I am Patrice McDermott, senior information policy analyst for 0MB Watch which is a non-profit research and advocacy group on issues of government openness and accountability. We advocate for maximum public access to government information as essential to public participation in both government and governance.

Before I present my comments, I want to commend the Commission — and the panels that assisted it in its assessment of public information dissemination — particularly for the central challenge the report takes up: recommending to the President and the Congress steps to ‘maximize the diffusion of the government’s data, information, and knowledge resources to all sectors of society, down to the level of the individual citizen, and to help all of those sectors utilize that knowledge effectively and efficiently” in the pursuit of their goals and objectives. As the Commission cogently notes. this is a far more daunting challenge than just “strengthening the dissemination of government information.”

I am, however, concerned by several concepts developed in the report and the recommendations. One central concern is with the concept of an “Information Dissemination Budget” which is based on an analogy with the Information Collection Budget. I have two concerns with this concept. The first is that it is a false analogy and, because of that, dangerous. The ICB has to do with agencies keeping track of the amount of time the public will be required to spend completing agency forms and the clear intent in recent history has been to eliminate 5% of that “burden” every year, as mandated by the PRA. It is not about monies authorized or allocated for the purposes of information collection. Indeed, if the recent Congresses — and some past OMBs — had their way, the failure to reduce the ICB would trigger some comparable reduction of funding. So, this is not an analogy you want to make!

My other concern with the concept of an Information Dissemination Budget has to do with its limited scope. And this concern reflects some larger problems with the report in general. The limitation of this 1DB to scientific and technical information specifically and research-and-development activities in general, while understandable for fiscal reasons, is very short-sighted. And it reflects the tendency of the report and the recommendations to keep circling back to the concerns of that one government information community. While the plight of NTIS is the ostensible origin of this assessment, the needs of that community are not the whole of the problem. The Commission clearly recognizes this throughout the report, but — nevertheless — it keeps narrowing its focus back in to STI, to the detriment of the potential impact of its report and recommendations. We may need one report and set of recommendations specific to the concerns of NTIS in the near future. and a separate set to look at the broader set of concerns.

My other central concern has to do with the Commission’s definition — in the summary of its proposed legislation — of public information versus “internal information resources.” That definition says that “internal information resources” are any government information products or services that are excluded from public use because l)they have been determined by the issuing components to be required for official use only or 2) to be for strictly administrative or operational purposes and to have no public interest or educational value, or 3) they are classified for reasons of national security. While I understand the Commission is drawing on statutory language here, it needs to be aware..that these are not undisputed categories. Indeed, just one month ago the President vetoed the Intelligence Authorization Act because of language in it about leaks of classified information. The other two categories are also contested and the Commission should be very wary of drawing its exclusionary net so widely. As you note in your report, the FOIA in particular pits the rights of the government against the rights of citizens. And much of the classification of information happens in a process that is analogous to what you say about proper public information dissemination: it “depends on the judgment of thousands of unmonitored officials at all levels in thousands of lower level units of government.”

Finally, I would urge you to consider in your report how the growing use of the Internet blurs the distinction that Circular A- 130 makes between access and dissemination. This, it seems to me, is critical to examine because many of the upcoming battles over the proper role of government in providing its information online are going to use this terminology and these distinctions. It would be an important service for the Commission to assist Congress and the executive in thinking through if these distinctions continue to hold meaningfully in an online environment. This is begun in the discussion of some of the customized services provided by NTIS, but, in many ways, linking these services to the distinction between access and dissemination may be a disservice to a clear understanding of whether and how the digital environment affects our customary categories.