White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online

coondoggie writes "Looking to save $1 million, 20 tons of paper, or close to 500 trees, the White House said today President Bush's 2009 Federal Budget will for the first time be posted online. The E-Budget will be available for downloading at the Office of Management and Budget Web site on Feb. 4. Typically the White House has paper-bombed congress and anyone else who wanted to read the budget with a tome which can reach 3,000 pages and weighed multiple pounds each."

The page uses browser exploits

[by Anonymous Coward]

To force anyone visiting it to print it out.

Re:

[Goldberg's Pants (139800)]

So they save a million? Wow, know how else to save money? STOP WAGING WAR YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!

Re:The page uses browser exploits

[|deity| (102693)]

They could also quit writing budgets that require 3,000 pages.

I'll give the government this, they have more imagination than me, I couldn't come up with 3000 pages of new ways to spend other people's money.

Re:

[Kjella (173770)]

Does your department have a budget? Now break down the US government until it's the size of your department. I think you'll find 3000 pages is still summary level.

Re:The page uses browser exploits

[timeOday (582209)]

In addition to economic benefits, this 'peace' idea has some other nice side-effects, like tens of thousands of people not being slaughtered.

Doing the math, it appears the Big Dig was about 1/70th the price of the Iraq war. (Oh, and did I mention tens of thousands of people not being slaughtered?)

Re:The page uses browser exploits

[nospam007 (722110)]

The only way the White House is going to get green with the current president is if they call the painters with lots of green paint.

Re:

[Bert64 (520050)]

Because Bush and his administration have proven time and again that they are only out for themselves, and don't give a shit about the American people or even the American environment, let alone the world as a whole.
There will be some self serving reason this has been done, whether to save money so it can be siphoned off elsewhere, or perhaps to increase bandwidth usage as people download instead (im sure bush has ties to isps/telcos, but doesn't stand to benefit from the government printing office having mo

The Journey of a Thousand Miles

[dsginter (104154)]

Now, all we need to figure out is how to let the constituency modify it.

This is an exercise that is left to the reader.

Re:

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Now, all we need to figure out is how to let the constituency modify it.

This is an exercise that is left to the reader.

That's easy, just join a Congressman or Senator's staff. Or become a lobbyist.

Do you think your representative actually reads or crafts legislation?

cash money

[User 956 (568564)]

White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online

Really? I thought they got green by taking it out of your paycheck?

Re:

[HomerNet (146137)]

White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online

Really? I thought they got green by taking it out of your paycheck?

No, no, no...that's congress

Net Savings: $0

[r_jensen11 (598210)]

Why? Because everyone's going to have their assistants print the budget off for them.

Re:

[Pfhor (40220)]

Actually more like -$[some amount of money]

Because office lasers and related supplies cost more than a bulk printing center.

They could probably buy every member of congress a Kindle and still save in the end.

Actually.

Why DONT they buy every member of congress a kindle, that way they can get instant EVDO downloads of every bill that is ever submitted to congress, whenever, wherever they are? And search it.

Re:Net Savings: $0

[by Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how much harder it is to hide Pork in a searchable document with revision history then a 20 pound stack of paper? Like this would really take off.

Some states now require public online

[Shivetya (243324)]

disclosure of all budget items.

I believe Texas is one of them. It apparently does cause legislators a lot of grief to the point many try to find ways to eliminate or bypass the requirement.

If only we could force the US government to be totally open people might get disgusted with the current crop of Democrats and Republicans to maybe do something

Re:

[corsec67 (627446)]

That assumes one thing:

That anyone in congress actually cares about reading any of the bills.

Re:Net Savings: $0

[by Anonymous Coward]

% grep -i bridge fiscal_budget.txt | grep Alaska

All joking aside, the ability to index and search the budget should make it more accessible for inspection. Theoretically, you could apply filters to the budget and print out many categorized versions that would make it easier to see just how much money is being spent on various things.

Now if they'd only release this information as a importable relational schema...

Re:

[KokorHekkus (986906)]

I beg to differ. Having the budget or budget proposal available in an electronic format will allow interested parties to analyse the content in a more effective manner. And interested parties aren't just politically entities with "printing assitants" but organisations and persons trying to influence the agenda. Some might see this as a burden to political executives but I do belive that in the end that a widely disseminated budget information is better than a set of papers that only those who have access to

revision history - accountability

[h2_plus_O (976551)]

Also consider that electronic copies opens up the door to source control and therefore auditable revision history. Ever wonder who added that earmark in the dark of night, after committee, just hours before a floor vote so none of the voters could review it?

Serious. My team can't check in code without leaving a revision history, why should congressional staffers be able to modify legislation without leaving an auditable (revertable) trail? This would do wonders for our transparency and accountability problems in congress.

Still savings (and losses)

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

Less delivery, perhaps, means less fuel usage though people will have to go to the store to buy an extra few k sheets of paper. Printing at a commercial printing outfit is probably more efficient than running thousands of in-office laser print runs, so that's another loss. Less delivery effort for postal workers too. All up, looks like potentially a loss.

