Establish transparency standards for military contractors

No transparency in sight

Updated: Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | By Hadas Gold

As a candidate, Barack Obama talked a lot about transparency in government. In the case of defense contractors, he said he would "create the reporting requirements, accounting, and accountability needed for good governance and actual money savings with contracting."

While several reforms have been put into place to improve the process of military contracts, we couldn't find any new transparency standards. We did extensive searching on the Web and spoke with Laura Peterson, an analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks military spending and contracts. She hasn't seen any, either.

If any transparency standards have been put into place, they aren't very transparent because after hours of research, we haven't been able to find any.

We'll keep an eye on this one to see if there's progress, but for now, we're rating it Stalled.

Sources:Interview, Laura Peterson, national security analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense Extensive searching of White House, Department of Defense and other Web sites