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Mark Tapscott (back to story)
December 13, 2001
Bush project could end closed-door government
There’s been precious little coverage yet in the national media – properly focused as it is on the war on terrorism – but President George W. Bush has started a project that could someday assure that much more of the public’s business is done in public.
The project is an initiative overseen by Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels to expand the frontiers of electronic government through Uncle Sam’s FirstGov.gov Web site.
Part of the OMB project is making more federal contract data publicly available via the government’s Web portal. This is not the ideal – which would be having all the government’s approximately 10,000 contracts worth nearly $200 billion annually being posted on the Web for public examination – but it is a significant step forward.
Under the present system, it is usually easier to discover the formula for Classic Coke or the recipe for the Colonel’s Extra Crispy fried chicken than to get credible answers from a government agency about one of those 10,000 contracts.
That is why support for the idea of Web posting of federal contracts is emerging across the political spectrum. Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and the Consumer Project on Technology’s James Love proposed Web posting of federal contracts to President Clinton but got only a cursory response.
More recently, in a column for the Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire, yours truly included the proposal among several measures President Bush could use to undo much of the damage inflicted on the public’s right to know during the Clinton scandals.
Now Daniels disclosed in a Nov. 26 letter to Love that “the Bush administration shares your belief that the federal government should use the Internet to give the public easier access to information about its contracts.” As a result, Daniels said, “we have in process an initiative to re-engineer the existing Federal Procurement Data System, which should result in a wealth of additional data being made available to the public.”
Unfortunately, the OMB project stops short of Web posting of all contracts with supporting documentation, but Daniels has now put the Bush administration on record as favoring use of the Internet to make public access to such documents easier.
The OMB Director cites costs and excessive labor demands as the main reasons for not going to full posting. “Many federal contracts (or the documents that are associated with a contract) contain trade secrets and other confidential business information that is protected under federal law,” Daniels said in his letter to Love.
Agencies would thus have to spend vast amounts of time going through existing contracts to determine which parts contain confidential information or data, Daniels said. “Given the very substantial amount of work that would be required, we believe that this approach would be impractical and would divert scarce agency resources away from other electronic government activities that hold greater promise for benefiting the public.”
Even so, the Bush White House deserves credit for taking a partial step down a road that could revolutionize the way individual citizens, small businesses and Fortune 500 corporations deal with the government. It will be interesting to see if President Bush is credited for the OMB initiative by those on the Left who see a conspiracy against the First Amendment lurking behind every White House proposal.
There are at least three ways in which the Bush proposal could have such a dramatic impact. First, greater transparency in government contracting will reduce the waste and fraud that annually cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. After all, what government contracting officer would steer a lucrative deal to a favored company knowing the whole world will be able to read the contract on the Web?
Second, Web posting would make the federal contracting process more competitive, thus lowering the cost of government to taxpayers. For many of the same reasons that commercial advertising creates downward pressure on prices for goods and services, bidders for government contracts would face a vastly more open market and adjust their bids accordingly.
Finally, the public’s ability to hold politicians and bureaucrats accountable would be dramatically enhanced. Instead of being a near-impossibility, getting the facts about a government contract would be a couple of mouse clicks away for everybody, including those pesky journalists, think-tank analysts and non-profit sector activists.
And won’t it be great when the citizen’s mouse replaces the Inspector-General’s subpoena as the crooked bureaucrat’s biggest fear?
Mark Tapscott is Director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, a TownHall.com member group. Contact Mark Tapscott
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