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On Tuesday, June 13th, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin testified before the House Appropriations Committee in defense of the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Budget request (see the request here). Mnuchin’s testimony showed an opening to standardize data fields and formats across the nation’s overlapping financial regulatory regimes - just as the Data Coalition has already been recommending to Congress.
Last week the White House released President Trump’s first proposed budget. We read it, and we figured out what it means for federal technology and the implementation of the DATA Act, so you don’t have to.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released two reports assessing the federal government’s work on the DATA Act. Nine months from now, in May 2017, every federal agency must begin reporting standardized spending data. If the agencies follow the law, and if they report good, quality data, they’ll create the world’s most valuable open data set: a single, standardized view of the spending of the entire federal executive branch.
Earlier this month, the open Congress movement gained a huge endorsement from House Speaker Paul Ryan. The Speaker backed the adoption of Congressional data standards and common formats for legislative information. The House Speaker's endorsement of the Bulk Data Task Force's work will further efforts to make legislation, floor summaries, committee work, and the U.S. Code available as structured data. The Speaker even endorsed the technical approach of building out XML-based open data structures across Congress.
The DATA Act, the nation’s first open data law, hit two major milestones this May. Not only did it celebrate its two-year anniversary since being signed into law by President Obama on May 9th, 2014, but we are now seeing federal agencies, the White House, Congress, and the private sector embracing the law’s vision for government-wide spending transparency as a very real inevitability.
On Wednesday, the Data Coalition hosted a Legislative Data Demo Day to show what’s possible when we make our laws and legislation more accessible. This past Wednesday we explored how legal and regulatory information can be reformed in order to provide maximum value to both lawmakers, and the public.
The Data Coalition, which represents the growing open data industry, was pleased to welcome the introduction of the Open, Public, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act by Representatives Derek Kilmer (WA-D) and Blake Farenthold (TX--R) last Thurday at a press event co-hosted with the Center for Data Innovation.
Last week, the Data Coalition hosted a record-setting Financial Data Summit in Washington. We brought together over 300 supporters of transforming U.S. financial regulatory reporting from disconnected documents into standardized, open data.
Last week a multi-year campaign to let the public see Congressional research reports paid off. On Thursday, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Representatives Leonard Lance (R-NJ) and Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced House and Senate versions of the Equal Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Act of 2016 (Open CRS Act; H.R. 4702 and S. 2639). The Open CRS Act aims to publically release the renowned legislative research products produced by the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service (CRS) on a public web portal.
Last week the Data Coalition held our second annual California Data Demo Day in Sacramento. Over 100 open data supporters joined us for two panel discussions and a roomful of tech demos.
Several California agencies are making steady, step-by-step progress toward open data. Agencies like the Department of Justice and the State Treasurer’s office have started to adopt consistent standards to make their data searchable, then publishing data for all to scrutinize and use. And many California municipalities are going further, publishing comprehensive open data sets on topics like spending and public safety.