Today the White House released an Executive Order designed to increase the transparency and usability of public government information by making government data open and machine readable by default.

“To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable. In making this the new default state, executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall ensure that they safeguard individual privacy, confidentiality, and national security.”

The order and accompanying memorandum lay out a new approach to open data that incorporates planning for open data principles in the earliest stages of government projects, requires agencies to index all of their data internally, and requires agencies to publicly report what datasets are already and can be made public under existing law online. The latter requirement will effectively create a digital menu of what information can be requested from which agencies and under what circumstances for the first time — potentially making that information more accessible to journalists, activists, and entrepreneurs.

Similarly, by making data available in machine readable format (read: not PDFs), the order will may make it much easier for those stakeholders to process and analyze large amounts of government information for patterns and connections.

This is not the administration’s first foray into transparency and open government initiatives, issues that featured prominently in President Obama’s 2008 campaign. In December 2009, the White House issued an Open Government Directive similarly aimed at opening access to public government data. However, many groups believe its implementation fell short of expectations.

The House Financial Services Committee advanced a package of bills Tuesday that would weaken major regulations included in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, doing so over the objections of the Obama Administration with bipartisan support.

The legislative package, which has been criticized by both current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and his predecessor, consisted of six bills that would weaken the regulation of derivatives. Derivatives are the the financial instruments that were at the “center of the storm” that caused the financial crisis, according to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Nevertheless, those regulations have emerged as a key target for opponents of reform and the financial industry.

One of the most significant rules the package would weaken is the so-called “push-out” provision that would limit derivatives trading at banks and financial institutions that are insured by the federal government. But rather than weaken the push-out rules, Congress should be making them even stronger, former Federal Deposit Insurance Commission chair Sheila Bair told Bloomberg:

“If Congress wants to re-open Dodd-Frank on this question, if anything, they should push all derivatives activities (other than the banks’ own hedges) into affiliates outside of the insured bank,” Bair said in an e-mail. “This would force market funding of derivatives thus providing substantially greater market discipline than permitting them to be funded with insured deposits.”

Like the Volcker Rule, which would limit forms of risky trading at federally-insured banks, the push-out rule is meant to make the large institutions that were at the center of the financial crisis safer. But the Financial Services Committee, chaired by noted Dodd-Frank opponent Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), has repeatedly passed legislation weakening derivatives reforms since the law passed. At one point in 2012, there were nine separate pieces of legislation aimed at the regulation of derivatives pending in Congress. “These proposals threaten to create large oversight-free zones that could allow risky behaviors to flourish,” advocacy group Public Citizen wrote of such legislation in 2012.

The package of legislation isn’t expected to move forward in the Senate, according to Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), one of the sponsors. But Congress isn’t just taking aim at the rules: in recent years, it has gutted the budget for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing the new derivatives rules.

A new report from GMI Ratings on the percent of corporate boards that have women members shows that global progress is moving at a crawl. The Women on Boards 2013 survey looked at 5,977 companies in 45 countries and found that women hold 11 percent of board seats, up a mere 0.5 percent from a year ago and just 1.7 percent over the last five.

But the report did find a bright spot: Europe leads the trend, with far higher percentages of women on boards. In fact, Europe accounts for more than half of the female directors added to boards between 2009 and 2013. The report chalks this up to legal mandates requiring diversity:

Leading the globe on gender-diverse boards is Europe, where legal requirements for women’s representation exist or are being considered at both the EU level and in various countries. Norway, Sweden and Finland continue to lead the developed world in their percentage of female directors, with 36.1%, 27.0%, and 26.8%, respectively. Significant increases in women’s representation are also happening in Italy and France, following the passage of recent laws on board diversity. France now ranks 4th in the world, with 18.3% female directors. (In Spain, however, where a law exists but enforcement mechanisms are weak, much less change has occurred.)

Europe also leads in having at least three women on companies’ boards, a level at which research suggests women’s influence comes to a critical mass.

The United States, on the other hand, lags pretty far behind. While the percentage of women on boards has risen 3.3 percentage points in Nordic countries and 4 points in the rest of developed Europe since 2009, it has only risen by 1.9 points in the U.S. Rather than mandating quotas for the inclusion of women on boards as has been done in Europe, the U.S. relies more on “investor pressure and voluntary change over legislative mandates,” the report noted.

The impact of diversity goes beyond inclusion. Research has shown that companies with gender diversity on their boards significantly outperform those that don’t. Diversity overall has been a boon for the economy: As much as 20 percent of U.S. growth in productivity over the past half century can be attributed to the inclusion of women and other marginalized groups in the labor force. But there is still a lot of room to grow. One report found that if women’s employment levels were raised to match those of men, it would boost U.S. GDP by 5 percent.

Gabriel Gomez, the Republican nominee to fill John Kerry’s open Senate seat in Massachusetts, claimed a $281,500 deduction on his income taxes for promising not to alter the appearance of his historic home. While he identified this “easement” as a donation to a controversial Washington, DC-based organization, he was reportedly already prevented from making any such changes under local historic preservation laws — a move the Internal Revenue Service has identified as a common “tax scam.”

