In March, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy asked agencies to improve the quality of the spending data they submit to the government’s database of record, the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. Agency progress reports were due to OFPP last week.
Data quality has been a major stumbling block for FPDS-NG, and there are concerns that USAspending.
gov, the new federal spending database, will have the same problems.
Glenn Perry, the Education Department’s senior procurement executive, said the memo spurred agencies to improve how they collect and report procurement data.
“We are doing things ongoing so that when data is generated, we are trying to figure out the best ways to get quality built upfront instead of after the fact,” Perry said.
— Jason Miller
Robert Shea, the Office of Management and Budget’s associate director of administration and government performance, said he worried last year when a bill that would require the government to create a public database of all contracts, grants, loans and other federal transactions — about $2.8 trillion in total — started gaining support on Capitol Hill. He organized a parade of agency experts to tell lawmakers why it couldn’t be done or how someone had already done it.
“I had enormous skepticism whether this could be accomplished,” Shea said last week during the launch of USAspending. gov in Washington. “Even when the bill became law, we said it couldn’t be done.”
However, after Shea became one of the program leaders, he and others began to realize that the government could develop such a database and finish it two weeks before the Jan. 1 deadline set by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.
“This is an example of what can happen when Congress and the executive branch have a shared goal and Congress holds the executive branch accountable,” Shea said. “We saw what could be done when OMB Watch launched their version, and we partnered with them.”
That partnership enabled the Bush administration to buy OMB Watch’s software for about $600,000. The government developed the entire database for less than $1 million, a figure that doesn’t count the hundreds of hours agencies spent collecting, formatting and uploading data on all spending transactions. Agencies spent more than $400 billion on contracts and $488 billion on grants in fiscal 2006.
Shea said the first iteration of the federal spending database includes all transactions, despite some initial concern that the site could provide only contracts and grants spending. He credited the agencies with defining the requirements, producing the data and ensuring the site’s quality.
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