The big advantage is accessibility

[jesterzog (189797)]

The headline of the article implies that this is intended to be some kind of environmental decision, but nothing in the article appears to back it up. In fact, the guy quoted is primarily going on about the much-improved accessibility of the budget. It'll now actually be possible for people to get it (rather than forking out an impossible $200 just to read it), and being in an electronic form, it's much easier to search through and index, not to mention only reading or printing the bits you happen to be interested in.

At the moment I'm working at a government department (non-US) where we've been publishing information online for a while now, [smh.com.au]. People love it, both inside the organisation and those in the general public (journalists, opposition politicians, economists, and whoever else may have an interest). This is largely to do with the Official Information Act which, in New Zealand, basically states that government departments have to make available whatever information people ask for, unless there's a good reason not to. Over time it's resulted in most government entities publishing large amounts of information even when it's not requested, on the assumption that someone may ask for it sooner or later.

The annual budget is probably one of the most important blocks of information and it's also one of the hardest, because it tends to be full of massive amounts of tables and figures from all over the place and from all kinds of different sources and people who often like to do things in very different ways. Even in a small country it's a big logistical exercise. Recently redeveloping the website to make things more accessible was a 2 to 3 year job, simply because of the amount of historical data that had to be gone through and re-formatted with more accessible markup, with people either using scripts or just manually trawling through it. I guess the nice thing about it now, though, is that there are systems in place to make sure that new data gets marked up usefully in the first place.

Budgets are huge things to manage, as much because of the massive amounts of organisation that have to go into collecting the information and compiling it all together in a way that can be printed at all. Hopefully getting it out as a PDF would be the first step for the White House towards getting it more accessible.

Re:

[misleb (129952)]

No kidding. At the school I work for we went to great lengths to get class materials online and digital to save wear and tear on copiers as well as paper. Guess what? The usage on the laser printers in the labs skyrocketed.

-matthew

Useful? Maybe not as much as you think...

[Ambiguous Coward (205751)]

You mean it will actually be searchable in an efficient, reasonable manner? Or will it just be one giant black rectangle playing the part of a 3000-page redaction?

-G

Re:Useful? Maybe not as much as you think...

[yali (209015)]

If the do the redactions their usual way [slashdot.org], then the answers to both your questions will be "yes."

Missing forest behind the trees

[iamacat (583406)]

The bigger story here is that non-congress members will be able to read budget for free in the first place. There should be a distributed volunteer campaign for each user to read a page of the budget and look for outrageous tidbits.

Re:

[LWATCDR (28044)]

"There should be a distributed volunteer campaign for each user to read a page of the budget and look for outrageous tidbits."
Yep but they should start by looking for their local pork. And then tell your congressperson that you don't want it.
I already tried that with mine over the USS Forrestal (CV-59). On a good note it did get retired even over the objections of my Democratic Senator.

A Few Thousand Page PDF

[phantomcircuit (938963)]

A three THOUSAND page pdf?

that is 3,000.

THREE THOUSAND

Nobody is going to read it.

Re:A Few Thousand Page PDF

[Marcion (876801)]

Nobody is going to read it.

Mission accomplished.

Did you see that scene in Fahrenheit 911 when they faxed the patriot act to congressmen overnight and then voted on it the first thing in the morning?

British politics may involve a lot of shouting and require people in strange wigs, but at least the read the laws and debate them and modify them several times before voting on anything.

Re:

[i kan reed (749298)]

Browsing, on the other hand, and using summaries to gather information, that you can do. Oh... wait... "pdf", you're right, no one will read it.

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[strredwolf (532)]

Biggest... PDF... in... the... WORLD!

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[msuarezalvarez (667058)]

Isn't the OOXML spec bigger, actually?

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[Bob of Dole (453013)]

I think that's rather the point, sir.

Before: No one read it, and they wasted a small forest printing it.

Now: No one reads it, and the webserver wastes a few kilowatt-hours sitting idle.

Re:

[jesterzog (189797)]

Nobody is going to read it.

But you can safely bet that a lot of people will print it.

Wrong!

[jdigriz (676802)]

I downloaded the 2008 budget just yesterday from here, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy08/browse.html [gpoaccess.gov] Ooh, maybe they mean this is the first time the *2009* budget is available just like it is a first every year each time it's posted.

Have we really solved or saved anything?

[hacker (14635)]

What is stopping them from downloading it, and printing it themselves? Or giving it to an intern who runs off ten copies instead of having to open up just one from the regular post mail?

Have we really solved anything? Now, if the budget was in a PDF that prevented printing, NOW we'd be somewhere...

It's a start, the postal system should be next.

[schwit1 (797399)]

I don't remember the last time I received something via snail mail that couldn't have been sent via email and the web. Bills, stock notices, adverts, etc.

500 trees is a pittance compared to what could be saved.

Green?

[Jeffrey Baker (6191)]

Paper is a renewable resource like rice or strawberries. It's grown on farms like any other crop. They aren't out there chopping down ancient redwoods for paper.

The issue of going paperless to save the planet was always bogus. Driving a mile in a car has a much larger impact on the planet than printing a page.

