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."

Re:A Few Thousand Page PDF

[Marcion]

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:Net Savings: $0

[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:quick, somebody stick that on a wiki somewhere

[Marcion]

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.

revision history - accountability

[h2_plus_O]

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.

Re:quick, somebody stick that on a wiki somewhere

[HappyDrgn]

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.

Farming isn't magically green.

[Chuck Chunder]

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.

Only a declared war is authorized

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no declaration of war with Iraq.

Re:Net Savings: $0

[misleb]

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

Re:The page uses browser exploits

[jonadab]

> 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.

Oh, neither could they, but you don't seem to understand what a budget is. A budget is not a list of new ideas. It's a detailed accounting of where all the money is allocated. (This differs from a budget *report*, which is a detailed accounting of where all the money *went*, and how that differs from where the budget said it should go -- which, in the case of the US federal government, would probably be even more terrifying.)

In fact, there are probably very few new ideas in the budget. Most of the money goes to the same things it went to last time, although the exact numbers probably change slightly each year.