On Nov. 30, Congress and the President succeeded in tying the hands of the judicial system from releasing photographic evidence of American soldiers torturing detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The Supreme Court today reversed a lower court ruling that the pictures must be released.

Since the lower court decision, the Obama administration worked to aggressively cover up evidence behind closed doors despite its public posturing.  Attorney General Eric Holder testified in June that the administration would appeal the lower court decision to the Supreme Court and if unsuccessful would review their opinions on the matter.

Statements by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), however, indicated that the administration wanted to see legislative action to stop the release of the photographs.  After Holder’s testimony, the Senate passed the Detainee Records Photo Protection Act of 2009 (S 1285) with unanimous consent that would have exempted such photographs from the Freedom of Information Act.  The bill passed easily in the House on October 28 as an amendment to the Defense Department’s authorization bill (HR 2647).

Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court pointed to this legislation in a one-paragraph ruling as the reason for allowing the administration to withhold these records.  The decision places the case back in the hands of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which will likely follow orders not to release the records.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration released memoranda that detailed the policy and actions of U.S. personnel in torturing detainees because “the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known.”  Logic follows that continuing to withhold the images of such abuses can only be an effort to obscure the historical record.  The administration, on the other hand, claims it is an effort to protect American soldiers.  However, it’s impossible to conceive of how our soldiers are safer if our government continues to conceal evidence of its past crimes.

In an unprecedented move to increase congressional transparency, as of 1 pm this afternoon, the House of Representatives Statement of Disbursements is available online. 

The Statement of Disbursements (SOD) is a record of the public funds received and expended by Members of Congress in their pursuit of their official representational duties, as well as the expenditures of the House committees, leadership, and administrative offices.  Disclosure has been required by law since 1964, and must be published within 60 days of the end of a quarter.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) directed the Chief Administrative Officer in June 2009 to make the records available online.  Prior to today's release, the SOD were publically available, but only in book form either at Federal Depository Libraries or for purchase from the Government Printing Office.  Those who had the time and resources to access a copy were then faced with the cumbersome task of finding what they were looking for in a poorly indexed three volume, 3400 page document.  As a result, public access in practice was restricted.

This is a big step towards increased congressional transparency, and one that will surely increase public trust in the institution and in their representatives in the long run.  The United States has been, for the most part, spared the sorts of expense scandals that have plagued the British Parliament of late, but there were several instances in the early 1990s of Members of Congress misusing office funds for their personal gain.  Easy access to these records for both the public and the press will aid both groups in holding the people's representatives to account, and stands as a serious disincentive to abusing public funds.

As noted by John Wonderlich on the Sunlight Foundation blog, today's disclosure is only a first step.  This earliest edition of the website only features the SOD in a large PDF file with minimal search functionality.  The next logical step is to increase the user friendliness of the disclosure. 

The Senate, which issues its own Statement of Disbursements semi-annually, is due to put their expenditure reports online beginning in 2011 at the start of the 112th Congress, in order to allow time to develop sufficient web infrastructure for the release.

There’s a lot going on at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Several news items have popped up this week covering a variety of the products the agency is responsible for keeping safe. Strung together, the stories show an agency struggling to regain its footing as a trusted regulator after years of dawdling.

Here’s a quick recap of some of the stories and my impressions at first blush of how CSPC is handling them.

Chinese Drywall

CPSC released yesterday a report examining the health effects of contaminated Chinese drywall. The Chinese drywall has been increasingly showing up in American homes, especially in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The drywall has been causing breathing problems and skin irritation and has corroded home fixtures.

Verdict: Thumbs down. The report identifies a strong correlation between the drywall and corrosion but still only classifies the link between drywall and health effects as probable. Nonetheless, CPSC is urging those who live in homes containing the drywall to spend more time outdoors. Absent a definitive position, CPSC is breeding uncertainty and fear.

The report also says, “There are several known inventories of uninstalled Chinese drywall in the United States and the owners of these stockpiles have been notified of this ongoing investigation and advised to notify the CPSC if they sell or dispose of any drywall from their inventory.” So, as long as CPSC is notified, this stuff could still be sold and end up in homes?

Crib recall

CPSC and Stork Craft Manufacturing announced yesterday that Stork is recalling more than two million drop side cribs after they were linked to the deaths of four infants.

