[Senate Hearing 111-728]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
S. Hrg. 111-728
REMOVING THE SHROUD OF SECRECY:
MAKING GOVERNMENT MORE TRANSPARENT
AND ACCOUNTABLE--PARTS I AND II
=======================================================================
HEARINGS
before the
FEDERAL FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, GOVERNMENT
INFORMATION, FEDERAL SERVICES, AND
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY SUBCOMMITTEE
of the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
of the
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MARCH 23 and APRIL 13, 2010
__________
Available via http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JON TESTER, Montana ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah
ROLAND W. BURRIS, Illinois
PAUL G. KIRK, JR., Massachusetts
Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
Brandon L. Milhorn, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
------
SUBCOMMITTEE ON FEDERAL FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, GOVERNMENT INFORMATION,
FEDERAL SERVICES, AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada
ROLAND W. BURRIS, Illinois
John Kilvington, Staff Director
Erik Hopkins, Professional Staff Member
Bryan Parker, Staff Director and General Counsel to the Minority
Deirdre G. Armstrong, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Carper............................................... 1, 25
Senator Coburn............................................... 15
Prepared statements:
Senator Carper............................................. 47, 51
Senator McCain............................................... 49
Senator Coburn............................................... 53
WITNESSES
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator
for Electronic Government and Information Technology, Office of
Management and Budget.......................................... 5
Hon. Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer and Associate
Director for Technology, Office of Science and Technology
Policy, Executive Office of the President...................... 7
Hon. David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, National
Archives and Records Administration............................ 9
Ellen Miller, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Sunlight
Foundation..................................................... 23
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
John Wonderlich, Policy Director, Sunlight Foundation............ 27
Stephen W.T. O'Keeffe, Founder, MeriTalk Online.................. 29
Thomas Blanton, Director, National Security Archive, George
Washington University.......................................... 33
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Blanton, Thomas:
Testimony.................................................... 33
Prepared statement......................................... 85, 97
Chopra, Hon. Aneesh:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 61
Ferriero, Hon. David S.:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 67
Kundra, Vivek:
Testimony.................................................... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 54
Miller, Ellen:
Testimony.................................................... 23
Prepared statement........................................... 72
O'Keeffe, Stephen:
Testimony.................................................... 29
Prepared statement......................................... 79, 93
Wonderlich, John:
Testimony.................................................... 27
Prepared statement........................................... 89
APPENDIX
Robert Pinkerton, Director, Public Sector Solutions, Adobe
Systems, Inc., prepared statement.............................. 75
Stephen W.T. O'Keeffe, Founder, MeriTalk, prepared statement with
attachments.................................................... 79
Thomas Blanton, Director, National Security Archive, George
Washington University, prepared statement...................... 85
Questions and Responses for the Record:
Mr. Kundra................................................... 101
REMOVING THE SHROUD OF SECRECY:
MAKING GOVERNMENT MORE TRANSPARENT
AND ACCOUNTABLE--PART I
----------
TUESDAY, MARCH 23, 2010
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management,
Government Information, Federal Services,
and International Security,
of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:31 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Thomas R.
Carper, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Carper and Coburn.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Well, good afternoon, everyone. The
Subcommittee will come to order.
Senator Coburn and I were talking back in the anteroom
about what is going to happen on the floor. It will be
interesting to see what happens on the floor this afternoon,
but we are going to go ahead and get started, and we will see
how far we can go. We appreciate that our panel of witnesses
could be here today. We will do as much as we can, and if we
have to, we will just recess or adjourn and come back around
midnight. [Laughter.]
Well, maybe not that late, but it looks like we could be
here for a long time tonight. Hopefully you will not have to
be. But our thanks to our guests and our witnesses for joining
us today. For the next hour or so, we are going to discuss ways
that President Obama and his team of Open Government experts,
some of whom are here today, can reshape old and inefficient
bureaucratic agencies into lean--not so mean--citizen-focused
machines.
We have also invited a panel of outside experts to testify
on areas where the Administration is doing well, what areas
they may need to apply a bit more attention, and more
importantly, how making agencies more open and transparent will
make the lives of America's 300 million citizens better.
I am told that Albert Einstein once said that,
``Information is not knowledge.'' Now, I would also like to
quote Albert Einstein who said, ``In adversity lies
opportunity.'' I have never heard this quote, but my staff told
me that he also said, ``Information is not knowledge.'' And I
think that statement is as true today as it was then. In the
21st Century, information is power.
In fact, some would say that the U.S. economy has
experienced a surge in job and wealth creation over the past
three decades because of the information revolution and
advances in technology. But like any other tool, information
unto itself does not do us a lot of good unless we know how to
use it.
For example, just because we simply possess a hammer does
not mean a house will build itself, but if we know how to use
the hammer, then we can see how a house can be built and go
right ahead and build it. I think the same is true with
government information.
So we called this hearing not only to see what agencies
need to do to open up their treasure troves of information, but
also I would like for us to learn how releasing this
information will reduce wasteful agency spending, make senior
leaders more accountable, and improve, we hope, the lives of
everyday Americans.
On his first day in office, President Obama took an
extraordinary step in signing an Open Government Directive
which instructed agencies to open their operations to the
public. The idea behind the directive is that a more Open
Government allows members of the public to contribute ideas and
their expertise to government initiatives. This collaboration
will hopefully improve the effectiveness of agenies by
encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the Federal
Government, across levels of government and between the
government and the private sector.
Further providing more government information by default
instead of by exception will help reduce the financial and
administrative burdens on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
process and spur innovation in the private sector. But as our
Administration moves forward on these new and exciting
initiatives, I want to make sure that we are sticking to
fundamentals.
For example, I am told that despite the fact that
legislation such as the Presidential Records Act and the
Federal Records Act have been law for decades, agencies have
done an abysmal job when it comes to preserving their physical
and electronic records. In fact, it was only 2 years ago when
we held a hearing that touched on the fact that the Bush White
House could not locate millions of e-mails, including those
from the 3 months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. That type
of situation is just unacceptable, and we need to make sure
that it is not repeated again.
Further, as our witnesses may know, I joined Senators
Coburn and McCain and a former Senator named----
Senator Coburn. Obama.
Senator Carper. Senator Obama, a few years ago when he was
a mere mortal, passed the Federal Funding, Accountability, and
Transportation Act under the leadership of the fellow sitting
here to my right. My colleagues and I put forward this
legislation to increase the transparency and accountability of
the Federal Government by providing access to information on
Federal spending through a single, searchable, publicly
available Website. However, the Government Accountability
Office (GAO) recently released an evaluation of
USAspending.gov, the Website created as a result of Senator
Coburn's legislation, and it seems that there have been some
problems.
For example, GAO stated that there were widespread
inconsistencies between the information provided on
USAspending.gov and the actual physical records of
transactions. And, furthermore, the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) apparently does not hold agencies accountable for
ensuring that information placed on the site is accurate and
reliable. So before we start pushing agencies to spend time and
money on releasing more information, we want to make sure that
the information we have is reliable and accurate.
In closing, then, I will just add that as we discuss all
the new, exciting initiatives that the Administration has
underway or plans on undertaking in the near future, we need to
keep our eye on the ball. Our job does not just end at making
information freely available, but in making sure that the
information can be effectively used to improve services to
every American, to reduce wasteful spending, and to enforce
accountability.
Again, thanks to our witnesses for taking your time to be
here with us today and for sharing your ideas on these and
other important issues. I am not going to recognize Senator
McCain, although my script says to do that, but I do want to
recognize the Senator from Oklahoma whose initials I share and
whose passion I share for trying to make government work
better, more cost effectively.
And I want to say, Senator Coburn, it was an honor to join
you and a couple of our colleagues a number of years ago to
pass legislation that we thought at the time could do a great
service to this country. And I do not think we have realized
its full potential yet, but we now have an Administration here
that seems to be intent on making sure that we do reach that
potential, and when we do, you are going to get a lot of
credit.
So thanks very much for being here today.
Senator Coburn. Thank you. Well, welcome to each of you.
The President and I and Senator Carper and Senator McCain
worked very hard to put into place one of the tools we thought
that American citizens could hold us accountable by. I must say
I am significantly disappointed at both the quality and the
depth of information that is available. I applaud President
Obama for wanting to make more steps towards transparency, but
I would caution him that if we cannot do the first one, the
simplest one, and we cannot do it well, why would we start off
on other areas until we got the first one right?
So I look forward to your testimony. I have a lot of
questions about the Transparency and Accountability Act. It is
of no value when the vast majority of the money is
subcontracted and we do not have any intent or have the
information with which to hold subcontractors, sub-grantees,
sub-awardees, accountable. Let me just give you two examples.
During Hurricane Katrina, we paid the Corps of Engineers
$60 a cubic yard to get rid of the debris. The guy on the
ground eight layers lower was getting $6 a yard. We consumed
$54 in sub-grantees before we picked up the first cubic yard of
debris, and we paid 10 times more for that than what the actual
cost of picking up the debris and hauling it off was. If we are
not going to do sub-awards and sub-grantees, there is no reason
to have the site in the first place.
The other thing that is very dangerous about it is we are
creating an expectation of the American public, and then we are
going to pop the balloon. If the American public goes there
thinking they can find out and it is not available--it was not
just for Congress that we asked this.
The other thing I would note is by June 30 of this year the
law mandates--it does not say you may, it says you will have
put in place a system to measure sub-grants, sub-awards, so
that everybody in this country can see it. I am going to have a
lot of questions in that regard.
I know it is a tough effort. I do not deny that. But unless
we have the OMB pushing down and holding the agencies
accountable, it is never going to happen. I would like to see
as much emphasis in fixing the Transparency and Accountability
Act as the Administration plans to put on these other wonderful
areas of transparency that we need. But if their results are
the same as the Transparency and Accountability Act, we are
going to create more disappointment in the American public.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Carper. Thank you, Senator Coburn.
I want to turn to our witnesses and go ahead and introduce
them. We may start voting at about 2:45 p.m., and if we do, if
we just have one vote, Dr. Coburn, I do not know if you want to
tag-team and I could stay here until maybe you could run and
vote and then come back. But just think about that, if that
might work for you. That way we can keep going.
Senator Coburn. I will try to do that.
Senator Carper. Good. Thanks so much.
Let me just start by introducing our first three witnesses
today. First we have a familiar face who is no stranger before
this Subcommittee. Vivek Kundra is the Federal Chief
Information Officer of the United States and responsible for
overseeing the Federal Government's management of information
technology. He comes to us most recently from the District of
Columbia where he was recognized by InfoWorld as one of the top
25 chief technology officers not just in the District of
Columbia, not just in the United States, but around the world.
Congratulations and we thank you very much for your service. We
thank you for being here and for the dialogue that we have
enjoyed in the past year or so.
Next up we have the Hon. Aneesh Chopra, who is the Chief
Technology Officer of the United States. I understand that Mr.
Chopra and Mr. Kundra are the ones responsible for tag-teaming
President Obama's technology and transparency initiatives. Mr.
Chopra comes to us from the Commonwealth of Virginia where he
was the Secretary of Technology. Who was the governor then? Not
Warner.
Mr. Chopra. Tim Kaine.
Senator Carper. Tim Kaine, OK. I am told that you and Mr.
Kundra also served together in Virginia at the same time. Is
that right?
Mr. Chopra. Yes.
Senator Carper. OK. We are grateful for you to be here
today and serving together once more.
The final witness is the Hon. David Ferriero, Archivist of
the United States and the head of the National Archives and
Records Administration. Essentially, he is the defender of our
Nation's history. That is a heavy burden to carry. He has
previous experience at the New York Public Library, at MIT, and
he is a veteran of the U.S. Navy.
We thank you, Mr. Ferriero, and the rest of our panelists
for taking the time to be with us here this afternoon. I am
going to recognize Mr. Kundra to begin with his opening
statement. I was able to read everyone's written statements, so
if you want you can summarize for about 5 minutes. If you go a
couple minutes over that, I will not rein you in, but if you go
too far over, then I will have to. But we look forward to
having a great dialogue here with you this afternoon. Thank you
so much for your preparation and for your presence and for your
willingness to have this discussion with us today. Thank you.
And your entire statements will be made part of the record,
for each witness.
Mr. Kundra, you are recognized.
TESTIMONY OF VIVEK KUNDRA,\1\ FEDERAL CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER
AND ADMINISTRATOR FOR ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT AND INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
Mr. Kundra. Good afternoon, Chairman Carper, Senator
Coburn, and Members of the Subcommittee. Thank you for the
opportunity to testify about how this Administration is working
to make government more transparent and accountable for the
American people.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Kundra appears in the Appendix on
page 54.
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On his first full day in office, President Obama signed the
Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. This
Administration is laying a new foundation that changes the
default setting of the government from closed, opaque, and
secretive to transparent, open, and participatory. I would like
to talk about Open Government not as an abstract idea or
notion, but specifically how it is driving innovation,
improving performance, and changing the way we serve the
American people.
Opening our government allows us to draw upon the knowledge
of all Americans, not just those inside the Beltway of
Washington. The Federal Government does not have a monopoly on
the best ideas, nor does it have unlimited resources. We have
seen how third parties can create tremendous value when given
the opportunity.
The Department of Defense's decision to release Global
Positioning System (GPS) data sparked innovations that touch
our daily lives, helping us reach our destinations throughout
the country and helping first responders save lives.
To unlock the value of public data, we launched data.gov
last May with just 47 data sets. Now there are over 169,000
data sets on every aspect of government operations, from public
safety to the environment to health care. In just 10 months,
third parties have already used these data sets to build
applications that serve the American people such as
FlyOnTime.us, which allows travelers to check wait times at
security lines across the country and also view airline on-time
performance.
As we democratize data, we must also foster an innovation
ecosystem to support the creative use of these data sets. That
is why OMB released guidance this month to increase the use of
prizes and challenges across the public sector and will launch
a challenge platform to facilitate innovation.
