Issa Cites Tensions with Executive Branch on Bipartisan DATA Act

The act Congress passed last year to standardize and publicize government data eventually became bipartisan, but resistance may now come from the agencies through half-hearted implementation, said its chief author, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

When co-sponsor Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., “joined the fray, it became clearly apolitical,” Issa told reporters before speaking Wednesday at a Data Transparency Coalition conference on the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. “There could perhaps be a fight with the executive branch arguing against being mandated in law to do something it could have done first,” he said.

What he called “the magic of the DATA Act” is when agencies publish their information with keys and tags so documents are easily searched through pre-determined fields. “You never have to enter it again, and agencies no longer need to spend $100,000 every time Congress asks for a report,” said the former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He complimented the Postal Service for a fill-in form program that “almost works.”

Issa said he did not wish to “short-count” the administration’s efforts to implement the DATA Act, “but typically agencies say this is just another unfunded mandate, so I don’t expect movement until [the Office of Management and Budget] produces guidance” for each agency, asking what are the roadblocks, where is the funding, which portion of the agency’s data needs more metadata, he said.

“The agency people may not have the capacity,” Issa said, but they will if OMB or the president leads. Agencies should have been “telling the world that the Freedom of Information Act matters, and that they should [not] wait until a newspaper or law firm makes a request but make the data [available] as an ordinary course,” Issa said. More important, when the agencies do comply, he added, “scores of FOIA officers will no longer be necessary.”

Interpreting rules and redacting personal information from documents for release under FOIA “is a human nightmare if you lack strong metadata” and tidy standards, he added. “But an administration for whom no amount of money will do may buy new computer systems” that don’t address DATA Act requirements.

So “strong oversight is essential,” Issa said. “The DATA Act is major piece of legislation but it’s just a start. Many chief information officers aren’t competent, and lack controls,” he said, and too many federal managers may think the DATA Act “threatens my revenue stream unless the administration says they really mean it. Some bureaucrats—bless their hearts—may delay and thwart it because maybe they’re just months from retirement just don’t want the challenge. My hope is some energetic young government employee who will want to make sure it all goes public.”

If Congress closes its eyes and says all it good, Issa continued, “then we may wake up years from now and still have legacy programs.” Issa said the key to maintaining pressure on implementation is for “the public to continue to demand” such data as prices for agency purchases. “The only way to get the executive to stay on it is for the public to make it matter politically,” Issa said. “I intend to stay on top of it for the rest of my career.”

Issa’s notion that OMB has offered no agency guidance for gauging progress was contradicted at the conference by David Lebryk, fiscal assistant Treasury secretary. OMB and Treasury “are working with agencies to review their data standards, and Treasury is responsible for what the presentation looks like,” he said. “I can’t say the environment was widely enthusiastic about such a significant effort, but I’m enormously impressed with the progress made in past year.”

Lebryk said the approach is “more data-centric than system-centric,” which lowers costs and reduces the extent to which information resides in silos. “We have a number of pilots, and if the data is there, our people will figure out a way to make it publicly accessible.”

Issa was asked whether it was fair to cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service when it still uses some legacy information technology systems from the 1960s. “It’s their own damn fault,” he said, noting that his committee exposed fraud in IRS IT purchasing.

“For half a century they’ve been using IBM 360s [mainframe computer], and they made the decision to build on legacy systems.” After the Clinton administration passed a tax hike in 1993, Issa said, the IRS created a separate data system for the 100,000 taxpayers affected (he among them). “But they forgot it was a Leap Year, so they sent a dunning letter for this perceived one-day delay in payments. That’s why we passed the CIO mandate,” because good CIOs understand the issues with building new systems.

The Obama administration, Issa said, “still has an opportunity for a data transformation before the lights go out” on Jan. 20, 2017. “But the next administration will be just as bad, just as frustrating, with bureaucrats who have kingdoms and separate pots of money,” he said. “It’s not the legacy of any one president.” Standardizing data to open it up for the public “is not a quick process.”