January 20, 2003
Environmental organizations swarm around U.N. meetings like flies in a barnyard. By listening closely to the noise, words and phrases can be extracted from the buzzing: "transparency," "new and adequate funding" and "sustainable" are among the most often-repeated terms.
Transparency is not a bad thing--it means that government procedures must be clearly visible to anyone who cares to look. The time has come to apply "transparency" to environmental organizations … and their dealings with government.
Let's require every government agency that gives money to any non-government organization to fully disclose on their website the amount and purpose of the award and the name and address of the recipient organization. To bring transparency to the organizations that suckle at several federal teats, each agency should be required to also report all awards to the Bureau of Census through the Federal Assistance Awards Data System.
The FAADS was supposed to bring transparency to grants made by the federal government. It did not. It provides data in the aggregate, presented in a variety of ways, but it provides no specific information about how much money a particular non-government organization received from the federal government.
Remember the hours of endless debate about campaign reform, about full disclosure of soft money and hard money to political candidates? It's time to hear a similar congressional debate about full disclosure of hard-earned tax dollars given to environmental organizations.
The Environmental Conservation Organization has created a computer program that penetrates the 20 million records of raw data accumulated by the FAADS since its beginning in the mid 1980s. We have found that the data reported through the FAADS is not complete.
The magnitude of the deficiency may be indicated from a preliminary analysis of grants made to The Nature Conservancy during the period 1997 to 2001 — FAADS reports $82.4 million. The Office of Management and Budget, however, reports $146.6 million awarded to TNC during the same period. Neither agency reported the $140 million that TNC received in FY 2000, from the federal government in contract fees and the sale of land to the government.
For the same period, FAADS reports only two grants totaling $509,250 to STAPPA / ALAPCO (State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators). OMB reports $4.1 million awarded during the same period.
These discrepancies have gone unnoticed for 20 years because there has not been transparency in the relations between environmental organizations and the federal government. It is time to shine the light of transparency on both the agencies of government and on non-government organizations.
Some courageous congressman should step forward and introduce a bill that will require every agency of government to fully disclose every grant awarded to every non-government organization — on the agency's website — within 10 days after the award. The information posted should include the amount of the award, the purpose for which it was made and the name, address and federal tax identification number of the recipient.
The Bush administration has been working for 15 months on what it calls an "E-Grants system" that is supposed to bring some coherent uniformity to the reporting procedure. It is expected to be in place by the end of 2003, but will apply only to future grants and internal reporting. In the interest of transparency and full disclosure (both hot-button buzz-words for environmental organizations) grant awards to non-government organizations must be made public and easily accessible.
Some organizations, STAPPA / ALAPCO for example, may be embarrassed if the public becomes aware that its members' salaries are paid largely by grants from the EPA, which also awards about $1 million each year to the organization, whose staff consistently appears before the Appropriations Committee to lobby for increased funding for the EPA.
Nevertheless, the public is entitled to know which organizations are on the federal dole, how much money they are getting and what they are supposed to be doing with it. Without this information, there is no transparency. Certainly, no environmental organization could oppose this legislation that enhances the transparency they clamor for at U.N. meetings. Nor could any congressman who demands full disclosure of campaign financing oppose full disclosure of financing of environmental organizations.
This proposed law is very simple. It would require very little time to consider and even less time to implement since every agency already maintains a website. Within a matter of weeks, or a few months at most, full disclosure of federal grants to non-government organizations could be a reality. It is simply a matter of congressional will.