The House and Senate have agreed on a version of S. 2590, the Coburn-Obama database bill. The press release indicates that the publicly available database that the legislation will create will include both federal contracts and grants (an earlier House bill, Blunt-Davis, would have disclosed grants but not contracts). The bill still has to pass the House, but it looks like it's moving forward. Here's the release:

WASHINGTON---House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.), U.S. Senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), Barack Obama (Ill.), and Tom Carper (Del.), and Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (Va.) today announced that they have reached agreement on legislation to increase accountability and transparency by establishing a public database to track federal grants and contracts.

Sunlight's been an active analyst on what turns out to be Sen. Ted Stevens' hold on the Coburn-Obama bill and how the lack of transparency of this peculiar Senate process is a huge disservice to our democracy, even though it has long been a hallmark of how the Senate does its business. It's time has come and now, thanks to citizens' response to the blogosphere's rallying calls to find out who was at the bottom of  the hold, gone. (OK. That's too optimistic, but I bet that the next time a high profile piece of legislation is moving, a Senator will think twice about putting a secret "hold" on it.)

Senator Tom Coburn is holding a hearing this morning with the above title. The hearing is focusing on the nearly complete lack of transparency for federal spending decisions and his bill to remedy that. He says his bill would create a "google-like search engine" that will disclose all the recipients of federal funding. Could there possibly be a sane argument against this? The co-sponsorship alone (Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama) suggests that this legislation is significant.

A number of folks are testifying this morning, including Gary Bass, Executive Director of OMB Watch. OMB Watch is working on just such a searchable online database of all grants and contracts as a grantee of Sunlight. It's pretty certain that the database will be ready (look for it in the early fall) before Coburn's bill becomes law given the indefensible hurdles the bill faces. But the OMB Watch database will reveal how "what you don't know can hurt you" and hopefully give a push to enacting a Coburn-type bill down the road.