The FY 2011 budget: So much for transparency

Cabinet officials and other administration leaders met with reporters yesterday to outline the President’s Fiscal Year 2011 federal budget. That spending blueprint includes $147-billion-and-change for research and development programs. But in contrast to past years, details tended to be skimpy — and any chance for followup or verification of apparent trends has proven a bit more difficult than usual.

Attempting to make sense of the federal budget is always a bear. Mountains of numbers lay buried in many hundreds of tables printed within a series of tomes the size of big-city phone books. Poring over their data to understand budget priorities is invariably a study in frustration. Which is why many of the reporters — who work on your behalf to identify trends of interest — were especially vexed yesterday.

Take those of us “attending” the Environmental Protection Agency briefing. This year, for the first time, the event was available by telephone only. It lasted 25 minutes, which included about a 15 minute synopsis of highlights by Administrator Lisa Jackson. Then she took a handful of questions from the media.

Many of us who had signaled our interest in asking a question — I did so within a second (literally) of the operators asking us to do so — were simply ignored. So we were left with answers to the eight brief questions allowed before the even was summarily ended. It gave us little chance to flesh out details of interest on how the agency would spend $10 billion (including $651 million on R&D).

For instance, when Jackson said: “the largest scientific research increase will go towards our Science to Achieve Results, or STAR grants,” she neglected to mention the size of that increase. Or how big the program is this year. And when I used “science” or “results” as key words to search the EPA section of the budget documents online (and on the CD that came with one of the hard-copy documents), no reference to the STAR grants programs turned up. I sent queries to both the press office and the budget office at EPA for clarification on that program and others. And as of more than 24 hours following the close of the briefing, I’ve yet to get the missing numbers.

In previous years, EPA’s briefing lasted about an hour after which reporters were encouraged to corner agency program experts for followup on details that hadn’t been addressed. Yesterday, the phone cut-off precluded any chance to ask officials to explain nuances or address confusion. Such as the size of the STAR grants increase or details on the two other budget numbers I most wanted to mention.

Our medical writer listened in on the Department of Health and Human Services press briefing. He wasn’t even offered the option of trying to ask a question during that briefing. For that, he would have had to appear at the briefing in person (although at least HHS hosted a face-to-face gathering). Our writer was able to get his details afterward by phoning the National Institutes of Health. But with its roughly $32.1 billion R&D budget constituting the lion’s share of HHS’s $32.156 billion proposed R&D total, it would have been nice to let health and science reporters pick up some details about NIH’s developments en masse. Not one-by-one through successive calls to NIH.

And then there was the NASA briefing. Reporters got more than an hour to probe new developments there — or at least notable projected changes in the planned direction for major programs. NASA’s budget briefing had originally been scheduled to take place at the agency’s headquarters yesterday afternoon. Sunday night, NASA revised its schedule and informed reporters that it would instead hold only a lunch-time teleconference on Monday.

Now maybe we reporters have just been spoiled by decades of briefings that went on long – perhaps too long – allowing even tiny niche publications to probe what could be in store for their constituencies. But the Obama administration has scaled back the amount of data available on the day the budget is unveiled (three books vs. up to eight in the past, each offering different analyses and levels of detail), so it’s hard for reporters to fill in on their own what the briefings had once readily delivered.

Budget briefings are shorter, sometimes postponed (last year, the National Science Foundation budget briefing occurred a week after that for other agencies) or eliminated (NIH didn’t get its own this year as it typically has in the past).

Bottom line: The new administration is making it harder for us to ferret out the information that presumably you will care about.

President Obama has promised greater transparency of his team’s actions and deliberations than had been typical of recent administrations. Yet there have been a number of instances that call into question how well the president is following through.

So it’s tempting to question: Why the paucity of details Monday? To control the news? To bury details that might be embarrassing or controversial? Or just to keep costs down by holding fewer briefings and increasing the share that are digital rather than brick-and-mortar events? Indeed, teleconferencing should be more egalitarian, allowing even distant reporters access to newsmakers. But that’s only true if the agencies give those reporters a chance to ask their questions. And provided the agencies secure sufficient bandwidth to simultaneously host hundreds of online news gatherers for each event (something that Uncle Sam’s minions admitted this week that they hadn’t managed).