Government Transparency

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other federal agencies have taken steps to improve federal spending data available on USAspending.gov. This effort to publicly display comprehensive data arose from the federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 which required OMB to establish a free publicly accessible website containing data on federal awards and subawards. OMB launched USAspending.gov in December 2007 to meet these requirements. As GAO reported in 2010 while OMB had satisfied most of the requirements associated with the act such as establishing the site with required data elements and search capability it had only partially satisfied the requirement to establish a pilot program to test the collection and display of subaward data and had not met the requirements to include subaward data by January 2009 or to report to Congress on the site''s usage. Also GAO found that from a sample of 100 awards on USAspending.gov each award had at least one data error and that USAspending.gov did not include information on grants from programs at 9 agencies for fiscal year 2008. Subsequently OMB and agencies have taken steps to improve the site and the quality of its data through increased agency-level accountability and government-wide improvements. These efforts include directing agencies to appoint a senior-level official to be accountable for the quality of federal spending information disseminated on public websites and increasing the use of automated tools. However OMB has not yet implemented plans to create a data quality dashboard on USAspending.gov and has produced only one of the required annual reports to Congress on usage of the site.