Right now, if you are an American, you have an incredibly narrow view of what your government spends. When a news story breaks you can suddenly find out that the Supreme Court spent $50,000 on hookers and blow in Vegas, but it’s usually months or over a year after the fact.
A general report is provided quarterly, but I consider the usefulness of something like “TSA - $1B” to be less than ideal.
The revelation of misdeeds typically works in one of two ways:
A) A reporter gets wind of a scoop, files a FOIA request for the accounting records he has his eye on and then reports the amount of hooker purchased as an expose.
B) A partisan actor goes fishing for “Outrage” material and finds it in a place that lets him take a pot shot at his political rivals.
So, what if there was a different option?
My proposal is fairly simple: Require the government at all levels to detail its income and expenditures monthly by a certain date, say the fifth of each month, to a central database that can be browsed on the web in-depth by any visitor.
This detail would require the hierarchy backing the purchase (E.g. GA -> GA Dept of Parks and Recreation -> Northern Region -> Fulton County or however they are internally broken down) the name of the purchaser, the amount, a description of the charge, and who the money was paid to. This would include everyone employed by the government as well as payments made for all services.
The exceptions for reporting would be for classified operations, which would only track the total spent, say on the NSA, and be allowed to lack detail. Also reporting would be temporarily suspended for up to 6 months in the case of natural disaster, attack, or other exceptional circumstances.
I know that there are movements, especially at local/state levels, to move towards transparency, but this would supplant those efforts and make it mandatory at all levels of government. My idea is to make it transparent enough that people could easily see who, what and where the pieces of the government that currently exist are functioning and how much they are pushing out the door.
Americans: What do you think? Is this level of transparency a bad idea? A good idea? Why is that your opinion?
Non-Americans: What’s your take on this idea for transparency? Has your government adopted this and provided you with comprehensive information about how they spend the taxes they collect? Do you have an alternative method that works better/would work better?
I’ve tried to keep my personal views out of the above, except for my belief in the need for transparency. My personal view on the topic is that, while government is important, we need some way to easily find and assert political pressure to keep costs down. Having a transparent view into the internal fiscal workings of the government at all levels would allow us, as citizens, to directly identify and prioritize certain cuts, such as (my personal pet peeve) duplicated programs under different wings of the government.
I’m not sure it would work out in the way you’d expect. Sure, lots of bad programs would be cut,along with a few good programs because of one or two bad or spinworthy examples contained within.
But that itself might be worth it if in the end it led to a true, substantial, reduction in the actual budget. But it wouldn’t. Because the amount of spending on non-defense non-mandatory budget is minuscule compared to the rest of the budget. It’s around the same size as the deficit. That includes the entire executive branch and Congress.
In order to even start to eliminate the deficit you need to raise taxes or lower spending on SS, Medicare Medicaid and / or defense. And having a way to highlight bad spending in all other realms other than that would lead to people thinking they were cutting expenses but really weren’t. You need to eliminate literally thousands of examples of waste to even begin to make an impact.
How does the OP deal with the fact that 99% of people don’t have the first clue about how to read a budget?
If you would like to review the TSA budget, go nuts. Their budget requests, and the requests for all other agencies (except classified programs) is already available on the web. The first thing you will notice is that there isn’t a line-item for “hookers and blow in Las Vegas.”
But a system that would report monthly expenditures among all government agencies in a consolidated format would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, be of no use to the general public due to the vast amounts of information it would generate and the average person’s total lack of knowledge of how budgeting works, and generally be a total waste of time and effort for no substantive benefit to anyone.
I look at it from the other side. They have a budget of X. Are they efficiently spending that budget? Or is it going to ridiculous things?
While the deficit is a problem that this proposal doesn’t directly address, I do believe it would help if ALL spending is reported publicly. I’m not just talking about the departments that are mandatory vs non-mandatory. Every branch, office, and member of the government would have to account for their spending. Put $500 for a rental car on the GVisa? Great. Why? A conference? Ok. Did we spend $250B putting conferences on across the entire Federal Government? Maybe we should tell our Congressional representation that that’s a joke and we can eliminate some of that cost, especially if any of that cost was ill-spent. (What? Having Billy Ray Cyrus personally serenade my team at the Las Vegas Hotel wasn’t a good transaction? Well…Why not?!)
