This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 6, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

After nearly four years in office, it's easily time to evaluate President Obama's pledge to preside

over the most transparent administration in American history.

The Cato Institutes Jim Harper says the administration has been bested by the U.S. House,

controlled by the other party.

Jim Harper is author of the new Cato report grading the government's data publication

practices available at Cato.org.

On the campaign trail in 2008, President Obama often spoke about transparency and other good government practices

to hails of applause and cheers because I think people actually really did want those things.

And he began his administration putting great effort into transparency, though at the

midpoint not a lot had actually changed.

I realized from watching and participating in many discussions

on transparency, that the transparency community hadn't actually made clear of what it wants

from the administration.

So I set to work on figuring that out, building a bridge from the transparency community

over to the administration so that they could deliver the data that people want and this is a follow-on to a December 2008 event we had here at Cato call.

Just give us the data.

The project involved modeling what the data should look like.

That is figuring out what data is that represents budgeting, appropriating, and spending.

What is the data that represents legislation? We weren't only looking at the

administration but at Congress as well. What is the data that you would need to get a handle

...