FedSpending.org, the go-to site for all government spending information, has now added some 2006 data–the full set isn’t available from the Feds just yet–plus some new and improved features for keeping track of how Washington manages our money. Congratulations to all at OMB Watch on the upgrades and updates. I’m appending the press release below, but what I think might be the coolest new feature is the summary data, which provides a really nice snapshot–here’s Lockheed Martin, and here’s Halliburton. Compare the trend boxes.

Though we’re two months into 2007, the federal government has yet to release all of the 2006 data–I think it’s generally the Department of Defense that lags behind (though in fairness, they award more contracts than anyone else).

It’s also worth noting that the Office of Management and Budget, who are building official database of government spending required by the Coburn Obama bill, have launched FedSpending.gov, which right now is soliciting suggestions, comments and ideas for the federal site. Nice to see that they link to OMB Watch’s excellent effort. I’m going to make a suggestion of my own, and will post it here when I’m finished.

OMB Watch Launches Upgraded FedSpending.org Website

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22, 2007—OMB Watch today launched the first in a series of upgrades to its popular FedSpending.org website (http://www.fedspending.org). The site updates make FedSpending.org more comprehensive, more searchable, and more customizable. Journalists, researchers, and the public, among others, will benefit from the upgrades.

The upgraded FedSpending.org site includes the following improvements:
• Updated Data – FY 2005 now contains all four quarters of federal assistance data; the most recent publicly available data for FY 2006 has been added for both contracts and assistance (but the data for both remains incomplete at this time); many problems in older data have been corrected.
• Summary View – This level of detail has been designed to provide a better overview of contractors, recipients, congressional districts, states, and agencies, as well as other data categories, such as recipient type, assistance type, grant programs, products and services contracted for, and extent of competition. The summary view also includes a new Trend bar chart to quickly compare changes over time. The view is brand new for contracts and significantly upgraded for assistance.
• XML Output – The site now provides an XML format for data which will allow advanced users and programmers to design their own interfaces to pull and display FedSpending.org data.
• More Searchable – Improvements in page titles and implementation of sitemaps protocol should make it easier to find FedSpending.org data through online search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
• New Home Tab – The side bar navigation now includes a separate “folder tab” for the home page of the website, making it easier for visitors to navigate among the different sections of the website.

OMB Watch welcomes feedback on the upgrades and ideas for future improvements at http://www.fedspending.org/contact.php. The organization intends to launch two additional upgrades to the FedSpending.org website in 2007. The first is scheduled for June/July and the second is scheduled for October/November. Among the improvements that OMB Watch hopes to include are a mapping function, inflation adjustments, and the ability to combine federal spending data with other census data.

# # #

0 Comments

The basic research is done, and before I begin making the earnest effort to digest the raw results, let me first thank all who participated–especially Beezling, who topped his prolific performance on round one with an incredible turn on round two–he did 319 this time around, doing by far the bulk of the entries. Get that man a fedora and a press pass!

More information soon…

0 Comments

If this keeps up much longer, our friends at OMB Watch are going to have their hand full maintaining the grants side of FedSpending.org. Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute finds that the number subsidy programs listed in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance has skyrocketed–from 1,013 programs in 1985 to 1,390 in 1995 to 1,696 in 2006.

New programs in 2006, according to Edwards, include things like the $150 million to give to groups that promote health marriages (here’s the official Web site), $99 million to give to states and school districts to develop merit-based compensation plans for teachers (here), and $7 million to get Americans to eat more fruits, vegetables and nuts and also to improve the competitiveness of U.S. growers of these foodstuffs (no site yet, look up “10.169″ here).

I kind of liked the way that Edwards framed this type of spending:

The proliferation of special interest spending in the federal budget in recent years has created much waste and corruption. Politicians have helped special interests while helping themselves. But the main problem has not been that politicians have their hands in the cookie jar; it is that the cookie jar has grown so large.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with all the implications of the last sentence, but the first two strike me as true, and as for the third, as we’ve found with earmarks, it’s probably true that the amount and beneficiaries of a lot of federal spending are left to the discretion of very few lawmakers, who dole it out with very little oversight or exposure. And a cookie jar that no one’s watching is far too tempting for politicians and special interests to dig into…

0 Comments

Forgive me for slacking off on the blogging this week. I’ve spent the last three days “inside” a new database – and you’re going to like it when it’s released in a couple of weeks.

Okay, I’ll admit to being a little weird when it comes to databases. I’ve always enjoyed digging into data, and for someone with such propensities there’s no greater thrill than the feeling that you’re looking over information that no one else has ever seen before. It’s like laying down a fresh set of footprints on an island or a continent that nobody knew was there. Well, except the “undiscovered” people who lived there before.

In the case of government databases – which this one was – we know of course that some people have seen it before. Someone inside the government put it together, after all. And the data inside it reflects real government actions. In this case, the database shows federal government grants over the past six years: the recipients, the amounts, the agencies involved, even the congressional district that got the money.

But all that was for an inside audience. People receiving the checks knew about it. The ones writing the checks certainly knew about it. So did the galaxy of insiders who made it happen  – including members of Congress, lobbyists, and a small army of government staffers.

