vote counts for specific lawmakers.

"There is no reason we cannot provide this information," said the Senate aide. 

Sunlight is accepting comments on the draft for another two weeks. The suggestions will be gathered and added to a second draft, which will also be posted online. 

Wonderlich will then take the bill to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers on sponsoring the legislation.