Ability to access comments gathered by White House questioned

Open government advocates have criticized the Obama administration for removing some public comments it collected on a site developed for the presidential transition and fear the practice means the White House might stop making some citizen input accessible on its site.

The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires the Executive Office of the President to archive most online public dialogues for historical purposes. But the administration is under no obligation to host the data on a Web site during President Obama's four-year term. It shut down parts of Change.gov, a Web site the presidential transition team created before Obama took office, which gathered public input on policies as well as provide other information.

But the public expects ongoing access to the original comments from online brainstorming sessions that the administration conducts with citizens, including those collected during the transition, said government transparency advocates and critics of the administration. Interactive forums include a March online town hall meeting with Obama, public input periods for a forthcoming open government directive and an exchange of job-creation ideas that White House officials announced on Nov. 30.

A link on Change.gov to a collection of citizens' advice for the new administration doesn't work. The inaccessible page cataloged public contributions for the Citizen's Briefing Book, a project that produced policy guidance for the administration. The book is available on the White House Web site, but it does not include the original recommendations, some of which didn't make it into the final document. The contractor that collected the input, Salesforce.com, is no longer being paid to maintain the database.

A link to an announcement about the interactive project is still live. But anyone who clicks on the announcement link in the Citizen's Briefing Book to view the comments will be taken to a page that reads, "Oops! This link appears to be broken."

"If it still exists, the White House should get access to all those other pages," said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org. "If it's something that they had linked to from Whitehouse.gov," such as a wiki on the open government directive, "it's important that that be there."

The raw conversations help the public see what administration officials were drawing from in formulating policy and with whom they were engaging, she added.

"I don't think I want the government to make the distinction between [maintaining access to] the finished product and the social media input that went into the decision-making," McDermott said.

Some in the Washington transparency community said the inability to access the briefing book ideas is a rare situation, given the administration's dedication to full disclosure. John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, pointed to the government's interest in procuring services to archive social network content. The Executive Office of the President this summer began checking into the possibility of acquiring such services by issuing a request for quotes.

"That shows they are committed to preserving public records online," he said. The captured information would be preserved in a digital archive and presented at a future presidential library, according to the document.

"If you set up a dialogue and say your ideas are going to help to inform our decision-making process, implicit is that we are going to be able to look at those ideas submitted by the public," Wonderlich said. "The public at large will probably take public participation less seriously if their participation is just liable to disappear."

White House officials declined to comment for this story.

Other open government advocates perceive sustaining the social media record as a low priority. "From my point of view, it ranks very low in the hierarchy of significant information," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonpartisan think tank. "These comments originate with the public, not with government officials."

Aftergood said he probably would never go back to view citizen comments, even though he often participates in the Web-based conversations. "If they were worth posting in the first place, then perhaps they are worth archiving somewhere," but not necessarily online, he added.

Some Republican congressional aides questioned Obama's commitment to maintaining online transparency because of the dead link to the transition's clearinghouse of briefing recommendations. A senior GOP Senate staffer asked, "If the Citizen's Briefing Book link is dead, what's going to happen to the community job-creation ideas? Is that going to have the same kind of lasting impact?"