Category Archives: open data

Internet Caucus to host forum in DC on open data with Zillow CEO

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Tomorrow, the Internet Caucus is hosting a forum on open data in the United States Congress that will feature a conversation between Zillow CEO Spencer Rakoff and  yours truly.

Open government data powers Zillow’s ability to give consumers more insight into the real estate market. They are a clear winner in the open data economy, an early beneficiary of federal government releases of data that could one day add trillions of dollars in economic value, better services, resilience against climate change, accountability, and social justice. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the potential and challenges of opening up data about housing and making the real estate market more transparent.

If you have questions about Zillow, open data, startups, real estate or other counts, please let me know. 

[Image Credit: Zillow]

On data journalism, accountability and society in the Second Machine Age

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On Monday, I delivered a short talk on data journalism, networked transparency, algorithmic transparency and the public interest at the Data & Society Research Institute’s workshop on the social, cultural & ethical dimensions of “big data”. The forum was convened by the Data & Society Research Institute and hosted at New York University’s Information Law Institute at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as part of an ongoing review on big data and privacy ordered by President Barack Obama.

Video of the talk is below, along with the slides I used. You can view all of the videos from the workshop, along with the public plenary on Monday evening, on YouTube or at the workshop page.

Here’s the presentation, with embedded hyperlinks to the organizations, projects and examples discussed:

For more on the “Second Machine Age” referenced in the title, read the new book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

Obama administration seeks to increase community resilience against climate change

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Today, the White House launched an effort to engage the nation’s private sector to create tools and resources that increase the resiliency of communities to extreme weather events.

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In the pilot phase, more data related to coastal flooding are now on Data.gov, with more on projected sea level rise and estimated impacts to follow. More government data from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies will be featured on climate.data.gov. NOAA and NASA have will host a challenge for researchers and developers “to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of their own communities to sea level rise and flood events.”

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As the Associated Press reported, another effort plans to add sensors on city buses in Philadelphia to collect data. Should the effort go forward and be expanded, it will provide an important focus for sensor journalism.

A number of private sector companies have announced their involvement. part. Later today, The World Bank will publish a new field guide for the “Open Data for Resilience Initiative.” Esri will partner with a dozen cities across the USA to challenge developers to use its ArcGIS platform. Google will donate one petabyte of storage for climate data and 50 million hours of processing time on the Google Earth Engine.

In sum, the focus on this component of the initiative is on helping people understand and plan for potential changes to their communities, as opposed to using data to make a case to the public about the source or science of climate change. While it is no substitute for increased public understanding of the latter, improving local resiliency to severe weather through data-driven analyses is a sufficiently pragmatic, useful approach that it might just have an impact.

The White House will host a forum at 5 PM in DC today featuring talks by officials and executives from the agencies and companies involved. More details and context on the new climate data initiative are available at the White House blog.

[Image credit: NASA]

Representative Quigley introduces updated Transparency in Government Act (TGA)

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Earlier today, Congressman Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced a comprehensive open government transparency bill on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. The aptly titled “Transparency in Government Act” (PDF) (summary) coincides with Sunshine Week, the annual effort to stimulate a national dialogue about the iopen government and freedom of information.

“The public’s trust in government has reached historic lows, causing many Americans to simply give up on Washington,” said Representative Quigley. “But the mission of government matters, and we can’t lead in the face of this deficit of trust. The Transparency in Government Act shines a light on every branch of the federal government, strengthening our democracy and promoting an efficient, effective and open government.”

As it has in its previous two iterations, the transparency bill has received strong support from most of the major government watchdog and transparency groups in Washington, including Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Sunlight Foundation, Data Transparency Coalition, the Center for Responsive Politics, the Center for Effective Government, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

As Matt Rumsey noted at the Sunlight Foundation blog, this iteration of TGA is the third version to be introduced since 2010:

As we noted at the time, the original bill was inspired in part by model transparency legislation put together on PublicMarkup.org, a project of the Sunlight Foundation.

The 2014 version of the TGA includes a number of Sunlight Foundation priorities including, but not limited to, enhanced access to the work of congressional committees and Congressional Research Service reports, improvements to the current lobbying disclosure regime as well as increased transparency in federal contracting, grants and loans.

The prospects for TGA to pass through the entire House don’t appear to be much better than the prior two versions. That said, as CREW policy director Daniel Schuman wrote today, the bill is a deep reservoir of transparency ideas that Congress can draw upon to amend other legislation or introduce as stand-alone bills:

  • Greater congressional accountability through improved disclosure of foreign travel reports, gift reports, how members of Congress spend their official budgets, and greater disclosure of personal financial information.
  • Greater congressional transparency through improved access to the work of committees (including meeting schedules and transcripts) and greater contextualization of floor votes.
  • Empowering public understanding of congressional work through public access to Congressional Research Service reports.
  • Better tracking of lobbying by broadening the definition of lobbyist, improving the tracking of lobbying activity (in part through the use of unique entity identifiers), and more frequent disclosures by lobbyists of political contributions; improved access to information on lobbying on behalf of foreign entities; and public access to statements by grantees and contractors certifying that they have not used money awarded by the federal government to lobby (the SF-LLLs).
  • Enhancing transparency for contracts, grants, and loans through improved data quality, better disclosure (including electronic) and improved compliance.
  • Making the executive branch more transparent by requiring online access to White House and executive branch agency visitor logs, providing centralized access to agency budget justifications, and allowing the public to see how the Office of Management and Budget OIRA changes draft agency regulations.
  • Improving transparency of non-profit organizations by requiring non-profit tax forms (990s) to be available online in a central location (replacing the current ad hoc disclosure system).
  • Improving the Freedom of Information Act by publishing completed requests online in a searchable database and requiring notice of efforts to carve out exemptions to FOIA. (Ourrecommendations go even further.)
  • Opening up federal courts by requiring live audio of Supreme Court hearings, publishing federal judicial financial disclosures online, requiring a Government Accountability Office study on the impact of live video-streaming Supreme Court proceedings, and requiring a GAO audit of PACER.
  • Require annual openness audits by GAO that look at whether data made available by the government meets the eight open data principles.

