Well, since the current administration has at least made some moves towards transparency (e.g. setting up data.gov in the first place), it's reasonable to expec

Well, since the current administration has at least made some moves towards transparency (e.g. setting up data.gov in the first place), it's reasonable to expect that the agencies who manage to do the coolest or most high-profile data releases will be rewarded in purely institutional terms. Or, to put it another way, if I were the CIO of [generic agency] looking to move up in the federal government, getting more data out there is a good way to position myself for a higher-up CIO-type role. It's a somewhat crass way to look at it, and that's certainly not how I'd make a public case to the agencies, but if we're talking about how CIOs are disincentivized from releasing data because it might make them look bad, we ought to also consider that they're incentivized to release some data because doing so makes them look good.