At a time when even the opaque Federal Reserve says it is trying (although not trying hard enough) to make government transparency a top priority, the confidentiality of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports stands as a curious anomaly. Every year CRS receives over $100 million in taxpayer fu...

I like this post by Mark Morford! I feel the same way as he does when I see the issues that have long been "swept under the carpet" actually addressed! It's still hard to trust after 8 years of hell! I expect it maybe that way for awhile. You gotta admit, it's so exciting to be able to have our Pres...

Governmentattic.org has posted several documents from the Federal Reserve in response to a FOIA request about the Fed's lending activities related to the credit crisis.  We spent some time combing through the documents, and as previous news reports suggested, the Fed's reputation for o...

For those of you counting along at home, let's do some open-government math. The White House has, as we've repeated here again and again, committed itself to posting non-emergency legislation online for public comment for a period of five days. As the most significant piece of legislation thus far t...

Though it may look like disaster.  Those of you outraged by the news that 67 computers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are "missing" and that 13 have been lost or stolen--in this year alone--probably should (maybe shouldn't?) check out the latest report from the National...

I went to the event about open government, it was good.  (It was a "meetup" I guess, in the popular terminology, or a new term I learned, 5à7). Jennifer Bell of VisibleGovernment.ca did a presentation that I liked a lot, about mobilising government data by opening it up for public engagement throu...

Accountability got mugged today when congressional leaders stripped federal whistleblower protections from their compromise stimulus bill. There were, however, a couple of bright spots, with improved language for the government database that will track the flow of stimulus funds to the state and loc...

In the wake of the financial meltdown, many believe that the entire U.S. regulatory framework must be revamped (see, for instance, the recent report by the Government Accountability Office and Jesse Eisenger's column in Portfolio ).  The latest group to add their voice to the debate is the...

In its most recent biennial report on federal programs that are at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) added a new item: the “Outdated U.S. Financial Regulatory System.â€�  And with good reason: as the GAO has detailed, changes in ...

For all the talk in DC about transparency in government, that seemed (at least in my sense) to really come to the forefront of everyone’s attention with the House Rules on social media use issue last July, then escalated with the Senate, the bailouts and finally the election of one of the most...