The latest version of the federal budget to materialize from Congressional negotiations in an attempt to prevent rescue the United States government from an impending shutdown may cut data transparency programs by 75%. In an increasingly desperate plea, the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency watchdog organization, is reporting that the proposed $35 million for the Electronic Government Fund was slashed to only $8 million in the latest proposal. The fund supports sites like USASpending.gov and Data.gov.

Some of the most important technology programs that keep Washington accountable are in danger of being eliminated. Data.gov, USASpending.gov, the IT Dashboard and other federal data transparency and government accountability programs are facing a massive budget cut, despite only being a tiny fraction of the national budget. Help save the data and make sure that Congress doesn’t leave the American people in the dark.

The Sunlight Foundation has launched into an 11th-hour social media campaign using Twitter and other avenues to galvanize their supporters and get the American people on board with telling Congress that data transparency in government will be extremely important for surviving even a budget crunch. In fact, re-tweets of their current campaign notice have been seen from Internet moguls such as Tim O’Reilly: “Congress may cut key gov’t transparency programs this week. Only 4 days left to #savethedata! Join the campaign: http://snlg.ht/savedata”.

The availability of such profound data transparency from the government pumped directly into the digital veins of the government currently drives a profound shift in the way that the public can understand the inner workings of the State. It fuels the engine of discovery for citizen journalism, public self-education into government spending and statistics, and even gives ordinary citizens thinkers and bloggers access to what traditional newspapers would spend thousands of dollars on to educate them. Without this information, services such as Google’s Public Data Explorer visualization tool and IBM’s City Forward tool would be much less useful.

Government data transparency programs go much further than simply keeping the public informed—as if such a thing were actually simple—but also provide deep access to statistics and data for analysis for politicians and the people’s representatives. The people of the people, for the people who could use all the help they can get in seeing how other states and the federal government handle and solve problems (or create them.) As much as a well-informed citizenry greatly oils the wheels of a democracy, so does a well-informed government that can anticipate problems that would otherwise be hidden in the vast stores of dark data.