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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Recovery Board Chairman Can’t Certify That Data Is Accurate, Auditable
Recovery.gov is supposed to be a transparency clearing house for information on the federal stimulus spending appropriated in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year. Unfortunately, the reports on spending and jobs saved or created are showing errors across the board.
Clay Johnson at Sunlight Labs looked at the “dirty secret” that is FederalReporting.gov, the site where agencies and stimulus fund recipients file their reports before that data is pulled by Recovery.gov:
Looking into FederalReporting.gov is a lot tougher than Recovery.gov. Not a lot of light has shone upon this website. In terms of costs– the only thing I can find on usaspending.gov is that the EPA has set up a $4,000,000 helpdesk for the operation. It looks like right now there are three ways to send data into FederalReporting– via an Excel Spreadsheet, a Web Form, and via an XML API.
The question on my mind is– what kind of validation is being done on the data before it goes into federalreporting.gov? For instance, how is data getting being accepted by FederalReporting.gov saying that jobs are being created in Arizona’s 15th District when Arizona’s 15th district doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t FederalReporting.gov be validating that? It seems from the documentation that all three methods of submission have a validation process. Is the validation so lax that obviously wrong data can get through?
My initial reaction upon seeing the Arizona 15th District story was that this could have been a state-level agency or contractor reporting that jobs were created in the 15th District of the Arizona Legislature (Arizona elects one state senator and two state representatives from each of their 30 legislative districts). That was until I saw that jobs and spending were being reported from the 86th District and other states were seeing reporting coming from the 99th District and other non-existent legislative boundaries. This problem, which is huge for a project that is relying on transparency for legitimacy, stems from a patchwork reporting structure that, as Clay reported, is not being overseen properly. It looks like some of the state and local agencies and private contractors and subcontractors are simply putting a number into a box where they decided not to figure out the correct answer. Subsequently, the reporting site that they submit to is apparently not checking for errors.
In response to a letter sent by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chairman Earl Devaney answered questions about the accuracy of Recovery.gov reporting by stating, “Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification.” The accurate part is obvious from the many examples pointed out by ABC, Sunlight Labs and others, but the auditable seems a bit shocking. Why isn’t the data able to be audited? Is it really that bad? Or is the Recovery board’s staff that over-stretched. While Devaney promises “increasingly higher levels of accuracy in the future,” this problem of accuracy and auditability should have been tackled before issuing press releases claiming the positive effects of stimulus spending.
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Senators Grill Stimulus Watchdog on Recovery.gov
Yesterday, Earl Devany, Inspector General for the stimulus, and Rob Nabors, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), went before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs to discuss details of their oversight plan for recovery funds. One of the chief topics was the web site, Recovery.gov. The White House has sold Recovery.gov as a beacon of transparency, a web site a top a hill that will shine down as an example for all government web sites. However, as our Bill Allison has noted in numerous venues, the web site does not offer all of the information or content that it could. This lack of content became a sticking point in the hearing.
Devaney, who answered most of the questions, agreed with many of the senators who complained that Recovery.gov was not all it was cracked up to be. Describing why citizens are going to the web site, which is receiving high traffic, Devaney chalked it up to “curiosity,” but stated that if the web site does not become more interactive and substantive, the public will lose faith in the recovery effort. This applies particularly to interactivity and responses to user comments, Devaney stated, and that the recovery oversight board needed to get out in front of this faster.
In achieving the goal of interactivity, Devaney said that he is talking to outside groups and individuals who have ideas about how to sort through millions of comments and respond appropriately. He also stated that he is willing to meet with any of “the smartest people” to talk about this.
Sen. Tom Coburn raised pointed questions regarding the accessibility of the data, contrasting the data search functions and presentation on Recovery.gov to that of USASpending.gov, the federal site tracking all federal spending. Coburn’s biggest issues were the lack of multiple search capabilities on Recovery.gov and why USASpending.gov wasn’t used to display the recovery spending. Nabors responded that the public has a unique interest in the recovery spending and that the information needed to be brought to the public in a speedier fashion than USASpending.gov could deliver. The idea behind Recovery.gov is to provide real time tracking of recovery spending. In his “wildest dreams,” Nabors declared, he would want to be able to track overall spending, as in what is displayed on USASpending.gov, in real time.
Coburn pointedly asked when the “ideal” Recovery.gov would be online. Devaney, under pressure from Coburn, answered, “Yes,” after Coburn asked him if the site would be complete in a year.
One of the more interesting suggestions came from Sen. Claire McCaskill, asking Devaney if he had considered hiring unemployed journalists to provide investigative capability along with context and storytelling to Recovery.gov. Devaney, in what seemed like a happy surprise to McCaskill, stated that he had two interviews scheduled with journalists the very next day. McCaskill responded, “Great minds think alike.”
