I believe that children are our future. But I don’t know if that means the White House needs to look after them. There certainly are people who do.

A new bill, H.R. 2653, would create a White House Office of National Youth Policy to ensure the coordination and effectiveness of services to youth.

The good folks at WhiteHouseOfficeonChildrenandYouth.org say:

The Federal government runs hundreds of programs to serve children and youth ages 0-24, spread across 12 departments and agencies. The vast majority of these efforts are essential and effective; however, they are not part of an integrated, strategic plan to help at-risk populations achieve successful adulthood. Overall, the federal government’s efforts for children and youth are scattershot and these fragmented efforts, contained within narrow silos, are failing America’s young people.

For this reason, they say, there should be a White House Office on Children and Youth.

But not everything that’s important should be a subject for the federal government to handle, much less the White House. If the government is making a priority of everything, the government is making a priority of nothing.

Agree? Disagree? Comment!

And here is the current vote on H.R. 2653. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article about the bill.

The Washington Post had an interesting article late last week about how hard it is for the federal government to follow the money it is spending under the Recovery Act, even though transparency and accountability were heavily doubted during debate on and passage of the bill.

Enter Onvia, a company that supplies nationwide information about opportunities to government contractors. They put up a site called Recovery.org and have rapidly outstripped the federal government’s efforts to track its own money on Recovery.gov.

Draw your own conclusions about whether a government that can’t follow the money should get the money in the first place. In fairness, the public hasn’t really asked for all that much accountability in the past, but with this Internet thing opening windows onto much more of corporate and governmental activity, it’s time to for the government to step up and get good at running its own show. You’re paying for it – a little over $3,200 per U.S. family.

The news on Friday and over the weekend was that the Treasury Department will not announce which banks are getting cash infusions in the next portion of its modified bailout program. The standard line is that Treasury announcements about our “investments” in the financial sector are being restricted because those announcements would label winners and losers. And for some reason that’s bad.

(I said “modified”: Recall that the bailout was supposed to be the purchase of troubled assets from financial institutions. Now, it’s about about buying pieces of the financial institutions themselves. And it may be extended soon to insurance companies – and then automakers!?)

But there’s another interest at stake, beyond this “winners and losers” justification. Remember the pressure Treasury is under from the blogosphere for hiding its payments to financial services providers like New York Mellon Bank? Be confident that this is causing Treasury bureaucrats some discomfort.

By keeping its latest list of investments obscure, Treasury reduces by just a little bit the ability of the average taxpayer to figure out what it’s doing. The result? More freedom of action for the Treasury Department.

In the contest between its own power and the “good government” practice of transparency, a government agency will always choose to enhance its own power. What we’re seeing here is nothing sinister – it’s exactly how you’d expect an agency to act. But hidden government doesn’t need to have sinister motives to cause bad results.