Transparency was a hot topic (indeed, promise) during the 2008 campaign (as during the 2010 mid-terms, for those of you who care about those). Most commentators seem to agree that that transparency is a promise that has not been entirely fulfilled. But there are different kinds of criticisms, and they are not all of equal value. The conversation gets very muddy for the average voter/citizen (I include myself) because what we hear is a mish-mash of criticisms, most of which have nothing to do with transparency. For example, you likely heard that Donald Trump (oh god, I'm talking about him again) offered to pay five million dollars to the charity of Obama's choice if POTUS would release his university transcripts. (One can only guess what Trump was hoping to find). Trump claimed that "President Obama is the least transparent president in the history of this country". This may be true in some vaguely defined, Trumpean sense, but this is not at all what is meant by government transparency in the sense that it is/was promised by both Obama during the 2008 campaign and John Boehner in 2009. The CATO institute has issued a rather long-ish report on the successes and failures (mostly failures) of government transparency in recent years. The most valuable part of the report is that it clears away the dross of these ridiculous notions of transparency and offers in intelligent version by which one can judge successful government transparency--hint: it has nothing to do with college transcripts, your morning breakfast routine, how many cigarettes you smoke each day, boxers or briefs...
Read the full report here:
http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/grading-governments-data-publication-practices
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