Data.gov & 7 Other Sites to Shut Down After Budgets Cut
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
This is such a momentous leap backwards, i just don't know where to begin. There is no other source for this data. We're still figuring out the best use for it, but if the government doesn't provide it in this manner, the only way we're going to get access to it is via laborious and time consuming FOIA requests. And then, only if you know the data exists.
This really is fucked.
Defense
Social Security
Medicare/Medicaid
It seems to me that at this point, they're looking for politically low-hanging fruit rather than fiscally low-hanging fruit.
Democracy is a great idea so long as you limit whom you consider "the people".
Given the number of people employed in our industry without a university degree — many of whom are leaders in their subject matter area — i think your proposal is not just obviously discriminatory, but spitting into the wind of a gale of contrary evidence.
Get out, see the world, go talk to people in places and industries where a university education isn't paramount, and then tell me again that they should be denied a right to vote.
When people talk about the deficit, they're typically talking about the operating budget deficit, which is only funded from income tax and runs on a separate budget from the SS and medicare/medicaid administrations. So it doesn't really make sense to advocate cutting entitlements to address the deficit, they have problems too but they're separate problems.
The fact that we're the constituency, does mean that we have to temper our vociferousness with solid arguments and evidence. This stuff is important, but remember, there are programs out there to feed impoverished children. Is data.gov more important than that? Maybe not.
The point is though, that data.gov and open government data is, given our governing system should be more efficient, and provide better results than alternatives, such as making everyone go through FOIA or scraping individual agency sites, and relying on a patchwork quilt of agency disclosure.
Killing this program is going to cost more money in the future, and one very clear argument was articulated by David Eaves a couple days ago (http://eaves.ca/2011/03/30/access-to-information-is-fatally-... i also posted this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ).
This is terrible policy, but we do need to understand that the budget is a complicated beast.
As for those who can't feed their children without federal help should have learned to keep their legs closed or at least used a condom. I feel sorry for the kids, but there are soup kitchens or private charity.
As for the second one, I oppose heavy state interference in private affairs and social security too, but if you're suggesting that feeding poor children is less important than maintaining a website, quite frankly you're insane.
These "cuts" are nothing more than talking points.
As long as you need dollars to buy oil, we'll continue with nonsensical debate like this.
"More than a third of our petroleum, about 37% of our total usage, is produced domestically by our own oil companies. I'm not sure why people seem to forget about those guys, ExxonMobil and Chevron and all of them; you may resent them but they are the principal source of our non-foreign-dependent energy. So this means that only a bit less than two thirds of our petroleum is imported. That still means most of our petroleum comes from OPEC, right? Wrong. Most of our petroleum imports come from non-OPEC countries; 56% of it, in fact. Of that 56%, the majority is from Canada and Mexico, who are about as far removed from the Middle East as can be. The rest of it is from other random places like Angola, Russia, the Virgin Islands, and Brazil [...]"
Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4032
Also interesting: Peak Oil, http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4100
Also, much of the oil "imported" from Canada actually transits through Canadian oil ports and is delivered to the US via pipeline.
Defense. Job program for millions of workers.
Social Security. Welfare 2.0 -- after the Clinton welfare reform, you get bumped out of welfare after a few years. So people get declared "disabled" instead. Also, checks for grandma and checks for people with chronic disabilities.
Medicare. Healthcare for grandma. Welfare for big hospitals and doctors. Ever notice hospitals are always under construction? Medicare is what pays for it.
Medicaid. Healthcare for the indigent, and tool to make red state more appealing to business. (Protip: Compare Medicaid benefits in South Carolina to New York or Michigan.)
See: http://www.thestreet.com/story/11061024/1/the-cannibalizatio...
We still have a substantial manufacturing base, it's just that we've squeezed the jobs out of it by emphasizing high productivity and automation, while outsourcing the dirtiest work. The developing countries can enjoy more industrial jobs because their wages are lower, but the U.S. is already facing a "robot economy." We just haven't raised the question politically yet.
A web site is also the 21th century way of providing this data, who goes to request data from an archive as a stack of papers these days?
It's pretty ironic indeed that this gets shut down. Obama started all kinds of sensible things at the beginning of his term, and now pulls them back one by one.
That said, the HN community makes a real point of how apolitical it is. Rather than organize and work with government transparency advocates to try to influence the system, the norms here discourage people from discussing politics. So it's pretty ironic to me to see all the disappointment about this here.
The problem is that both political parties pay lip service to openness and transparency (although my partisan biases would claim one party favors this more than the other), the real difficulty is hold politicians to their promises in the face of the sausage-making of daily federal politics.
But, to quote Napoleon, never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'm more than willing to believe that this is being left out of a sense of benign neglect.
That this is being neglected is much more indicative of what Congress's actual priorities are. :(
But when it comes to politics, where we recognize that our voices are small and we aren't empowered to do directly do anything and that what all the grandmothers want is going to overshadow what we want, we tell ourselves that we'd be able to affect change if only we got involved and became more political. Small voices have an uphill battle on trying to execute on political stuff.
If we have trouble communicating to people about what's important (or what should be important) when it comes to technology choices, we're going to have trouble communicating what's important (or what should be important) when it comes to things like government budgets or political positions. And I think we all recognize this. And that's why we're not politically involved and avoid discussing politics.
It's a waste of my time to have political discussions with almost everyone, it makes me feel bad about being a nerd and valuing things like rational discourse, the scientific method, and trying to being informed. I'd rather spend my time doing things that make feel good about being a nerd, and that's having discussions about technology things and not political things. Stereotypical technology discussions have the capability to advance the state of the art; stereotypical political discussions rarely advanced anything.
