Act of Congress Budget Publication Act

[Silly Billy(Raz0Baz0)]

CONGRESS OF THE
COMMONWEALTH OF REDMONT
​

---

A BILL TO

Amend the Appropriations Process Act of 2024




​

---

The people of the Commonwealth of Redmont, through their elected Representatives in the Congress and the force of law ordained to that Congress by the people through the constitution, do hereby enact the following provisions into law:


​

PART I — PRELIMINARIES

1. Short Title and Enactment

(1) This Act may be cited as the ‘Budget Publication Act’

(2) This Act shall be enacted immediately upon its signage.

(3) This Act has been authored by Representative Raz0Baz0.

(4) This Act has been co-sponsored by Representative pricelessAgrari.

(5) This Act amends the following acts:

(a) Act of Congress - Appropriations Process Act of 2024

2. Reasons and Intent

(1) The people of the Commonwealth of Redmont deserve transparency in the activities of their government in regards to its spending and budget.

PART II — AMENDMENTS AND TRANSITION

3. Amendments

(1) Section 7 of the Appropriations Process Act of 2024 is to be amended as follows:

7 - Budget and Financial Transparency

(1) A #budget channel will be made under the Government category on Discord.
(a) All members of Congress shall be able to read this channel. The #budget channel is to be publicly viewable.
(b) The Presiding Officers of Congress, the Deputy Presiding Officers of Congress, the Cabinet, Deputy Secretaries, Executive Officers, Judicial Officers, and heads of any federal government institutions — including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve Bank — shall be able to view and write in this channel.
(i) Additional positions may be able to view and write in this channel if permitted by the President or Chief Justice.
(c) A transcript of this channel will be made available to the public at the end of each Fiscal Month.
(i) Confidential data such as trade secrets may be redacted from this transcript.
(d) With the exclusion of criminal fines, all payments made for any reason by federal government institutions will need to be declared in this channel; all money received by federal government institutions must be reported in this channel.
(i) Federal government institutions without a corresponding Minecraft account are exempt from this. Instead, they must submit a transcript of all transactions in #budget following the end of each Fiscal Month.

4. Transition

(1) Staff and the Department of Homeland Security are given a period of three (3) weeks to exclude criminal fines from the #budget channel.

 

[ToadKing]

- This, but I'm not going to nay it this time.

 

[End]

Nay — we have a representative democracy.

Some things are unrealistic to be available in real-time.

This is just going to cause estimates over the budget to spill into politics.

It’s all already published, just not in real time.

 

[Technofied]

Presidential Assent

This bill has received Presidential assent and is hereby signed into law.

Reason: This Bill makes the existing #budget channel public to Citizens to view in real time. I do hold concerns that this real-time transparency could lead to scrutiny over individual transactions, prior to more elaborate explanation or reasoning provided.

That said, a valid counterargument is if this information is already published monthly, making it real-time shouldn't change anything substantively.

Employees and other individuals who incur expenses on behalf of the Government as such should take care to provide informative reasons, while remaining succinct, moving forward, if they are not doing so already.

Technofied