Re:Green?

[Ardeaem (625311)]

Paper is a renewable resource like rice or strawberries. It's grown on farms like any other crop. They aren't out there chopping down ancient redwoods for paper.

The issue of going paperless to save the planet was always bogus.

Making paper requires lots of chemicals which are not particularly eco-friendly. Also, only a percentage of the trees used to make paper worldwide come from tree farms. According to this website [ecology.com], only 16% come from paper farms, so that means the rest (that isn't recycled) comes from sources that take more time to renew. In the mean time, the older trees that were removing more CO2 from the air are (at best) replaced by much seedlings or much younger trees, meaning that there is less CO2 being removed from the air.

On the contrary, making something that will be widely read available online will have only a small effect of power usage. If you factor in the amount of power used by the machines that harvested and created the paper it WOULD have been printed on, I imagine there is a pretty big savings.

Re:

[hansamurai (907719)]

But what about saving U.S. taxpayers $1 million in paper costs? It doesn't seem like much to the federal budget, but every little bit helps.

Must be a short PDF...

[themushroom (197365)]

...which simply says "70% military, 25% domestic defense, 4.99% other domestic concerns, 0.01% schools and education."

Not quite...

[raehl (609729)]

60% Old People, 20% Sick People, 15% Military (offense and defense), 4% other domestic concerns, 1% bridges in Alaska.

Re:

[Scudsucker (17617)]

Seems to me that defense is one of the top priorities, according to the constitution.

You don't need to outspend every other nation in the world, combined, when you are surrounded by two friendly nations and the world's largest oceans.

I didn't see anything about education in that document so that is supposed to be left up to the states.

The Constitution grants the authority to Congress to promote the general welfare and make laws to that effect, and your general welfare is going to be pretty piss poor without

Re:Must be a short PDF...

[alshithead (981606)]

"It's actually 0% education. Schools are run by state governments, not the federal government."

Right...so the "no child left behind" mandates that have to be followed in order to get federal funds show that state governments run the schools how? The states can choose to receive no federal funds or follow federal guidelines and receive federal funds. Kind of a catch 22 the way I see it.

good start

[roman_mir (125474)]

that's a good start, however for some time now I've been thinking that the government should be publishing real time expenses online through an easy to use interface. I live in Toronto, Ontario and our city has been suffering on the verge of bankruptcy even though the budget from the taxes is over 7.5 billion CAD/year. About 60% of the money goes to the unionized city workers, which is a shame, there is no competition for the city contracts really, it's all government based mafia. This is not a surprise given that the city is governed by an NDP idiot-troll [canadafreepress.com] and the province is yet again in the hands of a liberal pathological [thestar.com] lier. [canoe.ca]

I would like to see the government's bank statements on line. If the city gets the 7.5 billion CAD a year from the taxes, I would like to see the current balance, look at all expenses in detail. If a million is given away here [splatto.net], another million there [thestar.com], I would like to see the details of every transaction.

If the city mayor suffers a defeat on his crazy tax proposals (something he concocted instead of looking at balancing the budget the correct way, without immediately imposing new taxes the NDP way,) then the mayor wants to punish the city [theglobeandmail.com] with meaningless reduction in working hours of community centers and libraries, I want to see the savings in the budget. Of-course the truth is that there was no savings, since the union city workers are still sitting in those centers and libraries because the union will not allow the city not to pay these people and the only sufferers are the citizens who cannot use these public resources.

The government does not want the citizens to be able to see detail of every dollar that is spent, because if we did see these details, we would revolt.

Re:quick, somebody stick that on a wiki somewhere

[Marcion (876801)]

You need someone to use pdftotext and then use SQL to import it all to populate the wiki. It would be a couple of hours of work (you might have to do it a few times, PDFs can have strange artifacts) but not rocket science.

Re:quick, somebody stick that on a wiki somewhere

[HappyDrgn (142428)]

Sure it does, individual sections could use the "dispute" feature on wiki software like the way wikipedia.org uses it. Individuals could comment directly on questions that arise. This could help organize grass roots efforts to push for specific changes.

Re:

[Shados (741919)]

My personal budget fits on one page.
The specs for a 1 person software development project that would take about a month of work could spawn anywhere between 5 and 100 pages.

Specs for just about anything (software or otherwise) are always much bigger than an average budget of the same scale.

Re:next debate question

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

"Would you as president maintain a blog?"

Answer:"No I call the plumber to do all toilet repairs".

Re:Paperless is good

[User 956 (568564)]

3000 pages??? Just printing the budget puts a nice dent in the budget, huh?

Seriously. You know that trillion dollar deficit? Two words: Ink Cartridges.

Farming isn't magically green.

[Chuck Chunder (21021)]

What about energy used in the producing, distributing, printing, binding, distributing (and so forth) steps for a paper version?

Things aren't magically "green" just because they are farmed.

I'd be highly surprised if the energy used in viewing the pages you were interested in online (and probably selectively printing specific bits out) were to be more than the energy involved in getting 3000 pages of hardcopy from a seed to your desk.