The concept of challenges and prices goes back to at least
1714 when the British Government offered 20,000 pounds to
anyone who could develop a method to calculate a ship's
longitude. The prize motivated clock maker John Harrison to
develop the marine chronometer which solved the problem in a
simple and efficient way.
Open Government also helps keep the government accountable.
As the President said in his inaugural speech, ``Those of us
who manage the public's dollars will be held to account to
spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the
light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust
between a people and their government.''
Last June, we launched the IT Dashboard, which allows the
American people to monitor Information Technology (IT)
investments across the Federal Government. Last July, the
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) halted 45 IT projects that
were significantly behind schedule or over budget, identified
in part thanks to the IT Dashboard. In terminating 12 of these
projects, the VA avoided wasting $54 million of taxpayer money.
Building on the foundation of the IT Dashboard, we launched
face-to-face evidence-based reviews of IT programs called
TechStat Accountability Sessions. These sessions enable
government officials to collaborate with one another to turn
around or halt IT investments that do not produce dividends for
the American people.
As we continue to open up our government, we must balance
our decisions with protecting the privacy of the American
people and safeguarding national security. Individual pieces of
data, when released independently, may not reveal sensitive
information, but when they are combined, this mosaic effect
could be used to derive personal information or information
that is vital to national security.
The government, unfortunately, has a history of not
managing data quality from accuracy to completeness to
timeliness. To improve data quality, OMB released the Open
Government Directive on December 8, 2009. This directive
actually requires every agency to designate a senior official
accountable for data quality, objectivity, and internal
controls across financial spending.
On April 7, 2010, OMB will release a strategy for sub-award
reporting to help carry out the vision of the Federal Funding
Accountability and Transportation Act that this Subcommittee
fought for. To provide better insight into Federal spending, we
will launch an improved USAspending.gov platform. We are just
at the beginning of what can be accomplished. Imagine
enterprising Americans and government officials working
virtually alongside one another to co-create the next
generation of public services. Imagine being able to create and
share dashboards on demand, powered by data, to shed new light
into government performance in the same way that we share
YouTube videos with our family and friends.
Open Government is not an abstract notion. It is a new way
of doing business in Washington. The Obama Administration is
committed to make the Federal Government work better for the
American people.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to
your questions.
Senator Carper. Thanks for your excellent testimony. Very
well delivered, thank you. Mr. Chopra, please proceed.
TESTIMONY OF HON. ANEESH CHOPRA,\1\ CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
AND ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR FOR TECHNOLOGY, OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY POLICY, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
Mr. Chopra. Thank you, Chairman Carper and Senator Coburn.
I would like to expand upon my colleague's testimony with
particular emphasis on how we are harnessing technology, data,
and innovation to improve the lives of everyday Americans.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Chopra appears in the Appendix on
page 61.
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In my capacity as the Chief Technology Officer, I've had
the honor and privilege of working with the American people in
developing the recommendations that form the basis of our Open
Government Directive per the President's instructions in that
memorandum that he signed on his first full day in office.
Over the course of 2 months starting last May, we held an
unprecedented consultation process that surfaced over 900
ideas, thousands of public comments, and over 300 draft
versions of Open Government recommendations. The directive that
we published December 8, 2009, referenced many of those
recommendations and serves as an aggressive timeline for our
entire Federal Government to meet specific milestones towards
greater openness, including the publication of new high-value
data sets on Data.gov.
Now, what does Open Government mean to the American people?
When the Department of Agriculture makes nutritional
information available, parents can make smarter eating choices
for their families. When the Department of Education makes key
information available about colleges and universities, students
can make more informed choices about the quality and cost of
their education. When the Department of Labor makes information
on workplace risks and hazards available, employers can improve
the safety of their workplaces for employees.
I would like to highlight three examples to better
illustrate our approach and its current impact on the American
people.
On the topic of innovation, our engine of economic growth,
as we all know, is born on the ingenuity of America's small
businesses. To that end, I am pleased to announce that today
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will
begin providing data on awardees of the Small Business
Innovation Research Program that utilize a new streamlined
process for contracting and will extend this streamlined
process to future Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
solicitations. Initially, DARPA will display data on the number
of awardees that are eligible for this streamlined process, how
many awardees have opted for it, and the average number of days
it has taken to complete the streamlined agreement.
As an example, Mr. Chairman, typical contracting in this
domain might take 5 to 6 months to complete. But we believe
that this streamlined approach will take, on average, less than
60 days. That represents a 60- to 70-percent reduction in both
time and cost, savings that will help small businesses
throughout the country in achieving lower costs and getting
them to work faster on the important projects we have in front
of them.
In energy, we recently concluded a Smart Grid Forum online
which focused on the impact the Nation's energy consumers will
have in promoting innovation in smart grid products and
services. Specifically, we invited all Americans to participate
in a discussion on how best to deploy the smart grid, with
particularly engaging discussions occurring on data access and
consumer ownership.
The thoughtful comments that we received will help our
Nation accelerate the development of innovations to address
some of the most challenging smart grid goals that we have,
from deployment of smart grid solutions to the development of
standards needed for the exchange of data, to ensuring
cybersecurity in the smart grid. Put simply, Mr. Chairman, I
want to know my energy usage on a real-time basis in my home,
and this process helped to bring that forward.
In education, on February 15, Education Secretary Arne
Duncan announced the launch of the Open Innovation Web Portal
at innovation.ed.gov, bringing together key stakeholders in
education, including those who previously had no voice or way
to elevate their ideas, in a collaborative manner so that those
ideas can turn into reality. The Open Innovation Web Portal is
a trial initiative that has engaged many stakeholders in
education--from teachers to school administrators, parents and
foundations, nonprofits and for-profit organizations alike--all
to develop the innovations that our country desperately needs
to achieve our President's goal to be the Nation with the
highest percentage of college-educated citizens. The Department
of Education has posted an initial set of challenges to engage
the community around the Department's key priorities, including
human capital and data.
Again, Mr. Chairman, to make it simple, if a teacher in
Delaware has a terrific idea to help kids understand physics
better, this portal will allow that individual to find
development capital from the philanthropic community so that
the idea can be tested, validated, and scaled.
Last, Mr. Chairman, I would like to end my remarks on how
our commitment to an open and transparent government is
surfacing and executing on the very best ideas from everyday
Americans.
Last August, President Obama challenged the 19,000 front-
line workers within the Veterans Benefits Administration to
reduce the backlog of disability claims and streamline
processing. Todd Bonn, a dedicated veterans service
representative from the offices in Togus, Maine, submitted an
idea through the VA's Innovation Initiative Website to improve
certain performance metrics to get the agency to focus more on
results and less on process. He was one of 7,000 participants
submitting and voting on over 3,000 ideas from each of the 57
regional offices within the Veterans Benefits Administration
(VBA). His colleagues in Maine prepared a business plan that
was pitched to a panel of national leaders, including Craig
Newmark from Craigslist. Todd's idea was one of 10 selected for
implementation, and what is remarkable about this is that his
idea will take very little time and effort to reprogram the
performance database. VA will implement this initiative by the
summer at no incremental cost to taxpayers. Todd's story is yet
another example of how this Administration is leveraging the
principles of Open Government to meet our Nation's challenges.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your time, and, of course, we
look forward to answering your questions.
Senator Carper. You bet. Thank you again for an exciting
and, I think, uplifting bit of testimony. Thanks so much.
We have started the vote. I am going to try, if possible,
to allow Mr. Ferriero to finish his testimony, but if we run
short, we will have to run out and come back in a little bit.
But I think we have two votes, and I think we will be able to
just bear down and stay here. Thank you.
Mr. Ferriero, go ahead.
TESTIMONY OF HON. DAVID S. FERRIERO,\1\ ARCHIVIST OF THE UNITED
STATES, NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Mr. Ferriero. Thank you for inviting me to participate in
this hearing on making government more transparent and
accountable. The last time I appeared before you was my
confirmation hearing in September, so it is truly an honor to
return. I would also like to thank you for the opportunity to
testify alongside two visionary leaders whose work I deeply
admire, Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Ferriero appears in the Appendix
on page 67.
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As the Subcommittee knows, on December 8, 2009, President
Obama issued the Open Government Directive with the aim of
making our government more accessible and accountable by
improving transparency, public participation, and collaboration
in and among the Federal agencies. This directive was
enthusiastically received by the National Archives for the core
of our mission is serving democracy by providing access to the
essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and
the actions of their government.
NARA's own Open Government plan describes how we are
providing guidance and services to assist Federal agencies with
carrying out their plans. Our Records Management Program
provides guidance for agencies on the records management issues
highlighted in the Open Government Directive. Our National
Declassification Center is taking a leadership role in ensuring
that over 400 million pages of classified records in NARA
holdings are declassified and made available to the public by
the end of 2013.
Our Office of Government Information Services has provided
Questions and Answers on the Open Government Directive which
outlines transparency issues that are relevant to the Freedom
of Information Act.
Today, however, I would like to focus my testimony on what
I feel is the backbone of Open Government records management.
To put it simply, the government cannot be accountable if it
does not preserve and cannot find its records. Although I have
only been in the job for 5 months, I have seen and heard enough
to be concerned that across the government we are falling short
in our records management responsibilities, particularly in
regard to the exponential growth of electronic records. The
long-term success of the Open Government Initiative--and the
future of the National Archives--hinges on the ability of each
Federal agency to effectively manage their records.
At the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA),
our records management approach is grounded in these three
principles: Agencies must economically and effectively create
and manage records necessary to meet business needs; records
must be kept long enough to protect rights and assure
accountability; and records of archival value must be preserved
and made available for future generations.
NARA's National Records Management Program is made up of
nearly 100 full-time staff members. They have the enormous job
of working with Federal records officers in over 250 different
Federal agencies. They develop policy, guidance, and training.
They conduct studies so others can learn best practices and
avoid costly mistakes. They also work with agencies to conduct
self-assessments of records management programs. This is part
of the Archivist's statutory authority to conduct inspections
and report findings to the appropriate oversight committees and
the Office of Management and Budget.
Most notably, they work with agencies to schedule and
appraise records. This is how we ensure proper documentation of
our government's actions. The statutory authority to grant
Federal agencies disposition authority to manage their records
is the most important responsibility I exercise as Archivist of
the United States, because it determines what records will come
to the National Archives for permanent preservation and access.
Given that records management is the backbone of Open
Government, the central question is: What is needed to ensure
that Open Government values are realized and that NARA's
mission is accomplished?
My answer has two parts. First, heads of agencies and
senior leaders across the Federal Government need to understand
that the records and information they and their organizations
are creating are national assets that must be effectively
managed and secured so that the public can be assured of the
authenticity of the record. Heads of agencies and senior
leaders need to be held accountable for managing these assets.
This is required by law in the Federal Records Act, but
moreover, it is good government and a necessary condition of
Open Government.
In the next 30 days, NARA plans to send to Congress and OMB
a report based on agency self-assessments carried out in
September 2009. Our preliminary analysis of the data suggest
that 79 percent of reporting agencies have moderate to high
levels of risk associated with their records management
programs, particularly with electronic records. These levels of
risk in agencies should be a great concern to all who believe
in open and accountable government.
Second, senior agency leaders must work with NARA, OMB, and
GSA, as well as with groups like the CIO Council, the Federal
Records Council, and the Federal Web Managers Council, to
develop the IT tools necessary to manage electronic records.
The technical challenges associated with developing the IT
tools for records management are not insignificant; however,
these tools do not exist today because, in my view, the Federal
Government has not deemed recordkeeping a high priority in IT
systems. The Federal Government spends over $70 billion
annually on information technology that, to a large degree,
creates or receives Federal records in some form. Developing
cost-effective electronic records management tools that work
and then integrating them into agency IT systems needs to be a
high priority.
In conclusion, as Archivist of the United States and the
leader of over 3,000 dedicated National Archives employees, I
would like you to know that we are committed to doing all we
can to carry out the National Archives mission to provide
access to the essential documentation of the rights of American
citizens and the actions of their government and to build an
Open Government that values transparency, citizen
participation, and collaboration.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you
today, and I look forward to answering your questions.
Senator Carper. Mr. Ferriero, thank you very much, and my
thanks really to each of you for setting the stage for what I
think is going to be a very interesting and I think very
productive and helpful hearing.
We start off, first of all, it looks like we have two votes
back to back. I have 7 minutes to get there. I am going to
recess for probably about the next 20 minutes, and we will be
back. Dr. Coburn may come back before I do.
We will be back shortly, and we look forward to asking
questions of our first panel. But thank you for getting us off
on the right foot.
With that, the Subcommittee stands in recess for roughly
the next 20 minutes. Thank you.
[Recess.]
Senator Carper. All right. You have all been having enough
fun. Back to the salt mines. Thanks for hanging in here, folks.
Good to be back with you. We had two votes, and if we are
lucky, we will be able to get this hearing in without any
further interruptions. We could be in session all night, but
fortunately you will all be spared that.
I have a couple of questions for folks on this first panel,
and one of the things to do is I love to go into schools. I
think we have over 200 public schools in Delaware. I also think
I have been at almost every one of them over the years. And
whenever I visit a school, kids ask really great questions.
Some are really funny questions, too. For example, are you
married to a movie star? Do you live in a mansion? Do you have
a limousine? And on and on and on. Sometimes they ask me what
do I like about my job. One time a kid not long ago asked me
this question: ``What do you do?'' [Laughter.]
I thought that was a pretty good question. And I said,
well--he was in elementary school. I said, ``Do you have rules
in your school?'' ``Yes.'' ``Do you have rules on your bus?''