But even they only saw fragments of the whole picture. The database shows everything. That means that outsiders to the process – news reporters, curious citizens, all those do-it-yourself journalists in the blogosphere – everyone will soon be able to search, sort and subtotal the data on government grants in ways that even the insiders couldn’t do before.

All the heavy lifting to make this happen and put it on the web is being done by a crack team of database pros at OMB Watch, funded by a Sunlight Foundation grant. The only role I had was standardizing the names of the agencies, universities and others that received the grants. That actually turned out to be quite a job, since lots of the agencies have long names and they were entered in the database under a bewildering array of variations.

So for three days I’ve been cleaning it up, turning entries like “NC ST DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVIC” into “NORTH CAROLINA DEPT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES.” When the names are standardized it’s much easier to do searches and generate meaningful subtotals for each recipient.

It’s dry, painstaking work, and after three days of it – take it from me – you get into a zone that’s not completely unlike a hypnotic trance. But it’s also fun, in an odd sort of way. It’s like solving a difficult crossword puzzle – something I love doing in my spare time. But it has the added bonus, unlike a crossword, of being useful to the wider world.

I’ll leave it at that and you’ll have to wait another couple of weeks to play with it yourself. (Don’t worry, we won’t be shy about letting you know when it’s coming out.) But take it from someone who’s been digging around inside it: this is good stuff. I don’t know yet what kind of news stories, and maybe scandals, will rise to the surface when a larger audience starts examining this information, but I know it will happen.

That’s the great thing about putting new databases on the web. It’s not just the database builders who get all the joys of discovery – its the users who start typing in questions and digging up answers. Once the data’s up there, the whole world can share in on the same thing I’ve been living with for the past three days: that richly satisfying “aha!” when you find something interesting that nobody ever noticed before.

0 Comments

I was lucky enough to be invited to the bill signing ceremony for S. 2590, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, at the Old Executive Office Building this morning. President Bush’s remarks are here; Glenn Reynolds has a post here; and Mark Tapscott previewed the event this morning. It was nice to meet the two of them in the flesh, as well as a fair number of the folks who are part of the Exposing Earmarks coalition.

It occurred to me while I was sitting there that, had it not been for the Out the Secret Holder campaign–in which citizens not only identified the two Senators blocking the bill (Sen. Ted Stevens and Sen. Robert Byrd) but also let 98 other Senators know that opennness in government was an important issue–there probably would not have been a bill signing today. Sunlight really is the best disinfectant, and let’s hope the federal spending database that this bill creates will provide much more of that. I’m going to try to keep a close eye on the process–we all need to make sure that the database is all that it can be.

In his remarks, Bush said,

You know, we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort collecting your money, and we should show the same amount of effort in reporting how we spend it. Every year, the federal government issues more than $400 billion in grants, and more than $300 billion in contracts to corporations, associations, and state and local governments. Taxpayers have a right to know where that money is going, and you have a right to know whether or not you’re getting value for your money.

I’ll leave aside the obvious criticism I could make (that the IRS, which audits fewer than one percent of income tax returns, guestimates it misses something like $100 billion a year in collections)(okay, I’m not leaving aside that criticism), and instead focus on the “knowing where your money goes” part of that equation–and particularly on the nettlesome details of that. On the contracting side, for example, we need to see not just the contracting agency, the company winning the contract, the amount of money, and the nature of the work to be performed, but also information on whether or not there was competitive bidding; if so, how many companies bid for the contract; how did the original request for proposals read (if that’s how the procurement process was handled); information on whether the contractor was chosen by a member of Congress through an earmark or at the discretion of the government agency; information on whether the contracting entity is performing the work or in turn having a subcontractor perform parts or all of the work and for how much money–these are all just off the top of my head, but they’re something of a starting point. Agencies already collect a lot of this information (on no-bid vs. closed competition vs. full competition; on whether contracts are indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity, cost plus or fixed fee); the rest shouldn’t be difficult to start collecting going forward. I’m not as familiar with the grantmaking side of federal spending, but it seems to me that a similar level of transparency regarding who authorized the spending (whether it’s Congress through an earmark or block grant or federal formula for apportioning money to the states, or at the discretion of an agency), whether the grantee will perform the work or whether a subcontractor will do it, should be disclosed.

There’s a fairly detailed discussion of these issues from the Senate testimony of Gary Bass of OMB Watch (full disclosure: they’re a Sunlight grantee, and reading what Gary had to say about S. 2590 this will give you a pretty good idea of why).

Let’s return a minute to the President’s remarks. He said:

By allowing Americans to Google their tax dollars, this new law will help taxpayers demand greater fiscal discipline. In other words, we’re arming our fellow citizens with the information that will enable them to demand we do a better job — a better job in the executive branch and better job in the legislative branch.

Information on earmarks will no longer be hidden deep in the pages of a federal budget bill, but just a few clicks away. This legislation will give the American people a new tool to hold their government accountable for spending decisions. When those decisions are made in broad daylight, they will be wiser and they will be more restrained.

Okay — that’s the goal. Let’s keep an eye on whether the database will have the kind of data it needs to bring disclosure of earmarks and other questionable federal spending decisions from deep within the pages of a federal budget bill or from backroom decisions granting no-bid contracts to the light of day through online transparency.

0 Comments