JULY 29, 2009

The Case Of The $1.2m Ham

In January, when Congress and the Obama administration decided to allocate around $800b for an unprecedented economic stimulus package, the federal government announced its commitment to spending the money in a transparent way, with plenty of opportunity for citizen oversight. Reviews of the administration’s transparency initiatives have been mixed, with commentators of all ideological stripes faulting the President for not following through on a few campaign promises, including a seven-day public comment period for all bills on the President’s desk. But, I think, by any objective measure, the Obama administration has been among the most transparent American administrations in history - not that that’s saying a whole lot.

A few months back, though, I talked about how transparency can come back to bite you politically if the appropriate context is not given for the information disclosed. And it’s happened again - recently, political bloggers seized upon a report from Recovery.gov, the federal government’s searchable database of stimulus projects, suggesting that the feds paid $1.2m for two pounds of frozen ham.

Any reasonable person would look at that and assume there was a typo, or that some key information had not made its way into the report. But our political discourse features more than a few unreasonable people, who assumed the worst: that the federal government had bought ham at $600,000/lb. Luckily, the USDA cleared things up - apparently 760,000 lbs of frozen ham, packaged in 2lb units, were purchased, with the meat going to food banks hit by state budget shortfalls. But, regardless of the perfectly reasonable explanation for the mistake, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear this tale around the Thanksgiving table in a few months.

Jake Brewer writes about the episode at the Sunlight Foundation’s blog, criticizing the USDA for having to resort to a press release, rather than simply disclosing all the information within Recovery.gov. And he’s right - a database of government spending isn’t very useful if relevant details like “quantity purchased” aren’t readily available. But I think this misses the point: you can disclose every fact in the world about a government transaction and still have someone take it out of context, sometimes in a dishonest manner. The episode of the fish passage barriers, from a few months ago, is a perfect illustration of that.

I’m starting to believe that transparency for transparency’s sake is putting the cart before the horse -  what’s needed before transparency can work as a check on government secrecy and power is a cooperative and thoughtful atmosphere, one where an observer’s first instinct in a case like this is “that can’t be right” - not gleeful celebration over having caught one’s political enemies emptying the treasury for a package of frozen ham. We’re not there yet.