Paul, Obama, and Brownback support "google government"

[nancylebov]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/08/26/obama-only-dem-candidate-_n_61851.html

It is one of the unlikelier alliances in the 2008 presidential campaign: what possibly could bring together Barack Obama, Sam Brownback and Ron Paul? The answer: the highly ambitious, if infelicitously named, Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.

The act is meant to bring average Americans a kind of Google for the federal government, an online search engine that will allow citizens to look up any company, organization or other entity receiving federal contracts, grants and earmarks. The act was passed by Congress and signed by President Bush last year, but some of its supporters charge that federal agencies are already dragging their feet on its implementation.

Offhand, I can't think of anything wrong with this proposal. Ok, it would collide with national security, but even if the public is only keeping track of the vast majority of the government, it's progress.

Comments

[nwl.livejournal.com]

Offhand, I can't think of anything wrong with this proposal.

Well, maybe not "wrong", but how about technologically near-impossible? To a non-computer geek, doing an automatic data dump across agencies sounds quick and easy. It's not.

Oh, running it agency by agency might not be bad, but the real trick is linking the agencies and maybe even the different parts of the agencies into one usable database. While it might not be impossible, it's not something that takes a few hours work. It might take years. This is because they all have different ways of storing and retrieving data. You might think that the government has a standard for this. Yes, each agency does, which is different from other agencies. Well, they did when I worked there in the early 90's and I'm willing to bet it hasn't changed.

I know several people who are in agencies subsumed into Homeland Security - it was a nightmare, on a tech level. I'm not sure that the communications are all that smooth yet.

I'm not saying it can't be done, a database of government contractors, I'm saying it's going to take time, depending on how things are supposed to work and how much funding it got.

Sounds like an interesting project.

I believe The Washington Post runs a list of the government contracts awarded each week. Maybe people could just access that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's a very interesting point.

I don't know how ambitious the project would be. Having anything about the content of the contracts, or even their size, would be a mess.

Or maybe not. Here's Nader calling for all government contracts to be online, and saying that a few of them are already online, with the point made that some agencies are already have their contracts in electronic form for internal use.

It would be a job for real political finance junkies to pull out anything useful if the contracts were just tossed up online as pdfs, but it doesn't sound technically difficult. What am I missing?

I found that link when I was looking for the Washpost list of contracts, but there's no obvious way to find the contract list.