This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 30, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has failed to deliver on his pledge to create a drastically more transparent

federal government, but there's still an opportunity

in 2012 for the President to make important changes.

If the President adopted basic reforms to how the government provides its data to the public, his failures so far may be a little

less memorable.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, the Cato Institute, comments.

During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama talked a great deal about transparency and good

government practices that he would institute if elected, and he got a great deal of credit on the campaign trail for doing that and in part that may have elected him.

I believe the promise was made in good faith and he showed a great deal of effort in the early going,

issuing an open government memorandum on his first full day in office.

But two years along into his administration, a lot of progress was not in the offing.

And it occurred to me that the transparency community had failed to say what it wanted.

We all want transparent government, but what is that? And so earlier

this year I started working on defining more specifically what transparency is, what publication practices,

deliver transparency.

So in September came out with a paper called publication practices for

transparent government and put on a Hill briefing where we issued grades for how well the legislative branch was issuing

publishing data about its activities and functions and key decisions, that kind of thing.

The grades were quite poor. and functions and key decisions, that kind of thing.

The grades were quite poor.

This month, earlier this month, I did the same with data going to budgeting appropriations

...