Obama's Oversight Cop Calls for Backup
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, April 27 2009
There are few profiles of Earl Devaney, Obama's pick to head oversight over the spending of those $787 billion in recovery funds, that don't either lead with or quickly note the notion that Devaney looks just exactly like the former Secret Service enforcer that he once was. And that's because Devaney looks exactly like a Secret Service enforcer, down the fitted charcoal suit that he looks like he wants to grab with one fist and yank off his body at the earliest opportunity.
Devaney was once the Inspector General at the Interior Department, too, where he uncovered that Secretary Gale Norton's deputy was lying about his connections to Jack Abramoff, working to block a casino that Abramoff was interested in having built on behalf of a client. Related obstruction of justice charges put J. Steven Griles behind bars for a time. You might also know Devaney from his work uncovering the sex, drugs, and other assorted hanky-panky that went down in Interior's Minerals Management Service. Neither high-profile investigation earned him the undying gratitude of higher ups at Interior.
Devaney's propensity for old-style go it alone investigatin' is one of the reasons that this week's "National Dialogue" to build the best possible Recovery.gov website is so intriguing. As the head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board (or RAT Board for short) Devaney has an enormous -- and, frankly, quite possibly close to impossible -- task of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse of those federal dollars as they're spent from coast to coast, from Alaska to Hawaii. Tough job.
And so he's turned to the Interwebs. All this week, NationalDialogue.org is hosting an online forum for the submission and evaluation of ideas for quickly building a Recovery.gov that both keeps tabs on the spending of recovery funds and creates a forum in which the public can help to spot bad behavior. In the community forum, anyone can submit an oversight idea and rate others' ideas on a scale of one to five stars. Comments are also welcomed.
The National Dialogue on Information Technology is open to vendors, advocates, and plain old citizens alike, and is focused on five key tasks:
- Data Collection: Aggregating financial information and other contracting details from recipients at every level -- from federal down to state down to individual recipients. (There, it seems Devaney is signing on to the wishes of the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery that recovery tracking drill down to as granular a level as possible.)
- Data Warehousing and Provisioning: How to store disparate data sets coming in through multiple channels and in a variety of formats -- and then serve the data out to the public and other end users.
- Analysis and Visualizations: What the Recovery.gov team should do on its end to model the data in meaningful ways, including mapping and the creation of structured displays.
- Fraud Detection: How to present the data in ways that makes the detection of waste, fraud, and abuse possible, and how to make it so the public has a way to report uncovered fraud.
- Website Design: Building the most intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Besides its significance in the recovery effort, the project gains attention for being the first major attempt in the Obama Administration to meaningfully invite people into the governing process. The National Dialogue on recovery oversight IT kicked off this morning, and runs through Sunday night.