``Yes.'' ``Do you have rules at home?'' There was kind of a
mixed message on that one. But I said, ``My role is to work
with other Senators, Representatives, and the President and
Vice President to help make the rules for our country.'' And I
said, ``Just like you have rules in your school and on your bus
and at home, we have rules for our country. We call them
laws.'' And he said, ``Oh, I get that. I get that.''
What do you do? How would you explain your job? Because a
lot of what we are going to cover here today and what we have
covered in hearings leading up to this day can be another world
for some people. The topics may not make that much sense, and
it is hard to relate to what we are actually talking about. But
when people say, ``What do you do?'' I want you to explain it
in simple terms. And then I am going to ask some questions to
follow up and see if we cannot bring what you are talking about
here today to terms that it will be real in the lives of most
people in our country.
Mr. Kundra, do you want to go first? What do you do?
Mr. Kundra. Sure. So, simply put, what I would say to a
school kid is essentially when you apply for college and you
have to fill out that student aid application, part of my role
is make sure that the Department of Education is using
technology to make your life easier; or when your parents have
to go online and interact with their government, it is to make
sure that they can easily interact, whether it is filing taxes
or filing for a passport. It is to use technology ultimately to
serve the American people.
Senator Carper. Good. Thank you. Mr. Chopra.
Mr. Chopra. Oh, man, that is a hard one to follow.
Senator Carper. I am sure you are up to it.
Mr. Chopra. Mr. Chairman, I would describe my role as
producing three P's. The first of those P's is to ensure that
we have the right policies that harness technology, data, and
innovation for national priorities. The second is to make sure
that we make thoughtful investments in platforms, that is, a
modest investment in the public sector spurs a much larger
investment in the nonprofit sector to expand and leverage the
goal. And then the third is to support public-private
partnerships, and that often means no new laws and no new
funding, but a way to bring, as the President described, an
``all hands on deck'' approach to advancing a certain priority.
I am happy to engage on any examples in those domains, but
that is essentially what I focus on.
Senator Carper. Good. Thank you. Mr. Ferriero.
Mr. Ferriero. And I am the records guy. My job is to make
sure that we are collecting, protecting, and encouraging the
use of the records of the government.
Senator Carper. All right. The folks that all of you serve,
we think they are interested in Open Government. A lot of them
say that they are. How is Open Government going to help them
from your perspectives, each of you?
Mr. Kundra. Well, so in a big way, if you think about the
innovations we have seen across the board, there has been this
Old World view that the public sector has a monopoly on
innovation and creating solutions. But if you think about just
Apple, for example, and how Apple essentially created the App
Store, and what happened is Apple did not go out there and
build 150,000 applications. What it did is it provided a
platform that allowed for innovation to happen on top of that.
Or if you think about YouTube, YouTube did not go out there and
create every video that you see there. It is the American
people and people around the world that created that content
that makes it so valuable.
In the same way, when you think about government, it is a
huge shift when you look at it in the context of Open
Government where we are shifting power actually to the American
people and not concentrating power in the hands of government
employees. At the same time, by moving towards this
architecture where we are building platforms allows third
parties to start innovating, such as with spending data, and as
Senator Coburn said, and providing the ability to see a $60
contract and recognizing that only $6 out of that $60 contract
is actually going towards doing that work. By shining a light
on those types of issues, we can rethink public policy; we can
rethink how we are investing in money. But, more importantly,
it is making sure that the American people now have as much
power in terms of knowing how their government works and not
just sending tax dollars over to the government and hoping that
they are spent well.
Senator Carper. OK. Thanks. Others, please.
Mr. Chopra. It is difficult to follow my colleagues in
describing this, Mr. Chairman. I would say three things.
First, the average American would want greater confidence
that their government is working for them, so a great deal of
transparency, including spending but even beyond, on the actual
performance and outcomes more broadly is how we view the
transparency component.
The second component is what I would call news you can use.
My wife and I have two little girls, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-
old, and we recently installed car safety seats. I am not the
strongest guy in the world: You stick your knee in, you plug it
in, and it is all really difficult to install. The National
Highway Traffic and Safety Administration has a database on the
ease of installation of car seats of every manufacturer in the
country.
Senator Carper. No kidding.
Mr. Chopra. Yes, we just published that data for the first
time in machine-readable format in January. So now every
product has information on their ease of installation of that
car seat online. News you can use. We have made it available so
others can use it.
And then the third one is the notion that somewhere someone
has an idea on how our collective well-being can be improved.
And the notion that your idea can be heard by your government
and, frankly, acted upon it so that it can actually become
real, Open Government allows us to shrink the concept of time
from when you have an idea to when it can actually take hold
and people can see those concepts being put into use to advance
our collective well-being.
Senator Carper. OK. Thank you. Mr. Ferriero.
Mr. Ferriero. Let me answer that from two different
perspectives.
One, this is very much a bottom-up initiative. Each of the
agencies has been encouraged to create an Open Government plan.
And for my own agency, seeing how this process has unleashed
talent in the organization in terms of thinking creatively
about how we do our business, is for me one of the most
important parts of this whole process.
From the second perspective, I see a huge potential here to
use the Open Government Initiative as a way of connecting our
records management folks with our IT folks, because as I said,
we cannot have Open Government if we do not have good records.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
I want to go back to a point that Senator Coburn and I
mentioned earlier. About 3 or 4 years ago, several of us teamed
up, under his leadership, with former Senator Obama, I think
John McCain, among others, in order to pass something we called
the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, and
the original intent of that legislation was to shed a little
bit of sunlight on the approximately $1 trillion that Federal
agencies wrote every year in contracts and grants and in loans.
One provision of the bill required OMB to set up a Website that
would show where all the money was going.
Unfortunately, the Government Accountability Office
recently showed us that the information on the Website was
inadequate in many instances and that agencies did not take the
time to make sure that information was up to date. I have also
heard that this type of situation may be happening on other
transparency initiatives such as the Website used to track the
stimulus spending and the Websites used to track overbudget IT
investments.
Let me just ask Mr. Kundra, if I could, what is the
Administration doing to make sure that agencies provide
accurate and up-to-date information on previous transparency
initiatives as well as ones that we may be undertaking in the
future?
Mr. Kundra. Senator, I share your frustration and Senator
Coburn's frustration in terms of how the government is moving
forward and the quality of the data that is in a lot of these
systems. But if I could just step back for a second, one of the
challenges across the board as we look at the Federal
Government is the number of systems that are out there. When
this Administration came into office, there was a database that
was set up, essentially USAspending 1.0. From a platform
perspective, from a technology perspective, it was not scaled
to be able to handle those trillion-dollars-plus transactions
across the board.
Second, if we looked at accountability at the agency level,
one of the challenges was it was a culture of faceless
accountability where everybody was responsible----
Senator Carper. A culture of what?
Mr. Kundra. Faceless accountability, so there was not a
single individual accountable for the data. And then on top of
that, what compounded the issue is that you had the grants
community and you have the contracting community, and the
communities themselves had not set the appropriate standards
across the board so you could identify a grant from one agency
and compare it to the grant from another agency.
Part of what we have tried to do in the Obama
Administration is on his first full day in office, the
President issued a memorandum on Open Government. Immediately
following that memorandum, we began scaling from a technology
perspective the USAspending platform. The other area we
invested in heavily as we looked at a nationwide system was
with the Recovery Act. We wanted to make sure that we were not
wasting taxpayer dollars by building two parallel systems.
So there is a nationwide effort to collect data at a sub-
award level and across there, and we wanted to make sure, as we
were making those investments, that we could leverage those
investments as part of the USAspending platform. And as part of
the Open Government Directive, what we have done is we have
made sure that there is a senior accountable official at
agencies who is charged to make sure that the data quality is
accurate, it is comprehensive, and it is timely. At the same
time, on April 7, OMB is going to be releasing very specific
guidance to agencies on sub-award data collection. And we are
also going to be launching shortly a new USAspending.gov
platform.
Senator Carper. Say that last sentence again.
Mr. Kundra. We will be shortly launching a new version of
USAspending.gov.
Senator Carper. Do you have any idea when?
Mr. Kundra. Shortly.
Senator Carper. Around here that can be quite a while.
Mr. Kundra. In a matter of a month or so.
Senator Carper. OK. Good. Well, that is music to our ears.
I am going to yield to Dr. Coburn, but before I do, let me
just telegraph my next pitch, and I am going to come back and
ask each of you to talk about some areas that the
Administration and the Congress ought to be looking into to
increase transparency and to try to reduce wasteful spending.
But for now, Dr. Coburn?
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR COBURN
Senator Coburn. Well, first of all, let me say to all three
of you I have extreme confidence that you are the right guys
for the right job. Had you put the same effort into
USAspending.gov as you put into everything else, we would be a
lot further down the road right now, wouldn't we?
Mr. Kundra. Senator, I think we have put tremendous effort
on USAspending.gov----
Senator Coburn. I did not say you had not put effort. First
of all, there is only one of these that is a law, and that is
the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. It is
the law. In fact, we are out of compliance on the law. There
has not been a report from you all, which is required under the
law. As a matter of fact, this will be the second year that we
do not have a report. I hope we get that this time. But it is
the law.
The others are mandates by the President, and I applaud
them, but they have held us up from achieving what we were
trying to achieve. I have no complaints with your capability.
But the fact is that right now USAspending.gov is not accurate,
and it lacks the biggest component that is necessary for
Americans to truly know what is going on with spending, and
that is sub-awards and subcontracts.
The whole idea behind sub-awards and subcontracts was for
everyday citizens could actually see what is going on. So when
they saw waste, they could report it. They could be a
whistleblower. Because we do not have sub-award and we do not
have sub-grantee, they do not have that ability.
So we do not really have transparency with the Transparency
and Accountability Act. I am not here to beat you up. I think
you guys have worked hard. I think you have done a wonderful
job with everything that you have worked at. But I am still
wanting to know when the law is going to be followed.
Mr. Kundra. Senator, that part of our strategy hinges on
leveraging the investments that have actually already been made
with the Recovery Board. And the April 7 guidance will speak
specifically to how we are going to be addressing the sub-award
issue, whether it is on the grant side or on the contracting
side.
Because of the recovery investments, we are going to be
further along as we have addressed one of the most complicated
issues, which is how do you build a nationwide system that is
going to be able to collect sub-award data, and how do you do
it in a short time span. And we are going to benefit as we look
forward in terms of leveraging that infrastructure, given the
momentum that was behind driving transparency related to the
Recovery Act.
Senator Coburn. I do not doubt that, but what you just told
me is you choose to do this rather than follow the law. When is
it going to be there? What is the answer to that question? When
is it going to be accurate? When is the sub-award and sub-
grantee information going to be on there? It is a real simple
question. And if ``I do not know'' is the answer, ``I do not
know'' is the answer. We have a law, and the fact is that we
choose not to follow it. Just like improper payments, we have
multiple agencies that will not comply with the law because
they do not think they have to.
Again, I will compliment each of you. I think you are
rightly suited for your job. But I tell you what the people of
Delaware and the people of Oklahoma want. They think if it is a
law, it ought to get done and it ought to get followed. I have
been around this place long enough to know that if I do not pin
people down, it never happens. If April 7 is not going to
happen, then my hope is the Chairman will have another hearing
so we can talk about that.
We are 3\1/2\ years into this, and you may have been dealt
a mess. I do not know. That is the usual thing that we hear
from one Administration--it does not matter if it is Republican
to Democrat or Democrat to Republican. It was not done right.
But we cannot manage America without that information. You may
be absolutely right that you have created the infrastructure
and the base so that we actually will get there in the long run
better. But part of not complying with the law is explaining to
us why you are not complying with the law.
I want to go back--first of all, car seats?
Mr. Chopra. Yes, sir.
Senator Coburn. I followed all the rules on them and
pinched my finger every time. [Laughter.]
Senator Coburn. I have grandkids, and it is tough.
Mr. Chopra. It is tough.
Senator Coburn. But it is designed to be tough so that the
kid does not go anywhere.
Mr. Chopra. You are right.
Senator Coburn. Let me ask you, Mr. Chopra. You said three
P's: Policy, platform, and public-private partnerships.
Mr. Chopra. Yes, sir.
Senator Coburn. Is that being applied to the Transparency
and Accountability Act?
Mr. Chopra. Well, I serve in the Office of Science and
Technology Policy. I do not know to what extent we have been
actively involved in the OMB implementation of the Act, but we
are using these principles across a wide range of national
priorities. I am happy to give you an example of public-private
partnerships, whatever would be appropriate for you.
The one that we most recently announced about a month and a
half ago was in health care, and it focused on an initiative we
called Text4Baby. Given your background, Senator, to address
issues surrounding the number of women who lack access to the
information on appropriate prenatal care to address both pre-
term birth rates that are too high and infant mortality rates
that in this country are too high. We understood that many of
the young women in this country have cell phones that could be
used as a vehicle to convey this information. We did not have
any government money to spur this kind of collaboration, but
what we did have was an opportunity to bring an ``all hands on
deck'' approach. So the cell carriers, through their industry
trade association, the Consolidated Treaties and International
Agreements (CTIA), waived text message fees for 2 years. About
115 partners--nonprofit, for-profit, a whole mix--built content
and have distributed content three times a week to women in
need. So 25,000 women are getting this service. We did not pay
for, but it is an example----
Senator Coburn. OK. So that is great, but my question was
about the Accountability and Transparency Act.
Mr. Kundra.
Mr. Kundra. In terms of partnering with the public, one of
the things we have done as we have looked at these platforms
with the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) community. For
example, the Sunlight Foundation launched an independent
competition and actually created the applications. In my
testimony, as I talked about FlyOnTime.us, it was a product of
a competition that the Sunlight Foundation did.
We have also seen private citizens actually build an
application. For example, they took their recall data, and they
built an application that allows you to see on your phone when
a product has been recalled so you can prevent yourself from
buying it.
