Oct. 9, 2006 – Page 2689
I magine clicking on a map and quickly learning how much money local companies, state agencies or nonprofits are receiving in federal contracts and grants. Or finding with a mouse click whether your town’s low-income areas are getting their fair share of aid to the poor. Better yet, how about being able to type in the name of a company, say “Halliburton,” and instantly see details on all of its federal spending — along with all the campaign contributions the company made to your member of Congress?
If exposing federal dollars ever gets that easy, agencies might think twice before granting huge no-bid contracts; lawmakers may ease up on those earmarks for ridiculous pet projects — and disaster relief might get spent more wisely than it was after Hurricane Katrina.
The government data behind such complex searches exists today — as does the required search and mapping software. What’s been missing, however, is a government mandate to make its federal spending data more easily accessible to taxpayers.
President Bush on Sept. 26 signed a law that issues just such a mandate. By 2008, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) must launch a free Web site that allows anyone to search and find details on any federal grant or contract over $25,000.
The law requires only that the Web site allow scrutiny of federal spending via the site’s search engines. So sticking with the letter of the law won’t make the above scenarios a reality. For that to happen, OMB will have to embrace the law’s spirit as well: If the agency structures the data properly — and makes it easily accessible to software developers — scores of new public spending sites could emerge that combine federal spending data with mapping engines and other information. The result could very well be a new era of government accountability and transparency.
Amateur and professional government watchdogs can’t wait to get their hands on Uncle Sam’s expense details, which exist today only on incompatible, inconsistent and often inscrutable federal databases. One political blogger, Ed Morrissey of Captainsquartersblog.com, estimates the new law could launch 10,000 new blogs as an army of new “citizen auditors” plumbs the data for scandals, trends and tidbits.
“Think of citizen auditors as thousands, perhaps millions, of cleaner-fish preening the great white shark of our federal government,” wrote Eric Kavanagh, a Web editor for a nonprofit education training company who, as a New Orleans resident, saw firsthand the need for greater scrutiny over federal programs.
The blogosphere, in fact, credits itself for the law’s enactment. Bloggers “outed” two former chairmen of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Republican
The legislation’s brief history shows that government does not go into this project eagerly. An earlier House version included only grants, not contracts. State and federal agencies also complained of the burden of reformatting their past spending data into a one-size-fits-all structure. So the bill was watered down: OMB must now include only new spending from 2007 onward.
The watchdogs aren’t waiting for the law to take effect. This week the nonprofit groups OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation will unveil FedSpending.org, a six-month project that vastly improves online tracking of federal spending covering the past five years. The project was designed to set a higher bar for when OMB builds its Web site. “We’d be very happy in 2009 for OMB to put it out of business,” said OMB Watch Executive Director Gary Bass. “We hope that by us pushing the envelope, it forces OMB to push the envelope.”
Ideally, Bass said, OMB should embrace open-source software principles, meaning the government should make the software code identifying database table structures freely available so developers can write their own Web applications around the spending data.
He points to projects such as the Information Commons, an effort by the private firm MAYA Design Inc. to join multiple state, local and federal databases with mapping software such as Google Earth. An early example is HumanServices.net, which lets residents of Allegheny County, Pa., quickly find information 10,000 public programs, including mapping tools that locate after-school day care centers or medical clinics close to residents’ homes.
When Bush signed the new law, the public policy watchdogs and bloggers rejoiced. “I think we can finally break out the champagne,” Morrissey wrote in his blog when the new law was signed.
One of his readers, however, cautioned that “Big government and computers don’t seem to like each other very well. I’m absolutely positive that this latest project will not prove to be an exception, since the senators (and others) won’t let computery types who actually know what they’re doing within a mile of this project.”
I hope that won’t be the case. If OMB does it right, history might just consider this new law the most important achievement of the 109th Congress. And we would come closer to having a government of the people, for the people — and audited by the people.
Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing.