Clinton/Gore and Information Dissemination

[James Love <love@tap.org>]

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TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT - INFORMATION POLICY NOTE
January 6, 1995

The following essay, which was written for the National Council
of Non-Profit Associations on December 20, 1994, is a comment on
the Clinton/Gore policies on public access to government
information.

                  The Clinton/Gore Administration and
                 public access to government information
                                James Love
                             December 20, 1994

     Over the past four years there has been an explosion of
interest in public access to the vast information resources of
government agencies.  This surprising attention given to the once
backwater area of public records management is fueled by the
growth of the Internet and the realization that modern
information technologies can deliver startling greater access to
vast amounts of valuable and useful information on a very wide
scope of issues.

     In the early 1980's, President Ronald Reagan undertook a
number of measures to privatize the dissemination, control and
ownership of data that was produced by the federal government. 
Commercial data vendors, owned by large publishers such as McGraw
Hill, Knight-Ridder, Mead Data Central, Ziff-Davis and others
actively lobbied for government policies that would make it
difficult and expensive for citizens to obtain records directly
from government agencies, so that the government would become a
"wholesaler" of records to data vendors who would "retail" the
information to data users.  There were also a number of areas
where private vendors obtained exclusive rights to disseminate
government information.  Federal agencies were discouraged or
prevented from making a wide range of "value added" contributions
to government databases, including, such trivial matters as
disseminating data on floppy diskette, making the information
accessible through a personal computer.

     In the early 1990's federal policies began to change, driven
principally by new activism by data users who organized and
discussed public access issues on various discussion groups on
the Internet.  The 1992 election of President Bill Clinton and
Vice President Al Gore raised the public's expectations about
access to government databases and information systems, but the
Administration's record has been mixed.  Despite the high public
profile that has been given to the issue of public access to
government information, the Administration has received
surprisingly low marks by professional librarians and others who
have worked for years to develop new public access initiatives.

     The Administration appears to have given a lot of attention
toward initiatives such as putting its own press releases online,
and providing ready electronic access to "hot" reports, such as
the Vice President's National Performance Review, or the text of
the GATT or NAFTA agreements.  The White House has also given
agencies a green light to undertake new dissemination projects,
and this has lead to an explosion of new information products and
services, many available for free through the Internet.

     What the Administration hasn't done, however, is do much
about the bread and butter details of dissemination policy. 
Among the problems:

-    Pricing of government information is largely random.  Some
agencies charge thousands of dollars for databases that can fit
on a handful of floppy diskettes, or only "license" databases
with high royalties based upon use and very restrictive rules
against redissemination of the data.  Other agencies make
information available for free.  OMB has adopted non-binding
pricing rules that limit prices to dissemination costs, but there
is no effective enforcement mechanism and the OMB rules are
largely ignored by agencies.

-    Some agencies, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, provide
catalogs of databases and documentation which makes the
information more useful.  Other agencies, such as the FDA, make
little or no effort to provide the public with any idea of what
types of databases the agency maintains.  The Administration's
clumsy attempts to comply with Congressional requirements that it
provide central "locator" services have been half-hearted and
ineffective.

-    The Administration has done next to nothing to solve the
vexing problems of standards for database record formats and
searching software.  For example, federal agencies maintain
hundreds of databases of research abstracts, but little has been
done to standardize the management of the data so that all the
databases could be disseminated with a common CD-ROM search
engine.

-    Vice-President Gore has mounted a perplexing attack on the
Government Printing Office (GPO).  While giving agencies greater
freedom to ignore GPO as a dissemination outlet, the Vice-
President would also eliminate the agency's centralized
cataloging and sales program function, which have made it easier
for citizens to find information.  Moreover, while GPO must base
dissemination fees on its costs, agencies often charge much
higher fees than ordinary citizens can afford.  The
Administration is widely perceived as hostile to the GPO
administered federal Depository Library Program, which has
provided free access to government information for more than a
century.

-    The Administration has provided no mechanisms for systematic
assessment of the type of products and services that are needed. 
The Administration has opposed proposals that would force federal
agencies to regularly solicit public comments on the types of
information products and services which citizens want.  Many
observers believe that the White House is largely focused on
using the technology to provide propaganda functions, by
emphasizing White House selected "hot reports" and press releases
over the more mundane but important systems that would provide
systematic access to complete collections of records.

-    The Administration has shied away from a number of
controversial privatization battles.  In January 1994 the Clinton
Administration shut down the Department of Justice JURIS system
and severely curtained the Air Force FLITE online information
systems, ending a 30 year effort by the federal government to
collect and store computerized legal information.  The
Administration's actions principally benefited politically active
West Publishing, a company which has aggressively sought to
monopolize control over citations to judicial opinions and the
corrected (and official) text of published legal decisions.  A
belated announcement by the Attorney General in September that it
would consider a public database of court decisions was seemingly
abandoned in November after an aggressive West public relations
and lobbying effort.  Even the very successful and popular NSF-
funded demonstration project at NYU to provide free access to the
Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database of corporate
disclosure filings has received very little concrete backing from
the Administration, and no endorsement of permanent public
funding.

     What can the Clinton/Gore administration do to elevate
public access concerns to a higher level?  One key would be to
fix a fundamental organizational flaw.  Former President Reagan
created the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)
in OMB, with joint authority over management of federal
information resources and oversight over all federal regulatory
efforts.  The "R" in OIRA has always received more attention than
the "I," and more important, the persons who head OIRA have
always been chosen primarily because of their qualifications to
oversee the regulatory functions of the bureaucracy.  The current
OIRA Administrator, Sally Katzen, has always seen the Information
Policy aspects of her job as side show, and is clearly
insensitive to many important information policy issues.  The
Administration should split OIRA into separate Information and
Regulatory affairs offices, and choose a leader for the Office of
Information Affairs who has a background in library and
information sciences, a training conspicuously missing from the
current White House staff.  Then we could get serious about
providing electronic access to the federal government's vast
information resources.   
     james love (jamie@tap.org)


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