My friend and colleague at the Mercatus Center, Jerry Brito, just launched a really cool website called Openregs.com. The site gives everyone an easy-to-use portal to educate themselves on government regulations (and the damages they can do). Brito, who is a tech wiz and a fervent advocate for new technologies (he crowdsourced his latest testimony), built this site to allow people to find, read, discuss, and submit comments directly to the agencies regarding thousands of regulations.
Anyone who has tried to look up a regulation in the past will know how valuable that is. And, anyone who has always wanted to rant about a regulation without knowing where to do it can do that, too.
What I find really great about Brito’s initiative is that in the light of the government’s failure to deliver greater online government accountability and transparency, in spite of many promises, we see today that private citizens are taking matters in their own hands. It’s not the first time Brito delivers valuable spending information in a usable format. He is the guy behind stimuluswatch.org, a site designed to monitor federal stimulus spending where he listed and allowed people to comment on all the “shovel-ready projects.”
Check it out because it’s really a great tool to fight what’s coming our way.
Oh and by the way, finally months after signing the stimulus bill, the federal government finally awarded the contract to build recovery.gov, the Obama website that will deliver all the secrets of government-stimulus waste, for the gigantic price of $9.5 million. Here is how much it cost state governments who did it before.