In aggregate, this is a bright beam of sunshine from Congress that everyone should stand behind, from citizens to legislators to advocates. The Project for Government Oversight is strongly supportive of its provisions, writing that “there is a lot to like in this bill, including more transparency for Congress, lobbying, the executive branch, and federal spending on contractors and grantees.”

Taken one by one, the individual provisions in the bill are well worth considering, one by one, from bringing the Supreme Court into the 21st century to FOIA reform.

If Representative Quigley’s bill can attract the attention of Congressional leaders and legislators across the aisle who have professed support for open government and transparency, maybe some more of these provisions will move forward to enter the Senate, though that body has shown little appetite for moving legislation forward in the 113th Congress to date.

Federal government agencies receive .91 GPA in FOIA compliance from Center for Effective Government

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Today, the Center for Effective Government released a scorecard for access to information from the 15 United States federal government agencies that received the most Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, focusing upon an analysis of their performance in 2013.

The results of the report (PDF) for the agencies weren’t pretty: if you computed a grade point average from this open government report card (and I did) the federal government would receive a D for its performance. 7 agencies outright failed, with the State Department receiving the worst grade (37%).

The grades were based upon:

  1. How well agencies processed FOIA requests, including the rate of disclosure, fullness of information provided, and timeliness of the response
  2. How well the agencies established rules of information access, including the effectiveness of agency polices on withholding information and communications with requestors
  3. Creating user-friendly websites, including features that facilitate the flow of information to citizens, associated online services, and up-to-date reading rooms

The report is released at an interesting historic moment for the United States, with Sunshine Week just around the corner. The United States House of Representatives just unanimously passed a FOIA Reform Act that is substantially modeled upon the Obama administration’s proposals for FOIA reforms, advanced as part of the second National Open Government Action Plan. If the Senate takes up that bill and passes it, it would be one of the most important, substantive achievements in institutionalizing open government beyond this administration.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have disputed the accuracy of this scorecard, based upon the high rating for the Department of Justice. CREW counsel Anne Weismann:

It is appropriate and fair to recognize agencies that are fulfilling their obligations under the FOIA. But CEG’s latest report does a huge disservice to all requesters by falsely inflating DOJ’s performance, and ignoring the myriad ways in which that agency — a supposed leader on the FOIA front — ignores, if not flouts, its obligations under the statute.

Last Friday, I spoke with Sean Moulton, the director of open government policy at the Center for Effective Government, about the contents of the report and the state of FOIA in the federal government, from the status quo to what needs to be done. Our interview, lightly edited for content and clarity, follows.

What was the methodology behind the report?

Moulton: Our goal was to keep this very quantifiable, very exact, and to try and lay out some specifics. We thought about what the components were necessary for a successful FOIA program. The processing numbers that come out each year are a very rich area for data. They’re extremely important: if you’re not processing quickly and releasing information, you can’t be successful, regardless of other components.

We did think that there are two other areas that are important. First, online services. Let’s face it, the majority of us live online in a big way. It’s a requirement now for agencies to be living there as well. Then, the rules. They’re explained to the agencies and the public, in how they’re going to do things when they get a request. A lot of the agencies have outdated rules. Their current practices may be different, and they may be doing things that the rules don’t say they have to, but without them, they may stop. Consistent rules are essential for consistent long term performance.

A few months back, we released a report that laid out what we felt were best practices for FOIA regulations. We went through a review of dozens of agencies, in terms of their FOIA regulations, and identified key issues, such as communicating with the requester, how you manage confidential business information, how you handle appeals, and how you handle timelines. Then we found inside existing regulations the best ways this was being handled. It really helped us here, when we got to the rules. We used that as our roadmap. We knew agencies were already doing these things, and making that commitment. The main thing we measured under the rules were the items from that best practices report that were common already. If things were universal, we didn’t want to call a best practice, but a normal practice.

Is FOIA compliance better under the Obama administration, more than 4 years after the Open Government Directive?

Moulton: In general, I think FOIA is improving in this administration. Certainly, the administration itself is investing a great deal of energy and resources in trying to make greater improvements in FOIA, but it’s challenging. None of this has penetrated into national security issues.

I think it’s more of a challenge than the administration thought it would be. It’s different from other things, like open data or better websites. The FOIA process has become entrenched. The biggest open government wins were in areas where they were breaking new ground. There wasn’t a culture or way of doing this or problems that were inherited. They were building from the beginning. With FOIA, there was a long history. Some agencies may see FOIA as some sort of burden, and not part of their mission. They may think of it as a distraction from their mission, in fact. When the Department of Transportation puts out information, it usually gets used in the service of their mission. Many agencies haven’t internalized that.

There’s also the issue of backlogs, bureaucracy, lack of technology or technology that doesn’t work that well — but they’re locked into it.

What about redaction issues? Can you be FOIA compliant without actually honoring the intent of the request?

Moulton: We’re very aware of this as well. The data is just not there to evaluate that. We wish it was. The most you get right now is “fully granted” or “partly granted.” That’s incredibly vague. You can redact 99% or 1% and claim it’s partially redacted, either way. We have no indicator and no data on how much is being released. It’s frustrating, because something like that would help us get a better sense on whether agencies would benefit would new policies

We do know that the percentage of full grants has dropped every year, for 12 years, from the Clinton administration all the way through the Bush administration to today. It’s such a gray area. It’s hard to say whether it’s a terrible thing or a modest change.

Has the Obama administration’s focus on open government made any difference?

Moulton: I think it has. There were a couple of agencies that got together on FOIA reform. The EPA led the team, with the U.S. National Archives and the Commerce Department, to build a new FOIA tool. The outward-facing part of the tool enables a user to go to a single spot, request and track it. Other people could come and search FOIA’ed documents. Behind the scenes, federal workers could use the tool to forward requests back and forth. This fits into what the administration has been trying to do, using technology better in government

Another example, again at the EPA, is where they’ve put together a proactive disclosure website. They got a lot of requests, like if there are inquiries about properties, environmental history, like leaks and spills, and set up a site where you could look up real estate. They did this because they went to FOIA requests and see what people wanted. That has cut down their requests to a certain percentage.

Has there been increasing FOIA demand in recent years, affecting compliance?

Moulton: I do think FOIA requests have been increasing. We’ll see what this next year of data shows. We have seen a pretty significant increase, after a significant decrease in the Bush administration. That may be because this administration keeps speaking about open government, which leads to more hopeful requestors. We fully expect that in 2013, there will be more requests than the prior year.

