releases: https://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/articles?ID=341de686-137f-4f9b-b8e0-ee8965d50bc7
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
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| https://www.portman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/articles?ID=341de686-137f-4f9b-b8e0-ee8965d50bc7 | Portman, Warner, Issa, and Cummings Joint Op-Ed: DATA Act Expands Transparency and Accountability for Federal Spending | 2013-12-17 | 2013 | 2013-12 | Republican | House | OH | Rob Portman | P000449 | www.portman.senate.gov | legacy | Washington, D.C. – In case you missed it, U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) wrote a joint Op-Ed in The Hill to highlight the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA), legislation that would expand transparency and accountability for federal spending by requiring standardized reporting of federal spending to be posted to a single website. Excerpts are included below and the full Op-Ed can be viewed here. The DATA Act will shed light on government spending The Hill December 16, 2013 By Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) Transparency is critical to our democracy, especially for a federal government that spent about $3.5 trillion last year. Policymakers and taxpayers should be able to quickly answer some basic questions about federal spending, like how much did we spend, and who received our money? Determining this very basic information can take countless hours of work, if it is able to be determined at all. … But hopefully, those days are almost over. The four of us have teamed up on an important bipartisan bill that modernizes the way the federal government collects and presents spending information. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, or 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. The DATA Act will 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. Here is how it will work. First, our legislation will expand the USAspending.gov site to include spending data for all federal funds—by appropriation, federal agency, program, and function. Currently, it covers only grants, contracts and other federal awards. This feature is important because there is currently no place to find and compare all government spending. The information also will be made available in downloadable, easily-accessible format. Second, the DATA Act will set government-wide financial data standards. Currently, there are no consistent standards, which makes much of the data on USAspending.gov confusing and unreliable. Without consistent data standards, taxpayers and policymakers can’t compare apples to apples. Third, the DATA Act will reduce reporting costs for entities that are awarded taxpayer dollars. The current reporting systems are duplicative and frustrating. States and organizations like universities are awarded hundreds of different grants from dozens of federal agencies each year. Oftentimes, they must file financial reports on an annual, quarterly, and monthly basis to each of those agencies on each of those grants. The current system is fractured; the state or university may be required to maintain completely different systems to file what is ultimately a very similar report. If this reporting were streamlined, our institutes of higher education and our state and local governments could direct more funding to programs and less to overhead costs. Finally, the DATA Act will make other efforts to enhance transparency-through-technology, like the President’s Open Data Policy and the modernization of the Government Performance and Results Act, truly useful. We can post performance metrics for every federal program on Performance.gov., and we can post all data sets collected by every agency on Data.gov, but without information about where taxpayer resources are going, there is no context for policymakers and the American people to make informed decisions… | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |