With Government Site Shutdowns, Public Loses Information, Say Openness Advocates
With the shutdown of numerous government websites, public access to government information will be affected in a way it wasn’t during the last government shutdown that lasted several weeks in 1995 to ‘96, several experts told us Tuesday. Some significant government resources such as Thomas, the online legislative database of the Library of Congress, pulled about faces Tuesday to stay running, but other major informational sites such as the FTC aren’t accessible. “Times have changed in terms of how agencies communicate with the public, so it is a different ball of wax if a website goes dark than if it had in the ‘90s,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “It will have ramifications for consumers and for small businesses."
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Taken together, the hiatuses will mean the pause of numerous research projects and transparency-focused online resources that rely on government databases, said experts we interviewed. While GovTrack.us, which follows legislation and votes in Congress, can still rely on Thomas, other information on the site “is probably now frozen in time,” wrote GovTrack creator Josh Tauberer in a blog post (http://bit.ly/19ePQCv). The Sunlight Foundation may not be able to provide updated Federal Election Commission spending-disclosure information since such FEC filings often are submitted to the agency online, Tom Lee, director of the government-openness advocacy group’s Sunlight Labs, wrote in a blog post (http://bit.ly/18GZIRo).
The FTC and FCC websites were taken down Tuesday, hampering outside organizations’ ability to both disseminate and research information, said Vice President-Research Sam Flores of Berry Best, which copies and distributes to clients documents submitted to the FCC. While Berry Best’s own databases of past FCC filings and releases will still function, “everything, everything related to” ongoing research projects has been shut down, he said. With the online portions of the FCC reference center inaccessible, Flores’ team can’t research large swaths of information, he said.
Other agency websites weren’t taken down, but instead updated with a notice like the one on the Justice Department’s website: “Due to the lapse in government funding, information on this website will not be routinely updated, the transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the department may not be able to respond to inquiries until funding has been restored.” That intermediate solution still hinders access, said Program Director Todd O'Boyle of the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause, which seeks government accountability. “Transparency is key to government accountability,” he said. “Yet instead of solving our nation’s many ills, policy makers in Washington would rather leave consumers and advocates in the dark. We deserve better.”