DHS gets the biggest number of all, but that’s not surprising when we look at the size of it. It’s second biggest agency, after Defense, and the biggest domestic facing agency. when you start talking about things like immigration and FEMA, which go deep into communities and people’s lives, in ways that have a lot impact, that makes sense.

What about the Department of Justice’s record?

Moulton: Well, DoJ got the second highest rating, but we know they have a mixed record. There are things you can’t measure and quantify, in terms of culture and attitude. I do know there were concerns about the online portal, in terms of the turf war between agencies. There were concerns about whether the tech was flexible, in terms of meeting all agency needs. If you want to build a government-wide tool, it needs to have real flexibility. The portal changed the dialogue entirely

Is FOIA performance a sufficient metric to analyze any administration’s performance on open government?

Moulton: We should step back further and look at the broader picture, if we’re going to talk about open government. This administration has done things, outside of FOIA, to try to open up records and data. They’ve built better online tools for people to get information. You have to consider all of those things.

Does that include efforts like the Intelligence Community Tumblr?

Moulton: That’s a good example. One thing this administration did early on is to identify social media outlets. We should be going there. We can’t make citizens come to us. We should go to where people are. The administration pushed early on that agencies should be able to use Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook and Flickr and so on.

Is this social media use “propaganda,” as some members of the media have suggested?

Moulton: That’s really hard to decide. I think it can result in that. It has the potential to be misused to sidestep the media, and not have good interaction with the media, which is another important outlet. People get a lot of their information from the media. Government needs to have good relationship.

I don’t think that’s the intention, though, just as under Clinton, when they started setting up websites for the first time. That’s what the Internet is for: sharing information. That’s what social media can be used for, so let’s use what’s there.

Presidential Innovation Fellows show (some) government technology can work, after all

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The last six months haven’t been kind to the public’s perception of the Obama administration’s ability to apply technology to government. The administration’s first term that featured fitful but genuine progress in modernizing the federal government’s use of technology, from embracing online video and social media to adopting cloud computing, virtualization, mobile devices and open source software. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau earned praise from The Washington Post, Bloomberg View, and The New York Times for getting government technology right.

Last fall, however, the White House fell into a sinkhole of its own creation when the troubled launch of Healthcare.gov led to the novel scene of a President of the United States standing in the Rose Garden, apologizing for the performance of a website. After the big fix to Healthcare.gov by a quickly assembled trauma team got the site working, the administration has quietly moved towards information technology reforms, with the hopes of avoiding the next Healthcare.gov, considering potential shifts in hiring rules and forming a new development unit within the U.S. General Services agency.

Without improved results, however, those reforms won’t be sufficient to shift the opinion of millions of angry Americans. The White House and agencies will have to deliver on better digital government, from services to public engagement.

pif-logo-300pxThis week, the administration showed evidence that it has done so: The projects from the second round of the White House’s Presidential Innovation Fellows program are online, and they’re impressive. US CTO Todd Park and US GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini proudly described their accomplishments today:

Since the initiative launched two years ago, Presidential Innovation Fellows, along with their government teammates, have been delivering impressive results—at start-up velocity. Fellows have unleashed the power of open government data to spur the creation of new products and jobs; improved the ability of the Federal government to respond effectively to natural disasters; designed pilot projects that make it easier for new economy companies to do business with the Federal Government; and much more. Their impact is enormous.

These projects show that a relatively small number of talented fellows can work with and within huge institutions to rapidly design and launch platforms, Web applications and open data initiatives. The ambition and, in some cases, successful deployment of projects like RFPEZ, Blue Button Connect, OpenFDA, a GI Bill tool, Green Button, and a transcription tool at the Smithsonian Institute are a testament to the ability of public servants in the federal government to accomplish their missions using modern Web technologies and standards. (It’s also an answer to some of the harsh partisan criticism that the program faced at launch.)

In a blog post and YouTube video from deputy U.S. chief technology officer Jennifer Pahlka, the White House announced today they had started taking applications for a third round of fellows that would focus on 14 projects within three broad areas: veterans, open data and crowdsourcing:

  • “Making Digital the Default: Building a 21st Century Veterans Experience: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is embarking on a bold new initiative to create a “digital by default” experience for our Nation’s veterans that provides better, faster access to services and complements the Department’s work to eliminate the disability claims backlog.
  • Data Innovation: Unleashing the Power of Data Resources to Improve Americans’ Lives: This initiative aim to accelerate and expand the Federal Government’s efforts to liberate government data by making these information resources more accessible to the public and useable in computer readable forms, and to spur the use of those data by companies, entrepreneurs, citizens, and others to fuel the creation of new products, services, and jobs.
  • By the People, for the People: Crowdsourcing to Improve Government: Crowdsourcing is a powerful way to organize people, mobilize resources, and gather information. This initiative will leverage technology and innovation to engage the American public as a strategic partner in solving difficult challenges and improving the way government works—from helping NASA find asteroid threats to human populations to improving the quality of U.S. patents to unlocking information contained in government records.”

Up until today, the fruits of the second class of fellows have been a bit harder to ascertain from the outside, as compared to the first round of five projects, like RFPEZ, where more iterative development was happening out in the open on Github. Now, the public can go see for themselves what has been developed on their behalf and judge for themselves whether it works or not, much as they have with Healthcare.gov.

I’m particularly fond of the new Web application at the Smithsonian Institute, which enables the public to transcribe handwritten historic documents and records. It’s live at Transcription.si.edu, if you’d like to pitch in, you can join more than three thousand volunteers who have already transcribed and reviewed more than 13,000 historic and scientific records. It’s a complement to the citizen archivist platform that the U.S. National Archives announced in 2011 and subsequently launched. Both make exceptional use of the Internet’s ability to distribute and scale a huge project around the country, enabling public participation in the creation of a digital commons in a way that was not possible before.

RankAndFiled.com is like the SEC’s EDGAR database, but for humans

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A new website, Rank and Filed, gathers data from the Security and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database, indexes it, and publishes it online in open formats that  investors can use to research and discover companies. I’ve included a screenshot of Tesla’s SEC filings below.

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The site currently has over 25 million files indexed.

