By MIA STEINLE
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently took to task Energy.gov, the newly relaunched web presence of the Department of Energy (DOE). Science writer Dawn Stover detailed her difficulties finding an important 2002 document about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, concluding that Energy.gov may be more visually pleasing than it is useful.
DOE responded the following week with a new page for Yucca Mountain and improved search functions for the related documents. While the agency said it’s proud of the new Energy.gov, it admitted that it’s not done migrating documents to the new site and making them searchable.
Making it easy for the public to find documents online is certainly a good step. But this whole exchange reminded POGO of just how much DOE information isn’t even publicly available in the first place.
To wit: POGO has repeatedly asked DOE to make its Performance Evaluation Reports (PERs) and Performance Evaluation Plans (PEPs) readily available to the public. PEPs and PERs are the DOE's way of keeping accountable the contractors who run the sprawling nuclear weapons complex and gobble up 90 percent of the Department’s budget. The documents are currently kept secret for three years, making it impossible for the public to assess how DOE is managing these contractors and why nuclear weapons labs are given billions of dollars in award fees.
And then of course there are the items on the Openness Floor—a good government coalition’s list of documents (for example, top-level officials’ calendars and detailed contracting information) that agencies must make public in order to be considered truly open.
Unfortunately, openness has never been DOE’s strong suit. In an evaluation of agency Open Government Plans—the blueprints for openness mandated by the Obama Administration’s 2009 Open Government Directive—DOE finished in 35th place (out of 39). The only agencies that scored lower than DOE weren’t even required by the Open Government Directive to create a Plan—they did so voluntarily.
Responding to Stover’s criticisms, DOE’s Cammie Croft wrote, “At the Energy Department, we’re striving each day to make Energy.gov better and achieve the principles of Open Government: transparency, participation, and collaboration.”
If DOE truly wants to embrace the principles of open government, it should use Energy.gov to publish documents which, like PEPs, PERs, and the items on the Openness Floor, empower the public to hold it accountable. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) offers an instructive example: its website makes it easy for the public to find certain documents AND takes steps towards ratcheting the agency up closer to the Openness Floor with publication of Chairman Gregory Jaczko's meetings and events.
User-friendly websites are important. But perhaps ProPublica’s Jennifer LaFleur put it best:
Information on anything that's inspected, spent, enforced, or licensed. That's what I want, and that's what the public wants.
Mia Steinle is a POGO Investigator.
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