WASHINGTON — Advocates of greater government transparency and accountability are lauding a new legislative proposal they say would offer the public unprecedented insight into federal government contracts, appropriations and expenditures.
Supporters say passage of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, commonly referred to as the DATA Act, would constitute the most significant increase in government transparency since the late 1960s, when the Freedom of Information Act became law. Yet there are concerns that the House version of the bill could now be weakened during negotiations in the Senate.
“The American people deserve a functioning government that is both open and accountable,” Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, said last month in support of the legislation’s passage. “The DATA Act is an important step to achieving this goal, because it will publish federal spending data and transform it from disconnected documents into open, searchable data for people to see and read through online.”
The House passed a re-introduced version of the DATA Act in late November by an almost unanimous margin, with just one representative voting against the proposal. That support underlines the unusually bipartisan nature of the bill, which is sponsored by lawmakers that are typically ideological opposites. These include Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Elijah Cummings D-Md., the leading figures on the powerful House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform.
“No wonder public trust in government is at an all-time low – we spend taxpayer dollars, but we fail to take sufficient steps to report back how it was spent. But hopefully, those days are almost over,” the DATA Act’s four primary sponsors, which also include Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, wrote in an op-ed this week.
“The DATA Act will shed additional light on the federal government’s finances and leverage modern technology to give the taxpayers the transparency over federal spending they deserve … [and] ensure that the information collected by the budget analysts, accountants, and grant and contract officers is combined, reconciled, and presented in an easy-to-use way.”
Supporters say the bill could allow taxpayers to quickly track congressional appropriations down to the last dollar. They hope that such increased transparency could eventually allow for easy comparison between, for instance, congressional authorization on education funding and how much is actually being spent at the state or neighborhood level.
“Ultimately the hope is that all stakeholders in government would get together and create strong financial data standards, so that all financial data could be interoperable between agencies,” Matt Rumsey, a policy associate with the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group here, told MintPress.
“We as a group hope the data will become both more accurate and easier to use. The aim is to get more and better data to those outside of the government that want to do analysis and oversight.”
Set up for abuse
Transparency and accountability mechanisms have started to be ramped up within the federal government in recent years, in part due to pledges and plans offered by President Barack Obama. Perhaps the most advanced such effort is taking place around U.S. foreign aid spending, with the State Department and USAID in the midst of a major transformation in how they publicize spending information.
More broadly, in May the president unveiled landmark new open government rules, mandating that all federal agencies make openness and public accessibility the default methods for handling official data. Yet while advocates were elated at the aims of the executive order, its full strength continues to depend on its implementation. To a great extent, the DATA Act would now provide details on that implementation, though the White House has yet to publicly weigh in on whether it supports the bill.
“President Obama should put the goals of his Open Data Policy into action by publicly endorsing the DATA Act,” Hudson Hollister, the executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition, an advocacy network, said in a recent statement. “As Comptroller General Gene Dodaro testified in July, without this legislative mandate, spending transparency won’t happen.”
In fact, there already is one pan-government Internet portal that is supposed to function as a clearinghouse on pan-government financial information: USAspending.gov, created through transparency legislation passed in 2006. Yet this effort has been repeatedly disparaged for providing only certain information, covering only grants and contracts without data on internal government spending, and even then including only summaries of most information.
Perhaps more important, the accuracy of the information on USAspending.gov is difficult to verify. And when analysts have delved into and cross-compared this data, they have found that large parts have not correlated with other sources of information on government spending.
A Sunlight Foundation project called Clearspending has carried out annual such studies in recent years, during which it cross-examined a bit less than 50 percent of the information on USAspending.gov using metrics on consistency, completeness and timeliness.
According to the project’s most recent analysis, for 2011 data, more than $1.5 trillion in government spending was misreported for that year alone. That accounts for some 95 percent of total granting data for that year, and appeared to be an increase from 2010 findings.
The upshot is that neither the government nor taxpayers nor oversight groups know how much money federal agencies are spending. Those gaps are almost invariably facilitating both waste and fraud, both issues that have increased resonance in the current fiscal environment of austerity and polarized debate over how to cut federal spending.
“Right now it’s nearly impossible to determine how taxpayer dollars are spent – USAspending is quite broken and in need of repair and serious upgrade,” Angela Canterbury, the director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group here, told MintPress.
“If you’re talking about reining in wasteful spending, you have to know what we are spending, and we don’t. Members of Congress don’t and the administration doesn’t. There’s a lack of basic information and a resulting lack of accountability. Right now, we have a system that’s set up for abuse, for wasteful and fraudulent spending.”
Penny wise, pound foolish
Currently, both the House and Senate versions of the DATA Act would significantly strengthen the information being offered on USAspending.gov. The site would be massively expanded to include information on all federal non-secret spending. The bill would also set the first broad pan-government data standards, requiring that all federal agencies offer this new trove of information in the same format and thus allowing for straightforward comparisons.
Yet the proposals coming out of the House and Senate differ in some notable ways, with the Senate committee in November having stripped out important provisions included in the House version. Advocacy groups are now turning their attention to pressuring key senators to strengthen certain provisions, to come into closer alignment with the House, before any floor vote takes place.
“From our perspective, the House version is certainly the stronger version right now,” the Sunlight Foundation’s Rumsey said. “In particular, it focuses governance on the Treasury and would include an independent organization empowered to act on its own and oversee government spending.”
As in the past, the Senate’s primary skepticism involves the amount of money that certain provisions would require. One of these is the independent oversight body Rumsey refers to, which would extend an existing “accountability platform” set up under legislation passed in 2009 to oversee federal stimulus funding offered in the aftermath of the financial crisis. While this body has been widely seen as highly effective, tracking down around $100 million in fraud, it is currently slated to stop functioning in 2015.
The House of Representatives now wants to expand the accountability platform’s purview to all federal spending, but the Senate has balked at the cost of doing so. Interestingly, while a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate found that the House proposal in total would cost around $79 million a year, it did not offer any analysis on the potential savings that would come about by having such an independent safeguard in place.
“This strikes us as penny wise and pound foolish on the Senate’s part, as the accountability platform would be an investment in saving taxpayer dollars,” POGO’s Canterbury said.
“It’s one thing to improve the data and transparency, but it’s another to empower entities to use that information to find waste, fraud and abuse. We need both the transparency and the accountability. Fortunately, there are some Senate offices that are currently revisiting the platform and looking at how to strengthen the Senate version of this bill, and our hope is they will do so before the Senate votes.”
While there is no public timetable yet as to when the Senate may schedule a vote on the DATA Act, proponents are hoping to have a law in place by the end of next year.