Point taken. However, my point (not well expressed) is that no adminsitration has gone out of their way to ensure that citizens really understand the financrs of their government. The data are there, but, for example, those links for the OMB are hardly paragons of clarity.

There's is a reason to hire someone like Tufte, and that is because a) this sort of data are hard to convey in all their nuance and import, and b) there's no one currently in place who is doing a good job of it.

We spend 12 years of public schooling trying to drill some rudimentary general knowledge about the world into the heads of people who couldn't give a shit about it, and only partially succeed. What makes you think that Ed Tufte can do the same job with a website, or with a cameo on some weekly YouTube addresses?

The data is available for people who care to inform themselves. Doing better than that seems to me like a pretty damn hard task in the short term.

Tufte is smarter than at least 99% of public school teachers, and he is one of the best humans alive at making accurate and concise visual explanations of complex data. It wouldn't be particularly surprising to see him succeed where others have failed, because he's better at this kind of thing than pretty much everybody who's tackled this problem before, and he is able to learn from the mistakes of previous attempts.

The data has always been accessible, for some definition of "accessible". The job of a guy like Tufte it to put it into a form where it doesn't take as much effort to spot patterns and other hidden trends. Essentially, he'll be trying to lower the barriers of entry to the "informed electorate".

However remember that he's only one member of a panel that advises the board that's actually going to be publishing stuff. We and I'm sure he have no idea how influential he's actually going to be.

How influential has Paul Volcker been?

I dunno, seems to me that the data.gov initiative represents the Obama administration making a pretty significant effort towards ensuring that interested citizens can learn about the government's finances.