The Boston Globe reported Thursday major alterations to the facade of the the Gomez family’s 112-year old home — assessed in 2012 as valued at more than $2 million — were prohibited under the Cohasset, MA town by-laws, as it falls into the Cohasset Common Historic District. As such, experts told the paper, there was little or no value to his “donation” when he promised the the National Architectural Trust (now the Trust for Architectural Easements) that he would make no major changes to the outside of his home.

In 2005, Gomez claimed the $281,500 income tax deduction, suggesting that agreeing to the easement had reduced the value of his property. Five weeks later, the Globe noted, the Internal Revenue Service identified such tax deductions for valueless easements as one of its “Dirty Dozen” tax “schemes that promise to eliminate taxes or otherwise sound too good to be true.” In a section called “Abuse of Charitable Organizations and Deductions,” the advisory warned:

“A “contribution” of a historic facade easement to a tax-exempt conservation organization is another example. In many cases, local historic preservation laws already prohibit alteration of the home’s facade, making the contributed easement superfluous. Even if the facade could be altered, the deduction claimed for the easement contribution may far exceed the easement’s impact on the value of the property.

A Gomez campaign spokesman told the Globe that Gomez’s easement goes further than the existing zoning laws, in part because homeowners have the right to challenge any rejected requests for alterations in court. He also noted that the IRS did not challenge Gomez’s deduction — as it did in many other cases — but refused to explain how the value of the easement was calculated.

But Dean Zerbe, former senior counsel for then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), blasted the deduction as “unconscionable” and mostly for the wealthiest “one percent.” “All this is a tax break shenanigan that all the blue bloods on Beacon Hill and the swells in Georgetown take advantage of,’’ he told the paper, “It is wealthy people playing fast and loose. Nobody is taking tax breaks on mobile homes.’’

On his campaign website, Gomez notes that he “experienced how onerous taxes and excessive regulation are barriers to job creation,” and complains that the federal govenrment “runs at an annual loss.”

But while he personally took advantage of this complicated tax loophole, he claims to want to do away with such provisions. On Monday, Gomez told CNBC’s Lawrence Kudlow that he would support comprehensive tax reform to benefit CEOs. “Absolutely we need to have a comprehensive tax reform. I think we need to start looking at the corporate tax loopholes as well as the personal loopholes… we shouldn’t have a tax code that is thousands of pages long.”

America’s budget deficit is shrinking at a faster pace than at any time since World War II, and it is now projected to fall below 5 percent of GDP this year, 3 percent of GDP in 2014, and 2 percent of GDP in 2015, according to a Potomac Research report released Wednesday. That may please Washington politicians who have ignored jobs and unemployment over the last three years, but it isn’t good for the economic recovery.

The immediate deficit reduction efforts Washington has pursued repeatedly since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2011 have in fact dampened the economic recovery, economists told the New York Times, and without the spending cuts and tax increases enacted in the last three years, unemployment would be a full-point lower and economic growth two points higher:

The nation’s unemployment rate would probably be nearly a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth almost two points higher this year if Washington had not cut spending and raised taxes as it has since 2011, according to private-sector and government economists.

After two years in which President Obama and Republicans in Congress have fought to a draw over their clashing approaches to job creation and budget deficits, the consensus about the result is clear: Immediate deficit reduction is a drag on full economic recovery.

Hardly a day goes by when either government analysts or the macroeconomists and financial forecasters who advise investors and businesses do not report on the latest signs of economic growth — in housing, consumer spending, business investment. And then they add that things would be better but for the fiscal policy out of Washington. Tax increases and especially spending cuts, these critics say, take money from an economy that still needs some stimulus now, and is getting it only through the expansionary monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.

The spending cuts have been especially damaging, as they have made up the vast majority of deficit reduction efforts since the end of the Great Recession. Modest tax increases targeting the wealthy went into effect at the beginning of 2013, but it is the expiration of the payroll tax holiday, which will raise taxes on the median American family by roughly $1,000 this year, that will hurt the recovery, the economists and analysts said. Nonpartisan reports have said the income tax increases on the wealthy would do little to affect growth.

That deficit reduction is holding back the recovery should not come as any shock. The stimulus bill President Obama signed into law in 2009 put the U.S. on a path to recovery that far outpaced the austerity-laden European economies, but as focus has turned to deficit reduction, growth has turned tepid. While rises in government spending have traditionally added to growth and pulled the U.S. out of economic downturns, it has plateaued since 2010, hampering recovery efforts this time. Reduced spending, in fact, “has detracted from growth in five of past seven quarters,” one investment bank wrote in a midyear report this week.

Republicans have blocked efforts, such as Obama’s American Jobs Act, that would have further stimulated the economy. That legislation would have led to the creation of a million jobs and added to growth, according to independent analysts, and would have aided states and local governments and federal agencies that have laid off more than 500,000 public employees, many of them teachers and public safety workers, since the end of the recession. With government borrowing costs at historic lows and unemployment still high, it’s that sort of shot in the arm the economy needs. But after Congress let sequestration, the damaging budget cuts that could wipe another 700,000 jobs out of the economy, take effect in March, it is now focused on finding even more deficit reduction in the immediate future.