Which Agency is Most Open?

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Which government agencies are most transparent? Which are the least open? The surprising answers are in a new report from OMB Watch, a good-government group that monitors the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. The report shows that some agencies, such as NASA, the General Services Administration, the State Department, and the Department of Education, are doing a halfway decent job adhering to the minimum requirements of the “Open Government Directive” [OGD] released by the White House late last year. But even NASA scored only 40 of a potential 57.5 points on OMB’s scale, and most agencies did a whole lot worse—including, tellingly, the White House itself:

While agencies did generally meet the minimum requirements of the OGD for the new webpages, several scored particularly low in this review. The bottom five agencies, excluding those that failed to put up any open government page, were the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)/White House, the Department of Agriculture, FDIC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice… [N]one of the bottom agencies’ have Inspector General reports, a link to Recovery Act data, reports to Congress, budget justifications, or performance results that can be easily found from the new webpages. Similarly, several laggard agencies, including FDIC, Department of Health and Human Services, OMB/White House, as well as others, failed to link to public participation tools for collecting input and open government ideas as mandated by the OGD.

You read that right: the White House agency that promulgated the open government plan has trouble living up to the spirit, if not the letter, of its own rules. That’s pretty sad.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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