If the news from Washington tends to give you indigestion more often than it makes you feel good, here’s a story that should warm your heart with something other than heartburn. Eagle Eye Publishers, a for-profit research and consulting firm in northern Virginia did something recently that’s distinctly odd behavior in the business world – helping a non-profit prepare a free website that, at least at some levels, competes with their own subscription-only database designed for high-budget customers.

One of Eagle Eye’s premier products is their database of government contracts – a much cleaned-up version, and vastly easier to navigate, than the federal government’s own website.

Two questions were answered on Tuesday: what’s the government spending its money on, and what do members of Congress own.

And when I say answered, I don’t mean in a sound bite or a pie chart or a news conference, though there was one of those too. I mean virtually every question you could dream up about who’s getting federal government contracts and grants, or which companies members of Congress are investing in, you will now be able to answer yourself, in seconds, on the web.