Facing Public Pressure, Bush Administration Will Continue Site Tracking U.S. Economic Indicators

On Feb. 13, ThinkProgress reported that facing a faltering U.S. economy, the Bush administration was attempting to hide economic data by shutting down the award-winning website EconomicIndicators.gov.

As Forbes explained when it awarded the site one of its “Best of the Web awards, Economic Indicators is a “necessary” portal because it provides easy access to aggregated economic data across government agencies. More significantly, people can sign up to receive e-mails as soon as new data becomes available.

Yet recently, the Bush administration announced the site would be shut down on March 1 because of “budgetary constraints“:

In addition to pressure from the netroots, the Commerce Department heard objections from tech experts and lawmakers. Yesterday, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, pressing him to keep Economic Indicators open.

ThinkProgress spoke with a Commerce Department spokesman today who said, “We heard from the users of the website, and they liked being able to receive the e-mails with the news releases.” A new announcement on the Economic Indicators notes that the “decision has been made to continue the site and improve its functionality”:

Many users also subscribe to the site and have economic indicators and the full releases emailed to them. There are a number of technical challenges with this aspect of the EI site — the service often backs up and fails because of bandwidth issues, releases sometimes take hours to reach subscribers, and some subscribers receive multiple copies of the releases while others get none at all. The cost of maintaining the site is almost entirely attributable to operating this feature.

To address these concerns we will redesign the subscription feature of economicindicators.gov. The new system, which will remain free of charge, will email an abstract and link so that users can access the full release on the source website. We believe the cost of rewriting the system will, in the long-run, be less than continuing to run the existing system. The new subscription service will be operational in the next few months.

Originally when the agency announced the site’s closure, it offered users “a free quarterly subscription to STAT-USA®/Internet„¢” instead. Once this temporary subscription ran out, however, the public would have been forced to pay a fee.

Glad to see that the Bush administration found a few dollars in its record $3.1 trillion FY 09 budget to keep the site running.

UPDATE: Schumer responds to the Department’s announcement:

The administration took the right step in keeping this important economic indicators website and email alerts free and open to the public. This is no time to pull back on the free flow of critical information about our quick-changing economy, and I’m glad the administration agrees that shutting down this website would be penny wise, but pound foolish.

Digg It!