No Kidding: Most U.S. Government Transparency Web Sites To Go Dark

From Federal News Radio:

Many of the Obama administration’s top open government initiatives are set to be turned off by May 31.

Government sources confirm that the Office of Management and Budget is planning to take seven websites dark in two months because of a lack of funding.

One government official, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to discuss the topic, said funding will begin to run out on April 20 for public sites IT Dashboard, Data.gov and paymentaccuracy.gov. The source said OMB also is planning on shutting down internal government sites, including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort.

The official said two other sites, USASpending.gov and Apps.gov/now, will run through July 30 but go dark soon after.

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Several industry and good government groups have been trying to drum up support for these e-government initiatives.

The Sunlight Foundation sent a letter to House and Senate appropriators as well as each chamber’s leadership explaining why these programs are so important.

“Basically what the letter says is this is the way to find out what’s going on in Congress, this is the way to find out where tax dollars going and this way to figure out what the government is doing,” said Daniel Schuman, a policy counsel with Sunlight, during an interview on In Depth with Francis Rose Wednesday.

He said that if the sites go dark, the data will eventually go out of date and the efforts to clean up and make the information more useful also will stop.

Much More in This Federal News Radio

See Also: “Budget Technopocalypse Deepens: Transparency Sites Will Go Dark In A Few Month” (by Brad Schuman, Sunlight Foundation)

See Also: Full Text of Sunlight Foundation Letter Mentioned in Article

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