Today marks the final days of Sunshine Week, a national event aimed at getting people to talk about the importance of open government and public access to government information. It’s fitting then that today DCFPI will testify at the oversight hearing for the CFO’s Office of Budget and Planning ‘ the agency responsible for putting together the budget documents we read every year ‘ on ways to improve the transparency of DC’s budget.
A transparent budget ‘ one that provides accurate, clear and timely information ‘ is critical to helping the public understand how its tax dollars are being spent, and to enable the public and elected officials to hold the District accountable for the delivery of services. The Office of Budget and Planning has made some notable improvements to the budget over the past few years ‘ such as adding detailed descriptions of year-to-year funding changes, organizing the budget online to make it easy to find all of the relevant budget documents for an agency in one place, and adding spending detail on “special purpose” funds ‘ that have helped improve DC’s budget transparency.
The Office of Budget and Planning also made a great transparency leap forward last year when it created CFO Info. CFO Info is an online budget tool that allows users to drill down into a particular part of the budget, expands the amount of budget information available to the public and, starting today, allows the public to see how much agencies have spent during the current fiscal year. DCFPI feels CFO Info has great potential to be a rich and useful tool to allow the public to access detailed budget information online. We say “potential” because while OBP is to be commended for launching CFO Info and putting out more detailed budget information, there are still a number of improvements that could be made.
For example, the DC budget contains very little information on how federal funds are spent. This despite the fact that federal funds make up the majority of the total budget of many agencies and fund very critical programs and services. Over 87 percent of budget for the HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, STD and TB Administration, for example, is made up federal dollars. Similar to how CFO Info provides detailed spending information on special purpose funds not found in DC’s budget books, it could also provide that level spending detail on federal funds.
In addition, CFO Info could also be more user-friendly. Right now the layout and navigation can be difficult to use, especially for someone who isn’t so familiar with budget jargon or how DC’s budget is laid out.
But enough about us. What suggestions do you have to improve budget transparency? In the spirit of sunshine week and generating discussion around open government we’d like to hear your thoughts on how to improve the transparency of DC’s budget in the comments section below.
