Senator Bennett from Utah is single-handedly quashing the most commonsense, bi-partisan bill this year–a requirement that the U.S. government write clear, concise, and intelligible English. And he is doing so based on a misreading of the bill.

Never mind the bill's near unanimous (376-1) passage in the House. Never mind that the bill simply reiterates an active Executive Order and memoranda from Presidents Clinton, Carter, and Nixon. And never mind that millions of Americans are befuddled by bureaucratic forms every day.

One senator from Utah has concerns, so it will not go to a vote....

Senator Lieberman is not happy with how difficult it is to find government information online. Thankfully, he is one of the few people who can really do something about it.

I attended a Senate committee hearing that Lieberman chaired today on the E-Government Reauthorization Act. He opened by saying his goal is to change the "often cumbersome, static, and bewildering approach to get information" from .gov websites....

We all know that government documents can be hard to understand. Tax forms and legalese befuddle the best of us.

Finally, Congress is poised to pass good legislation to outlaw government gobbledygook....

Government information is about to become easier to find.

By some estimates, 50% of all Government web pages on the Internet are invisible to search engines. By searching on Google, Yahoo, or MSN you are missing half of what your Government is posting online. Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs sent the E-Gov Reauthorization Act to the Floor. Besides renewing the original E-Gov Act for 5 years, it requires that "publicly available online Federal Government information and services are made more accessible to external search capabilities".

This is clearly a step forward for Government transparency, but not yet a victory. As they say: the devil is in the details....

Senator McCaskill is working to require Federal agency websites to support users in the task of reporting waste, fraud, and abuse online. This is a user task that often goes overlooked by Federal web teams, but it is nonetheless important to taxpayers at large....

The legislative earmark database published earlier this year is little more than a data file dump. Although Sunlight Labs published some cool visualizations of the data, the database itself still lacks fundamental information—who requested each earmark and who will be the final beneficiary of the money.

Luckily for American taxpayers, the Senate is also working to make earmarks transparent....