This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 11, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama talked a good game on transparency during the campaign,

but he's now demanding a massive spending bill be approved

long before its contents can be fairly considered. There's no indication he'll

give the public time to digest the legislation before he signs it as he promised he would during the campaign.

Jim Harper, the director of the Cato Institute's Information Policy Studies, evaluates the short

Obama record on transparency.

President Obama promised to have the most transparent administration in history.

And that was exciting because he actually knows what that means.

He was the sponsor of a major piece of legislation in terms of transparency while he was in the Senate.

And among other things he promised that bills coming to his desk from Congress

would get five days waiting time, that is they'd be posted online by the White House.

He would take comments and then after five days had transpired, he would sign or not sign bills from Congress.

We can come back to that, but those are among the things that he promised on the

transparency front there were many indications that he was going to follow

through a lot of that based upon how he handled his transition to the White

House that's correct the transition was impressive frankly in the way they did the And what they did there was they published online all the documents that were submitted

to subject to certain parameters, but mostly all the documents that were submitted

to the transition for the public to look at and to comment

on.

And that was fascinating, just a window into how the transition was going for the average American

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