It would indeed cost that much. But why would it cost that much? That’s the problem. Government programs spend an insane amount of money and everyone in Congress just kinda shrugs or maybe issues a talking point about “pork” spending if anyone brings it up.
As for reading a budget, there is a difference between reading a budget request (which has to be vague because it’s the future and an estimation of funds to spend based on mandate and is also giving it’s request a positive spin to convince people to give them cash) and reading a statement of things already paid. For example: I’d bet that most Americans can look at their checking account and go “I understand that!” I’m certain that there are those who can’t, but we shouldn’t design government reporting with them in mind, at least in my opinion.
I also disagree that it would be useless. Americans would concentrate on what is of the most interest to them. Some people would look only at their city to see if there is any waste there. Some people would look only at Federal Defense budgets because “those guys spend too darn much!” The best part about this sort of open transparency is that you only need a few people looking at each segment to see that Government Person’s GVisa was used 14 times at Martha’s Vineyard Hookery for a swipe of $15,000 each.
Don’t you think you could find 10,000 people of 310 Million to each want to look over parts of the federal expenses paid and raise a red flag that something isn’t kosher?
For the state/local level, couldn’t you find 100-200 people per Million population to want to do the same thing?
On the “bright eyed wonderment for the future” slant, if you could export the data to G Spreadsheets or Excel you could setup formulas that runs through the entire thing and flag things that look suspicious according to incidents that happened in the past for you (assuming you were interested in looking at it in the first place).
I’ve looked at it between 2 and 3 times per year since it launched. Admittedly, I’ve only looked at my own state and the total expenditure, but in terms of the reinvestment act, that’s all I care about. If another state is getting twice the funding, that doesn’t impact me much.
Turn-around questions: How many Americans do you think know it exists? If they are looking specifically for “Planned Parenthood funding” or “Number of Christian Schools receiving funding” where do they go?
Each government agency that might deal with some aspect of funding a particular type of item tracks and provides public information in different ways. Some departments give you nothing. Others give you generic data. Few give you specific spending information.
I’d distrust anyone who felt the desire to do this. Not that they would necessarily have an agenda, but that it would be trivial for a group with an agenda to completely hijack the process.
So, you think anyone should be able to raise a red flag on anything they think might not be kosher? Who exactly are they raising the red flag to? Who is investigating the red flags? How much do you figure that might cost?
A huge part of the cost of government is the layers and layers of oversight and approvals. Most of them are a result of past abuses, so I don’t really see a way to avoid them, but adding yet another layer where non-experts can trigger expensive investigations anytime they feel like it? I see spending a lot of money to save a tiny amount.
Consider the NASA viking fiasco: Some innocuous photos of NASA staff dressed up as vikings led to a congressional investigation to be sure they weren’t wasting government money (they weren’t). Much, much more money was spent on the investigation than the amount under consideration, which turned out not to be a problem in the end anyway…
Remember William Proxmire? He was able, in the name of “saving money” mock and kill some very good programs, because the average boob out there couldn’t see past his mocking to see their utility.
Do you have any idea of the cost of doing this level of detail every month? Ever wonder why companies do this quarterly? And “putting it in a database” does not mean that anyone can access it effectively, let alone answer questions like some of the ones you posed. How many expense classifications do you think there would be?
Remember the ruckus about the oh so expensive meetings and the absurdly expensive coffee at them? I’m involved as a volunteer in running a fairly big non-government conference, and we work with professional conference planners. Their reaction was that the government got a pretty good deal. Ever read a hotel catering menu? The first time I did my teeth nearly fell out. Those who have never ordered more coffee than an extra-large at 7-11 will have a fit, and we will lose some of the benefits of people in diverse parts of the government getting to talk to one another.
Let’s keep the books open, but I don’t want to spend a lot of my tax dollars to make life that much easier for people.
