The dumb part here is really that cutting these problems INCREASES the cost of government. By a lot. Taking public data offline, or making it less accessible means it gets FOIAd instead. FOIA costs the government a half billion dollars a year.
Need an example of how the data.gov team did some great work?<p>Compare a search for "interchange fees" on the <a href="http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr" rel="nofollow">http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr</a> site, with federalregister.gov. Not only does it return the most relevant result in the #1 spot, but it's also beautiful and usable:<p><a href="http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/12/28/2010-32061/debit-card-interchange-fees-and-routing" rel="nofollow">http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2010/12/28/2010-3206...</a><p>The Federal Register is a critical function of how our government functions. My jaw dropped the first time I saw the new site, it's sad to compare with what we were forced to put up with before.
This is very unfortunate and demonstrates how easy it is to kill a relatively inexpensive program that has enormous potential upside when its constituency is diffuse and dividends from it may only be realized in the future.
So if I'm BigContractor X or Union Y, I have a few issues I really care about and have the willingness to spend money to influence legislators. Open data does not concern me.<p>But since the the beneficiaries of "open data" are widely dispersed, who lobbies on behalf of greater transparency? Sounds like a startup opportunity!
Why don't they publish the data in a quick and dirty no frills way, and let hackers like myself pretty it up? Data.gov has a lot of value, and I'd love to contribute some of my free time working with it.
Government is so good at managing this sort of thing. We should really ask our government to do more stuff because of its stellar track record! <sigh>