Via TPM, there’s an interesting article in The Hill about a below-the-radar effort by both Obama and McCain to push a bill that would put the text of all government contracts online. Short version – Obama’s office was working on the bill with Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, McCain’s people found out about it and asked to sign him on as a cosponsor, Coburn and Obama accepted.
Some of this is, of course, about optics. McCain, who has a track record on the issue, and doesn’t want to concede any advantage to Obama.
But the fact that the two parties’ nominees are competing in their ardor for government transparency is a good sign. After all, we’ve been treated to nearly eight years of efforts to make the operations of government simultaneously more arbitrary and more opaque. Not surprisingly, the result has been disastrous – government works less well, accountability has declined, and privatization and earmarks have turned the federal contracting process into a giant piñata. McCain and Obama evidently recognize this and think that government reform is good politics. It sounds almost quaint.
This bill isn’t a major reform, but it’s an important minor one. If you put the text of federal contracts online in a searchable database, it will become a trove of useful information for journalists and accountability NGOs, as well as private companies trying to understand the process. That will make it harder to get away with really egregious, criminal stuff. Or at least, easier to expose it during or after the fact. As every investigative journalist learns, it’s not the secret stuff that’s the most scandalous – it’s the stuff that’s just sitting out there in plain sight.
