Transparency is the new buzz word in Washington. The most open and transparent government ever; transparent stimulus spending; making earmark spending requests transparent; the list goes on and on. Let’s be clear, the Obama Administration’s commitment to transparency is welcome and important. That said, the administration needs to do everything it can to live up to its rhetoric. And simply throwing a lot of data and documents on the internet isn’t enough.

The stakes are high. One of the key factors in getting the economic stimulus passed was the accountability and oversight mechanisms. And one of the major oversight provisions is www.recovery.gov , a site where watchdogs and everyday citizens can track where their tax dollars are going. As the website points out: “This is your money. You have a right to know where it is going and how it is being spent.” To date, the site has fallen far short of its goal. Much more needs to be done to make it truly transparent.

Rather than a one-stop shopping department store for all stimulus information, recovery.gov is more like a shopping mall. You enter the site and click on a lin k to a listing of federal agencies involved, which then take you to the various agency sites, the quality and format of which varies. If you can find them, links to grants on some of these sites may redirect you to yet another page. One thing that all the sites have in common is infomercial text about how great the stimulus is and opportunities to tell stimulus success stories.

After federal agency spending, another main conduit for stimulus funds is spending by state and local governments. You are also supposed to be able to track this from recovery.gov. At press time, 17 states have yet to launch tracking sites. Many of those that are up are skeletal at best, and it is still hard to see how funds will be tracked.

If the administration is struggling to figure out how to herd the information cats around recovery.gov, one place they should not look for guidance or examples is Congress. For years we have pushed for increased information on earmarks in the federal budget. And Congress has answered by putting more information online about those lawmakers requesting the funding and about the projects themselves. We appreciate this. But to date this information has been provided essentially in electronic versions of paper lists . Searchable, yes, but impossible to manipulate to discover trends, and hard to track to figure out who exactly got what. TCS has worked hard to convert these lists into usable spreadsheets that the public can peruse and query to find information about how their lawmakers are spending tax dollars.

Congress should put us out of a job.

Surely if a handful of hard working people at a small non-profit can do this in a matter of days, Congress could do it in a matter of hours.

Congress should also centralize and make easy to use earmark request information. The recent announcement that lawmakers submitting earmark requests will be required to post the requests on their individual websites at the same time they submit them, is better than nothing. But dispersing information across 535 different web sites doesn’t give taxpayers anything close to a clear big picture. (And while they are at it, Congress should pass S. 482 requiring the Senate to file their campaign finance records electronically as opposed to the current system of paper reports.)

TCS’s long-standing goal is to make the budget transparent and accountable to the American taxpayer. And what we have found is that simply making information available, even when it is available online, is not enough. The information must be understandable and usable. Considering the massive amount of tax dollars flowing out of the treasury these days, Congress and the administration have an obligation to make budget and spending data consistent, readily available, and comprehensible to the average citizen. After all, “this is your money.”