I heard about the new website directly from its creator, Maris Jensen, a former SEC analyst who built the site independently. According to Maris, she proposed the project internally in March 2013 but was immediately turned down.

A month later, after she was terminated for threatening the Commission’s mission with a “lack of respect for senior management” — an issue she holds was unrelated to the proposal — Maris decided to make the idea become real independently and started building. She has since offered to give the site and its code to the SEC but has not heard back from them yet.

Our interview, lightly edited for content and clarity, follows.

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Where did the idea for this originate?

The breaking point was realizing that the guy in the cubicle across from me had spent a week writing the same parser as me — a Python program to parse the EDGAR FTP index for specific filings. This is nearly two decades after Carl Malamud set everything up; the FTP index is exactly as he left it. We were in the division responsible for the SEC’s data analytics and interactive data initiatives. The division literally rewrites this program each time they need SEC filings data. There’s no version control. There’s just no excuse!  Hilariously, that guy also left the SEC and built an SEC filings website, though his is for-profit: http://legalai.com/

What does this do that the SEC needed?

In 2008, the SEC set up a task force (the ‘21st Century Disclosure Initiative‘) to rethink the way they were making data available to the public. A year later, they published this report, with their conclusion and proposal for a new, modernized disclosure system.  I basically just tried to build the system they described. I also did lots of googling — ‘SEC EDGAR tool terrible‘, ‘how to find SEC data‘, etc — and then tried to address the problems people were having.

The problems have been the same for decades. In 1994, people wanted a SEC CIK-to-ticker mapping. 20 years later, this question still pops up on forums monthly.

There are over 600 different forms on EDGAR but the SEC’s form lists are basically no help at all. I went through and googled each form individually. I tried to group them into understandable categories.

The comment at the bottom of this post describes the SEC’s current problem better than I ever could:

Has anyone out there ever tried to use SEC.GOV to search for information about a company? The problem is very easy to articulate. If you search for something, you get 5000 results. At about 10 results per page, you have 500 pages to sift through to find what you want. Once you find what you want, there is ZERO ability to navigate from what you found into related documents!

What if you want to research a particular company’s board of directors? What other companies is each director associated with? Have there been any problems in any of those companies? You can’t investigate these types of things using the technology sec.gov has fielded. You want a needle. The SEC gives you a haystack.

Why not allow for better discovery of all of the SEC data and let investors perform their own investigations of markets & companies?

So instead of focusing on this obvious improvement to the public service the SEC provides, the emphasis apparently is on improving investigative actions. Great. Why not just shut off the sec.gov website completely and let the SEC do all of the investigating and researching of SEC data?

How does RankAndFiled.com compare to other sources of SEC data online?

I unfortunately haven’t added that much ‘value’ yet. I’m a total amateur. I’m just trying to make the data available and understandable! The website doesn’t do any analysis: it just collects, links and presents data from different SEC filings.

Looks like you got some great help from the folks you thanked. Did you build this all yourself with these tools?

Yes, open source tools these days are amazing!!  I started this project with no web or software development experience at all.

I actually feel really lucky to have fallen into all of this. Everything I know I learned on google, mostly through tutorials written by the developers listed there.

I also didn’t know anyone in the dataviz or open source community, so I reached out to some of them with stuff like etiquette questions. Their response and support was just incredible — especially the D3 community, they’re just wonderful.

Can you tell me more about where the data on this site comes from and what you’ve done to it?

Basically, the system watches the SEC’s RSS feeds. It reads and indexes data from SEC filings as they come in. Not all the filings show up on the feeds — I’m not sure why — so it also scans the FTP index for any missed filings.

About 25 million SEC documents have been parsed and incorporated so far, which is everything that’s publicly available on EDGAR.  So companies and people are tracked and connected over time — who’s raising money where, who owns whom, who moved companies or got promoted, who sold a ton of shares.  I also realign all the financial data from quarterly and annual reports so you can see a company’s financial history and so the data is comparable between companies.

It actually feels silly even talking about it, because it’s just so basic. This is stuff the SEC should have been doing years and years and years ago.

But its not a perfect science because one, only a few SEC forms are machine-readable and two, the SEC doesn’t even try to standardize names. SEC registrants are given distinct identifiers but anything goes when companies or names are listed inside a filing. Middle names, middle initials, nicknames, suffixes, titles…

What’s next?

I spent November and December trying to give all my code to the SEC. I received no response, not even a polite no. That’s still the goal — I want them to take over and open source it, or at the very least host the underlying API.  It’s their job to make this data available and accessible. They NEED a team over there doing hands-on work with SEC filings, a team struggling to make sense of this data with just the tools available to retail investors, especially now that they’re talking about disclosure reform.  Right now, they have almost no incentive to change things over to structured data — they buy all the structured EDGAR data they need.

The SEC keeps saying that it’s the private sector’s job to build tools like this, not theirs, but in the past 20 years nobody has come up with a really great, really affordable option.  It doesn’t make sense for any of us to even try — I’ve heard that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters hire legions of Indian professionals to go through each SEC filing by hand.  We just can’t compete.

The SEC will have to make a lot more of their data machine-readable before any ‘disruptive’ innovation can happen, but they won’t do that until they’re forced to (by Congress), unless they have people there who realize how unfair the situation has become.

There are actually a heartbreaking number of SEC employees who also want this to happen, self-described worker bees who’ve reached out to me from personal email to say they’ve been trying to convince their bosses to give this thing a chance.  So far, no luck! I would open source it myself, but unfortunately I can’t afford to host the project indefinitely.

AskThem.io launches to enable citizens to ask public officials anything

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badgeToday, the Participatory Politics Foundation launched AskThem.io, a new online tool focused upon structured questions and answers with elected officials.

As David Moore, founder of PPF, put it, “AskThem is like a version of the White House’s “We The People” petition platform, but for over 142,000 elected officials nationwide.” 

The platform is an evolution from earlier attempts to ask questions of candidates for public office, like “10 Questions” from Personal Democracy Media, or the myriad online town halls that governors and the White House have been holding for years. 

AskThem enables anyone to pose a question to any elected official or Verified Twitter account. Notably, the cleanly designed Web app uses geolocation to enable users to learn who represents them, in of itself a valuable service.

