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| Editorial: Honoring The President's Promises |
| Monday, 28 September 2009 12:21 |
 The prime purpose of the stimulus is to create jobs, Blair Levin told me, and to bring broadband to all unserved Americans. http://bit.ly/40Zd0m Sounds good to me, and I'm doing my best to keep those goals paramount. Obama promised an “unprecedented level of openness in Government. ... My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, todisclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.With a recovery package of this scale comes a responsibility to assure every taxpayer that we are being careful with the money they work so hard to earn. ... we expect you, the American people, to hold us accountable for the results. That is why we have created Recovery.gov so every American can go online and see how their money is being spent.”I've been trying for several weeks to get basic information about the stimulus proposals, starting with the number of unserved reached and how many jobs will be directly created by each. My goal is to identify smart government choices before the money is spent. I haven't asked for anything that should be sensitive, confidential, or burdensome to produce. I hope the difficulty has just been some overworked staffers who can't keep up. It's now up to Larry Strickling, head of NTIA, to decide whether that information should be publicly available. They have a pretty good database system that can produce most reports in an excel or database file in minutes. They have on staff the brilliant Danny Weitzner, who led the effort for the semantic web for the W3C at MIT, who knows how to solve any technical problems. Larry, please issue a simple directive to your staff: release all non-confidential information freely and as quickly as practical. |