Senator Coburn. OK. We had two pilot sub-award programs
that GAO said they were not successful. Are you planning more
pilots or what is the plan with USAspending.gov?
Mr. Kundra. So the plan as we move forward is to actually
leverage the infrastructure that has been deployed, and also to
go deep in terms of the sub-award data, which is to go to the
$25,000 limit that has been set to make sure that we can get as
much of the data out there and roll it up and characterize it
as possible and make sure that we can also show trends as we
look at the USAspending.gov.
Senator Coburn. What is the problem with the sub-award
data?
Mr. Kundra. The sub-award data is a pyramid problem. When
you go down one level, you may deal with 100,000 recipients.
When you go down the second or the third level, you may start
dealing with a million, 2 million, 3 million----
Senator Coburn. Give me an example of a program where we
have sub-awards that go to 100,000 people.
Mr. Kundra. So let us say you give out a grant at a State
level, whether it is at the Department of Transportation or
whether it is at Health and Human Services, and at a State
level where you begin to allocate that funding across the board
and then that is the government recipient.
Now as you get down to the private sector recipient and
companies that may start disbursing those funds across the
board, you end up getting thousands and thousands of----
Senator Coburn. Yes, but you are not at 100,000 on
anything.
Mr. Kundra. Well, I am talking about across----
Senator Coburn. I know, but let us just take a Department
of Education grant. There are 50 States, plus Territories, and
then they may give 100 per State. So you have 5,000. That is a
small data set. What is OMB's directive to all the agencies
about sub-awards? Are they told that you have to do this or
not?
Mr. Kundra. So we actually issued guidance on sub-award
data to try to collect that information. The challenge for us,
as I mentioned before, was also on the technology front, which
is we did not have a technology platform----
Senator Coburn. OK. So if you have the technology, then the
real problem is not going to be technology. The problem is
going to be compliance.
Mr. Kundra. Yes.
Senator Coburn. So what is OMB going to do about
compliance? Is there any consequence to not following the law
as far as the Accountability and Transparency Act?
Mr. Kundra. So what we have already done is we have made
sure that across the board there is a senior accountable
official assigned at each of the agencies who is going to be
accountable for the reporting of that data. And that is what I
meant when I said there is a faceless accountability in terms
of everybody was responsible for data quality----
Senator Coburn. No. I agree. Well, Mr. Chairman, thanks for
allowing me to go a little bit over on my questioning time. I
will submit a few other questions to you.
Anything either of the other of you want to add before I
finish?
Mr. Chopra. Well, if I may--I would make two comments.
One, this Congress did authorize about $37.5 million in
this year for what we call the Partnership for Program
Integrity, basically a fund that would allow us to get after
the issue of federally funded government services that are
State-administered, locally delivered, and anything in between.
So my presumption is that a great deal of the architecture and
the way we can get better data will come out of the grants
process--to get that money out and to find ways to be more
efficient. Coming from Virginia's State government, Senator, I
can tell you our own accounting systems at the State level were
very difficult, so Federal funds would come in, the State
systems are often 20 or 30 years old, and their financials
would only have a few items of information associated with the
actual dollar figure. Then a separate system altogether would
administer where the money ultimately went and the ability to
cross-walk the----
Senator Coburn. But there is an easy way to fix that. With
every grant acceptance, a State or an individual signs that
they will comply, and here is what compliance means. It is
easy. Then the onus is on them to comply: If you take this
money, here is what you have to do to comply.
Let me just share with you a minute until Senator Carper
comes back. Almost every week, I have a whistleblower that
contacts my office. Not having sub-grant and sub-award data
keeps us from eliminating waste in this country. There is $350
billion a year in waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in the
Federal Government right now that I can document. How do you
get it out? The only way to resolve these problems is to have
the data there so that when you get a whistleblower and you
have the data, you do not have to present a significant case
because it is there already.
If we can ever get the sub-award and sub-contract data--
and, remember, 98 percent of everybody in this country is doing
the right thing, but the ones that are costing us are the ones
like on Medicare fraud and some of these other things, they are
costing us a ton. When we do not have that data, we cannot
leverage the information. When we go to try to get the
information, guess what? Even on the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, which has subpoena power, unless we subpoena
it, most of the time we cannot get it, information that should
already be online.
So I want you to understand how important this is as a tool
for us, and looking at what our financial situation is, what
you guys are doing is more important than anything that I do up
here every day, what you all are doing because it is going to
pay far greater rewards and far greater dividends.
Thank you.
Senator Carper. Senator Coburn and I are interested, as he
just reminded us, in trying to ensure that folks are doing what
they are supposed to be doing. And it is hard for us to police
every person in government or folks that are not in government
to ensure they are doing what they need to be doing.
One of the things that I like to do--and I think he does as
well--is to try to find ways to incentivize people or agencies,
people within agencies, to do what they ought to be doing, to
do the right thing. And one of the things we have focused on
over the years is trying to ensure that when Federal agencies
have surplus properties that they do not need, that they sell
them and get to keep some of the money to help fund their
programs.
We are interested in making sure that not only do we have
agencies stop making improper payments, but actually to
identify where the money has gone, particularly in----
Senator Coburn. Would the Senator yield? Just for the
record, we spend $8 billion on properties we do not want and
that are empty that the Federal Government owns. Every year.
There is $8 billion. That will pay for the extender package
that is coming on to the floor. But yet we are not doing it
because we do not have all the data.
Senator Carper. Yes. But one of the things we are
interested in doing is trying to go out and collect all the
money that is fraudulantly taken out of Medicare by fraudsters.
If we allow contract recovery folks to go out and recover the
money and let them keep a portion of it, then we can
incentivize them to do a much better job. If we can do the same
thing with whistleblowers, let them keep some of the money that
is actually recovered. But the idea is to find ways to
incentivize--use financial incentives to harness market forces
and get people to help us do what needs to be done.
I like to say--and Dr. Coburn has heard me say this once or
twice--that the role of government is to steer the boat, not
row the boat, and one of the things that always fascinates me
is how do we harness market forces to drive good public policy
outcomes.
What I want to do is ask you all to take a minute--and I
will start with Mr. Ferriero and then we will go to the other
panelists. Are you trying to find ways to use prizes or rewards
for people to be able to develop a more effective way to use
agency information? What kind of results are you seeing so far,
if you will? And is this something that we ought to be thinking
about expanding in the future? What is your office doing to get
the word out on these kinds of competitions? Are there ways
that we can help put a spotlight on these competitions so that
more people will want to participate?
Can you all just take a moment and take a shot at that,
please? Thanks. And, Mr. Ferriero, if you want to respond, you
are welcome to.
Mr. Ferriero. Sure. That is part of the Open Government
plan that is being created now by the Archives, and there is
the intention of creating within our agency opportunities for
competition for coming up with new ideas about how we go about
doing our business. And this is something that is very much why
I am so excited about the plan, is that it is staff driven, it
is from the bottom up. And we do not have concrete examples of
that yet, but it is a definite part of our Open Government
plan.
Senator Carper. OK. Thank you. Mr. Chopra.
Mr. Chopra. Well, Mr. Chairman, that is absolutely a key
priority for us, and we think that is a terrific tool when
thoughtfully designed--you cannot just have prizes and
competition for anything--to achieve pretty dramatic outcomes.
Senator Carper. How do we do the design there to make sure
that what we are designing actually is going to be appealing to
folks whose cooperation we need?
Mr. Chopra. Well, we have built a community of practice
that was launched in conjunction with the guidance that was
released on March 8 so that we could incorporate best practices
in that model. There are nonprofit and for-profit stakeholders
who have been experienced in prize design, the most famous
being the X Prize that is contributing to our community of
practice. But even beyond, companies like McKinsey, the Joyce
Foundation, and others have been contributing and publishing on
best practices and how to achieve the proper design.
But they run the gamut, so you might have a design to try
to develop breakthrough new ideas that you had not thought of
before. DARPA's most recent $40,000 network design challenge
really allowed us, with a very small amount of money, to think
about how do these new emerging social networking technologies
help to advance big challenges. And they had a simple one: Find
10 balloons that were floated all over the country that all in
one morning would be up and then brought down by the evening.
The entire land mass of the United States was in play, and
through social networking, the winning team built an incentive
system. Your point about financial incentives? They tiered the
payment structure to get thousands of people to volunteer to
look out and invite their friends and neighbors to say, ``Hey,
where are the balloons?'' In 9 hours, they found all 10
balloons across the entire land mass.
Senator Carper. Were they mostly found in Delaware, do you
think? [Laughter.]
Mr. Chopra. Actually, I got a map in my head, but I cannot
think of where it was.
Mr. Ferriero. But guess where the team was from?
Mr. Chopra. MIT. A lot of love.
But I say that because there are prizes that spur new
thinking, as was this prize. There were prizes that achieved
outcomes goals where government investment may not be the right
goal. So we want to help young people learn about healthier
eating habits. It is one of the First Lady's top priorities in
her Let's Move! campaign. We do not have a lot of government
money. Whether we should or we should not--your point about row
versus steer the boat is a great one. But we found $40,000 in
modest prize money to spur all this creativity in the gaming
community and the application development community, to take
the nutritional information from the Department of Agriculture
and find a way to help parents make better choices in food
preparation for their kids and to educate kids on the food
choices they have.
There are communities popping up all over the country
saying, ``Hey, we will sign up and help. We want to be a part
of this.'' For a very modest investment, you can spur a great
deal of leverage in behavior.
I think the point you are making is a good one. How do we
get this right? The guidance memo that OMB issued acknowledged
that certain Federal agencies have certain explicit
authorities. The Department of Defense (DOD), the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, (NASA), and the
Department of Energy (DOE) are explicitly authorized to run
certain prize competitions. Others do not have some the same
authorities, but have some other vehicles that might allow
prize competitions. So we describe this marble cake framework
for how one actually conducts prizes and competitions, and we
are looking at ways to hopefully make that a little bit easier.
And with your partnership and collaboration, Mr. Chairman, we
would love to engage further.
Senator Carper. Great. Thanks. Mr. Kundra, the last word.
Mr. Kundra. And I think when you think of prizes, they are
not just limited to monetary prizes. So what we have seen is,
for example, at OMB we launched the President's Security and
Freedom Ensured Act (SAVE) Award, which is essentially to find
game-changing ideas to help save money. And there was a woman
at Veterans Affairs who came up with the idea of saying, well,
why is it that every time we discharge a veteran from a
hospital, we throw away the medicine that may be half empty,
and recognizing that a lot of the talent and energies in the
front lines, obviously, of the public sector and harnessing
those ideas and baking them into how we run the government.
Second is when we launched the IT Dashboard--and we still
have issues, frankly, around data quality. But what is
happening is we are getting the American people who are sending
us e-mails or are coming in and saying, ``Well, why is it that
you are spending all this money on this particular project?
Maybe there is a better way, a third way.'' So, really, helping
improve actually performance.
And the third area I would say which is looking at how we
fundamentally change the way we deliver services to the
American people such as the application I was talking about,
where someone could create an application using data from the
Department of Transportation or, as Aneesh mentioned, car
safety data or looking at data around consumer protection or
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) data around foods that
may have been recalled.
We are seeing people actually creating all these mobile
applications that the government would have spent frankly years
and millions of dollars building. And so we are finding
mechanisms in terms of using challenges and prizes also to save
taxpayer dollars as well as find innovative approaches and
improve performance.
Senator Carper. All right. It has been a great panel and a
tough act to follow, but we have some folks sitting behind you
that are going to give it a shot. We very much appreciate your
being here, preparing for this and responding to our questions.
We will have some more questions that we will want to submit
and ask you to respond to those as promptly as you can.
Mr. Chopra. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Carper. Maybe at the end of the day we will not
only provide better transparency but a lot better service for
less money, and that is a pretty good goal for all of us. Thank
you very much. Good to see you.
I would ask the second panel to come to the desk at this
time, if you would.
Good afternoon. It is great to see you all. Thank you for
joining us. There is Steve O'Keeffe going around here with
crutches, and what is that device on your left foot there? What
is that? I wore one of those a couple years ago when I broke my
foot in a race.
Mr. O'Keeffe. I guess I can remove it soon.
Senator Carper. Eventually I got to stop wearing it.
Hopefully you will, too.
Mr. O'Keeffe. Thanks.
Senator Carper. Thanks for joining us. Coming off the
disabled list (DL), as we like to say in baseball, off the
disabled list.
I am going to give a brief introduction to our witnesses
and then ask each of you to proceed.
Our first witness is Ellen Miller, co-founder and Executive
Director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan and
nonprofit organization dedicated to the openness and
transparency of government. Ms. Miller is also the founder of
the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign where
she focused her attention on the influence that money has in
politics. She was named one of the 15 people the next President
should listen to--I do not think I made that list, but I am
glad that you did--by Wired Magazine. It is quite an honor, and
we thank you for joining us today.
Our next witness is Rob Pinkerton, Director of Public
Sector Solutions for Adobe Systems. Mr. Pinkerton has an
extensive background in government and technology, serving in
both the public and the private sector. Notably, he has been an
emergency medical response technician in Virginia. Whereabouts?
Mr. Pinkerton. Henrico County, Richmond.
Senator Carper. All right. A law clerk in the city of
Baltimore and a legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate. Who
did you work with?
Mr. Pinkerton. Strom Thurmond.
Senator Carper. Strom Thurmond. Well, we thank you for your
service and thank you for his, too.
Our next witness is Steve O'Keeffe, founder of MeriTalk,
and I am told that MeriTalk is an online community of
technology experts that focus on leveraging technology to
improve the way that agencies operate. I understand that you
have tasked this community of experts to grade the
Administration leading up to our hearing and that you will
report back the results today. We thank you for your help.