As with e-petitions, AskThem users can then sign questions they support, voting them up and sharing the questions with their social networks. When a given question hits a preset threshold, the platform delivers the questions to to the public figure and “encourages a public response.”

That last bit is key: there’s no requirement for someone to respond, for the response itself to be substantive, nor for the public figure to act. There’s only the network effect of public pressure to make any of that happen.

After a year of development, Moore was excited to see the platform go live today, noting a number of precedents set in the process.

“I believe we’re the first open-source web app to support geolocation of elected officials, down to the municipal level, from street address,” he said, via email. “And I believe we’re the first to offer access to over 142,000 elected officials through our combined data sources. And I believe we’re the first to incorporate open government data for informed questions of elected officials at every level of government.”

Moore referred to AskThem’s use of the Google Civic Information API, which provides the data for the platform.

AskThem goes online just in time for tomorrow’s day of action against mass surveillance, where over 5,000 websites will try to activate their users to contact their elected representatives in Washington. Whether it gets much use or not will depend on awareness of the new tool.

That could come through use by high-profile early adopters like Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes), of MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” or OK Go, the popular band.

Chris_Hayes_AskThem_TOtE_sampleQ

 

At launch,  66 elected officials nationwide have signed on to participate, though more may join if it catches on. In the meantime, you can use AskThem’s handy map to find local elected officials and see a listing of all of the questions to date across the USA — or pose your own.

 

With major pharmacies on board, is the Blue Button about to scale nation-wide?

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blue_button_for_homepage1The Obama administration announced significant adoption for the Blue Button in the private sector today. In a post at the White House Office of Science and Technology blog, Nick Sinai, U.S. deputy chief technology officer and Adam Dole, a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, listed major pharmacies and retailers joining the Blue Button initiative, which enables people to download a personal health record in an open, machine-readable electronic format:

“These commitments from some of the Nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and associations promise to provide a growing number of patients with easy and secure access to their own personal pharmacy prescription history and allow them to check their medication history for accuracy, access prescription lists from multiple doctors, and securely share this information with their healthcare providers,” they wrote.

“As companies move towards standard formats and the ability to securely transmit this information electronically, Americans will be able to use their pharmacy records with new innovative software applications and services that can improve medication adherence, reduce dosing errors, prevent adverse drug interactions, and save lives. ”

While I referred to the Blue Button obliquely at ReadWrite almost two years ago and in many other stories, I can’t help but wish that I’d finished my feature for Radar a year ago and written up a full analytical report. Extending access to a downloadable personal health record to millions of Americans has been an important, steadily shift that has largely gone unappreciated, despite reporting like Ina Fried’s regarding veterans getting downloadable health information.  According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, “more than 5.4 million veterans have now downloaded their Blue Button data and more than 500 companies and organizations in the private-sector have pledged to support it.

As I’ve said before, data standards are the railway gauges of the 21st century. When they’re agreed upon and built out, remarkable things can happen. This is one of those public-private initiatives that has taken years to take fruit that stands to substantially improve the lives of so many people. This one started with something simple, when the administration gave military veterans the ability to download their own health records using from on MyMedicare.gov and MyHealthyVet and scaled progressively to Medicare recipients and then Aetna and other players from there.

There have been bumps and bruises along with the way, from issues with the standard to concerns about lost devices, but this news of adoption by places like CVS suggests the Blue Button is about to go mainstream in a big way. According to the White House, “more than 150 million Americans today are able to use Blue Button-enabled tools to access their own health information from a variety of sources including healthcare providers, health insurance companies, medical labs, and state health information networks.”

Notably, HHS has ruled that doctors and clinics that implement the new “BlueButton+” specification will be meeting the requirements of “View, Download, and Transmit (V/D/T)” in Meaningful Use Stage 2 for electronic health records under the HITECH Act, meaning they can apply for reimbursement. According to ONC, that MU program currently includes half of eligible physicians and more than 80 percent of hospitals in the United States. With that carrot, many more Americans should expect to see a Blue Button in the doctor’s office soon.

In the video below, U.S. chief technology officer Todd Park speaks with me about the Blue Button and the work of Dole and other presidential innovation fellows on the project.

U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel on the risks and potential of open data and digital government

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Last year, I conducted an in-depth interview with United States chief information officer Steven VanRoekel in his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, overlooking the White House. I was there to talk about the historic open data executive order that President Obama had signed in May 2013. vanroekel On this visit, I couldn’t help but notice that VanRoekel has a Star Wars clock in his office.  The Force is strong here. The US CIO also had a lot of other consumer technology around his workspace: a MacBook and Windows laptop and dock, dual monitors, iPad, a teleconferencing system integrated with a desktop PC, and an iPhone, which recently became securely permissible on in the White House IT system in a “bring your own device” pilot. The interview that follows is slightly dated, in certain respects, but still offers significant insight into how the nation’s top IT executive is thinking about digital government, open data and more. It has also been lightly edited, primarily removing the long-winded questions of the interviewer.

We’re at the one year mark of the Digital Government Strategy. Where do we stand with hitting the metrics in the strategy? Why did it take until now to get this out?

VanRoekel: The strategy calls for the launch of the policy itself. Throughout the year, the policy was a framework for a 12 month set of deliverables of different aspects, from the work we’re doing in mobile, from ‘bring your own device,’ to security baselines and mobile device management platforms. Not only streamlining procurement, streamlining app development in government. Managing those devices securely to thinking about the way we do customer service and the way we think about the power of data and how it plays into all of this. It’s been part of that process for about the year we’ve been working on it. Of course, we thought through these principles and have been working on data-related aspects for longer. The digital strategy policy was the framework for us to catalyze and accelerate that, and over the course of the year, the stuff that’s been going on behind the scenes has largely been working with agencies on building some of this capability around open data. You’re going to see some things happening very soon on the release of some of this capability. Second, standing up the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and then putting specific ‘PIFs’ into certain targeted agencies to fast track their opening of data — that’s going to extend into Wave Two. You’re going to see that continuing to happen, where we just take these principles and just kind of ‘rinse and repeat’ in government. Third, we’re working with a small set of the community to build tools to make it easy for agencies to implement these guidelines. So if there’s an agency that doesn’t know how to create a JSON file, that tool is on Github. You can see that on Project Open Data .

How involved has the president been in this executive order? It’s his name, his words are in there — how much have you and U.S. chief technology officer Todd Park talked with the president about this?

