White House transparency effort falls short for some

When the Obama Administration threw open the floodgates in February, inviting all 1.9 million federal employees to stretch their imaginations and propose ideas on how the government could be more transparent, no one was prepared for what came pouring back. A trickle. To be more precise, 91 comments, and about half of those were questions or remarks on other people's ideas. "Among various kinds of people in the government, no one had heard about it," Gary Bass of OMB Watch said of the federal-employees-only bulletin board, which was set up to solicit the suggestions for a few weeks earlier this year. The outreach followed a memo President Barack Obama signed on his first full day in office promising "an unprecedented level of openness in Government." Bass, whose non-profit, open-government advocacy group has been closely monitoring Obama's transparency initiative, said he suspected that new administration officials didn't fully appreciate how reluctant most federal employees are to join such a process without direct authorization or instruction from a supervisor. "What is difficult for civil servants is, unless they get a memo from their boss, they're not going to comment," Bass said.