One of the most vigilant watchdogs on the U.S. government is housed at Syracuse University.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) gathers spending, staffing and activities data from federal agencies. It then analyzes and compiles those statistics so the information is understandable to newspapers, universities, public interest groups and even private citizens.

The center works under the Freedom of Information Act, which ensures that federal government records are public and available at request. TRAC examines agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The information TRAC provides could take journalism, public interest groups and citizens’ interaction with the government to the next level, if only they dug in and looked at the research, said David Burnham, co-director of the center.

‘I think people are uneasy with the whole concept,’ Burnham said. ‘There’s some weird thing that sports fans sit around and look at all the stats on their favorite baseball player, but if you present them with statistics on comparing, say, judges in immigration courts, they’re just uneasy.’

Burnham works for TRAC from the Washington, D.C. office. S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications II is set to become the new home for the on-campus office, and plans are in the works for a West Coast office to be opened this summer.

Burnham, who began working as an investigative reporter at The New York Times in 1968, said newspapers like to cover a single event, like a speech or a plane crash, because those are easy assignments to handle. He said he can’t explain why reporters don’t take that next step and delve into the research TRAC offers.

He said he’s gone to one of the leading environmental groups several times with information on environmental policy enforcement, and they tell him, ‘Oh, wow, that’s terrific. But I’m too busy doing what I’m doing now to do something new.’

But TRAC’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. Susan Long, the second co-director of the center, said TRAC publishes more than 100,000 reports each month. Long, also a statistician and professor in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, began this effort as a graduate student more than 30 years ago, and she said she’s seen the entire endeavor evolve, especially with the introduction of the Internet.

‘There’s just been an enormous change in terms of accessibility to regular citizens and the news media,’ Long said. ‘We’re seeing a major, major difference, in the sense that we can now manage huge amounts of information. It used to be that you had to have a main frame computer before you could even look at (the data), so there weren’t many people who could even do it after getting the court orders for the information.’

TRAC was founded in 1989 and jointly sponsored by the Whitman and Newhouse.

The center’s Web site allows easy access to data in an understandable form. For example, there’s an interactive map of the United States with white dots, each representing where someone has been convicted of international terrorism. Users can run their cursor over the dots, click on the cases and be directed to more information.

The reports published by TRAC have had an effect on government policy and actions. Long said most of the national media are subscribers to TRAC’s research, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press and the U.S. Supreme Court Library.

When TRAC publishes its studies, news organizations pick up the stories and give the research national attention. TRAC published a report last fall about the disparity among immigration judges granting asylum in the United States. It revealed that the major determinant of whether the person got asylum wasn’t the facts of the case, but the judge they were assigned.

‘It worked. At that moment, immigration was not a leading issue of the Congress,’ Burnham said. ‘But what is really pleasing is the court, partially on the basis of our reporting, adopted a series of eight changes, possibly reforms in their operations, which if properly implemented would be a big deal. And it’s pretty clear it’s something we did.’

TRAC also researched a trend within the IRS of higher rates of audits among people in the lowest income segments of the country versus those of a higher income bracket. The next year, that ended, Burnham said.

But these accomplishments have not been an easy task for TRAC.

Presidential administrations are not always cooperative, and President George W. Bush’s administration has set a new low in terms of not paying attention to the law, Long said. The center currently has four ongoing lawsuits filed to obtain information from federal agencies, the latest with the IRS. The IRS and Homeland Security have withheld information that should be open to the public, she said.

‘All government agencies under all presidents don’t like outside review,’ Burnham said. ‘They resist it. The current administration has been more resistant than any administration since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. And they have very, very, strenuously sought to prevent us and the American people and newspapers from getting data that we need.’

Keisuke Inoue, a graduate assistant studying information science, works in TRAC’s SU center for 20 hours a week.

‘It reveals a lot of facts that are not visible right away,’ he said. ‘But it’s there. That’s why newspapers and colleges subscribe to this and use it as an information source. Data is messy, but it has to be analyzed.’

Naufal Sheikh, TRAC’s second graduate assistant, is an information management student from Pakistan. He said although TRAC often has difficulty obtaining information from the U.S. government, he hasn’t seen any organization that serves a similar purpose in Pakistan.

Alasdair Roberts, a professor of public administration in SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, published a book in 2006 called ‘Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age.’ He said he isn’t aware of any other organization in the United States whose sole purpose is to make government data accessible.

‘The laws are complicated,’ Roberts said. ‘And they’re slow. And the enforcement of them isn’t very good. The service is underappreciated. But it’s a very powerful tool for improving government accountability. Very powerful.’

[email protected]

Published on March 24, 2008 at 12:00 pm