One Goal of Budget Cuts
Killing the publishing of crucial data series and analysis. Or better — smothering the building of open government in its crib.
From the EIA press release, this is the type of data that will no longer be available to taxpayers:
Do not prepare or publish 2011 edition of the annual data release on U.S. proved oil and natural gas reserves.
Curtail efforts to understand linkages between physical energy markets and financial trading. […]
Suspend auditing of data submitted by major oil and natural gas companies and reporting on their 2010 financial performance through EIA’s Financial Reporting System.
Terminate updates to EIA’s International Energy Statistics.
Eliminate annual published inventory of Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States.
There’s more that is being cut back or curtailed — and as you look at this list, think about how shortsighted it is while we struggle to find a path to a better energy policy that we will no longer have access to good, reliable data that would help light the way. So the debate has little chance of being informed with data any longer — because all that will be left is the made up BS of the Heartland Institute and the like. Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish.
Budget cuts may signal the demise of data.gov — the really remarkable effort to put a great deal of government data and data sets online, and available to everyone. Now cut by $8 billion, it is certain that a good chunk of the President’s initiative to get data sets (including spending data sets) available to everyone will disappear.
Open government is not in the category of waste, fraud and abuse — and really is pretty fundamental to how this democracy ought to work. There has been simply incredible progress in putting data up online and now this information looks like it will be locked back up in agencies. Republicans will trot out to disparage the lack of openess of this government — which belies the fact that this Administration has done more to open up than any other. We need to remember that data is the enemy of the current GOP crowd — because we can’t have anything that interrupts the narrative fed to them by Fox Noise.
Information is the lifeblood of a functioning liberal democracy. You can not have an informed electorate making rational decisions without easy access to unbiased (in as much as any “brutal fact” is objective) data.
That America’s middle class has swallowed this childish fantasy speaks to our childishness as a people.
Republicans will be unaffected because they get their data from the Heritage Foundation.
data in that sentence should be enclosed in quotation marks.
But anon reminds me of another point about this data — it is still possible to get much of it, it just takes way more work to get it. This is a business opportunity for folks willing to go get the data, tart it up a little and then sell it to people like me who can’t afford the time to go get the data (and doesn’t want to hire somebody to do this). And monetizing taxpayer assets without getting a return on it is unfortunately the habit of Democrats and Republicans.
I have used the EIA data for many years to assess the effectiveness of U. S. energy policy. Their data showed our energy policies were uneconomical, unreliable, and prospects overblown. Curtailing EIA information will make it more difficult to make accurate assessments. This has to be of benefit to those advocating use of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels like ethanol from corn because it covers up their failures.
The Heartland Institute and similar groups would have welcomed EIA data because it supported their positions
James H. Rust, Professor of nuclear engineering