Our last witness also has had some experience before our
Subcommittee. Mr. Blanton is the Director of the National
Security Archive at George Washington University. Mr. Blanton
has been a leading national advocate in reforming the way that
agencies classify and protect information. I understand that
you have conducted over more than 40,000 Freedom of Information
Act requests. That is a lot. Mr. Blanton, we thank you and all
of our other panelists for being here.
I am going to recognize Ellen Miller to begin her opening
statement. Just try to keep your remarks within 5 minutes. If
you get too far beyond that, I will have to reel you in. But we
are glad you are here. We look forward to your testimony.
Everything that is in your printed testimony will be made a
part of the record, and feel free to summarize as you see fit.
Ms. Miller, thank you.
TESTIMONY OF ELLEN MILLER,\1\ CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR, SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION
Ms. Miller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the
invitation to be with you today.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Miller appears in the Appendix on
page 72.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On a personal note, I want to just mention that 30 years
ago I was a staffer to this Committee, so I have a particular
affection for the Committee for which you do your fine work.
Senator Carper. No kidding. Didn't they have child labor
laws then? [Laughter.]
Ms. Miller. They did. The Chairman was Senator Ribicoff at
the time, and Ranking was Senator Percy. So it was some time
ago.
Senator Carper. OK.
Ms. Miller. I am delighted to be here.
My name is Ellen Miller, and I am the co-founder and
Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation. Sunlight is a 4-
year-old nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to using the power of
the Internet to catalyze greater government accessibility and
openness and transparency. We take our inspiration from Justice
Brandeis' famous adage, ``Sunlight is said to be the best of
disinfectants.'' We are committed to improving access to
government information by----
Senator Carper. Ms. Miller.
Ms. Miller. Yes?
Senator Carper. Please forgive me for interrupting. I have
just been advised by my staff that on the floor of the Senate
there has been a move to stop all the proceedings and hearings
that are going on in the Senate, and we are compelled to stop
at this point in time. I regret it, but there are rules here
that unless there is a unanimous consent to proceed for a
hearing--as you may recall, in the Senate we can only go for so
long, and then we have to stop our hearings. And the whistle
has blown, unfortunately, and we and all the other committees
and subcommittees that are holding hearings have to now at this
time cease. I feel very badly about that. It is not my doing.
But we are not going to ask you to stay around, but I am going
to ask you at some point that it is convenient for you and for
us, we are going to ask you to come back and have an
opportunity to hear from each of you.
So with that having been said, maybe after the start of
recess, we will be able to hold these hearings in a way that we
would like to. But I am going to have to adjourn at this point
in time.
Again, my apologies, Ms. Miller. Thank you, Mr. Pinkerton,
thank you, Mr. O'Keeffe and Mr. Blanton.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The hearing was adjourned before these three witnesses made
their statements. The prepared statements for Mr. Pinkerton, Mr.
O'Keeffe, and Mr. Blanton appear in the Appendix on pages 75, 79, and
85, respectively.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Blanton. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Carper. I have had a chance to look through your
testimonies. You have a lot to offer, and we want to be able to
have not just those of us who have read your testimony benefit
from it but a lot of people who have not.
So that having been said, again, our thanks to you and I
apologize to you for any inconvenience that this may have
caused for you, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.
Thank you very much.
With that, the hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:06 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
REMOVING THE SHROUD OF SECRECY:
MAKING GOVERNMENT MORE TRANSPARENT
AND ACCOUNTABLE--PART II
----------
TUESDAY, APRIL 13, 2010
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management,
Government Information, Federal Services,
and International Security,
of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:35 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Thomas R.
Carper, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senator Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Good afternoon. This is a little bit like
church. In church, you have the pews up front and the pews in
back. The pews up front are always empty, and if our witnesses
will turn around, you will see what I mean. The folks are
sitting in the back pews there. Some of them look kind of
young. I do not know where you ladies and gentlemen are from.
Where are you all from? Well, this is like ``American Pie.''
This is good. [Laughter.]
We are glad you are here.
To our witnesses, this group has your back.
Mr. Blanton. Thank you.
Senator Carper. Our Subcommittee will come to order, and
our thanks to our guests and our witnesses for being here
today. For the next hour or so, we are going to discuss ways
that President Obama and his team of Open Government experts
can reshape both old and inefficient bureaucratic agencies into
lean, not so mean, citizen-focused machines. And we had hoped
to hear from our panel of witnesses today a couple of weeks
ago, but there were larger issues at play, and unfortunately we
had to take a rain check. As I recall, we had to basically stop
our hearing. There is a procedure, a process in the Senate that
at the beginning of the legislative day, the Majority Leader or
his or her deputy will ask unanimous consent for the committees
to meet beyond a 2-hour limit, and if we do not get that
unanimous consent, we cannot meet. And the unanimous consent
was sought, was refused, somebody objected from the other side,
and as a result, we had to close down all of our committee
hearings throughout the Senate abruptly. And we apologize again
for the disruption. We are just glad that our witnesses were
willing to come back, and nobody objected today so we can all
be here.
But before our hearing ended last month, we were able to
hear from one panel, and that was from the administration's top
officials who are leading the Open Government Initiative. I
applauded them then and I will do so again today. The
Administration released guidance to reduce wasteful agency
spending to make senior leaders more accountable and to
improve, we hope, the lives of everyday Americans.
It should not be a talking point anymore that agencies
should be as transparent and accountable as possible, and
change needs to start at the top. When I was the age of these
old people sitting--actually, these young people sitting out in
the audience, to say to somebody that they were transparent was
not a compliment, and it is interesting today that we want our
agencies, we want those that are serving us, we want our
legislative process, we want our leaders to be transparent in
what they are trying to do. So what was not a compliment a few
years ago is today. We are very much attempting to be
transparent.
Now that we have an opportunity to hear from our panel of
outside experts, I hope to finish the discussion we started a
couple of weeks ago and learn in what areas the Administration
is doing well, what areas may need some more attention, and
more importantly, how making agencies more open and transparent
will make the lives of 300 million Americans a little bit
better.
Just to recap why this hearing is important, every year
agencies spend nearly $1 trillion--think about that, $1
trillion--on contracts, grants, and loans. Yet it seems like
every week or so we receive another report from outside
watchdogs--actually, they are kind of like inside watchdogs,
but the Government Accountability Office, which is a Federal
agency, or from an agency's Inspector General outlining
significant wasteful and inefficient spending. You expect some
of that with an operation as big as the Federal Government, but
there is plenty of waste that still goes around, and the folks
at GAO and the Inspector Generals help us to identify that. But
at a time when a lot of Americans are trying to keep from
losing their jobs or avoid foreclosure on their homes, we in
the Federal Government, need to lead by example and not by
exception.
I like to tell my staff, if it is not perfect, make it
better, and try to focus on doing everything well. I believe
that phrase can be applied here. There is more that both the
Administration and the Congress can do to make sure that we are
spending Americans' hard-earned tax dollars wisely, and we need
to work together to get it done. The American people demand it.
In closing, I just want to add that as we discuss all of
the new and exciting initiatives that the Administration has
under way or plans on undertaking in the near future, we ought
to keep our eye on the ball. Our job does not just end at
making information freely available, but in making sure that
information can be effectively used to improve services to
every American, to reduce wasteful spending, and to enforce
accountability.
Again, our thanks to our witnesses of this panel, one of
whom showed up wounded--he is coming off the DL, the Disabled
List--to be here with us today, and we are grateful for that.
My statement says I will now recognize Senator McCain for
his opening statement, but he has not joined us yet, and he may
during the time that you all are here, and I hope so. And if he
can, we will recognize him when he arrives.
Again, thank you. Your entire statements will be made a
part of the record, and I will just ask maybe, Mr. Wonderlich.
TESTIMONY OF JOHN WONDERLICH,\1\ POLICY DIRECTOR, SUNLIGHT
FOUNDATION
Mr. Wonderlich. Chairman Carper, thank you again for the
opportunity to appear before you today. As you said, my name is
John Wonderlich, and I am the Policy Director for the Sunlight
Foundation. The Sunlight Foundation is a nonpartisan nonprofit
dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze
greater government openness and transparency. We take our
inspiration from Justice Brandeis' famous adage, ``Sunlight is
said to be the best of disinfectants.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Wonderlich appears in the
Appendix on page 89.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are committed to improving access to government
information by making as much of it as possible available
online. Indeed, we believe it is important to redefine
``public,'' as in the phrase ``public information,'' as meaning
online. We focus on creating databases and new tools and
Websites to enable citizens to get the information they need to
be informed participants in our democracy. We believe that
transparency and openness are essential foundations for public
trust and that without the former, the latter cannot survive.
The Internet is making increased transparency cheaper, more
effective, and in higher demand every day as Americans come to
expect instantaneous and constant access to all kinds of
information. Given the rapid technological advances in how
information can be captured, stored, analyzed, and shared, this
is the time for government to rethink how it makes information
available.
There are three core principles for establishing an open
and transparent government:
First, transparency is government's responsibility.
Transparency must, first and foremost, be understood as the
responsibility of our government since private and nonprofit
responses can only reach so far.
Second, public means online, so whenever the government has
committed to making information public, the standard for public
should include freely accessible online. Information cannot be
described as truly public if it is available only inside a
government building, during limited hours, or for a fee.
Third, data quality and presentation matter. The Internet
has redefined effective communications and publishing, and it
is now an around-the-clock open medium in which now standard
practices include continuous dissemination, permanent
searchability and reusability, and other key features.
So why are these improvements in government transparency so
important? First, transparency is the basis for informed
participation in self-government. The public has rising
expectations of greatly expanded access to government
information so that they can play a fuller role in
understanding, evaluating, and participating in the workings of
their government. Our role as citizens is only as strong as our
government is open. This idea is not an abstract, distant kind
of public good. The actions that make up our civic lives--
informed voting, active participation or analysis--these all
depend on access to public information. Without that
connection, citizens are left disconnected and dispirited, and
substance and dialogue are replaced by apathy and divisiveness.
Second, online transparency can create accountable and
efficient spending, something that governmental bodies and
cities and States and here in Washington are just now starting
to discover.
Third, when government makes data public, it can foster
whole new businesses or industries. President Obama's Open
Government Directive recognizes this potential, noting that
information that make ``create economic opportunity'' should be
given special priority.
And, fourth, and perhaps most importantly, open and
transparent government is accountable government. Open
information allows us to check what government is doing with
our tax dollars and for whom.
Sunlight's vision is one of a rich, vital public sphere
where politics is driven by dialogue and fact and merit drives
decisionmaking in government. In that spirit, we are pleased to
help shape the new policies and technology that will allow us
all to benefit from a stronger democracy, creating new
platforms and databases to inform and engage citizens,
empowering journalists, lawmakers, and public officials,
investing in our social infrastructure to demand and make
better use of government information, and advancing the bold
and responsible policies that will ultimately open our
government.
Thank you very much, and I am happy to answer any
questions.
Senator Carper. That is your story and you are going to
stick to it?
[Nodding affirmatively.]
Senator Carper. Good enough.
I failed to introduce Mr. Wonderlich before he began
speaking, and I will just say just a couple things.
Is it true that you are the Policy Director at the Sunlight
Foundation?
Mr. Wonderlich. Correct.
Senator Carper. And is it true that the Sunlight Foundation
is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to openness
and transparency in government?
Mr. Wonderlich. Sounds right.
Senator Carper. All right. Is it true that in this capacity
you work with the Congress, you work with agencies, and the
public sector to develop smarter policies that help reform bad
government practices?
Mr. Wonderlich. Indeed, yes.
Senator Carper. And that is why we asked you to be here
today.
Mr. Wonderlich. Thank you.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Our next witness is Steve O'Keeffe, founder of--do you call
it MeriTalk? You founded it, didn't you?
Mr. O'Keeffe. I did.
Senator Carper. How long ago?
Mr. O'Keeffe. Two years ago.
Senator Carper. Two years ago. And before that?
Mr. O'Keeffe. I had been working in the public-private
domain for about 20 years.
Senator Carper. Where did you learn to speak English?
Mr. O'Keeffe. That was in London.
Senator Carper. OK. You speak it better than the rest of
us, I think.
Mr. O'Keeffe. Well, differently, maybe.
Senator Carper. I did an interview this morning on Fox
Business Network, and the guy who was interviewing me was
British. He kept asking me, ``What are you saying?''
[Laughter.]
He was wondering what I was saying. No, we actually had a
Kumbaya moment. We actually agreed on some things. It was
pretty amazing for both of us.
I am told that MeriTalk is an online community of
technology experts that focus on leveraging technology to
improve the way that agencies operate. I understand that you
tasked this community of experts to grade the Administration,
give them a grade leading up to our hearing, and that you will
report back the results today. And I just have one question
before you start: Do you grade on a curve?
Mr. O'Keeffe. No, it is not graded on a curve.
Senator Carper. OK. Fair enough. All right. Well, good. You
are recognized. Please proceed. Thanks again for being here.
TESTIMONY OF STEPHEN W.T. O'KEEFFE,\1\ FOUNDER, MERITALK
Mr. O'Keeffe. Chairman Carper and Subcommittee Members,
thank you for the opportunity to speak to you here today. My
name is Steve O'Keeffe, and as you mentioned, I am the founder
of MeriTalk, the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online
community that fosters public-private collaboration and
dialogue in the government IT community.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statements of Mr. O'Keeffe appears in the Appendix
on pages 79 and 93 respectively.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
First, I would like to congratulate you on the innovative
format for this hearing, breaking it into two parts. Seriously,
while the separation between government and industry panels was
unorthodox----
Senator Carper. I just want you to know, Mr. O'Keeffe--
forgive me for interrupting, but I just wanted you to know the
room is just emptying out. [Laughter.]
Moments after you started to speak, everybody got up and
began to leave. But we have a new group from Delaware that are
here to bolster you and they are here to cheer. So go right
ahead.
Mr. O'Keeffe. It is probably because they cannot understand
me. [Laughter.]
