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USAspending's Limitations
 By Tom Shoop | Monday, May 19, 2008  |  05:29 PM

Allison Stanger, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, had an interesting piece in the Washington Post yesterday about the limitations of the much-vaunted USAspending.org site, the official federal Web portal for government spending data. Her beef is twofold: that the information it contains is a constantly moving target (it's impossible to tell when a year's data has been "closed out") and that the Office of Management and Budget says it is "cleansing" the data, but doesn't make clear exactly what that means.

There are other issues with the USAspending.gov. Here's one: it's hard to tell exactly how much money some companies get from Uncle Sam. Do a simple search for information on Boeing, for example, and you'll get 14 different results, because data on some of the company's subsidiaries and joint ventures is listed separately. You'd need to add all of those figures up to get a more accurate picture of Boeing's contract dollars.

These are among the reasons why we at Government Executive continue to work with our friends at Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. to refine the federal contracting data we publish each year in our annual Top 200 Federal Contractors issue. In fact, we're doing so right now, in preparation for publication of the special issue in August. Information about how we use the data is available here.



Comments


As a taxpayer, I too, would like to see USASpending get better. However, as a senior contracting officer, I've used the existing data to great advantage. I can access contract award information for prospective contractors, which assists me in performing my determination of contractor responsibility. As to the matter of the difficulty in drilling down to specific Boeing or Lockheed Martin division or location, I would suggest adding the ability to search by DUNS and DUNS+4. This would make it easy to look for information on those firms who have multiple DUNS. Since the information in USASpending comes from the FPDS-NG database, it should be a simple matter to include the DUNS as a search option. I tried to do an "advanced" search by DUNS in USASpending for a firm I know we do business with and it came up as "no results". Come on Mr. Shea, this should be a simple problem to solve.

Helen  | Friday, May 23, 2008 |  08:18 AM


Tom:

Thanks for bringing attention to this issue. USASpending can and will get better, but I hope this doesn’t distract from the fact that it provides better access to Federal spending data than any other source, as required by the Federal Funding Transparency and Accountability Act. It’s not perfect by any means. We can be clearer about when we update data and what we do with the data we get, and we will. More importantly, we’re going to come up with an accurate measure of what agencies are reporting versus what they should be reporting. As they say, you get what you measure.

Keep the feedback coming. It will help USASpending.gov get better and better.

Robert Shea
Associate Director for OMB Administration and Government Performance
Office of Management and Budget

Robert Shea  | Wednesday, May 21, 2008 |  05:36 PM



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Government Executive Editor Tom Shoop takes a look at news and events affecting the federal bureaucracy, from the perspective of a longtime observer of government.

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