By almost every available measure, government secrecy continued to increase over the past year, according to report this week from OpenTheGovernment.org, a broad coalition of consumer and open government groups.
The report (pdf) describes the mostly unfavorable trends across a range of quantitative indicators, including classification and declassification activity, “black budget” spending, invention secrecy, Freedom of Information Act processing, and more.
“These trends indicate that citizens will have to wait even longer to find out what their government is doing,” said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org.
The new report is the fifth in an annual series issued by the coalition. See the 2008 Secrecy Report Card from OpenTheGovernment.org.
No one will be surprised if we end up with a continuing resolution to push our shutdown deadline out past the midterms, so the real question is what else will they get done this summer?
Rebuilding public participation starts with something simple — treating the public not as a problem to manage, but as a source of ingenuity government cannot function without.
If the government wants a system of learning and adaptation that improves results in real time, it has to treat translation, utilization, and adaptation as core functions of governance rather than as afterthoughts.
Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from egregious siloization.