Posted on 01/25/2009 9:20:17 AM PST by TFine80
On Friday, many people noticed that the federal government established a website entitled Recovery.gov. It includes a graphic of "Recovery.gov" in the normal Obama campaign-style typeset, and it contains the following message.
"Recovery.gov: Check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent. An oversight board will routinely update this site as part of an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government."
Aside from the creepy potential for this website, there seem to be several immediate legal concerns.
1. Why should the General Services Administration write a statement that assumes any piece of legislation will necessarily pass and implement any sort of oversight board at all? This is not the political fiefdom of President Obama. No bill has been passed and no money has been allocated for this oversight board. Why are any career employees of the federal government fiddling around with domains and websites for a future program?
2. Doesn't this violate the existing rules about domain choice in .gov? In the October 21, 2008 letter that initially rejected change.gov before the Obama people applied more pressure, Peter Altermanm, Deputy Associate Administrator of Technology Strategy at the GSA, stated:
"The CFR citation above [41 CFR 102-173.90] addresses special restrictions on the use of registration of canonical, or category, names in the Internet gov domain space. The regulations state that canonical name requests must provide total access coverage for the areas conveyed by the name. Thus, the URL "recreation.gov" would not be approved for the State of Maryland, but the URL "recreationMD.gov" would be approved if it provided statewide coverage. The logic of the name adds value to the dot gov domain. GSA reserves the right to deny use of the canonical names that do not provide appropriate coverage and to arbitrate these issues. Some examples from previous registrations that were also deemed too general are: Hydrogen.gov, Relocate.gov, Women.gov, Water.gov, Contracts.gov, Manager.gov and Innovation.gov."
Recovery is a normative term that has many meanings and has nothing to do with government oversight. It is a political characterization of the function of the to-be-passed bill. Will we always be in recovery mode? Why is a so-called spending oversight website necessarily tied to the generic word "recovery?"
3. Who are "Doug Jackson and Laura Clark?"
The website page holder has the HTML below. Are these low-level functionaries in GSA willing to play along with the Obama White House and their web team? Why are they attaching their names to the site? Do they have ambition with the Obama communications people? Were other GSA people more nervous about establishing this site in violation of normal GSA rules?
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> Page created by Doug Jackson and Laura Clark GSA ---> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>Recovery.Gov </head>
<body bgcolor="#ececec">
<center> <p><br /> <p><br />
<img src="recovery.jpg" alt="Recovery.gov: Check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent. An oversight board will routinely update this site as part of an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government." title="Recovery.gov: Check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent. An oversight board will routinely update this site as part of an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government.">
<br> <h3><a href="http://WhiteHouse.gov">http://WhiteHouse.gov <p> <h3><a href="http://USA.gov">http://USA.gov </center> --->
</body> </html></pre>
4. Is a FOIA request necessary for recovery.gov, as it was for change.gov? See this post from Michelle Malkin about the rule violations committed when change.gov was established: http://michellemalkin.com/2008/12/20/document-drop-the-story-behind-changegov/
http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/819-Recovery-gov.
read the first comment at the bottom. One of the zombies.
Do they mean waste like a $170 million inaugural celebration?
Or, the $850 billion dollar socialist pork-o-rama?
tears come to my eyes. Oh Blech!
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