In 2009 the Washington Times reported that an investigation conducted by researchers at the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity had found 440 nonexistent districts listed on Recovery.gov. Combined, the districts were marked as receiving $6.4 billion and creating almost 30,000 jobs. The article provides specific examples, such as the following:

• "Recovery.gov shows 12 districts, using up more than $2.7 billion, in Washington, D.C, which only has one congressional district."
• "Recovery.gov also shows 2,893.9 jobs created with $194,537,372 in stimulus funding in New Hampshire’s 00 congressional district. But, there is no such thing."
• "The site also shows $1,471,518 going to New Hampshire’s 6th congressional district, $1,033,809 to the 4th congressional district and $124,774 to the 27th congressional district. In fact, New Hampshire only has two congressional districts; inviting confusion about where the money listed for the 00, 4th, 6th and 27th districts is going."

"The News Without Transparency" shows you what the news would look like without public access to information. Laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available are absolutely vital, along with services that take that raw data and make it easy for reporters to write sentences like the ones we've redacted in the piece above. If you have an article you'd like us to put through the redaction machine, please send us an email at mbuck@sunlightfoundation.com.

Today Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, spoke about his vision for improving open government and federal spending transparency at the O'Reilly Media 2011 Strata Summit. The Chairman focused his remarks on the DATA Act, the bipartisan legislation he introduced that would transform how government tracks federal spending and identifies waste, fraud, and abuse.

He emphasized the importance of making government data available online in real time so that innovative minds can immediately make use the information to build their own businesses. Business, in turn, would help the government identify program mismanagement and data quality problems. The Chairman specifically singled out Vice President Biden as a supporter of efforts to find a common solution to make data available in a systematic way.

In an ensuring Q&A with O'Reily Media's Alex Howard, Chairman Issa explained that the private sector must step up as advocates for greater openness because they will benefit from building and using the tools made possible by greater transparency. He added when government drives down the cost of obtaining information, private individuals will derive value from the analysis of data, not its ownership.

The Chairman also addressed proposed cuts to the Electronic Government Fund, which supports many government transparency programs, saying that he doesn't always agree with funding cuts. He added that he has an assurance from appropriators that they're willing to listen when he makes that case that increased spending on transparency programs in the short term may save more money later. Accurate data will help drive down the inefficiencies of government.

by Jacob Hutt, Policy Intern

The government's point person for Recovery Act transparency and accountability called for an online “universal one-stop shop” in federal financial data reporting at a hearing on Tuesday. Expanding on his comments, Chairman Earl Devaney of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced a new report, “Accountability and Transparency: Template for the Future,” which identifies lessons learned from the Board's oversight of Recovery spending.

The report highlighted three important lessons:

• “The most identifiable obstacle to transparency and accountability of federal funds” is the “lack of a uniform award ID number” for contracts and other forms of financial assistance. Thus,  a single agency be responsible for distributing award ID numbers “across the entire government,” providing coherence and efficiency to a confusing system of identification.
• Agencies and inspector generals should have equal access to transparency and accountability tools.  Although IGs are thought to be more inclined towards fraud detection, both agencies and IGs have a common goal of fraud prevention.
• The Board's accountability and transparency tools are interdependent and should not be split into separate divisions.

Ultimately, the report calls for the creation of a successor Board to oversee federal spending generally. It should be independent, and maintain a website that centralizes how data is reported, how it is displayed to the public, and how programs are held accountable. All federal financial data would be available to the public in one central site.

It's been a busy day for transparency initiatives. This morning President Obama issued an executive order which will create an 11-member board led by Vice President Biden to oversee the reporting of all federal spending data. It is modeled on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and similar in aims to a board proposed in the DATA Act of 2011, also introduced this morning.

We'll have more on this from our policy experts later, but for now you can read the executive order below.

Executive Order--Delivering an Efficient, Effective, And Accountable Government

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