So just to say, apart from everybody leaving, I wanted to
congratulate you on the unorthodox format for this hearing,
breaking in into two parts. Here we are in the reloaded
session. While it was unorthodox, it did provide us the
opportunity, candidly, to connect with some of the people who
spoke in the first panel, the government experts, and engaged
in some very meaningful dialogue. Just last week, I met with
Vivek Kundra at OMB and with Mike Wood at the Recovery Board.
We reviewed the results of the MeriTalk Ogov Study, which I am
going to present in a minute or two here, and exchanged
perspectives that will help shape the path forward on both
sides of the equation, both government and industry, real,
meaningful public-private dialogue. Perhaps this should be the
format going forward. We should stop every hearing halfway and
reload it.
Senator Carper. Did you happen to engage them once the
hearing had to stop? Is that when you all had a chance to talk?
Mr. O'Keeffe. Yes.
Senator Carper. How fortunate. That is great. We may want
to do that more often.
Mr. O'Keeffe. I think it could be the new thing.
Senator Carper. It could be.
Mr. O'Keeffe. So I would like to begin by noting that
President Obama's Open Government Directive is not a stroke-of-
a-pen initiative. If you will pardon the hyperbole, it is
analogous to President Kennedy's challenge to go to the Moon in
1961. Nobody expected to see a spaceship take off one year
after the announcement, and if they did, I would put it that
few people would have jumped on board to ride that spaceship
just one year after the announcement. Many of us have had the
opportunity to ride on the Open Government Apollo 1, and I
think we have had some mixed experiences, candidly.
Just over a year ago, after the signing of the Open
Government Directive, Open Government is getting mixed reviews.
In my written testimony, I talk about some of our firsthand
experience trying to build applications on top of the first
version of the IT Dashboard from OMB as well as for searching
for content on Recovery.gov. I guess the net of our experience
was that it was pretty frustrating. If I might, the juice just
really was not worth the squeeze once we had gone through the
process.
That said, seeing as this is an Open Government hearing, we
thought it would be appropriate to bring the community's voice
into this hearing, so that is why we hosted the Ogov Survey on
MeriTalk prior to the initial hearing to get the community's
read on how we are doing in Open Government. And with that, let
me present a couple of slides here.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The slides presented by Mr. O'Keeffe appears in the Appendix on
page 82.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first is we asked, Do you think the government is more
open today than it was when President Obama took office? And
while 53 percent say yes, there is a surprising number of
people that think that, no, the government is not more open,
and also a significant number that think that they are not sure
whether it is more open or not.
Senator Carper. Interestingly enough, I saw some polling
data today at a luncheon presentation, and the President's
favorables and unfavorables or uncertains kind of reflect those
numbers right there. Isn't that interesting?
Mr. O'Keeffe. Yes, it is. Well, hopefully we can get the
Open Government--send them an op and hopefully get the
President's approvals up. That would be great.
Do you feel that Open Government is providing----
Senator Carper. I am glad you got that in before Senator
McCain joined us. [Laughter.]
Mr. O'Keeffe. There will be more people leaving the room.
We asked: Do you feel that Open Government is providing you
with a voice in how government works? And you will see that 58
percent of the sample say no, which is interesting. So when we
look at this notion of Open Government as a way for citizens to
have a say in how their government operates between elections,
we are not really meeting that requirement right now. I think
that is an important point.
These are just a few of the questions that we put. We
asked: How would you grade OMB's IT Dashboard? And what we see
is only 4 percent give that Dashboard an A grade. When I sat
down with Vivek Kundra, he was keenly interested in this
feedback. You will see that 37 percent give it a C grade and 21
percent give it a D grade. So there is a lot of room for
improvement.
One of the things that I think was very encouraging is a
very open path in terms of discussion about what the feedback
is. There is no denial from the executives.
We asked: What was the biggest challenge to Open
Government? And the No. 1 point here was management resistance
to transparency--hardly a huge shock. Obviously, we are trying
to introduce new ideas, and so I think we need a lot of
evangelism inside the government and talking about the
requirement to civil servants about the requirement to do this
because this is a new way of looking at things.
Another point here, 16 percent said the absence of a proven
model and infrastructure for real citizen engagement, so
looking at all this Web 2.0 stuff where we are looking at how
to put that together as it evolves provides something that is
really valuable.
And then we asked: Should the government execute research
to identify what citizens like and dislike, what they want and
need from Open Government? So if the government is building a
product, which is a new role for the government, it will be a
great idea first to have some understanding of what citizens
are looking for in Open Government rather than just building
what we think, if that makes sense.
So as I mentioned in my opening comments, I had the
opportunity to sit down with Vivek Kundra at OMB and with Mike
Wood at the Recovery Board since our first hearing. Both of
these executives were keenly interested in the results of the
MeriTalk Open Government Study and, importantly, open a
dialogue about how to improve the state of Open Government.
Vivek Kundra advised that OMB has made significant upgrades
to its IT Dashboard since we looked at it last year. We talked
about the opportunity for better communication with the
community on the site's functionality as very important.
That said, we took a look back out on the site, and we did
find that the platform has much improved. I would like to
present just a couple of slides from that to show the kind of
data that is available today on the site. The data is there,
the analysis we provided, and there is significant opportunity
for public-private partnership going forward in this area. So a
couple of quick slides.
This is the first slide looks at what the government's
information technology and management spend.\1\ This is $40.2
billion with a ``b'' each year. And so what we see here is that
64 percent of that spend is going on maintaining legacy
systems. So keeping up expensive legacy systems, and in many
circumstances we might perhaps be better off looking at
modernizing rather than trying to put Band-Aids on the existing
systems. And this speaks to cloud and many other initiatives
looking at modernizing government's IT infrastructure.
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\1\ The slide referenced by Mr. O'Keeffe appears in the Appendix on
page 83.
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We break out here by DOD and civilian, and what you see on
the first chart there on the left-hand side is that DOD spends
significantly less on maintaining the old than the civilian
agencies, so maybe there is a way to look at accelerating that
modernization and taking a leaf out of the DOD's book.
The next and final slide that I will show you is a further
breakdown of that data, and what this shows is information
infrastructure maintenance, information management, information
security spending.\2\ The red is information security spending,
and you will see that far and away the lion's share of
information security spending is happening in the Department of
Defense. There are red portions on each of these civilian
government's charts, but it is so marginal that you really
cannot even see it. So sometimes graphing data provides new
insight, and our intent is to look at taking data that is being
published by the government and repackaging it in fashions that
will provide applications and value for the American public.
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\2\ The slide referenced by Mr. O'Keeffe appears in the Appendix on
page 84.
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Mr. Wonderlich talked a little bit about this notion of the
private sector providing additional value-added, and we very
much support that notion.
We are currently in dialogue with a series of Federal
agencies to ground source some of the numbers that we pulled
from the Dashboard to find out whether they are indeed
accurate, and so we look forward to continuing that dialogue
and proving that out.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today, and I await
your questions.
Senator Carper. Thank you. I thought your colleague who
helped with the presentation on the charts just did an
exceptional job. [Laughter.]
Do you want to introduce her?
Mr. O'Keeffe. Yes, this is Lauren Walker. She is really the
brains of the outfit and helps out in all circumstances.
Senator Carper. I was watching her from time to time during
your presentation. I could just barely see her lips move when
you spoke. [Laughter.]
You guys are pretty good at that. Thank you.
Our last witness is actually somebody we have seen around
here before and we welcome him back: Thomas Blanton is the
Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington
University. Mr. Blanton has been a leading national advocate in
reforming the way that agencies classify and protect
information. We are pretty good at overclassifying, as I
recall.
Mr. Blanton. Yes, sir.
Senator Carper. And as I stated during last month's
hearing, I understand that you have conducted more than--is it
40 Freedom of Information requests? Is it 400?
TESTIMONY OF THOMAS BLANTON,\1\ DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY
ARCHIVE
Mr. Blanton. Forty thousand.
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\1\ The prepared statements of Mr. Blanton appear in the Appendix
on pages 85 and 97 respectively.
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Senator Carper. It is 40,000. That is probably more than
anybody around--well, maybe not, but that is a lot of 40,000
Freedom of Information requests. I can hear them say, ``It is
him again. It is Blanton again with another FOIA request.''
That is a lot. I do not know if you get paid by the FOIA
request, but if you did, you would be well off.
Mr. Blanton. The pharmaceutical industry does about 10
times as many.
Senator Carper. OK.
Mr. Blanton. We are just a small nonprofit media outfit
trying to keep the government open.
Senator Carper. OK. Well, we are glad you are here, and
thanks for joining our panel again today. I want to apologize
for your having to come back, but we are glad that you are
willing to. And as Mr. O'Keeffe suggested, maybe some real good
has come out of the fact that we were disrupted last time and
had a chance to have a dialogue that otherwise would not have
occurred.
Mr. Blanton. I would echo that, Mr. Chairman.
Last time I actually got to personally congratulate Vivek
Kundra on the CIO Council winning the Rosemary Award, named
after Rosemary Woods for her infamous 18\1/2\-minute gap in the
Watergate tapes. And we gave it to them this year, to the Chief
Information Officer Council, because although they have been in
charge of best practices for government's IT, all that spending
that Mr. O'Keeffe is talking about, since 1996 they have never
addressed the crisis in electronic records and e-mail
preservation. And if they cannot on the front end of those
billions and billions put in the preservation and access piece,
then none of us are going to have any documents to FOIA request
for down the road, and we will not know what our own government
has done.
So your hearing last time gave me the opportunity to give
him my own personal congratulations, but that is the least of
it. I just want to make three points today, Mr. Chairman. One
of them is just the importance of this process and this hearing
and this follow-up, because by calling Vivek Kundra, Aneesh
Chopra, and David Ferriero last time, you actually forced some
decisions on them. They had to face up and push the agencies to
come up with tangible deliverables and to be able to come here
and tell you we are doing something really positive here. You
have the bully pulpit, and your role, I think, is truly
essential to the progress that we are already seeing.
I think that is my second point. I am more optimistic today
than I would have been on March 23 if you had me on the panel
right after them. And the reason why is between March 23 and
today, those agencies have all deposited their Open Government
plans on the public. And it is a fascinating process to see the
bureaucracy itself churning. They have been ordered to do so by
the President, by the Office of Management and Budget, and they
have actually created interagency processes where some of their
best and brightest are trying to come up with ways to make
their process more open to the public. They have systems that
are trying to identify those high-value data sets they can put
out there. You see this bureaucratic motion happening, and
change will come of that.
But that is really the third point, which is we are not
there yet. It has not changed. Maybe the wheels over at the
White House--this is Norm Eisen . He likes this metaphor. He
says, ``We have turned the wheel all the way over with our
directives and our orders and our guidance and the memos and
Day 1 pronouncements by President Obama. But it is a super
tanker, and so the ship is just barely moving like this.''
Well, I am here to tell you today is not a super tanker. It
is actually a fleet. And there are aircraft carriers and there
are dinghies, and we have actually found a couple of rowboats,
too. And let me tell you, they have no radio equipment to be in
touch with the White House, and they do not know what is going
on, and they have not received the word yet.
What we released last month was our eighth audit
governmentwide of how Federal agencies are responding to
Freedom of Information requests, and we did a real simple
thing. The President had put out a directive on his Day 1 in
office for agencies to get more responsive, change your Freedom
of Information practice. The Attorney General then in March for
Sunshine Week last year put out specific guidance to all the
agencies saying: Change your FOIA practice, your regulations,
and your training materials.
So we did a simple thing. We filed Freedom of Information
requests with all 90 major Federal agencies, said: Show us.
What did you change? Give us a copy of your regs before and
after. Give us a copy of your training materials. Give us a
copy of your guidance. Give us a copy of anything that you
changed in response to the President and the Attorney General.
And I can tell you today 13 out of 90--only 13 out of 90--
Federal agencies made any concrete change to their actual FOIA
practice in that first year.
Now, why I am more optimistic. That made headlines across
the country on March 15, and the headlines were, ``Report
faults Obama's efforts at transparency,'' or ``Agencies lag
Obama message.'' That was Monday morning.
Tuesday morning, the White House Chief of Staff and the
White House Counsel sent a memo to all 90 agency heads saying:
Remember us? Change your Freedom of Information guidance,
practice, regs, and show it to us.
Twenty-four hour responsiveness, and that is, I think, Mr.
O'Keeffe's experience talking to Mr. Kundra and others in this.
They are not defensive about it. They want to change it. They
need us pushing to change it. They need you holding oversight
hearings to change it. They need agencies to get why it is in
their interest and the taxpayer's interest to be more open. And
that combination of pressure can actually make the change. But
diversity of agency response is the great challenge.
We are right in the middle today, with
Openthegovernment.org, Mr. Wonderlich's great outfit as well,
where we are looking at all those Open Government plans and
saying what is real, what is Memorex, what is really going to
be a change, and what is just promises for the future. And it
is a fascinating diversity because some of them are really
impressive.
In my written statement, I describe my colleague Gary Bass
has highlighted the Department of Health and Human Services and
saying this is a really impressive Open Government plan. They
have tangible high-value data sets they are going to have out
by the end of the year. They have done this on their flagship
initiatives. This is great.
Others of those plans just say: Well, something? We are
going to keep planning to write this plan. We will plan on
planning, and we will plan some more, and then maybe we will
plan again and we will give you the plan. And that is great,
but it is not openness.
You can see how frustrating it must be if you are sitting
at the White House and you are trying to turn the ship or
change agency practice. Our first governmentwide audit was
whether Attorney General John Ashcroft back in 2002 had changed
the way Freedom of Information requests were responded to. And,
again, he sent out this memo saying, we at the Justice
Department will defend you if you can find any reason to
withhold information from the public, we will defend you.
So we asked the agencies: What did you change? Fascinating.
