Yesterday, OMB Watch, a Sunlight Foundation grantee, launched its Web-based Regulatory Resource Center, which they built to provide guidance for citizens wanting to get involved in the federal government's regulatory decision making.  It promises to be a valuable resource, serving as the place to go to understand how regulations work.  The center has two parts: Advocacy Center and the Policy Library.  The Advocacy Center shows users how to comment on regulations and how to use Regulations.gov, the government's site that allows public comments.  The center also has a page that helps users find, read and interpret the Federal Register.  The Policy Library has a flow chart showing how regulations come about, a list of regulatory agencies explaining what each one does, and other neat tools.

Congratulations to our friends at OMB Watch. They continue to thrive at the cutting edge of government transparency and accountability.  Check it out!

When it comes to valuing openness and transparency in their government, the public is far ahead of most politicians as a new survey conducted by OMB Watch makes clear. The public is "clamoring" for a change in priorities. Last week, OMB Watch released the report [PDF] on the survey where they had asked the general public for their input on the top open government questions for candidates for federal offices. "Responses show that, more than anywhere else, Americans want greater transparency in the Executive Branch, particularly the White House," OMB Watch writes.

Here's something that hasn't gotten much attention that should. Late last week, OMB Watch released a valuable background brief on earmarks that gives a good overview of the earmarking process.

Dana Chasin says that the real issue for earmarks is the lack of transparency in the process that has led to corruption. The most effective earmark reforms, Dana writes, would be timely disclosure, revealing to the public what earmarks are being proposed by what lawmakers. He makes a strong case that an outright ban on earmarks won't reduce federal spending...and that really shouldn't be the real focus since earmarked funds are a tiny fraction of the federal budget.

We at the Sunlight Foundation agree that transparency is the needed reform. The Honest Leadership and Government Act of 2007 made some important reforms by providing some of the needed transparency, particularly for the House, but there is so much more that needs to be done.

This document from OMB Watch provides some very useful guidance a set of reforms that could be achievable first steps and that might actually provide some transparency and accountability. Those are good initial goals and they might just prove sufficient.

OMB Watch reports that EconomicIndicators.gov is back in business. Good news!

Dana Chasin, senior advisor at OMB Watch, has posted at the watchdog groups' Budget Blog a two-part profile of the new website of the non-partisan House-Senate Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).  Dana writes that it's "mostly a look-and-feel improvement" with little new content, however, you no longer "feel as though you're entering a 19century crypt when you log into it."  

The 10-member committee, established by Congress in 1926, investigates, reviews and issues reports on federal tax policy. He lauds the JCT for bringing the mysterious methodologies of revenues estimates into clearer view," even though they add that it's only a start.  Which legislation the JCT chooses to provide estimates for and the timeframe involved deserve a more thorough explanation.  "This process is opaque even to members of the Senate," Dana writes, and "the discreet Delphic charm of the JCT remains fundamentally intact."  

This weekend, House Republicans held their annual three-day retreat to the historic Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. Earmark reform was a hot topic at the retreat, with young Turks challenging the old bulls to take bold action for reform, as Dana Chasin wrote at OMB Watch's blog. Younger conservatives pushed for a moratorium on GOP earmarks through the rest of 2008 in hope of showing voters Republicans are serious about fiscal responsibility. Ultimately, the bulls won.

They did attempt to hang some window dressing on the decision by sending a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling on her to establish a bipartisan panel to work on reducing pork-barrel spending. And they took four other steps: pledging to not fund projects named after themselves (Ouch! That must hurt.), promising not to "airdrop" earmarks into bills, agreeing not to send funds to "front" organizations and pass-through groups, and requiring members to place rationales for earmarks in the Congressional Record.

Last week, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch, both Sunlight Foundation grantees, released a report highlighting how many federal agencies' databases and websites contain flaws making them hard to search with commonly used search engines. The report, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines," shows how vital government information appears "invisible" to ordinary Americans using the Internet. Congress passed the E-Government Act of 2002 to promote the public's access to government information and services. Based on this report, there a whole lot of work that still needs to be done.

The report not only points out the flaws in current government databases that make it hard, if not impossible, for ordinary citizens to find the data they are looking for, but it also provides fixes that would encourage greater accessibility of information by making it more searchable.

The launch of OMB's USASpending.gov, based on the Sunlight funded FedSpending.org, is a huge accomplishment worth celebrating. The Washington Post's story talks about the strange bedfellows that made it happen:

Robert Shea is a Republican insider with a head for business and a yen for federal program performance standards. Gary Bass is a government watchdog with a mean bite who wants openness and knows how to get it.

Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking....

Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking.

We're pleased to have been ahead of this curve -- and one of the prime catalysts for it. At the recent celebration of the one year successes of FedSpending.org (hosted by its creator OMB Watch), it was noted that over 5 million searches of the data occured in the last 12 months. That's not visits or hits, that's actual searches for the data! Now that's some success. At that event, Robert Shea of OMB also promised that the government data would be made available with programming interfaces to make it easy for developers and technologically sophisticated citizens to use the data in ways yet to be imagined. How nice that this government agency really gets what transparency is all about. 

Sunlight grantee OMB Watch is celebrating the first anniversary of their FedSpending.org, a searchable database of almost $17 trillion in federal spending. It's been a big hit, and we want to congratulate our colleagues at OMB Watch for their success. FedSpending.org is a perfect example of transparency in action. It has complete federal government annual data from FY 2000 through FY 2006, and partial data available for FY 2007. It has become the standard for online disclosure of government contracts and grants. For citizens and patriots, snoops, muckrakers, and journalists its become a must. What a service! Coinciding with the anniversary, OMB Watch is releasing new, improved, and even more powerful features of the database. They also have made what they call "major functionality improvements," that includes a "mapping feature on all searches," a "SuperSearch" function for all advanced searching, and other user-friendly functions. With the new features, it appears they are closing in on a warp drive for governmental research and transparency.

Some of grantees are stepping out...two of them have interesting pieces published within the past several days. The (Salida, Colo.) Mountain Mail ran a column today by Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, on the total disarray the budget process is in on Capitol Hill. In June, the paper published a very informative column Ryan wrote on mining reform, which the House passed last week.

Also last week, The Chronicle of Philanthropy published Gary Bass' piece "Advocacy is not a Dirty Word". In the piece, Gary, founder and e.d. of OMB Watch, makes the case that non-profit organizations, as well as the foundations that fund them, should engage public policy as advocates. Itʼs a message he more fully outlines in his new book "Seen but Not Heard: Strengthening Nonprofit Advocacy".