President Bush recently called for the US administration to dramatically curtail earmarks (essentially pet spending projects that members of Congress insert into the federal budget), saying he will veto any appropriations bills that don’t cut the number of earmarks in half when they come to him during the remainder of his days in the White House.

The Washington Posts reports that the budget officials at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) knew at the time that the White House would need an earmark tally if they were to measure progress toward the president’s goal. But rather than proceed in the usual fashion, the OMB launched a wiki and invited employees from across the government to pitch in.

With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.

The budget wiki is not as freewheeling as Wikipedia, the sometimes-controversial online encyclopedia. It is the government, after all. For security, federal officials have to ask permission to join; it is not open to the public or Congress. . .

It has 5,500 members and is growing by hundreds each month. A number of federal agencies are creating their own pages on the wiki, taking advantage of its automated tools and services that can perform multiple budget scenarios and analyze data.

I admire the OMB’s efforts — the project demonstrates how wiki-based collaboration can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of government. I can also appreciate the reasons why the OMB decided to restrict access to federal employees. At the same time, the decision to restrict access raises some bigger questions about the role of the citizenry in governing and whether the administration’s vision for Government 2.0 is as bold and ambitious as it might be.

Citizens can already view earmark data on Many Eyes thanks to the Sunlight Foundation and some clever visualization technology provided by IBM Alphaworks. So why not ask the public which half of the 13,496 earmarks they would like to see vanish from the federal budget? People are out there discussing this stuff anyways — shouldn’t the government open up the conversation?