John Lynch, Barack Obama and I all want you to Google your government. As government gets larger and larger over time, making it transparent and accountable becomes more difficult. Fortunately, an information revolution has made enormous piles of data easily accessible, just as it transformed a quirky number from a symbol of unimaginable size into a verb that suggests the world at your fingertips.
I have written before about the need for greater government transparency. Two years ago, the governor took up the cause in his budget address. He pointed out that New Hampshire is one of the most transparent states in the country in terms of revenue.
On the first of each month, the state publishes a revenue report for the month that ended 24 hours before. Every tax down to the penny, in a tidy report with historical and budget comparisons, is published and posted to the Internet for all the world to see. My colleagues in other states are routinely amazed by the level of detail and how quickly it is available.
The governor was concerned that this level of transparency is not available to the public on the spending side. The public sees annual data in an audit four or five months after the year ends. And that document doesn't include specific program data.
Enter the good folks from Google. For the last 80 years, google was spelled differently and meant something entirely different. The term googol referred to the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Googol denoted something finite but so large as to be almost beyond our imagination.
The computer guys changed the spelling and used it to make an incomprehensibly vast quantity of information accessible and searchable down to the smallest detail.
As both the right and the left saw this as a tool to make government more open and accessible, a transparency movement has grown. Then-Sen. Barack Obama was a co-sponsor of a bill to create a searchable federal database of spending. It was non-ideological common sense, he thought: "Whether you believe government ought to spend more or spend less or just spend differently, we all should be able to agree that government spending should be transparent and that public information ought to be accessible to the public."
In New Hampshire, other budget concerns have prevented much from happening to make spending more transparent. My organization, the Josiah Bartlett Center, is launching an open government project to create a free public Web site with every penny, every check, every last little bit of government spending online in a searchable database.
A public database isn't just a tool for those of us strange enough to want to pore over budget data. It is the sunshine that disinfects the public square. Knowing that every detail is available, accessible and searchable means there is no chance that any action, any contract, any expenditure is going to stay hidden from the public.
In Britain, the abuse of expense accounts has come to a screeching halt and toppled the speaker of the House not because of legislation or prosecution, but because of sunshine. Just the public knowing about it stopped it. Similarly, town scandals in New Hampshire are caused when an audit finds problems. Public disclosure is a permanent audit. If every check and every charge on a credit card is posted for the world to see, abuse is impossible to hide.
Any government agency, department or office could do this today. Last year, the office of widgets paid X for a computer, contracted with this guy for services and sent three employees to a conference in Worcester, Mass. We can all look and see if anything is odd. Maybe they paid a good price for the computer, maybe the consultant is the cousin of the agency chief. All would be known.
Our hope with our open government project is to create a tool. Reporters for the Union Leader could use it to investigate, but so could our own investigator, Grant Bosse, and so could the bloggers at Blue Hampshire or Red or Green or any other color Hampshire. The world may not be your oyster, but it will be your auditor.
John Lynch, Barack Obama and I all agree. When was the last time that happened? Let's Google and let the sunshine in.
Charles M. Arlinghaus is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Concord.
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