Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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USASpending.gov 2.0
In October 2006, Sunlight grantee OMB Watch set up FedSpending.org, a free, searchable database of federal government spending. Subsequent updates have allowed public access to approximately $16.8 trillion in federal government spending, with complete annual data from FY 2000 through FY 2006 and partial data available for FY 2007. The site was so successful that the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) set up USASpending.gov within the Office of Management and Budget, which Congresspedia dubbed "the ‘Google’ of federal spending" by bringing tremendous transparency to how and where government spends tax dollars. As the site says, it’s searchable and accessible by the public for free, and includes for each federal award:
1. The name of the entity receiving the award;
2. The amount of the award;
3. Information on the award including transaction type, funding agency, etc;
4. The location of the entity receiving the award; and
5. A unique identifier of the entity receiving the award.U.S. Sens. Tom Coburn and Barack Obama, the original sponsors of the FFATA in 2006, recognize there is more to be done. Moments ago, Coburn and Obama introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would require the federal government to go beyond summary data on contracts it currently posts. Since the senators just introduced the bill, we don’t yet have a link. We have learned from OMB Watch that the bill contains the following improvements and tweaks:
- Government agencies will add the requests for proposals and the actual contract to the summary information currently available on USASpending.gov, allowing citizens to compare what government asked for and what it got (and how much more or less it had to spend);
- Government will have to publish performance information on contracts, bringing greater accountability to government contractors and those who hire them;
- Grantees will have to disclose additional information, including what type of organization they are (state or local government, university, charity, and so on), the extent to which they rely on other sources for the projects for which they’re seeking federal funding, and whether the funds they’ve received were congressionally directed (that is, an earmark);
- Data quality will be enhanced, and users will be able to easily report errors.
This bill should bring greater disclosure to official government acts, all accessible on the Internet, requiring the federal government to go beyond the summary data on contracts it currently posts.
Only a transparent government can be truly accountable and responsive to its citizens. And we know this bill will bring the executive branch of government closer to realizing this goal.
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Two House Appropriations Bills List Earmarks
Via National Journal’s CongressDaily (subscription only) comes word that the Appropriations Committee has released lists of earmarks along with two bills (I’ve appended them to this post):
The House Appropriations Committee today took its first official steps to disclose pet projects in FY08 spending bills, revisiting the Interior-Environment and Financial Services measures to add the earmarks in advance of floor action next week. Now that Republicans got their wish, they are seeing the fruits of their efforts up close. Their own projects are being squeezed both by House Appropriations Chairman Obey’s decree of a 50 percent total reduction in earmarked projects as well as being on the receiving end of a 60-40 split between the majority and minority they have not experienced in a dozen years.
“There’s nothing magic about a 50 percent reduction,” Obey said.
“We’re simply trying to draw the line so that we have sufficient staff capacity to provide the review of these projects that is necessary to avoid embarrassment to the committee or the institution.”
I think there are actually plenty of people willing to help out with that.
The last page of the Interior list has some interesting language on it, taking a shot at the executive branch for its own earmark requests and for the practice of awarding no-bid contracts. OMB Watch’s FedSpending.org site has a breakdown of contracts awarded by amount of competition from 2000 to 2006 (for the last year, the government has released only partial data).
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Update on Family Business: Moving Toward Phase Two
We’ve gotten some great feedback on planning the next round of our Congressional Family Business investigation, both from inside the office, from some of the folks who made the first round such a success, and from some smart observers (thanks to David Cohn for posting that at Digg!).
We’re starting to design phase two now (what this means in practice is that I get to keep bothering our Sunlight Labs geniuses with questions that begin with cringe-inducing phrases like, “How quickly could you…” or “How hard would it be to…” or “Would it be possible to…”). I’m really excited about round two; and even though we won’t be able to incorporate all the excellent suggestions we’ve gotten right away, this step will include some of your ideas while also giving us the building blocks to do some never-before-seen investigations, like figuring out whether spouses work for companies or organizations that have gotten federal contracts or grants (something our friends at OMB Watch have made possible through FedSpending.org), or for firms that lobby or hire lobbyists to influence Congress.
If you need a reminder as to why this is important, look no further than this USAToday story focusing on relatives of members and staff working for just two committees of Congress, the House Appropriations Committee and its Senate counterpart:
Lobbying groups employed 30 family members last year to influence spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped write, a USA TODAY investigation found. Combined, they generated millions of dollars in fees for themselves or their firms.
The connections are so pervasive that, in 2005 alone, appropriations bills contained about $750 million for projects championed by lobbyists whose relatives were involved in writing the spending bills.
Again, that’s two committees, $750 million in one year. And that could be a low figure (I say this on the basis of what a dogged researcher with Taxpayers for Common Sense, who have as much experience as anyone else in ferreting out earmarks, once told me: Even after all their efforts, there are usually some big earmarks in Defense Appropriations or Defesne Authorization bills that they can’t tie to a member or a company). Imagine what we’ll find when we cover the rest of Congress…
Stay tuned…
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Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act Becomes Law
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.
