DURHAM, N.C. — The Obama Administration’s promised level of transparency, as evidenced by the new government website Recovery.gov, carries risks, but is the right way to try to build trust with the American public, says a Duke University expert.
“There are good reasons why leaders and managers in both the public and private sectors generally prefer to keep as much information as possible under wraps. Mistakes, and worse, can happen and one would prefer that these were never seen by potential critics,” said Wayne Norman, the Mackowski Professor of Ethics at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics.
“The other side of this transparency and accountability initiative is that it gives the White House a better chance to know the truth about how the money is being spent, and more of the truth, sooner and more completely. It can deal with problems before they get worse. And it can put criticisms about this or that program into context.
“There’s an old adage in business: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. This website initiative is, in part, about measuring it, so they can manage it,” Norman said.
Increased transparency will not prevent rumors and allegations about wasteful, silly or corrupt spending of stimulus money, Norman said, but it will help Obama build social capital, or trust, with the American people so he can pursue his legislative agenda.
“If the Obama administration goes back to the well for more stimulus and bail-out money, they must first prove they are responsible guardians of it,” Norman said.
Making the stimulus process transparent is “simply the appropriate thing to do in a democratic state. It is part of the ‘change’ that Obama campaigned on,” Norman said. “It is also a nod to bi-partisanship since worries about waste and earmarks were voiced as reasons why many Republican lawmakers opposed the bill.”
He added that by adopting transparency and accountability at the top, the government forces it upon everyone down the chain — from federal departments and agencies to state and city governments and, ultimately, to contractors and subcontractors.
“Everybody will have to be transparent, and more importantly, they know they will be exposed. In short, it gives an incentive for everyone down the expenditure line to use the funds appropriately, because they know it will be harder to get away with anything shady,” Norman said. “Although the value of transparency can sometimes be trumped by the value of privacy or confidentiality, there are no principled reasons why anyone should oppose the spirit of transparency and accountability in the spending of this money.”
