As part of Sunshine week, I had the opportunity to testify at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing to share a few of Sunlight's ideas about making the executive branch more transparent. Video and text of my opening statement are below. It almost goes without saying that we're very interested in the transparency bills the Oversight Committee will be marking up this Wednesday.
In a speech Wednesday, OMB controller Danny Werfel reportedly declared that improving the completeness and reliability of data on the federal spending transparency website USASpending is a "priority" of OMB. He reportedly indicated that OMB will issue guidance to prompt agency internal review about the reliability of their reporting.
If this news account is accurate -- and I could not reach anyone at the White House or OMB to confirm -- Mr. Werfel's remarks are welcome if they express a genuine administration commitment to address the government's systematic failure to accurately publicly report how the federal government spends money. The failure to report is of an enormous magnitude. Our recently released third annual ClearSpending analysis found more than $1.55 trillion in misreported federal spending for FY 2011... just in grants alone. (The prior two years didn't look too good, either.)
These accuracy problems shouldn't be a surprise to the administration. Sunlight testified twice before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on this topic (on March 11 and June 14, 2011) -- Mr. Werfel testified at the same March hearing (watch it here). We've also communicated our findings directly to the administration. (And others, like the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, have made similar points.)
Now, in 2013, momentum is again building behind a comprehensive approach to address the federal government's spending report problems -- embodied in the proposed federal spending transparency reform bill known as the DATA Act. This bipartisan legislation, which passed the House and was introduced in the Senate in the last Congress, addresses the longstanding issues that Mr. Werfel alluded to.
In 2012, Mr. Werfel expressed concerns about the DATA Act. However, to many observers, the criticisms looked more like an attempt to protect OMB's turf than an effort to address the reporting problems. The substance of his critiques were addressed in a blogpost by the Data Transparency Coalition, which wryly noted that "in the six years since FFATA's enactment, OMB has not tried to standardize federal spending data." Touché.
It could be that this new OMB guidance -- that no one outside government has seen or heard of until Wednesday -- is OMB's attempt to grapple with the difficult federal spending transparency issues that it has failed to comprehensively address over the last four years. But a more cynical assessment could be that the administration sees that its failure to address these issues has prompted a systematic, bipartisan transparency reform effort -- an effort that could weaken OMB's control over access to spending information -- and it will pay lip service to delay or blunt any such effort.
We hope that this recently-articulated administration desire to act on federal spending transparency has come from the realization that this is an issue where we cannot afford to wait. But it's fair to say that politics may more pressing upon OMB than policy in this matter. And if that's the case, then we should express our thanks for the assurances and move swiftly to enacting the DATA Act, because that's the driver of real reform.
Tonight, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union Address to Congress. He is expected to urge the Legislative branch to take action on guns, immigration, climate change and a laundry list of other issues. In order to make progress on the major questions of the day, the President will have to negotiate and compromise with Congress. But, that doesn't mean he can't make progress through other means.
A few weeks ago, the Advisory Committee on Transparency heard three ideas that President Obama could consider implementing right away to make the Executive branch more open and transparent. Read on for the videos.
It's a little late, but it's here! We've released an updated version of Clearspending with data that spans from 2009 to 2011. Unfortunately, it comes fresh off the heels of the Senate's failure to pass the DATA Act, which would have dramatically expanded and improved federal spending reporting. We're hopeful the DATA Act will get a second chance this Congress, especially since Clearspending's results show that USASpending.gov's problems with consistency, timeliness and completeness are ever-present.
As outlined in our methodology, Clearspending measures the grant spending in USASpending.gov across three metrics: consistency, completeness, and timeliness. Here's a quick breakdown of the overall failing dollar amounts (and rates) across all three metrics (without double counting dollars that failed for multiple metrics) for 2009-2011:
| Fiscal Year | Failed Obligations | Total Obligations | Percent Failed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | $1,579,430,789,844 | $1,625,257,115,439 | 97% |
| 2010 | $1,313,342,334,815 | $1,437,032,472,474 | 91.4% |
| 2011 | $1,549,909,322,828 | $1,639,826,026,452 | 94.5% |
Note that just because a dollar failed doesn't mean that the government doesn't know where that money is. But it does mean that there is at least one problem with how the government reports this spending on the public facing site. And that is the main point of USASpending.gov -- to be the publicly searchable version of federal spending that the public can use to hold government accountable. It deserves to be just as accurate as the information included on a federal audit.
You can still drill down by agency and program to see where the specific reporting problems lie. One new feature we've added this year is some slick D3 interactive graphics for each of the three metrics (consistency, completeness and timeliness).
So take a look around, and while you're at it, ask your representatives to support the DATA act!
Today we re-launched our Clearspending project with new data. Clearspending is a scorecard-like analysis of the quality of the grants data found in USASpending.gov. We evaluated the grant data on consistency, completeness and timeliness. The results are pretty much unchanged -- we found over $1.3 trillion in broken spending.
Head on over to the summary page for the quick highlights. While consistency and completeness haven't changed much, timeliness is much improved. Essentially, many programs are reporting bad data, faster. There are some exceptions however.
