No more faceless government

When we first started WRG back when President Obama was inaugurated, our aim was to give readers a sense of who was running Washington. But as time went on, we also realized we wanted readers to understand more about how Washington works. We also think our web site should be a place where government officials themselves can go to help explain their everyday work to the public, as well as to learn about their colleagues.

So, we developed what we call department profiles, which are comprehensive explanations of the purpose of each of the 15 Cabinet departments, plus the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency. They’re accompanied by org charts with photos of their office heads, which click through to our profiles.

We’ve tried to cut the unintelligible acronyms and annoying bill names out of these profiles so that the average citizen can understand them. We hope we’ve succeeded and think they’ve become a valuable resource. You can access them through the Institutions tab in our navigation bar.

Today, many of you checked out our White House profile, along with the profile for the Homeland Security Department (thanks TeamDHS, by the way, for contributing the new profile of Assistant Secretary for Policy Development Arif Alikhan, one of the highest-ranking Muslim-Americans in the Obama administration).

Not surprisingly, folks were also interested in learning more about the the complex workings of the Treasury Department, which on Monday began tapping federal pension funds as the debt ceiling was on the way to being reached. Readers also browsed profiles of the Health and Human Services Department and the Justice Department.

We’ve tried to keep these profiles as up-to-date as possible, but if you see something wrong, use the wiki to correct it, please! And add any of those missing photos. Our aim is no more faceless officials.