Participatory Democracy Roadblocks: Is FACA Still Relevant?
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, March 2 2009
Is the Federal Advisory Committee Act going to prove to be a big ol' obstacle between the federal government and all those eager Google Maps developers chomping at the bit to help Uncle Sam? Perhaps more importantly, should it be an impediment? You hear again and again at places like this weekend's Transparency Camp: the law passed when leisure suits were the height of fashion might actually make it exceedingly difficult for modern citizen engagement to actually take place in the 21st century.
But there's fascinating tension here, because, FACA was enacted to bring about the sort of good, transparent government that participatory democracy advocates are hungry for. It was even juiced a bit in the Bush era to add more layers of documentation about who was whispering in the ear of the President, Vice President, and other officials. But it might also prohibit the sort of informal, ad hoc work that technologists are eager to do for their country. So, has the time come to modernize FACA? Here's how the Congressional Research Service describes the need for restrictions on who can participate in government and how (pdf):
The legislative history pertaining to FACA reveals that Congress had two major concerns about advisory committees before 1972. The first concern was that the public perceived many advisory committees as duplicative and inefficient, and otherwise lacking adequate controls or oversight. The second concern was the widespread belief that advisory committees did not adequately represent the public interest, and that committee meetings were too often closed to the public.
Reading that, you have to start to wonder whether we don't have a tool (pssst, the Internet) that kicks the legs out from under those justifications, if we're smart enough to figure out how. Can we use these fancy tools we're now fairly good at to make ad hoc advisory committees both more inefficient? (Or does that worry itself shrink a bit in the lots-of-stuff-is-free Internet age?) Can we use tech to make the advisory process adequately open, like the way the transition team started to did with Your Seat at the Table? Google reveals a dearth of good thinking on the usefulness of FACA in the Internet age, so by all means point to useful discussions on it in the comments.