VanRoekel: Ever since about last summer, we’ve been talking to the president about open data, specifically. I think there’s lots of examples where we’ve had conversations on the periphery, and he’s met with a lot of tech leaders and others around the country that in many, many cases have either built their business or are relying upon some government service or data stream. We’re seeing that culminating into the mindset of what we do as a factor of economic growth. His thoughts are ‘how do we unlock this national resource?’ We’re sitting on this treasure trove – how do we unleash it into the developer community, so that these app developers can build these different solutions?’ He’s definitely inspired – he wrote that cover memo to the digital strategy last May – and then we’ve had all of these different meetings, across the course of the year, and now it culminates into this executive order, where we’re working to catalyze these agencies and get them to pay attention and follow up.

We’ve been down this road before, in some respects, with the Open Government Directive in 2009, with former US CIO Vivek Kundra putting forward claims of positive outcomes from releasing data. Yet, what have we learned over the past four years? What makes this different? Where’s the “how,” in terms of implementing this?

VanRoekel: The original launch of data.gov was, I think, a way of really shocking the system, and getting people to pay attention to and notice that there was an important resource we’re sitting on called data. Prior to data.gov, and prior to the work of this administration, the daily approach to data was very ad hoc. It wasn’t taken as data, it was just an output or a piece of a broader mix. That’s why you get so much disparity in the approach to the way we manage data. You get the paper-driven processes that are still very prevalent, where someone will send a paper document, and someone will sign it, and scan it, feed it into a system, and then eventually print it and mail it. It’s crazy what you end up seeing and experiencing inside of government in terms of how these things work. Data.gov was an important first step. The difference now is really around taking this approach to everything that we do. The work that we did with the Open Government Directive back in 2009 was really about taking some high value data sets and putting them up on Data.gov. What you ended up seeing was kind of a ‘bulk upload, bulk download,’ kind of access to the data. Machine-readability and programmability wasn’t taken into account, or the searchability and findability.

Did entrepreneurs or advocates validate these data sets as “high value?” Entrepreneurs have kept buying data from government over the past four years or making Freedom of Information Act requests for data from government or scraping data. They’re not getting that from Data.gov.

VanRoekel: I have no official way of measuring the ‘value’ of the data, other than anecdotal conversations. I do think that the motion of getting people to wake up and think about how they are treating data internally within in an organization – well, there was a convenience factor to that, which basically was that ‘I got to pick what data I release,’ which probably dates from ‘what data I have that’s releasable?’ The different tiers to this executive order and this policy are a huge part of why it’s different. It sets the new default. It basically says, if you are modernizing a system or creating a new system, you can do that in a way that adopts these principles. If you [undertake] the collection, use and dissemination of data, you’ll make those machine-readable and interoperable by default. That doesn’t always mean public, because there are applications that privacy and national security mean we should make public, but those principles still hold, in terms of the way I believe we the ways we build things should evolve on this foundation. For the community that’s getting value outside of the government, this really sets a predictable, consistent course for the government to open up data. Any business decisions are risk-based decisions. You have to assume some level of risk with anything you do.

If there’s too much risk, entrepreneurs won’t do it.

VanRoekel: True. To that end, the work we’ve done in this policy that’s different than before is the way we’re collecting information about the data is being standardized. We’re creating a meta data infrastructure. Data itself doesn’t have to be all described in the same way. We’re not coming up with “one schema to rule them all” across government. The complexity of that would be insurmountable. I don’t think that’s a 21st century approach. That’s probably a last century thinking around to say that if we get one schema, we’re going to get it all done. The meta data approach is to say let’s collect a standard template way of describing – but flexible for future extension – the data that is contained in government. In that description, and in that meta data, tags like “who owns this data” and “how often is the data updated,” information about how to get a hold of people to find out more about descriptions within the data. They will be a part of that description in a way that gives you some level of assurance on how the data is managed. Much of the data we have out there, there’s existing laws on the books to collect the data. Most of it, there’s existing laws, not just a business process. One of the great conversations we’re having with the agencies is that they find greater efficiency in the way they collect data and build solutions based upon these open data principles.

I received a question from David Robinson, regarding open licensing in this policy. Isn’t U.S. government data exempt from copyright?

VanRoekel: Not all government data is exempt from copyright, but those are generally edge cases. The Smithsonian takes pictures of things that are still under copyright, for instance. That’s government data. I sent a note about this announcement to the Secretary of the Smithsonian this morning. I’ve been talking to him about opening up data for some time. The nuance there, about open licenses, is really around the types of systems that create the data, and putting a preference for a non-proprietary format. You can imagine a world in which I give you an XML file, and I give you a Microsoft Excel file. Those are both piece of data. To some extent, the Excel format is machine-readable. You can open it up and look at it internally just the way it is, but do you have to go buy a special piece of software to read the file or not? That kind of denotes the open[ness] and accessibility of the data. In the case of policy, we declare a strong preference towards these non-proprietary formats, so that not only do you get machine-readability but you get the broadest access to the data. It’s less about the content in there – is that’s copyrighted or not — I think most data in government, outside of the realm of confidential or private data, is not copyrighted, so to speak from the standpoint of the license. It’s more about the format, and if there’s a proprietary standard wrapped in the stuff. We have an obligation as a government to pick formats, pick solutions, et cetera that not only have the broadest applicability and accessibility for the public but also create the most opportunity in the broadest sense.

Open data doesn’t come without costs. Is this open data policy an unfunded mandate on all of the agencies, instructing them to put all of the data online they can, to digitize content?

VanRoekel: In the broadest sense, the phrase ‘the new default’ is an important one. It basically says, for enhancements to existing systems or new systems, follow this guideline. If people are making changes, this is in the list of requirements. From a costing perspective, it’s pre-baked into the cost of any enhancement or release. That’s the broad statement. The narrow statement is that there are many agencies out there, increasing every day, that are embracing these retroactive open data approaches, saying that there is value to the outside world, there is lower cost, greater interoperability, there are solutions that can be derived from taking these open data approaches inside of my own organization. That’s what we saw in PIF [Presidential Innovation Fellows] round one, where these agencies adopted the innovations fellows to unlock their data. That’s increasing and expanding in round two, and continuing in the agencies which we thought were high administration priorities, along with others. I think we’re going to continue to see this as a catalyzing element of that phenomenon, where people are going to back and spend the resources on doing this. Just invite any of these leaders to the last twenty minutes of a hackathon, where folks are standing up and showing their solutions that they developed in one day, based on the principles of open data and APIs. They just are overwhelmed about the potential within their own organizations, and they run back and want to do this as fast as they can.

