When I served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the first Bush Administration, I discovered that the government was paying billions of dollars to large banks, defense contractors and universities to collect and manage data on the people and resources of the United States.
The lead defense contractor at HUD was paid approximately $150 billion to run the systems. (That was later to increase by even greater amounts.) No matter how much we paid to create and maintain rich databases, it was almost impossible for me to get any data that I needed to do my job. What I did get required a extraordinary effort on my part.
My efforts to get basic management and financial information was met with fear, lies and endless passive aggressive behavior. I soon learned that data about money in government was like cigarettes in prison. It was a currency, traded for power and position. Data that was supposed to be public was not easily available to government officials and it was certainly not available to the average person. Data that was supposed to be private appeared easily accessible to a variety of financial interests.
Years later, my company Hamilton Securities Group served as lead financial advisor to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). We were ordered by the agency to implement a comprehensive portfolio strategy and collect the necessary data from the agency. Most of the data needed was supposed to be publicly available. Thus began a data war during which various parts of the agency and the defense contractors who controlled and managed the data made it impossible for us to get various portions of the necessary data.
Frustrated, we started to build a software tool that simply identified all the federal data publicaly available online that informed resources in communities and would allow the user to aggregate and display the data by neighborhood. My employees were afraid of the project, so I finally assumed the initial leadership myself.
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