FEBRUARY 17, 2009

Transparency And “Fish Passage Barriers”

Can too much transparency be a bad thing?

Political debate this week here in Washington centered on an unprecedented effort to stimulate the flailing economy by passing approximately $800 billion worth of tax cuts and new government spending. Any government attempt to spend that much money is rightfully - and necessarily - going to be a long, complicated, drawn-out affair, and the stimulus debate proved no exception.

But the availability of new tools to track the provisions of the bill made this time different. Sites like Stimulus Watch allow those interested to investigate exactly how stimulus money will be spent on projects like new police cruisers for Youngstown, OH and downtown quiet zones in San Diego.

I’m usually reflexively in support of anything that remotely resembles a transparent database of government actions, and I was certainly in support not only of sites like Stimulus Watch, but also the White House’s own transparency efforts on the bill. But after watching how the opposition used that transparency to muddy the political waters to its own advantage, I’m a little more indecisive.

Consider GOP Chairman Michael Steele. Steele made a point of ridiculing some of the more esoteric-sounding provisions in the bill, like the one that calls for the removal of “fish passage barriers” from the nation’s streams and rivers. The only problem? Academic studies seem to indicate that the passage barriers are both an environmental problem and an economic problem for fishermen, and that the removal of the barriers would create jobs, the expressed purpose of the stimulus in the first place.

Without the necessary context to understand the provisions of the bill, many Americans likely heard Steele’s objections and agreed with him. After all, what are “fish passage barriers” anyway, and how does their removal help American families?  Not realizing that the provision could indeed be useful, not only intrinsically but also for the purpose of creating jobs, political opponents of the president used his own administration’s transparency efforts against him. Steele proved how easy it is to sort through a database like Stimulus Watch, cherry pick a few projects that sound easy to make fun of, and start stereotyping the largest government undertaking in the past five years as full of nonsensical projects and “pork”.

What’s the lesson for businesses and organizations undertaking their own transparency projects? Transparency alone is not enough to adequately represent your intentions to the public. Instead, it can be just an opening for your critics to take you out of context unless context is provided. Listening to questions and objections and responding to them in the spirit of good faith is a necessary part of any transparency initiative, and without those, transparency might be more of a liability than an asset.