Are you using anything that has ever been developed at a hackathon, personally or professionally?

VanRoekel: We are incorporating code from the “We The People” hackathon, the most recent one. I know Macon Phillips and team are looking at incorporating feature sets they got out of that. An important part of the hackathon, like most conferences you go to, is the time between the sessions. They’re the most important – the relationship building aspect, figuring out how we shape the next set of capabilities or APIs or other things you want to build.

How does this relate to the way that the federal government uses open data internally?

VanRoekel: There are so many examples of government agencies, when faced with a technical problem, will go hire a single monolithic vendor to do a single, monolithic solution – and spend most of the budget on the planning cycle – and you end up with these multi-million dollar, 3-ring binders that ultimately fail because technology has moved on or people have left or laws have moved on five or ten years later, after they started these projects. One of the key components of this is laying foundational stones down to say how are we going to build upon that, to create the apps and solutions of the future. You know, I can swoop in and say “here’s how to do modular contracting in the context of government acquisition” – but unless you say, you’ve got to adopt open data and these principles of API-first, of doing things a different way — smaller, reusable, interoperable pieces – you can really build the phenomenon. These are all elements of that – and the cost savings aspect of it are extraordinary. The risk profile is going to be a lot smaller. Inside government I’m as excited about as outside.

Do you think the federal government will ever be able to move from big data centers and complicated enterprise software to a lightweight, distributed model for mobile services built on APIs?

VanRoekel: I think there is massive potential for things like that across the whole of government. I mean, we’re a big organization. We’re the largest buyer of technology in the world. We have unending opportunities to do things in a more efficient way. I’ve been running this process that I launched last year called Portfolio Stat. It’s all about taking a left to right look, sitting down with agencies. What I’ve always been missing from those is some of these groundbreaking policies that start to paint the picture for what the ideal is, and how to get your job done in a way that’s different than the way you’ve don’t it before, like the notion of continuous improvement. We’ve needed things like the EO to give us those conversation starters to say, here’s the way to do it, see what they are doing over at HHS. “How are you going to bring that kind of discipline into your organization?” I’m sitting down with every deputy secretary and all the C-level executives to have those tough conversations. Fruitful, but good conversations about how we are going to change the way we deliver solutions inside of government. The ideal state that they’ll all hear about is the service-oriented model with centralized, commodity computing that’s mostly cloud-based. Then, how do you provide services out to the periphery of your organization.

You told me in our last interview that you had statutory authority to make things happen. What happens if a federal CIO drags his or her feet and, a year from now, you’re still here and they’re not moving on these policies, from cloud to open data?

VanRoekel: The answer I gave to you last time still holds: it’s about inspire and push. Inspire comes in many factors. One is me coming in and showing them the art of the possible, saying there’s a better way of doing this, getting their customers to show up at the door to say that we want better capabilities and get them inspired to do things, getting their leadership to show up and say we want better things. Push is about budget – how do you manage their budget. There’s aspects of both inspire and push in the way we’ve managed the budget this year. I have the authority to do that.

What’s your best case for adopting an open data strategy and enterprise data inventory, if you’re trying to inspire?

VanRoekel: The bottom line is meet your mission faster and at a much lower cost. Our job is not about technology as an end state – it’s about our mission. We’ve got to get the mission of government done. You’re fostering immigration, you’re protecting public safety, you’re providing better energy guidance, you’re shaping an industry for the country. Open data is a fundamental building block of providing flexibility and reusability into the workplace. It’s what you do to get you to the end state of your mission. I hearken back a lot to the examples we used at the FCC, which was moving from like fourteen websites to one and how we managed that. How do we take workload of a place so that the effort pays for itself in six months and start yielding benefits beyond that? The benefits are long-term. When you build that next enhancement, or that new thing on top of it, you can realize the benefits at lower cost. It’s amazing. I do these TechStat processes, where I sit down with the agencies. They have some project that’s going off the rails. They need help, focus, and some executive oversight. I sit down, usually in a big room of people, and it’s almost gotten to the point where you don’t need to look at the briefing documents ahead of time. You sit down and say, I bet you’re doing it this way – and it’s monolithic, proprietary, probably taking a lot of packaged software and writing a lot of glue code to hold it all together – and you then propose to them the principles of open data and open approaches to doing the solution, and tell them I want to see in the next sixty days some customer-facing, benefit value that’s built on this model. They go off and do that, and they get right back on the tracks and they succeed. Time after time when we do TechStat, that’s the formula and it’s yielded these incredible results. That culture is starting to permeate into how we get stuff done, because they see how it might accomplish their mission if they just turn 45 degrees and try a different approach. If that makes them successful, they will go there every time.

Critiques of open data raise concerns about “discretionary disclosure,” where a government entity releases what it wants, claim credit for embracing open government, and obfuscates the rest of the data. Does this policy change any of the decisions that are being made to delay, redact or not release requested data?

VanRoekel: I think today marks an inflection point that will set a course for the future. It’s not that tomorrow or next month or next year that all government data will just be transformed into open, machine-readable form. It will happen over time. The key here is that we’ve created mechanisms to protect privacy and security of data but built in culture where that which is intended to be public should be made public. Part of what is described in the executive order is the formation of this cross-agency executive group that will define a cross-agency priority goal, that we need to get inventories in from agencies regarding that which they hold that could be made public. We want to know stuff that’s not public today, what could be out there. We’re going to take that in and look at how we can set goals for this year, the next year and the year after that to continue to open up data at a faster pace than we’ve been doing in the past. The modernization act and some of the work around setting goals in government is much more compatible and looks a lot like the private sector. We’re embracing these notions that I’ve really grown to love and respect over the course of my private sector career in government around methodologies. Stay tuned on the capital and what that looks like.

Are you all going to work with the House and Senate on the DATA Act or are statutory issues on oversight still a stumbling block?

