Updating Senator Dirksen for inflation: “A trillion here, a trillon there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” (Attributed to Senator Dirksen but not documented.)
From the press release:
The Data Transparency Coalition, the only group unifying the technology industry in support of federal data reform, applauded the release today of the Sunlight Foundation’s Clearspending report and called for the U.S. Congress to reintroduce and pass the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) in order to rectify the misreporting of trillions of dollars in federal spending each year.
The Clearspending report, which analyzes the federal government’s spending information as published on USASpending.gov, showed that federal grant information published during fiscal year 2011 was inconsistent with other data sources for nearly 70 percent of all grant spending and lacked required data fields for 26 percent of all grant spending. In all, $1.55 trillion, or 94.5 percent of all grant spending, was inconsistent, incomplete, or untimely. The DATA Act would help rectify these problems by requiring full publication and consistent data standards for all federal spending.
“USASpending.gov fails, year after year, to deliver accurate data for one reason: the federal government lacks data standards for spending,” said Hudson Hollister, Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition. “The DATA Act would bring transparency and order to USASpending.gov by requiring consistent data standards for all federal spending information. Right now, there are no electronic codes to identify government grants, contracts, or even the grantees and contractors themselves. Without award IDs and a nonproprietary recipient IDs, there is no way to easily check USASpending.gov for accuracy or even verify that agencies are actually submitting the information the law requires them to submit – and as Clearspending shows, many are not.”
Note the limitation of the report to grant information.
That is USASpending.gov does not include non-grant spending, such as defense contracts and similar 21st century follies.
I have questions about the feasibility of universal, even within the U.S. government, data standards for spending. But I will address those in a separate post.