I think we also recognize that if you can't get people to take action on something obvious, such as that financing an expensive war machine is a massive waste and that we should spend more money on education, you're not going to have an easy time getting them to take action on something that's non-obvious. That being said, I think the value of transparency of government is obvious, but it's also hard to explain something that you find obvious to someone who doesn't also see that it's obvious.
From the source article:
The White House requested $35 million for the e-government fund in 2011. The House allocated only $2 million in its bill, H.R. 1. The Senate, meanwhile, would provide $20 million for the e-government fund.
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=35&sid=2327798
It's a budget fight, similar to the ones going on at hundreds of agencies right now. There's a lot of posturing going on around the budget, but considering the project results in a net savings for the government, I hope that common sense will prevail.
The pessimist in me thinks that keeping the inner workings of government in a state of murky obscurity furthers the interests of some more cynical politicians.
For instance, funding for poison control call centers. Instead of just calling up a call center, people who are afraid they or their kid has been poisoned would have to go to the emergency room, which is far more expensive even if it's a false alarm.
They're just making piddly penny-wise, pound-foolish cuts that will barely scratch the deficit.
I can't imagine there's a significant financial burden imposed by Data.gov (can't speak to the other services). I mean, the data collection certainly is the most expensive component... and from what I understand that keeps going independent of Data.gov. Presumably, the data is collected for programs beyond Data.gov - only more reason to keep maintaining the site since the marginal cost is minimal.
Data.gov has been a useful resource for both my own work (marketing & sociological research), but more importantly is a great way to find free, relevant data for cutting one's data analysis chops - either as student or professional.
As a stats nerd, I find this very depressing.
[edit: As an amusing aside regarding my "relevant" data comment. A few years ago I was trying to develop a viz technique that I knew some potential clients would like, but I lacked a good data set that fit the requirements. I eventually ended up using R and other various free tools to create visualizations of fish weight and length depending on various conditions such as geography, water temp and a few others I forget. I certainly learned a lot, but I certainly would have benefited by having a data set that was both relevant in the real world and met the contraints of my problem.]
I haven't made any apps with data.gov, but I refer to it regularly for research material and statistical data and have found many useful resources that I would not have thought to look for otherwise. It's far from perfect, but seeing small improvements all the time and it's certainly easier to have a single resource for feed discovery.
Cutting the budget for this seems perverse, at best.
But, shutting down a visionary (and probably inevitable) effort to open and modernize government feels like a backlash.
In the long term there are a lot of potential businesses to be built off the info these sites hold. For example: 379,939 raw and geospatial datasets on data.gov -- that's like 379,939 raw ingredients begging for a recipe to be made. One recipe = one business.
Republicans love business, business, business. So somebody with some brains needs to explain to them how these sites with raw data are good for businesses and potential businesses that can create jobs and grow the economy that they love to talk about.
Unless. . . the actual reason they are getting shut down is because the 'publicans have something to hide and they're worried what that transparency can reveal.
Most likely cuts to these programs were included in a multi-thousand page budget bill. The Republicans elected to Congress had a choice between two budget bills, one of which spent $30 billion less. Following the will of the voters who granted them a historic electoral sweep in November, they chose to pass the smaller one. The decision to cut these particular programs was made by one of the hundreds of lobbyists, aides, and government agency employees that had a hand in writing the bill.
The congress people who voted for the cuts did not go down the list of federal programs making cost/benefit analyses to decide which programs to cut. Rather, they were presented a large package and asked to make a yes or no decision. Politics is not as rational as the rest of the entries in this discussion imply.
These information programs are tiny for now (though federal programs have a way of metastasizing) and they probably provide more benefit than cost. It is a bad policy decision to cut them, but if the alternative is making no cuts to the budget then the whole package may be worth it.
I agree that $30 billion of cuts does next to nothing to shrink the deficit. Sadly, there is little momentum behind my man Rand Paul’s proposal to cut $500 billion, or Paul Ryan’s roadmap to reduce future Social Security and Medicare deficits. The Republican leadership is playing budget theatre, passing tiny cuts that make them look good without touching the politically sensitive programs that really need shrinking. On the other hand the Democrats are playing budget denial, fighting to keep and expand every line item on the budget. Neither approach is very appealing to me. We need a plausible path to avoid national bankruptcy without raising taxes to uncompetitive levels.
And, FWIW, many individual congressional republicans may have effectively had "a choice between 2 budget bills", but one of those bills (the one we're discussing) was entirely written by Republicans. So it's not like their hands were tied here, someone made the decision to go after this.
So what's happening now is that the Republicans are pumping out legislation that slashes and burns any discretionary spending that won't blow back and piss off their constituency. So farm subsidies are ok, but Obama initiatives whose constituency consists completely of left-wing "sunlight" groups are easy pickings.
It seems bizarre, but it really isn't worth getting too excited about. Lots of legislation is born in the House, but most legislation dies in the Senate. In fact, the strategic purpose of doing this is to get you excited and frantically calling your democratic Senator about your pet project.
It appears that the Republican intent is to shut down the government, or come real close to doing so. Why they want to do this is questionable, since Bill Clinton was able to use the shutdown in his era to neutralize the republican "revolution" in the Congress in the 90s. I figure the republicans are betting that Obama's crew will bungle their response, since they seem to lack competence and cohesion.
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/03/23/transparency-t...
So yeah, a bit more than $20/mo, but relative to the budget as a whole....
Later this month I'll be releasing the first open data project for the country where I currently live – the Isle of Man.
I used data.gov as an example of what can be done, why it's important, and also to get initial funding for the project.
"[A democracy] can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury."