Open government or 'Transparency Theater?'

By Maura Reynolds, CQ Staff

updated 2:57 p.m. ET July 24, 2009

WASHINGTON - One of the nastiest running battles between Capitol Hill and the White House when George W. Bush was president concerned what the administration should disclose to Congress and how. The fight would flare regularly and then fade into a classic “he said/she said” stalemate.

Information would leak about some secret program. Lawmakers would object. And administration officials, Vice President Dick Cheney most prominent among them, would claim congressional leaders had been briefed and had given their approval.

But members of Congress, led mostly by Democrats, would insist they hadn’t been fully informed and didn’t know enough to provide appropriately informed consent. In various iterations, this fight took place over the decision to go to war in Iraq, the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, its creation of secret CIA prisons, and its decision to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques against detainees who were presumed to be terrorists.

The latest episode of a Bush-era secret came to light only in the past month, when the current CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, first told Congress about a covert program of assassination teams targeting terrorist leaders that was born eight years ago. The enterprise was leaked in the press only last week.

Fast forward to the era of Barack Obama. Whatever the details of the Bush-era disputes — and many of those details remain in dispute — the rancor led most of official Washington to expect the new Democratic president to reverse course on most Bush policies affecting government secret-keeping. On the campaign trail, Obama had said as much, pledging to overturn what he described as Bush’s drive to evade congressional oversight and public scrutiny and “bring more and more power into the executive branch.”

On his first full day as president in January, Obama appeared to abide by that promise. He issued a memorandum to all federal departments and agencies ordering an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” His administration, he declared, would operate from Day One on the premise that if lawmakers or citizens request information, they should get it.

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Those words cheered government watchdog groups and Obama’s fellow Democrats in Congress. But in the six months since, their optimism has dimmed. In practice, the new president’s record on government secrecy and transparency has turned out to be decidedly mixed, with his administration seeming to take as many steps toward shielding government information as it has toward exposing it to the sunshine.

Two events in particular have struck advocates of more open government as disingenuous. The first was Obama’s refusal to release records of White House visits this spring by coal industry executives — the same position Bush took on records about visits by energy industry lobbyists at the outset of his administration.

The second was Obama’s threat that he would veto a bill reauthorizing U.S. intelligence-gathering activities if it set any curbs on the sort of limited, cryptic congressional briefings on intelligence matters that the Bush administration favored. Obama said he wouldn’t accept the bill if it required his administration to brief the full membership of the House and Senate Select Intelligence committees instead of just the so-called Gang of Eight — the chairmen and ranking minority members of the Intelligence panels and the top Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.

“There is no question that there has been a very disturbing trend of adopting many of the same anti-transparency policies of the Bush administration,” said Anne L. Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which promotes government openness. “The president’s statements all would suggest that they would be transparent in a number of ways that they are refusing to be.”

David Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which studies and advocates on electronic privacy issues, says he has been struck by how closely Obama is hewing to Bush-era objections to increased disclosure.

For instance, the new administration used arguments identical to those marshaled by Bush’s Justice Department when it moved in April to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Sobel’s organization on behalf of those who contend that they were subjected to illegal warrantless wiretaps. “No change. Not one word,” Sobel said. “They’ve said all the right things, but they haven’t really delivered on the rhetoric.”

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Many kinds of openness
Depending on who’s talking, Obama’s administration can be described as either one of the most accountable and open in history, or one of the least. One reason is that the term “open government” means different things to different people.

For some, it means that, in the Internet age, citizens can boot up a computer and quickly gain access to thousands of pages of government documents and megabytes of federal statistics and crunch them to their hearts’ content.

For others, it means that if a citizen has a concern or wants to express an opinion, he no longer has to put a letter in the mail or telephone his congressman. Instead, he can post a message on a government Web site or send an e-mail making his point — and sometimes receive a response — almost immediately. In fact, new interactive Internet tools are designed to allow citizens to participate directly in the deliberations around and drafting of government policies.

So far Obama gets good marks in those areas. The administration is in the middle of several initiatives to use the access and reach of the Internet to improve the flow of information between citizens and government. For instance, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy conducted a series of online discussions this spring as part of its effort to draft an Open Government Directive to guide federal departments and agencies. It even set up an open-access writing site — a “wiki” in Internet-speak — on which ordinary citizens can help write and edit a communal text of the directive.

Two Web sites in particular have drawn praise from advocates of greater openness in policy making: USAspending.gov provides detailed information about government contracts, grants and other forms of spending; and Data.gov, intended as a one-stop shop for number crunchers that consolidates statistics across federal agencies in standard, machine-readable formats.

Each site calls itself an “IT dashboard” to navigate electronically through the government. In theory, researchers anywhere in the country will someday be able, for instance, to download data on tornadoes or snowstorms and compare it with government spending for weather emergencies. Or analysts might compare changes in school test scores in different regions against the amount of federal money devoted in those areas not only to education, but to health care, housing or unemployment. Until recently much of that data has resided in unconnected databases.

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