Four or five agencies actually had written memos from their
counsel's office to their program people saying this is the end
of the Freedom of Information Act, you do not have to respond
to anymore requests. The vast majority of agencies, 30 or 40 of
them, just sent a copy of the memo out to their field offices,
but did not actually change their own regs or practice. And
then there were four agencies that wrote us back, and they
said: Excuse me. What Ashcroft memo was that? Could you send us
a copy? We never got that one.
I can tell you, every agency has gotten the Obama memo and
the Holder memo, and you can see it in just the responsive
process on the FOIA requests, and you can see it in the
responsive process to the White House. But change, it is still
in the future.
So let me just end with a suggestion. We are in the middle
right now of this evaluation of agency Open Government plans,
which is sort of where the rubber meets the road. My bet is by
the end of this month or certainly by the first or second week
of May, Openthegovernment.org is going to publish our rankings,
ratings, and evaluations. We are all volunteering. We have a
whole network of people all pitching in, taking this or that
agency, looking at it against a set of criteria. ProPublica
just won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday. They are pitching in on
this, too. A lot of us are doing it.
I have a recommendation for a hearing that when those
ratings are done, you not just invite Openthegoverment.org to
present the evaluations, but you pick the two best agencies and
the two worst agencies and have their chief information officer
come in, their chief Freedom of Information officer, maybe
their deputy head of the department, maybe even the Cabinet
Secretary, and tell you why are you so good, what is your
lesson, what is your best practice, and why are you so bad. And
I tell you, I think you will see direct change coming out of
that subcommittee hearing.
I really appreciate your attention to these matters. It
matters so much, and I look forward to working with you in the
future. Thank you, Senator.
Senator Carper. Thanks. Thanks very much for your comments
and your counsel, and thanks for your advice on----
Mr. Blanton. For what it is worth.
Senator Carper. It is going to be a pretty interesting
hearing. I have a couple questions for individuals, but I have
a question or two for the full panel. The first question I am
going to ask is for the entire panel, and I do not care in what
order you respond, but I would like for everybody to share at
least one thought on it.
One of the reasons we ask two panels to testify is to,
first of all, provide Administration witnesses with an
opportunity to really set the stage or attempt to set the stage
about what we are actually working on; and then we invite a
second panel of outside experts--that would be you--to provide
us some food for thought, to provide just outside-the-box ideas
and observations. In essence, your job is to let us know what
the Administration ought to be thinking about going forward or
perhaps what they could be doing better. And you have mentioned
a number of those already here today.
Can each of you tell me two or maybe three areas where my
staff or I ought to focus on to help the Administration reduce
wasteful spending and to improve services to the people we work
for? Maybe two, maybe three ideas for our staff. What can we do
to help make sure that the Administration reduces wasteful
spending and improves services to our citizens?
Mr. Blanton. All right. You started right in this direction
at the last hearing, and I was really impressed that both you
and Senator Coburn pressed Vivek Kundra on, OK, when is the
subcontracting information going to be up there, and that is a
great step forward because that is where the competitors are
going to be able to see what the other folks are up to. That is
where you are going to level the playing field some on both the
procurement side but also on the effectiveness side, which is
what your questioning goes to.
It is interesting to me--and I still remember the Obama-
Coburn bill, or was it Coburn-Obama bill? And it seemed like--
--
Senator Carper. Or in Delaware it was the Carper-Obama-
Coburn bill.
Mr. Blanton. I stand corrected, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Carper. No. Senator Coburn was the lead.
Mr. Blanton. It seemed to me that there was a meeting of--
--
Senator Carper. Barack Obama was just a mere mortal.
Mr. Blanton. Just a junior Senator then.
Senator Carper. He was a new guy.
Mr. Blanton. It seemed to me there were two theories of
governance that came together in that bill, and one theory from
Senator Coburn is that the more people see of what the
government spends, the more they will see the waste, the fraud,
and the abuse, and they will demand that it stop. And there was
another theory of that government spending which is that if
people can actually see--it is that old notion of when people
only vote for bond issues for a school when you can see what
the money goes to. If you see what it goes to and you have got
some built-in accountability so that there is counterpressure
against waste, people might actually support it. They might
actually want it. And it seems to me that argument is a
perpetual argument in the American system. I still remember--I
think Bill Moyers said the American eagle has two wings, a
right wing and a left wing. It is a permanent argument, right?
And that is great because that is a dynamic tension. But the
commonality is that transparency is the key that will lead to
those greater services. You can get to that subcontract data. I
know it is required by law. I think it is supposed to be all up
by October. Is that correct?
Senator Carper. I think so.
Mr. Blanton. Yes. Then I think we are a big step along the
way. I think if you can also reinforce this whole Open
Government process, because I really do see a level of new
energy in the bureaucracy, now that they have deadlines that
are set, now that they have been tasked by the President and by
the budget folks, they are producing some ideas. Some of the
ideas are terrible. Some ideas do not go anywhere. Some of them
could really be best practices that will directly, I think,
address what you are trying to achieve.
Senator Carper. OK. Thank you.
Mr. Wonderlich. So when the Open Government plans were
released on the January 7, 2009, my organization looked
specifically at the component of each agency's Open Government
plan and how well they fulfilled the requirement to inventory
existing data, high-value data, and identify future data to be
available for download. And what we found was, I think, what we
expected, and that is, very mixed results. Just as Mr. Blanton
was describing, President Obama's clear political will to open
up the Executive Branch translates into mixed results when you
look at real change within the agencies. So through the lens of
did agencies identify high-value data, the results are clearly
mixed, and I think we can see some of the limitations of a
concrete requirement like Mr. Blanton was describing.
So the first point I would make is to look into the idea of
data inventories. On top of the current Open Government
Directive, there are existing statutory requirements for
agencies to list all the information that they have that has
been largely ignored for a decade or more. So I think the idea
of telling the public what is knowable about an agency is a
very powerful one, and that is why my organization is focused
on it.
Now, beyond the idea of the concrete requirement, I think
one of the untold stories of the Open Government Directive is
this idea of encouragement and brainstorming and collaboration.
So in the last few days, the White House released this stretch
criteria document which is bonus criteria or things that the
agencies should do to move beyond what the directive requires,
and I think that is a very unusual and laudable move for the
White House to say: You know what? Our directive is not
comprehensive and it does not go far enough. But that is not a
failure. In fact, we are encouraging agencies to think about
what should come next. And so I would encourage you and your
staff to perhaps connect with the idea process that is
happening across agencies and some of these working groups that
are not just thinking about what the requirements are now but
what they should become maybe in a 3-year time frame. I think
there is a lot of really valuable work being done there.
Then the third thing is I would encourage--and this is very
much along the lines of what Senator Coburn was talking about
at the first part of this hearing, that the problems that
plague USAspending.gov and, by extension, the Recovery Website
I think are much deeper and endemic issues than just building a
Website, so questions of what kind of financial reporting
systems have to be rebuilt from the ground up in order for the
FFATA bill to actually come to fruition. I think that is a
longer-term question that is going to take real effort to
address and the one that we are looking into finding answers
for.
Senator Carper. OK, thanks very much. Mr. O'Keeffe.
Mr. O'Keeffe. I will make a couple points.
Senator Carper. Do you agree with anything they have said?
Mr. O'Keeffe. Not at all, no.
Senator Carper. OK. [Laughter.]
Mr. O'Keeffe. Yes, of course. Got to keep us awake. But I
think that the focus is very much on what data the government
is publishing, and I think one of the things we have to look at
is what data is America interested in consuming, and so I think
more research on who is interested in this data and what kind
of information we should be putting out is very important.
I spent about a year or so working in the Department of
Homeland Security in the National Cyber Security Division, and
at DHS we launched a thing called the National Cyber Alert
System, and it was a subscription-based service where you could
log on to find out what problems were happening on the Internet
and what might affect your computer. There were two different
systems, two different levels. One of them was a technical
level. That was for technical people. And then one was a
regular level for regular people. And so what I would do is I
would get these messages coming across my desk, and I would
call my mother-in-law, and I would read them to her and find
out whether she understood what I was saying. And if she did
not understand what I was saying, then I would send them back
to Carnegie Mellon. So after about 2 weeks, Carnegie Mellon got
very frustrated with my mother-in-law.
But what we have to do is understand what is the American
public interested in. Who are the audiences for this Open
Government content? Let us look at this hearing. Apart from a
lot of the school group that left earlier, this is not a packed
house, and so we need to work out what it is that people are
looking for from Open Government and provide that content.
The other thing I would say is that it is garbage in,
garbage out, and so there is a lot of discussion, and Senator
Coburn was quite forceful in terms of this subcontractor issue
and reporting subcontractor performance and so on. And the net
of it is if we do not have a better program management system
and a more standardized program management system in
government, then the data we get is going to be less than
optimal, and the outputs that we can produce are going to be
less than optimal.
We need to do the same thing from a program management
standpoint and also from a procurement standpoint. Wouldn't it
be great if we had better quality data coming out of the
agencies, people coding the same information in the same
fashion. So I would say, that, yes, we need to look at the
information that is coming out of the agencies, but we have to
take one step further back and look at how that information is
being captured, how we are managing projects in government, how
we are managing and recording the procurement process, and also
on the other end who is interested in consuming this data and
what are their opinions. What are the outcomes of these
efforts, not just the behaviors, which I think are very
important.
Senator Carper. All right. Well, thank you very much. I
thank each of you for your thoughtful responses.
Some of you have criticized the Open Government movement as
focusing a little bit too much on inside baseball. Now that we
are in baseball season, we will use that as an example. For
example, the previous Administration typically focused their
efforts on uploading outdated agency reports online that were
many times difficult to find and oftentimes more difficult to
understand. And although these reports were better than
nothing, Americans want transparency in the day-to-day services
that they depend on like Medicare, veterans' benefits, tax work
done by the IRS, or maybe getting small business loans.
How will Open Government help them? And how do we make sure
that we prioritize our efforts to help citizens? So a two-part
question.
Mr. Blanton. The way we have looked at the Freedom of
Information system is it is a kind of market signaling or
should be a kind of market signaling to the government to help
answer Mr. O'Keeffe's question about what are the audiences,
what do people care about, what do they want to get out of
their government. And if you look at the largest user groups of
Freedom of Information, according to agencies' own reporting,
it is veterans asking about their service records and their
benefits; it is senior citizens asking about Medicare and
Social Security and projecting their lifetime. And those are in
the tens of millions, those information requests.
And so the one problem is that many of those are personal
or private. That is first-party information. They are asking
for it about themselves or about their family. You do not put
that on the Web, or you probably should not, not if it
accompanies a Social Security record number, right? And yet
there are probably ways--and this is what I think I am most
optimistic about the Open Government plan focus on tools like
dashboards that make the online experience so much easier to
navigate so that you can then get to those individual--those
pieces of information most directly relevant to your own needs,
your own life. And if the Web can deliver what the promise is
and that the dashboard kind of toolkit allows for, this single
click, double click navigation right to the place, then the
system can be far more responsive, but we have got to clean up
the Freedom of Information nonresponsiveness of agencies, do
exactly what Mr. Wonderlich and the Sunlight Foundation are
trying to do, get more of the high-value data sets on the Web
so people can go search for themselves, because I cannot
predict what Mr. O'Keeffe's mother-in-law is going to want to
know from a given set of files, but it is our obligation----
Senator Carper. But can Mr. O'Keeffe predict?
Mr. Blanton. Maybe he cannot even predict, exactly.
Senator Carper. OK, just checking.
Mr. Blanton. But if you set up the navigation tool so that
his mother-in-law can go to the site herself and look around,
make it as easy as doing an online search in any of the major
search engines, then you are at a place where you are going to
get the benefit of the wisdom of crowds.
Mr. O'Keeffe. It is a full-time job trying to predict what
my wife wants to do, so I have not spent that much time
pondering my mother-in-law's requests.
As far as this notion of how will Open Government help and
how to prioritize, I would put it that research obviously is
very important, understanding, what are the priority issues,
but maybe that is not necessarily the role for government.
Maybe the role for government is to clean up the data, to
provide transparency and accountability in order to show the
faith in our democracy, to improve the quality of our
bureaucracy and the efficiency of our bureaucracy.
But by publishing the data in a format which is machine
readable and intelligible, as Mr. Wonderlich had mentioned,
there is an opportunity to unleash the private sector to
develop new applications which will deliver value in multiple
veins. So we are looking at perhaps almost a cable television
model of applications that could provide value for different
segments of the community, and how we work out whether those
are actually delivering value, well, they will either succeed
or they will fail. And so if you look at things, for example,
like health or veterans' health, why shouldn't pharmaceutical
companies step in and underwrite applications that will be
written on top of government data which would deliver value to
the American public.
So I think that the notion of the government developing
this complete infrastructure, from source, from cradle to
grave, if you will, in the Open Government model is not
necessarily the way to go. I think what we have to look at is
at what point is the data high quality to begin with? Is it
served up in a fashion which is easily navigable? Is it
delivering value inside the government? Looking at the priority
areas but then potentially providing the opportunity for the
private sector to step in and deliver value-add on top of that,
and if they succeed or fail, that is going to be largely a
product of whether they are delivering value or not.
Senator Carper. OK. Thanks.
Mr. Wonderlich, you get the last shot at this question.
Mr. Wonderlich. Thanks. So I think there is this existing--
the way things work now, so much of our government's data is
collected for the benefit of maybe 10 government regulators.
And for the life of me, I cannot figure out why that has been
the case for so long.
