Contracts in the sunshine

FOR YEARS NOW , Ralph Nader has been complaining that it's almost impossible to get basic information about federal government contracts. It's a crucial issue: as Nader reports in a column on our Web site (www.sfbg.com/37/43/x_nader.html), "contracting out what the government does and what it needs is a large part of our economy." It's a growth industry, too: as the Bush administration privatizes more and more public services, an increasing amount of taxpayer money will be going to private contractors.

And yet there's no easy way for the public to see those contracts, without going through a long, complicated, and often frustrating battle with the federal bureaucracy. Nader has a simple solution: all government contracts that involve a significant amount of public money should be posted on the Web. He urged the Clinton administration to do that and got nowhere. Now, it appears, President George W. Bush's director of the Office of Management and the Budget, Mitch Daniels, has agreed to look into a pilot project to "begin making federal contracts available to the public on the worldwide Web." It could, Nader notes, "be the beginning of the biggest window-opening in modern U.S. history on what government and corporations do in Washington, D.C."

It's a great idea – and San Francisco and every other city in the state ought to pick up on the initiative. Why not post all major city contracts on the city's Web site?

Posting the contracts might cost a modest amount of money – but it would more than pay for itself. San Francisco loses millions and millions of dollars each year to contract fraud and corruption, and shining direct sunlight on that process would be a huge step forward.