I can see that as a possible issue, but right now ONLY people with agenda have access. What if Fox News broke a story tomorrow that said…I don’t know…Obama was having gay sex with extraterrestrials on the taxpayer dime. (claim kept outrageous to avoid a political patty-cake fight…I hope i didn’t piss off any of Billy Meier’s friends…)
Journalists filed the FOIA request to get this same information together, they interpreted the information they found, and they tried to generate buzz about it. Now a congressional investigation has to take place at great taxpayer expense to prove that Obama wasn’t hanging out at the DC Motel 6 with BiZRtil. This is basically what happens, now.
Then Journalist A will argue with Pundit B and America will basically go “So…what actually happened?” Six months later, we get a Congressional study that doesn’t even make the news paper that says “We don’t think it happened.”
When I said “Red flag” I did not mean “Run to congress!” I meant put it online for plain people to read and evaluate (with direct access to the records at will) or send it to the media. Journalists can fact check with the public records and see what can be found and if it’s heinous or not.
The problem with “A huge part of the cost of government is the layers and layers of oversight and approvals. Most of them are a result of past abuses” is not that there’s oversight, but because that oversight is setup specifically to look for past incidents. Unless you spend a huge amount at Bob Governmentperson’s Embezzlement Corporation, they won’t catch things going forward very easily because no one wants to put 10,000 people on the payroll to actually find issues with the records.
I would also think it would reduce the issues with the viking party-like investigative craziness. Instead of going “ZOHMYGAW” and making Congress waste time and money, any journalist or random guy can go “When did this happen? April 2013? Huh, it looks like they spent $60 at Dunkin Doughnuts and nothing else looks out of place.” You replaced an entire investigation with a simple lookup that anyone can do.
We have 535 members of Congress playing patty-cake with killing a good program to benefit a pet program for themselves already.
The problem with the SEC filings every quarter from companies is that they are trying to match regulatory reporting. This is more of a dump from accounting software. In the big companies I’ve been with (granted, the small companies had trouble as they were on something like quick books) they could export the raw “GA State/Dept of Sanitation/Bob Everyman/$34.00/Home Depot/Toilet Seats” information as fast as they could dump it from the accounting package. Your huge cities may take a full day to export the information. Your State may take a full day. Smaller entities shouldn’t take more more than an hour or so. And it could even be setup to automatically dump the data once the accounting package was in place and update the entity hosting with the raw data every month. There are a lot of ways to make this fairly “simple” in terms of terror.
The main cost, I believe, would come from setup. Smaller municipalities would have to either get on a state system or get something basic that would do it for them. There are many, many accounting packages out there. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel (Even though I’m sure the government would try…or already has)
Stuffing it into a small cluster (admittedly expensive hardware) or licensing space and time from some place like Amazon or Google would give you the hardware you need. If you roll your own hardware, it would cost nothing to drop either another license (entity licensing) of Windows SQL Server (or whatever name it’s picked up these days) or MySQL and then build a PHP/ASP/Ruby/Java(if you hate people) interface to browse the table with some sorting functions. Instead of having people on hand like most other departments to create fancy reports and all that, it’s just the raw, simple balance sheet data.
I avoided expense classifications in my desire for data just because if we can narrow it down to the actual department it came from, it should make sense. Department of Sanitation buying things at Home Depot? Yeah. Makes sense. Head of the FBI buying things at Dave’s House o’ Strippin’ on the government dime? Yeah. Not so much.
I do remember, and that sort of thing is something that I think could be nipped in the bud. The investigation would simply go “Hey, Bob Everyman. Why did you spend $34 for toilet seats at home depot??” and can be explained quickly without a massive investigation. “We had hooligans cherry bomb the bathrooms on the first floor and we just needed to get them fixed quick” or something along those lines. It takes less time and less effort and you know exactly where to go and who to go to. Even if Bob Everyman himself died in a freak toilet-seat-accident shortly after returning from home depot, his boss or department head would know why.
Right now, I don’t think they are open. Pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle spend all of their time trying to find anything fiscal to smear their opponents with. It’s…bad, now. And I’d like to fix it.
I accept from both of you that there is some significant cost involved (which is an opinion-based value assessment and hard to argue about) and that there is room for abuse, but my opinion is that all we get currently is abuse from people looking to propel their own agenda.
Despite my positions differing from your own, I’d like to thank all of you for taking time to voice your displeasure with my idea.