Verdict: Thumbs up. CPSC Chairwoman Inez Tenenbaum said yesterday that her agency had not moved quickly enough on the cribs, but she is attempting to make up for the delay. In addition to the mega recall, “Tenenbaum said there is a compelling reason to ban the cribs altogether,” AP reports. This is the kind of strong warning and decisive statement missing from the drywall story.

Lead and Phthalates in Toys

A new report from U.S. PIRG finds that a substantial number of toys still contain lead and phthalates, a harmful class of chemicals found in certain plastics, even though Congress directed CPSC to ban both substances.

Verdict: Thumbs sideways. I don’t want to excuse lead contaminated toys, but Congress gave CPSC a big job when it banned lead and phthalates, and it did not give the agency or manufacturers much time to respond. The PIRG report also points out that CPSC has successfully orchestrated recalls of many products found to be in violation of the lead standard. PIRG spokeswoman Elizabeth Hitchcock told the Washington Post, "We have seen substantial progress over the last year” but "At the same time, we are seeing some products that slip through the cracks."

ATV safety

The New York Times reports today that the CPSC is in the midst of a big outreach effort to educate consumers about all-terrain vehicle safety, especially for young riders. CPSC is also keeping a watchful eye on imported ATVs, some of which do not meet mandatory safety standards that went into effect in April.

Verdict: Incomplete. As the Times reports, holding imported ATVs to the U.S. standard isn’t good enough, since the U.S. standard is not sufficient in the first place. CPSC’s outreach efforts are good, but CPSC will need to work hard to significantly reduce the dangers associated with ATV use. ATV accidents kill hundreds of people every year.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has launched a new feature on its website that uses several new interactive Web technologies that let users track the emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO2) from coal-fired power plants. SO2 is a pollutant that causes acid rain and harm to public health. EPA's Acid Rain Program (ARP) has been tracking quarterly SO2 emissions from covered power plants since 1995. The new features are a welcome tool for helping the public and government officials track pollution, hold polluting facilities accountable, and ensure that policies to reduce pollution are working.

In addition to providing the classic spreadsheet full of data, the agency is also providing several interesting tools for the public to view the data. Interactive motion charts showing changes in emissions and emission rates let the user watch the changes at facilities over time. The feature lets the user select and track emissions from individual plants and compare those changes to the changes at all the other power plants. 

Open government advocates have been urging federal agencies to incorporate such "data visualization" tools to help the public see trends, identify problems, and understand the bigger story that all the numbers are telling.

I encourage users to view the brief training video provided on the website to get a better understanding of how to use the interactive features and what the data reveal. (Currently one introductory video is posted, but others may be on the way.) Unfortunately, EPA has not provided a way to ask questions about the new technology and what the data show. Having a live person available to answer questions would be very valuable.

The website also uses Google Earth to map the facilities reporting to the ARP. The user can see where in the country are the power plants with the greatest changes in SO2 quarter-to-quarter emissions from 2008 to 2009. While the map is liberally dotted with blue circles showing the locations of plants that had decreases in SO2 emissions, a large red dot clearly identifies the J.M. Stuart station on the Ohio-Kentucky border as the plant with the greatest increase in emissions. (Using additional data recently supplied by EPA, we can see what J.M. Stuart station, run by Dayton Power and Light Company, is doing with all the coal ash it produces along with the air pollution.)

The data show that since the creation of the ARP, air pollution from SO2 was reduced even as electricity generation increased, supporting the claim that the Acid Rain Program is working. However, the data also raise questions about whether even greater successes are possible and whether the rate of improvement is as fast as it should be.

The ARP is a "cap-and-trade" program that caps the amount of pollution allowed and assigns pollution "allowances" among power plants. The facilities are able to trade the allowances to reduce compliance costs while a gradually shrinking cap ensures that overall pollution decreases. This is the same concept now being considered by Congress to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

EPA acknowledged that the information presented on this site is available in data and maps elsewhere on their web site, but the new features are intended "to make it easier to see if, and where, progress is occurring." Making complex data about environmental impacts easier to see is a laudable and much needed endeavor.

I hope the EPA continues to experiment with new technologies for analyzing and disclosing information. I encourage the agency to expand the use of these interactive features to other types of pollution and to link datasets. For example, it would be useful to see enforcement and compliance information overlapping the pollution data, allowing the public to see who's emitting how much and what the government is doing about it. EPA's Toxics Release Inventory program is already working on such applications.

The SO2 emissions tracking tools are found here.