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Cass Sustein Interview: Importance of Public Comments
Q. What was one of the most surprising lessons you learned about government during your time as the president?s regulatory chief?
A. “There?s no question that one surprise stood above all the others ? and that is that the public comment process for federal regulations is immensely important and very substantive. I taught administrative law for many years, and many teachers of the subject think that the public comment process is a TV show, and what actually is determined happens behind closed doors. That view is completely wrong.
When you set a rule out for public comment, whether it involves air pollution or highway safety or health care, you will often get comments saying, ?This section is going to hurt small business,? or, ?This provision could be changed in a way to get the public safety impact doubled.? Those are phenomenally helpful. You learn that you miss some things.
Sometimes what was missed was not huge, but, if fixed, would save hundreds of millions of dollars for people who deserved those savings. And sometimes you learn the whole proposal was misdirected or wrong. I did not expect the public comment process to be as substantively crucial as it is. I hope that?s true in every administration.”
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Census Bureau Releases Preview of New ACS Website
A preview version of the U.S. Census Bureau’s newly designed website for the American Community Survey (ACS) is now available. The website has a look and feel and contains terminology consistent with census.gov, allowing users to quickly find information thanks to an easy to understand hierarchical structure.
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Senate Committee Advances NSF, Census, Spending Bill
On June 10, the Senate Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations Subcommittee marked up its version of the fiscal year (FY) 2016 CJS bill. The full Senate Appropriations Committee followed suit on June 11, advancing the bill to the Senate floor. The CJS bill provides annual funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and the Census Bureau and other federal statistical agencies.
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BLS 2016 Appropriation Level in House Subcommitee Draft
The number for BLS in the House Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and related Agencies 2016 Appropriations Subcommittee draft is $609 million. This amount is almost $17 million more than BLS 2015 funding, but it is substantially below the President’s 2016 request of $633 million. Should this amount prevail, BLS would not receive funding for inflationary costs since 2014, or for program funding losses temporarily delayed via unsustainable hiring slowdowns, and reductions in staff training and development.
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Cities Trying to Process Data the Way Utilities Do
To take advantage of the next chapter in open data and data-driven strategy, numerous localities unveiled plans on June 9 to test out a new kind of data platform ? one that leverages both open and internal data similar to a utility service. The new tech comes from the open data company Socrata, which has collaborated with jurisdictions across the U.S. to develop a platform that centralizes government data into a user-friendly feed.
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New & Updated Data Sources
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Indian Govt Plans News Jobs Data to Aid Policy Making
The government is working on comprehensive jobs data, which would include annual and quarterly surveys to help economic management, the country’s chief statistician has said. There are several employment surveys which are already available and various agencies of the government undertake assessment of the labor market in the country but India lacks a comprehensive jobs data like the US.
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Using Data to Provide Complete Picture of Two Counties
A new website, called Benton-Franklin Trends, will serve as a tool in recruiting businesses, providing immediate access to information about labor force availability and education levels of potential workers. Most of the information is publicly accessible elsewhere, through resources such as the U.S. Census Bureau or from various state agencies.
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CMS to Expand Access to Data Program
The government is opening a trove of health payment and health care data to entrepreneurs and developers for the first time. A vast trove of information on Medicare claims, provider analysis, beneficiaries, chronic conditions, cost and utilization will be available for use in commercial tools.
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Visualization of the Week
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Visualizing the Effects of the Eurozone Crisis
The Wall Street Journal has created a series of time lapse visualizations that illustrate the sometimes wild fluctuation of yields on government bonds?which can serve as an indicator of a country?s financial health?in Europe as the result of the Eurozone debt crisis. The visualizations compare Eurozone countries considered to be financially strong, such as Austria and the Netherlands, with struggling countries such as Greece and Portugal. As the time lapses progress, the visualizations indicate major events and policy changes at the European Central Bank that influenced the Eurozone?s financial environment, such as interest rate cuts and the introduction of quantitative easing.
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Notable Data Publications
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GOVERNMENT
NON-PROFITS & FOUNDATIONS
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Did you work on a great report that you want your colleagues to know about? Just email us and we?ll include it here.
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APDU maintains a list of open calls for comment on proposed federal data collections. We periodically alert APDU members to newly added calls for comment. Over the last several weeks, calls for comment on the following proposed data collections were published in the Federal Register (with due date):
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