After passing the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, the White House launched Recovery.gov, its "centerpiece effort" to carry out the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act out with "transparency and accountability." The site is now home to details about where all the money is going, stocked with numbers, charts, and timelines.
But before we shout out "Three Cheers for Transparency!" let's turn a skeptical eye.
President Obama's made some hefty promises where government transparency and Web use is concerned, but so far it seems these may have limited merit.
For starters, a promise made by Obama said the administration will make legislation available to the American people for five days prior to the president's signing it. Great idea, but, alas, not this ginormous bill, which was far too urgent to be made public in advance. The promise, after all, only includes "non-emergency legislation" -- a rather evasive phrase which suggests the only legislation we'll be seeing in advance will be about naming bridges.
Well, it's only our money -- like, all of it -- and the money of our children and the foreseeable generations of this country being spent. We can let this one slide without seeing it first. I mean, considering Congress didn't even get the opportunity to read it, why should we?
OK, fine. So he didn't have the chance to publish details of the 400-page bill for the American people in advance. He was sort of trying to rescue the country, and at least, they're available now, right? It's true we can credit Obama for being the first president to go even this far in sharing critical legislation with the American people via the Web, albeit after the fact -- but let's have a quick golf clap and move on, because some other things already seem awry with Recovery.gov.
As reported yesterday by CNET, for example, Recovery.gov had been blatantly blocking requests by search engines. CNET reports the site's robots.txt file read as follows:
# Deny all search bots, web spiders User-agent: * Disallow: /
(Read: Transparency... if you can find it!)
Three hours after the CNET story was published, however, the robots.txt file was removed, making the site open to search engine requests. It's unclear whether the change in code was a direct result of the CNET story, and no one at WhiteHouse.gov responded to request for comment as of press time to clarify.
Further, if it's transparency we're looking for, Recovery.gov is lacking in serious detail. As an example, the image below, which presents a colorful breakdown of where all the money is going, designates one $81 billion bubble to "Protecting the vulnerable," and one $8 billion bubble to "Other" -- with no further explanation.
Image Credit: Recovery.gov
Is this really transparency, or is it just a distraction, a bone for the lowly citizens to chew on while the elected officials run off with the pork?
Admittedly, this is an early view of the site, which will, it claims, be updated over the coming months with more information. So, sure, let's give President Obama credit for his online efforts. But let's also treat Recovery.gov like everything else we read and see on the Web, fully aware it's only part of the story and skeptical of hidden agendas.
? Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution
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