Luke Rosiak at the Washington Examiner is not just a journalist who rolls his sleeves up to root out corruption. He’s also a capable computer programmer. Rosiak has produced a new feature on the Examiner web site called “Appropriate Appropriations?” that is worth checking out.
The page lists the many bills in Congress that spend taxpayer money—bills that either authorize appropriations or appropriate your money. You can sort spending bills by size, by date of last activity, and by state—look and see if your member of Congress or senator is a spender.
Rather than complaining about spending in the aggregate—“waste, fraud, and abuse” are horses that have escaped the barn—people who want spending control can now rein it in by contacting their members of Congress and senators to talk about specific spending bills.
The “Appropriate Appropriations?” page is powered by data that we produce at Cato. Cato’s “Deepbills” data is in use a lot of other ways, too. We use it to build informative infoboxes for Wikipedia articles about bills in Congress. The New York Times’ “Inside Congress” web pages use Cato data to show what executive branch agencies are topics of the bills in Congress. (See the “Mentions” section of the page for H.R. 1104, for example.) My own WashingtonWatch.com uses the data to show relationships among agencies, bills, and representatives. You’ll also find Cato data used by GovTrack.us, the largest private government transparency web site, to make searches out of references to existing law in the bills in Congress.
There are many more things that can be done with this data. Luke’s code is available to help others get started.
It’s a long game, trying to undo federal government growth that has been underway for at least 80 years. I started talking about how transparency could undercut rational ignorance and rational inaction more than seven years ago here on the blog. The serious work began with the election of President Obama, who promised transparent government. We’ve written about how the government should publish data to make itself transparent, and we’ve graded the quality of the government’s data publication. Now we’re putting out data that the government should, and it’s bearing fruit.
You can now investigate what Congress is doing in terms of spending and ask yourself: Are these “Appropriate Appropriations?”