VanRoekel: The spirit of the DATA Act, of transparency and openness, are the things we’re doing, and I think are embraced. Some of the tactical aspects of the act were a little off the mark, in terms of getting to the end state that we want to get to. If you look at the FY-14 budget and the work we’ve done on transferring USASpending.gov to Treasury to get it closer to the source of the data, plus a view into how those systems get modernized, how we bring these principles into that mix, that will all be a part of the end state, which is how we track the spending.

Do you ever anticipate the data going into FOIA.gov also going into Data.gov?

VanRoekel: I don’t know. I can’t speculate on that. I’m not close enough to it.

Well, FOIA requests show demand. Do you have any sense of what people are paying for now, in terms of government data?

VanRoekel: I don’t.

Has anybody ever asked, to try to figure that out?

VanRoekel: I think that would be a great thing for you to do.

I appreciate that, but this strikes me as an interesting assessment that you could be doing, in terms of measuring outflows for business intelligence. If someone buys data, it shows that there is value in it. What would it mean if releases reflected that signal?

VanRoekel: You mean preference data that is being purchased?

Right.

VanRoekel: Well, part of this will be building and looking at Data.gov. Some of the stuff coming there is really building community around the data. The number one question Todd Park and I had coming out of the PIF program, at the end of May [2013] was, what if I think there’s data, but I don’t know, who do I contact? An important part of the delivery of this wave and the product coming out as part of this policy is going to be this enhanced Data.gov, that’s our intention to build a much richer community around government data. We want to hear from people. If there are data sources that do hold promise and value, let’s hear about those and see if there are things we can do to get a PIF on structuring it, and get agencies to modernize systems to get it released and open. I know some of the costs are like administrative feeds for printing or finding the data, something that’s related to third parties collecting it and then reselling it. We want to make sure that we’re thoughtful in how we approach that.

How has the experience that you’ve seen everyone have with the first iteration of Data.gov informed the nation’s open data strategy today? What specifically had not been done before that you will be doing now?

VanRoekel: The first Data.gov set us on a cultural path.What it didn’t do was connect you to data the source. What is this data? How often is it updated? Findability and searchability of broad government data wasn’t there. Programmability of the data wasn’t necessarily there. Data.gov, in the future, instead of being a repository for data, a place to upload the data, my intention is that it will become a meta data catalog. It will be the place you go, the one-stop-shop, to find government data, across multiple aspects. The way we’re doing this is through the policy itself, which says that agencies have to go and set up this new page, similar to what is now standard in open government, /open, /developer. In that page, the most important part of that page is a JSON file. That’s what data.gov can go out and crawl, or any developer outside can go out and crawl, to find out when data has been updated, what data is available, in what format. All of the standard meta data that I’ve described earlier will be represented through that JSON file. Data.gov will then become a meta data catalog of all the open data out in government at its source. As a developer, you’d come in, and it you wanted to do a map, for instance, to see what broadband capabilities exist near low-income Americans and then overlay locations of educational institutions, if you wanted to look for a correlation between income and broadband deployment and education, you’d hypothetically be looking for 3 different data sources, from 3 different agencies. You’d be able to find the open data streams, the APIs, to go get that data in one place, and then you’d have a connection back to the mothership to be able to grab it, find out who owns it. We want to still have a center of gravity for data, but make the data itself follow these principles, in terms of discoverability and use. The thing that probably got me most pointed in this direction is the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which did a report on health IT. Buried on page 60 or something, it had this description of meta data as the linchpin of discoverability of diverse data sources. That’s the approach we’ve taken, much like Google.

5 years from now, what will have changed because of this effort?

VanRoekel: The way we build solutions inside of government is going to change, and the amount of apps and solutions outside of government are going to fundamentally change. You and I now, sitting in our cars, take for granted the GPS signal going to the device on the dash. I think about government. Government is right there with me, every single day, as I’m driving my car, or when I do a Foursquare check-in on my phone. We’ll be bringing government data to citizens where they are, versus making people come to government. It’s been a long time since the mid-80s, when we opened up GPS, but look at where we are today. I think we’ll look back in 10 or 15 years and think about all of the potential we unlocked today.

What data could be like GPS, in terms of their impact on our lives?

VanRoekel: I think health and energy are probably two big ones.

POSTSCRIPT

Since we talked, the Obama administration has followed through on some of the commitments the U.S. CIO described, including relaunching Data.gov and releasing more data. Other goals, like every agency releasing an enterprise data inventory or publishing a /data and /developer page online, have seen mixed compliance, as an audit by the Sunlight Foundation showed in December. The federal government shutdown last fall also scuttled open data access, where certain data types were deemed essential to maintain and others were not. The shutdown also suggested that an “API-first” strategy for open data might be problematic. OMB, where VanRoekel works, has also quietly called for major changes in the DATA Act, which passed the House of Representatives with overwhelming support at the end of last year. A marked up version of the DATA Act obtained by Federal News Radio removes funding for the legislation and language that would require standardized data elements for reporting federal government spending. The news was not received well on Capitol Hill. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the lead sponsor of the DATA Act in the Senate, reaffirmed his commitment to the current version of the bill in statement: “The Obama administration talks a lot about transparency, but these comments reflect a clear attempt to gut the DATA Act. DATA reflects years of bipartisan, bicameral work, and to propose substantial, unproductive changes this late in the game is unacceptable. We look forward to passing the DATA Act, which had near universal support in its House passage and passed unanimously out of its Senate committee. I will not back down from a bill that holds the government accountable and provides taxpayers the transparency they deserve.” The leaked markup has led to observers wondering whether the White House wants to scuttle the DATA Act and others to potentially withdraw support. “OMB’s version of the DATA Act is not a bill that the Sunlight Foundation can support,” wrote Matt Rumsey, a policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation. “If OMB’s suggestions are ultimately added to the legislation, we will join our friends at the Data Transparency Coalition and withdraw our support of the DATA Act.” In response to repeated questions about the leaked draft, the OMB press office has sent the same statement to multiple media outlets: “The Administration believes data transparency is a critical element to good government, and we share the goal of advancing transparency and accountability of Federal spending. We will continue to work with Congress and other stakeholders to identify the most effective & efficient use of taxpayer dollars to accomplish this goal.” I have asked the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about all of these issues and will publish any reply I receive separately, with a link from this post.