> 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong. I don't think it's necessary to point out why this is not very convincing > An

> 29% of facilities ProPublica contacted said the EPA’s data on them was wrong. I don't think it's necessary to point out why this is not very convincing > And why didn’t the government pay for an interface and analysis that the public could easily use? Because "the government" -specifically, the executive branch- has its upper leadership torn out and replaced with a completely new bunch of people with hugely different ideology if not an explicit political interest in dismantling the work of their forebears every 4 or 8 years. This is most obvious with the recent Trump admin, but applies in degree to every single administration. There used to be an internal, cross-disciplinary office that did API and visualization work for accountability reasons (unfortunately I forget the name). They did great work. It was dismantled and 90% of it was not replaced. The 10% that was replaced consists of (1) internal work (EIA being a good example, DOT being a bad one) that is driven entirely by the good will of employees who are fighting tooth and nail for any amount of budget to expose any amount of the work they do. And (2) external work by any number of massively wasteful contracting programs, like SBIR, where I used to work. Reagan's SBIR program mandates a certain amount of money to be spent on tiny (100k-1m) contracts which are either useless or unused, because there's no way to actually convert anything to a long-term status. Most of that money goes to defense, but make no mistake that the work there is also completely useless. The whole program should be lit on fire. > I think people believe their tax money could be spent more wisely and competently. It can, if people stop voting for republicans who intentionally destroy the only functional programs and then divert the money to completely worthless contractors in the name of "free markets".