Scott Amey at the Project for Government Oversight’s POGO blog writes about being positively surprised by one thing he found at USAspending.gov, the government site modeled after OMB Watch’s FedSpending.org. 2007 data has been replaced by updated FY 2008 and 2009 totals. (This is shocking on two fronts. The government is usually years behind in reporting contract spending dollars.)

But Scott’s more shocked to find that the government spent over $510 billion on goods and services in FY 2008. “And if history repeats, this total will increase by an additional $10-$20 billion as agencies report additional information,” he writes. That amount would rank as the 25^th largest GDP in the world, he figures.

In the shadow of the huge multi-trillion dollar financial bailout, all these huge numbers are mind numbing. Federal contract spending is out of control, and deserving of much more oversight and transparency, don’t you think?

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Gautham Nagesh, writing at NextGov, reports on how USASpending.gov is failing to provide up-to-date information on government contracts and grants.

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 mandated that OMB develop and maintain a site providing grant and contract information on all organizations receiving more than $25,000 from the feds. (Modeled after OMB Watch’s FedSpending.org, the site launched last December.) Nagesh reports that some agencies, including the Homeland Security, Labor, Transportation and Veterans Affairs departments have not updated their reports since last year. The agencies are supposed to issue a report monthly outlining who receives the funds and the amount of grants. Sen. Tom Coburn, one of the sponsors of the new law, has rightly called out the agencies for not adhering to the new requirements.

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When Congress passed and the president signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (two years ago this month) they started a trend that has swept well beyond Washington. According to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), state legislatures are starting to emulate the new federal law that requires access through a free and searchable Web site to details on all federal spending.

Since 2007, 11 states (Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Washington) have established, via legislation or executive order, free and searchable Web sites that give access to state spending. And 24 other states are working on it, with more than half introducing spending transparency bills this year. B2G Exchange blog wrote in May that transparency Web sites were the “hottest new trend” in state government. SunshineReview.org is a good place to monitor progress of government transparency at the state and local level.

Kansas was the first to establish a transparency Web site by passing the Kansas Taxpayer Transparency Act in July 2007, and launching KanView on February 29^th of this year. The site is expected to cost about $40 million but it is estimated that it will generate $1 billion in savings. The champion of the new site, State Rep. Kasha Kelley of Arkansas City, Kan., has since become something of a traveling evangelist for government transparency. National and regional organizations, such as NCSL, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Illinois Policy Institute, have invited Kelley to make presentations at their meetings and conferences. The federal Office of Management and Budget invited her to attend the unveiling of USAspending.gov, the federal transparency site. Because of Kelley’s transparency work, the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform named her a “Friend of the Taxpayer.”

And last month, the Columbus, Ohio, -based Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to small government in the state, launched its Center for Transparent and Accountable Government. The center says it will be collecting and posting online state and local government budgets, employee contracts, public records policies and other information. “Transparency and open government crosses ideologies and is equally supported, and equally opposed, by both major political parties,” said Mike Maurer, the center’s new director, a former statehouse reporter. He also said that Ohioans deserve the same type of transparency from their state and local governments that USAspending.gov provides at the federal level. In conjunction with its launch, the center issued a white paper gauging Ohio’s current level of openness, finding that the state “is behind its peers in government transparency.” They are asking candidates running for state office to take a transparency pledge. And they’ve set up OhioSunshine.org, an open government wiki. “The legitimacy of Ohio government rests on the consent of the governed, but that consent doesn’t mean much when so much of government occurs hidden, or deeply buried,” Hansen said. “Twenty-First Century information technology should be applied to draw back the curtain that stands between government and the people.”

Amen to that.

The explosion of open government activism in the states is a very encouraging legacy of the 2006 transparency act.

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Over the weekend, Tim Harford at Slate asked an interesting question: “How much do Republican-leaning corporations benefit from Republican political success?” His answer? “A lot!” Harford points to studies conducted by financial economists about the success of corporations with clear Republican and Democratic leanings. (The researchers defined a company’s party preference by whether the board of directors had members who were former members of Congress and/or served in an administration — all from one party.)

After narrowing the group of corporations they were looking at the researchers examined the share price of these politically partisan corporations at two points; the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Dec. 13, 2000 selecting George W. Bush the winner of the presidential race over Al Gore, and the May 2001 power shift in the Senate from GOP to Democratic control created by U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords’ decision to leave the Republicans and become a Democratic-caucusing independent.

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