Several agencies report very well across all metrics and programs. These include:
Even more agencies report well, though not uniformly across all programs. Most of their reporting is quite good, with a few exceptions that put them closer to the 'broken spending' threshold. These include:
However, as evidenced by the $1.3 trillion in broken reporting, the poorly reporting programs dwarf the programs that do report well, in terms of total obligations. And it doesn't help that Congress is set to slash E-Gov funding (which includes USASpending.gov).
To find out more about a particular agency or program, visit the Clearspending scorecard. Or for a visual, watch our new video.
Yesterday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released agency responses to a survey on agencies' internal financial management systems. We've been curious to peek behind this curtain for a while, considering the public version of these systems, USASpending.gov, has proven to be quite error-prone. Agencies were asked a number of questions, ranging from what software they use, to how their internal systems interact with USASpending.gov. You can view the responses on the Oversight Committee website, or on Sunlight's scribd account. The headline is not surprising. Most agencies use antiquated and fractured systems, requiring manual data entry between systems, which almost always results in errors.
We're excited to have this inside look, just as we're putting the finishing touches on an updated version of Clearspending, a project we released last year that assessed the data quality of USASpending.gov. We've always wondered how the flow of data to USASpending.gov compares to the reporting of accounting data that happens within the agencies. It's interesting to read through these responses and compare them to our new results. For instance, of all the grant programs we've found that report very well, 41% of them are in the Department of Education. If you read the survey responses from the Department of Education, you'll notice a couple of key things.
First, while there are several systems working in concert that each perform different functions (grant reporting vs contract reporting vs loan reporting), these same systems are used throughout the entire department. There aren't separate grant reporting systems within each program office. Secondly, ED describes their platform as "end to end grants management", including support for "...intake of applications, peer review, award, payment, performance monitoring, and final closeout of the grant award". We've always been of the mind that this kind of grants management should be available for the entire federal government*. Instead, we have Grants.gov for grant applications (rife with problems, according to the GAO), some black box inside the respective agency that processes the grant, and then sometimes, it gets reported to USASpending.gov. In the end, the entire federal government should have an end to end reporting system like this, with certain points in the reporting stream being automatically exposed to the public via a web interface. Public reporting of spending shouldn't be an afterthought -- it should be tightly integrated into the agency workflow as much as possible.
For anyone interested in how the federal government keeps track of what they're spending, I encourage you to read through these reports. As a programmer, the number of times I see "mainframe" mentioned is scary. If the DATA act does pass, the newly created FAST board would do well to study these reports and find key indicators of reporting success and failure.
*In the past we've described problems with the Department of Educations's reporting of loan data. We still believe there is a systemic misinterpretation of the guidance on loan reporting, causing student loans to sum to the trillions in the USASpending.gov data. However, the comments in this post relate exclusively to grant data.
We’ve often looked at the macro perspective with this data, but what if we followed the transactions of a single program? Would we be able to understand and follow the data easily and provide citizen oversight, as was the intent of the legislation behind USASpending.gov?
This fourth of July marks the 45th anniversary America's freedom of information law. FOIA transformed our world by giving teeth to the public's right to know. It made government prove why public information shouldn't be disclosed, instead of forcing people to justify why it should be. The internet age has brought another revolution, transforming how we expect information will be available to us. But our freedom of information laws have slowly calcified through a combination of inertia, bureaucratic reluctance, and lack of funding.
Just as FOIA of the 1960s embraced disclosure upon demand, it's time to reinvent our freedom of information laws for the internet age and embrace affirmative disclosure -- where government information is routinely published online, in real time, and in machine readable formats.
We have already seen some baby-steps in this direction. For example:
The scope of the public access is much larger than these initiatives can address. The public's information needs spans the scope of government activity, from census data to spending data, from policy and position papers to economist forecasts, from maps to legal information, and much more. It is worth highlighting four particularly clever ideas for next steps as examples of where things could go.
The Public Online Information Act (or POIA) is pending legislation, originally introduced by Rep. Israel and Sen. Tester, that would require executive branches agencies to publish all publicly available information in the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats, and create an advisory committee to help develop government-wide Internet publication standards. Like FOIA, POIA allows the public to go to court if agencies fail to comply.
In the UK, the website WhatDoTheyKnow.com makes many government information requests publicly available. You submit your FOIA-like request through the website, they submit the request to the appropriate agency and publish the answer online. This reduces the number of duplicate requests while making the sum of information released available to everyone. (There's a similar effort to crowd-source state-level freedom of information requests in the US called MuckRock. Disclosure: Sunlight gave funding to MuckRock.)
Data quality is a big deal. The ten open data principles lay out a means to evaluate the extent to which data is open and accessible to the public. Similarly, efforts like ClearSpending mash up government data to evaluate the accuracy of information reported by the government in the first place. It's difficult for the public to make use of information that is badly formatted or inaccurately reported.
It's not enough to make sure that the data reported by the government is accurate. We must also ensure that government identifies and reports on all the data that it has. The government must audit its holdings and build an index of what it has and who is responsible for maintaining the information. The President's recent Memo on Regulatory Compliance, for example, addresses how private entities disclose information to the agencies that regulate them and how that data is reviewed, shared inside government, and (whenever appropriate) made available to the public.
The public's need to access government-held information is as old as our libraries, post offices, and government publications. It's time to make our public information available online.
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:
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