Tomorrow morning I will be testifying before the full House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the Sunlight Foundation's work to liberate federal spending data and experience in developing databases and tools for tracking spending. The hearing, entitled "Achieving Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending," will be the second opportunity for me to discuss the Sunlight Foundation's Clearspending report where we identified nearly $1.3 trillion in misreported federal spending. The two hour hearing should be live-streamed on the committee website and will start at 9:30 am in Rayburn 2154.

It is an exciting time to continue this important conversation as just today there were two new federal spending developments. The House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduced a major piece of transparency legislation that would transform how we track federal spending and identify waste, fraud and abuse. You can read more about the bill from a blog post by Daniel Schuman, Sunlight's policy counsel. The White House also issued an executive order today that will put Vice President Biden in charge of an 11-member oversight board — very similar to the Recovery and Accountability Transparency Board — to address federal agency waste and fraud.

The entirety of my remarks appear below:

6-14-11 - Written Testimony of Ellen Miller before the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform

This morning I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's Subcommittee on Technology and Information Policy about the failures of government to make rhetoric meet reality. The Sunlight Foundation has been excited about the new promises of data transparency, but sometimes the results are nowhere near the accuracy and completeness necessary for the data to be useful for the public.

Sunlight's Clearspending analysis found that nearly $1.3 trillion of federal spending as reported on USASpending.gov was inaccurate. While there have been some improvements, little to no progress has been made to address the fundamental flaws in the data quality. Correcting the very complicated system of federal reporting for government spending is an enormous task. It has to be done because without it there is no hope for accountability.

In order to fulfill the promise of the Open Government Directive and move forward to meaningful spending disclosure I offered a number of recommendations to the committee. These include unique identifiers for government contracts and grants, publicly available hierarchical identifiers for recipients to follow interconnected entities and timely bulk access to all data.

A video of the hearing should be available shortly on the committee's website and the entirety of my remarks appear below:

Written Testimony of Ellen Miller before the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform