The Office of Government Publishing also offers a wealth of budget documents, including presidents’ budget proposals (which are usually implemented only piecemeal). Or go to USASending.gov – a government-run website – to view the budgets for each government agency.
It is true that it is difficult to easily know the expenditure by item of government agencies. Given that the federal government spends (doing some quick math based on OMB numbers) $220,000 per day, this would be difficult to do.
Oh sorry. Not per day. Per second.
Some of that is for things like military aircraft, which are expensive. Much of it, however, is on things like copy paper, which is not the case except across the federal government. So it’s easy to understand how tedious it is to review federal spending.
However, there are processes in place to do this. House standing committees are responsible for overseeing federal departments. Whistleblowers are encouraged to come forward and report any potential wrongdoing. (Here’s the House Budget Committee’s page for whistleblower complaints, for example.) It’s an imperfect system, to be sure, but it allows the people closest to the spending — federal employees — to keep tabs on things, even if it exploits the partisanship and desire for visibility of political actors.
Speaking at a rally this weekend, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a different idea.
“We are going to put the entire US budget on the blockchain,” he said in Michigan, “so that every American can view every line item in the entire budget at any time, 24 hours a day.” .
“We’re going to have 300 million eyes on our budget,” he continued, “and if someone spends $16,000 on a toilet seat, everyone will know.”
It’s a bad idea. It’s also an approach that aligns so perfectly with Kennedy’s approach to politics that it’s hard to believe no one predicted that this is where he would end up.
Blockchain – or more precisely here, A blockchain – is a distributed public database. Think of it as a secure, shared Google Spreadsheet to which you can only add new rows of information. Blockchains have become popular alongside cryptocurrencies, with bitcoin transactions, for example, being recorded on such a database.
So why doesn’t this make sense for the federal budget? Well, first of all, the proposition isn’t really clear. Does Kennedy want to take budget information that is already publicly available and put it on a blockchain? If yes: agree? Do not hesitate.
However, if he wants to put everyone transaction on blockchain it is much more difficult. It’s more difficult simply based on scale, with the Social Security Administration regional office in Tallahassee now having to record its $250 Staples office supply purchase in a digital record. It’s also more difficult because the government spends a lot of money on things it doesn’t want to make public, for good reasons, like counterintelligence efforts in foreign countries or the development of new weapons. A public entry of the “Black Ops – Kyrgyzstan” blockchain would neither help Americans understand the government nor help the government serve Americans.
None of this would certainly deter Kennedy. It’s an idea that, above all, implies that the federal government is too incompetent or too corrupt to police itself and that the average American would be better able to monitor federal spending. This is the kind of view of complex systems that might lead one to think that established and proven vaccination programs are in fact suspect and that individual observers can arrive at better assessments of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines as doctors and scientists. You know, just like Kennedy.
The entire cryptocurrency industry is, to some extent, based on a similar skepticism, a belief that government monetary systems are dubious and flawed. Thanks to his credentials, Kennedy managed to attract the crypto community; his idea of blockchain is a consequence of this. (Cryptocurrency’s most well-established use case is “crime” does not appear to be a deterrent.)
The idea of letting everyone see the budget is just the federal government’s version of do-it-yourself research, an impulse understandable in the modern era but undeniably fraught with consequences.
In 2009, Lawrence Lessig wrote an essay for the New Republic that offered prescient warnings about the need to make public information widely accessible.
“I fear that the inevitable success of this movement – if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness – will inspire not reform, but disgust,” he said. he writes. “The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply bring down all confidence in our political system.”
He expected that, when faced with an enormous amount of information, people would cherry-pick elements to form narratives that might not reflect the truth and be based on inaccurate assumptions. Think about the period after the 2020 election and the excess of absurd claims about voter fraud that were based on misleading or misunderstood data. Claims that were fundamentally aimed at finding evidence that could be presented as reinforcing a political position.
Now extrapolate that to the scale of the federal budget or to each purchase made by the government. Since you read this, the government has spent millions of dollars. Did you find any expensive toilet seats in this mix? And even if it did, do you have the context for this spending, or is it just the combination of “expensive” and “funny” that some politicians find so appealing?
It is certainly embarrassing to sit here as a journalist and argue against opening the government’s books. The Washington Post would like to remind whistleblowers that they can also contact us if they wish and that it would be appreciated if we could provide a breakdown by line item of all government spending. The difference is that, for all our admitted faults, our journalists – like government officials – have institutional controls in place aimed at accuracy and fairness. Three hundred million Americans (at least 38 million of whom would be under 18, but that doesn’t matter) spending money, many of whom hoped to justify a tax cut, would have different motivations and safeguards.
But this is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man whose entire candidacy is based on the idea that systems are less capable than individuals. And here we are.
