Surely the foremost benefit of governmental transparency is the opportunity to criticize...I don't think that code is somehow excluded from this.

I disagree that "opportunity to criticize" can be seen as a benefit. "Opportunity to help" seems like the biggest benefit.

The government is accountable to us, and we subsidize this work.

But your criticisms primarily address portability and well-packagedness which was probably not an original design requirement. Now that it is open source it may be an issue, but is it a valid target issue for tax dollars?

I believe this is an appropriate point for the community to step in.

These aren't worthless modules either; they all address needs that core Drupal lacks. Node Embed particularly sounds useful to me.

If open-sourcing becomes policy, I just hope there's better stuff to show than this (which I'm sure there is). Until then, the effort seems token.

It's a minor nit to pick, but I believe the majority of this was done pre-election, and hence, paid for out of campaign dollars. That isn't to say that some of us didn't pay for it, but the initial development of these plugins was almost certainly not done with taxpayer money.

If you're ever in the DC area, I'll be more than happy to depress you with all of the ways in which taxpayer money is all but thrown away by the millions, but in this particular instance, I think we're okay.