Bipartisan Kumbaya: President Trump turns Obama's open govt data policy into law President Trump on Monday signed legislation that attempts to make US government data more accessible for people and machines, though his predecessor deserves much of the credit. The OPEN Government Data Act is contained within the the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (H.R.4174, or FEPA), which attempts to …
Does the "Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act" have anything in it that actually requires Congress to make evidence-based policy?
...or ban Congress from forbidding certain researches which might provide evidence for that "evidence-based policy" by federal agencies or organizations receiving federal funds?
I'm guessing that the answer to both questions is "no".
The summary is here. Heck, you can read the full text if you like. I guess somebody should...
I read the summary, and I can see a number of quite glaring loopholes available to anyone who still doesn't want "evidence" to get in the way of their policymaking. For instance:
- Appoint a Chief Evaluation Officer who's sympathetic to your aims
- Stack the OMB's "advisory committee" with political allies
- Although you have to publish evidence in machine-readable format, there's nothing to say you can't change that format at will, thus making it basically impossible to compare figures from one year to the next. Or from one department to another, or one state or region to another...
Basically, it's like the constitution. Sounds fine in theory, but in practice it's only as good as the people who enforce it - and the executive basically gets to pick those.
Summary looks good. Law itself? TL;DR
As usual we get another Chief-something, which will create six Deputy CDO's. Each of these will need six Assistant Deputy CDOs. These will need compliance officers, policy analysts, financial analysts, budget analysts. Drug testers. Procurement people. Probably need a CIO for the CDO at that point. What the hell, might as well get a few hundred telephone sanitizers.
At this point each agency will have its own Open Data Fiefdom, each with its own standards. These of course will not be interoperable because its too hard to mate icebergs.
The Chairman's take: "Whether you want to grow or shrink Government, you need to understand it will metastasize like pancreatic cancer trippin' on growth hormones"
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