For example, the Department of Labor just released as one
of their flagship initiatives a unified search for different
accountability data, so certain OSHA violations and mine safety
health data. And I think that is a great move, but it also
leaves me wondering why that was never released before. So if
that data is valuable to collect and should have a behavioral
impact on the people that they regulate, then shouldn't it have
been released to the public in the first place? And I think the
mind-set responsible for not releasing that is one that says we
know how this data should be used best, and it is our job to
fix the problem. And I think what is happening now is there are
whole teams of developers, many of which are organizing through
our Sunlight labs, who are chomping at the bit to create new
businesses and new visualizations of how power and how our
country works and how they can use government data to start to
tell those stories and hold people accountable.
So on the question of priorities, I agree we have to have
priorities about what to open, but I think at the same time we
should recognize that we do not have all the right answers, and
we should unleash the private sector and the nonprofit sector
to help to start to find those answers.
Senator Carper. I think that response gives us a pretty
good segue to my next to the last question. Just based on what
you have heard your colleagues at the panel saying here today,
some of the discussion, some of the questions, some of the
responses to those, is there anything else that you would like
to either amend your original statements, opening statements,
or maybe reinforce or underline, re-emphasize something that
you had said in your opening statement? Just be thinking about
that for us, if you will.
I think there is a saying I like to remind my staff when we
are considering what the role of government should be in
America, and this is not original to me, but I like to say that
the role of government is to steer the boat, not to row the
boat. And people say, ``What do you mean by that?'' And I use
the analogy of health care delivery. In England, for the most
part, the doctors and nurses and health care folks actually are
government employees. In this country, that is not the case. We
have doctors, nurses, and so forth in the Defense Department
and the VA, but for the most part health care delivery is--it
is either done through nonprofits or it is done through for-
profit entities. But the role of the government, as I think, is
to steer the boat, not row the boat.
I also like to tell them that public policy should really
try to leverage market forces. At least one of you referred to
that here today. And we ought to really seek to incentivize
people to do what is the right thing.
In last month's testimonies, Mr. Kundra and Mr. Chopra
mentioned setting up prizes and awards for people to compete
for if they developed a more effective way to use agency
information, and that strikes me as an effective model, an
interesting model but a potentially quite effective model that
could lead to some interesting results.
What type of results are we seeing so far? And is this
something that Congress ought to think of expanding in the
future? And, second, are there other ways we can incentivize
agencies to do the right thing before it leads to a problem?
Mr. Wonderlich. On the question of prizes and awards, that
is a topic that my organization has some experience with.
So we ran something called the Apps for America contest,
and it has happened twice, and right now we have a Design for
America contest going on, and this is really an effort for us
to say there is this powerful new force in the country which is
that of the developer, whether working for a business or
perhaps on their own, and trying to say what happens when you
take those developers and set them free on Data.gov, what kind
of useful things get created. So things like FlyOnTime.us,
which is a Web page where you can see for any flight, how often
is this delayed, if this is an important flight, should I aim
for a different time.
Senator Carper. I wonder if we have those for trains.
Mr. Wonderlich. I do not know if that exists, but if we----
Senator Carper. I will have to find out. I used to be on
the Amtrak board, and I ride the train a lot. Amtrak used to
have an ad campaign that went something like this: ``Maybe your
next flight should be on a train.'' In Delaware we only have
non-commercial airports. In Delaware, I like to say all of our
next flights are on trains.
I am sorry I interrupted you. Go ahead
Mr. O'Keeffe. I think they were going to go with maybe your
next trip should be on a train.
Senator Carper. There you go.
Mr. Wonderlich. But from an investment standpoint, we had
enormous success with spending something, along the lines of
$30,000 in prize money and getting dozens and dozens of
applications that you would pay far more than that to have
developed, and almost everyone involved benefited from the
notoriety of being involved and getting attention to what it is
that they were able to create. So we have had some success with
the prize model. I am not sure how broadly that could apply to
solving some of government's tougher problems, but I think that
is an approach that the Obama Administration is committed to
experimenting with and seeing how far we can take it.
On a similar level, the phenomenon of the Dashboard, which
I think we are seeing more and more of, there is the IT
Dashboard. OIRA now has a Dashboard about pending regulations,
and the Department of Justice just announced a new FOIA
Dashboard. I think those are all very useful things to display
what is knowable about a certain behavior. I think we can
assume that will have a strong effect on behavior, and it will
be interesting over the next couple of years to see what the
limit is of how much behavior can be affected by displaying it.
But I think that experiment is currently underway.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Mr. O'Keeffe. So I think that the initiatives that are
taking place are good, and we need to innovate in order to
change to achieve different outcomes. At the same time, we need
to realize that we are going to fail in some areas, and this is
not something that the government is very comfortable with. And
so one of the outcomes of innovation is failure in certain
areas, so we need to develop walls around programs, try new
approaches and recognize they may not succeed. And I know it
sounds a little strange to say that government needs to embrace
the idea of failing, but I do think that is important. In order
to succeed, you have to try again.
I think that this notion of prizes is a great idea, and I
think wholeheartedly we support the innovation prizes that Mr.
Kundra is working on and look forward to working with him on in
that area. And at the same time, we need to look at both the
stick and the carrot, so the prizes are a great idea. We also
need to continue looking at reports that show how agencies are
doing. And what I would recommend is that rather than just
looking at measuring behaviors--and I think if you look at
information security, FISMA is a perfect example of that where
we measure whether or not you put in all this paperwork. We are
not really measuring whether or not your agency is actually
more secure.
Senator Carper. We do a similar thing in education. When we
measure performance in a classroom by educators or in a school
or in a school district, we measure a process. We do not
measure outcomes.
Mr. O'Keeffe. Right.
Senator Carper. Although speaking of leveraging resources
and a race to the top, I am amazed at how effectively the
Department of Education through Secretary Duncan has taken
about $4 billion, which is, admittedly, a lot of money, but
literally to leverage enormous changes in over 40 States in the
way they deliver education.
Mr. O'Keeffe. No. I think that is right. One of my
colleagues has a severely disabled child, and so his wife has
to go into the schools with Jack in order to take these tests.
And it is critical that the kids actually take the test in
order to get through the process. Of course, the kids cannot
take the test, so the mother has to put the hand on the button
in order to make sure they check the box, in order to file the
paperwork, in order to get the funding. And so really what we
have to do is focus increasingly on what are the outcomes that
we are looking for and try to measure outcomes rather than
behaviors.
Senator Carper. Fred Voltaire is the guy I----
Mr. Blanton. Oh, Mr. Voltaire. Right, your college
roommate.
I was in Bulgaria a few years ago, and they had developed
prizes for the government ministries who were the best and the
worst at answering public request information. And the best
award was called the Golden Key Award, and it was this
beautiful, huge skeleton key on a trophy pedestal. Beautiful.
The minister showed up to accept it, very happy. The bad award
was not--they did not have Rosemary Woods to call on, and so
for them it was the Rusted Padlock Award, also on a pedestal.
And let me tell you, no minister showed up to accept it, but
that was what all the newspaper stories led with, was the
Rusted Padlock. And I think that is part of the problem with
the prize approach, which is the news is the negative, when
actually our challenge is how do you accentuate the positive,
right?
And so that is why I would say, when you are looking at
constructing hearings, have a couple that are subperformers,
but get a couple of the best practices ones, because the best
practices ones, the prize winners are the ones that prove that
the old bureaucratic refrain is resources, we just do not have
enough resources, is not correct. The real difference between
the high performers and low performers is not resources. It is
leadership and will and pressure.
Senator Carper. Well, we try to put a spotlight on both
good behavior that we can to incentivize more of and that which
is not so good.
The last question was just to say after looking at what
each of you have been saying in response--just in your opening
statements but also in response to questions and listening to
the responses of others to the questions that have been raised,
is there anything that you want to say or add in closing? It
can be something new, maybe a new thought. It could be just to
emphasize or underline already something that has been said by
you or by someone else. We will start, Mr. O'Keeffe, with you,
if you do not mind.
Mr. O'Keeffe. Right in the middle.
Senator Carper. Yes.
Mr. O'Keeffe. I would just close with reiterating what I
talked about earlier, which is, this is really analogous to a
trip to the moon, and it is going to take some time. So, Vivek
Kundra was really put to it by Senator Coburn about the
subcontractor issue, and I think it is a very important issue,
but I think that we have to be practical about what can be done
and the time frames associated with it. So if we have program
management and procurement systems where the data is not
properly passed and there is not sufficient fidelity, then it
is going to be impossible to get the data that we require, so
we need to be realistic about what can be done.
I do not mean to say that letting people off the hook is
the way to go, but I think we need to be practical. I think
that we need to focus on outcomes, so it is not just a matter
of publishing data. We want to work out what our priorities are
and what we are looking to get out of this, who our audience
is. And at the same time, I think that the notion of engaging
with the private sector--and by doing that we allow the
government to perhaps insulate it from some of the turbulence
and ups and downs associated with getting new business models,
which I think is a great idea.
And, last, I would say that, I appreciate the hearing. It
is great to have these issues raised, and we are looking for
more dialogue with the Administration, with the government on
how to make this better. The answers are not going to come from
one source. They are going to come from this crowd sourcing and
discussion.
Thank you.
Senator Carper. Yes, thank you. Mr. Blanton.
Mr. Blanton. I would like to reiterate something that I
mentioned to you when you came down from the podium when we
called off that last hearing. I think I said to you, ``Mr.
Chairman, that first panel of government witnesses was
brilliant.'' And it was brilliant for this reason: That the
money and the power was at one end of the table, Mr. Kundra's
end of the table, and the legal responsibilities were in many
ways at the other end of the table with Mr. Ferriero, the
Archivist of the United States.
Senator Carper. I remember when you said that.
Mr. Blanton. And the National Archives is an orphan agency,
unfortunately, and down at that end is where the money and the
energy is and where the focus is, and yet our real challenge, I
think, as citizens, as people who care about Open Government
and transparent and accountable government, is to turn the
Archives' role from that orphan agency out in the hinterland
into being an integral part of the information technology
development on which we are spending $40, $60, $80 billion a
year, so that it is a seamless piece, so we are not saying to
Mr. Ferriero, OK, pick up the mess after we have created all
these very different legacy systems, all these different forms
of metadata, all these different kinds of software and
hardware, you have got to save the historically important stuff
that is important to individuals and for history, but you are
not integrated with what Mr. Kundra is doing.
I think at one of our previous discussions I suggested that
the concept we should be after for that integration is
something that you see on personal computers today, an
automatic, built-in, back-up process at the time that you are
running your network or at the time you are running your
ethernet. The Apple Mac has a time capsule function where I
never have to back up my little computer. It is every day
listening to my computer when I log on the net looking for a
new file or an updated file and automatically saving it.
The role the National Archives should play 5 years, 10
years, 15 years from now, should be the back-up hard drive for
the whole Federal Government. But to get from where it is
today, orphan agency spending only may be $400 million a year
and then a clean-up after the parade mode is going to be
permanent failure unless it switches over and becomes that
back-up hard drive on the net for the whole Federal Government.
To me that is the great kind of challenge, I think,
institutionally.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you. Mr. Wonderlich, last
word.
Mr. Wonderlich. Thank you. So to me, I think we are at a
really transformative moment for at least two reasons. One is
because the gap between people's expectations and what the
government is delivering is at an all-time high. If you look at
our experience as consumers or shoppers or students, it is very
different from our experience as citizens. The other reason is
the way that President Obama raised the issue on the campaign
trail of transparency and promised very big things about
changing the way the government works. And that leaves us in a
situation where the press and the public are very hungry for an
evaluation, and it would be really simple right now to try to
assign a pass-fail grade. To me, I think that would be an
enormous mistake because what is happening is much more
important and much more complicated than you could evaluate
with a simple pass or fail.
So I think the challenge that I see right now is to take
these transparency issues, which are really some of the things
that people care most about, like earmarks or the way Federal
money is spent or the way influence works in Washington or the
way our decisions are made, and keep the momentum that is
happening now moving forward in a way that is meaningful but
also recognizes the complexity of the challenge.
So as evaluators, I think that is the challenge that we
have right now.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you. Again, I will go back
to where I started off, and that is just to thank you for
coming back and finding time in your schedules to be with us
now a second time and to actually have a chance to share your
thoughts with us and to respond to our questions and actually
reflect on what each of you have to offer. We thank you for
that.
When my wife asks me this evening, ``How was that hearing
that you were going to hold today?'' I am going to say it was
fun, and it also turned out to be, I think, highly informative,
and we thank you for making it that way and sort of holding our
attention and giving us some good insights going down the road.
We discussed a lot of important issues that although to
most of us, to a lot of people in this country, they seem
fairly abstract, but they can also lead to real-world impacts.
For example, one area that we have been focusing our efforts on
is over-budget IT systems that many times just do not deliver
what they were supposed to have delivered.
I was happy to hear last month that, I think, because of
our efforts, the Veterans Administration terminated, I believe,
over $50 million in bad investments, and the Department of
Homeland Security will be finishing a review soon that also may
lead them to start cutting some of their dead weight. We need
to expand this kind of accountability to most, if not all
investments that our agencies undertake.
I also hear that the Obama Administration is leveraging the
private sector to come up with new and even exciting ways to
use massive amounts of government information. This type of
thinking, I believe, recognized that our government is not the
only one with good ideas. In fact, many times it is the average
citizen, or the above average citizen maybe, who knows where
the problems lie and maybe has some pretty good ideas on how to
fix them.
So as we leave here today, I hope we will not stop
discussing these issues. I think we will not. In fact, I want
to invite our witnesses, or anyone else for that matter who
might share our interests in these matters, to submit their
ideas on ways to improve how our agencies are operating and to
reduce wasteful spending.
Now, usually my colleagues who were unable to be here today
will submit some questions for the record, and if you do
receive them. You have as much as 2 weeks to submit questions,
and if you would be so kind as to respond to them promptly, we
would be grateful for that.
You all make a good team, and we appreciate very much,
again, your taking your time to share not just part of your
afternoon but some really good ideas with all of us. And with
that having been said, this hearing is adjourned. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 3:42 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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