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Monday, February 12, 2007
I Didn't ExpectMore.gov, But Should I Have?
We did not have a lot of good things to say about the president's FY 2008 budget last week (see here, here, here, and here), but there was one thing that was worthy of praise.
Back in 2006, in addition to continuing to criticize the Program Assessment Rating Tool, we criticized changes OMB made to the publication of their PART analyses and data sets. OMB launched a new web site that year called www.expectmore.gov that had very nice looking summary pages for each PART rating. At the time the web site was unveiled, it appeared the more extensive data sets and spread sheets that OMB had previously publish on the PART - and that we used extensively in our analyses - had disappeared.
But this year, OMB has made some new improvements to the web site that include moving the "assessment details" link from the bottom of the web site where they were impossible to find to the top of each PART rating page and making the larger PART spread sheet files available for download (in CSV format). These are excellent improvements, especially for analysts.
In addition, OMB had announced before the budget was released that they would voluntarily be publishing Agency's budget justifications documents that are formulated for the congressional appropriations committees each year. Whether this was in response to our work last year to pass a law requiring those documents be made public or because the good folks over at OMB just thought it best is unclear. Regardless, the justification materials will be available sometime this month on ExpectMore.gov. Give OMB some credit for actively publishing government information without being prompted.
Kudos to OMB on these improvements - acts where government actively opens up and releases information are hard to come by these days.
Posted by Adam Hughes
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