| What: | Enactment of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act |
| When: | May 9, 2014 |
| Why it matters: | The landmark law transformed the way federal agencies collect and report their spending information, changing culture around budget transparency along the way. |
Politics
DATA Act spurred a quiet revolution in government spending transparency
A decade ago, data on federal spending was a bit of a mess. Sure, the USASpending.gov website existed, and it was populated with grant and contract expenditures from across the government. But that data tended to be inconsistent, was sometimes inaccurate, and was presented in a way that made it all but impossible to match the total of agencies’ transaction-level outlays with what their topline numbers said they were spending.
Things are still far from perfect, but by and large, the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) solved the challenge its backers were aiming to tackle: making it much easier to reliably track and analyze the flow of federal dollars from congressional appropriations all the way down to individual contracts.
“It is unacceptable for federal spending on data currently to be so inaccurate, unpredictable, inconsistent, and quite frankly expensive,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), one of the DATA Act’s lead champions, said in remarks on the House floor just before its passage in 2014. “Nobody can follow the money at the federal level these days in spite of the fact that we spend over 82 billion dollars on IT … If we are going to handle large data in a way that gives us predictable success rather than inevitable failure, we have to start by demanding that data be structured from the day it is created and formatted in a way that makes it capable of search, aggregating, downloading in bulk, and manipulating both for the benefit of insiders trying to find accountability, and outsiders legitimately exercising their right to know how government is spending their money.”
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And that’s largely what happened in the decade that followed, as agencies, led by the Treasury Department, quickly began to see compliance with the law as not just another compliance exercise, but one that could bring meaningful benefits to how they managed their own budgets.
“It created a whole new way of talking about data common identifiers that are persistent and that are used across government, and it had a forcing function that brought all these people together who otherwise wouldn’t have worked together across the government,” said Daniel Schuman, a government accountability and transparency expert who advocated for the law’s passage and now leads the American Governance Institute. “It prompted Treasury to change how its systems work, and [the Office of Management and Budget] and the agencies to do so as well. This has only happened a couple of times in my career, but it was a law that was aimed at changing a process, and it ended up changing culture, which in government is much more important.”
The DATA Act had several specific requirements, most of which were geared directly toward presenting a much more robust, reliable and detailed picture of federal spending via the USASpending.gov portal. But to achieve that big objective, agencies also had to coalesce around governmentwide data standards that are still being updated today, connect all of their contract, loan and award data to specific agency programs, and streamline their systems for collecting and reporting spending data.
Implementation and culture change
By 2012, the deadline for agencies to achieve implementation of the DATA Act, those goals were largely met — with some notable exceptions. A Government Accountability Office report summarizing implementation progress reported by each agency’s inspector general found, for example, that 45 of the 57 agencies included in the implementation reporting had achieved “excellent” or “higher” scores on the quality of spending data they were submitting for public consumption.
At that point, only 12 agencies reported “moderate” or “lower” quality, though those agencies are also some of the largest, including the departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.
Although public reporting on DATA Act implementation largely stopped in 2012, DoD, for example, continues to report challenges with implementing the law. In its annual financial report last year, the department acknowledged that its “complex operating environment does not enable matching awards to accounting data for public transparency.”
But the widespread implementation success started fairly soon after the act was signed into law as agencies began to see the value of speaking a common language with their fiscal affairs. Within the first few years, better quality data and a new USASpending website was already starting to come into view.
As part of a 2017 special report on the DATA Act’s implementation, Christina Ho, Treasury’s then-deputy assistant secretary for accounting policy and financial transparency, credited agencies working together for some of the early wins.
“Because we took the agile approach, which required us to engage with the agency and work together, every two weeks they had the opportunity to test. We built something, they tested it, then we adjusted based on the feedback,” Ho said. “So there were really no surprises for the agencies in terms of submission, because by the time they were submitting they’d already done a lot of testing, and also we have been very responsive. If there were changes they needed to make and they gave us feedback and we felt that was really good feedback, they get that updated in a matter of weeks. I would say that very few government entities can say they have that kind of response rate for any type of IT changes.”
Schuman said that collaborative approach — and openness to input from outside advocacy groups — also eventually paved the way for greatly improved public access to how taxpayer funds were being used.
“The idea was we’re going to make sure that even though we’re at different agencies or different components, that everything kind of lines up. And because we have this vision that we should be able to see everything and be able to zoom in or pull out … that doesn’t happen because there’s a bunch of people nerding really hard to make it happen. It happens because the data is set up so that anybody can do this,” he said. “This is not a function that requires a data call. This is, you go to the website and you download some information and it just works. Everyone is going to use the information that they’re generating and we’re going to make sure that we’re talking about it in the same way so that you’re actually comparing apples to apples. And that worked.”
Maintaining transparency momentum
However, even with the firm foundation the DATA Act created for government spending information, there are serious questions about how enduring the act’s legacy will be. Some of the same advocates who worked in collaboration with government leaders to make data more accessible are now taking their successors to court, accusing them of concealing that data.
The latest development on that front happened just this week, when a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had illegally removed a public database on the regular funding allotments OMB makes to federal agencies and ordered the Public Apportionments Database restored by no later than Thursday morning.
Acting under a congressional mandate, OMB had operated the website for nearly three years before Russ Vought, the OMB director, ordered the website shut down in March, saying it contained “sensitive, predecisional, and deliberative information” and that public disclosure of OMB’s apportionments “have a chilling effect on the deliberations within the Executive Branch.”
Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected those arguments in a decision Monday.
“The law is clear: Congress has sweeping authority to require public disclosure of how the Executive Branch is apportioning the funds appropriated by Congress,” he wrote. “Under the law, the decision of the Executive Branch must be made public within two days of the decision. And if defendants need to make a new decision, that new decision must also be made public within two days … there is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money. Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”
Data collection capacity
And there are also signs that the government’s capacity to collect and maintain data is dwindling. In its annual “Evidence Capacity Pulse Report,” published in June, the Data Foundation noted that chief data officer positions are vacant at six large agencies, partly due to resignations and reductions in force; nearly half of the government’s statistical agencies are operating with acting leadership; and some agencies are simply reducing the amount of data they collect because of “hiring freezes and suspension of researcher access to restricted data.”
Nick Hart, the foundation’s CEO, said President Trump has made some significant moves toward more open data, including by publishing a federal data strategy in his first term, and with an executive order to eliminate “information silos” earlier this year. But the trend toward reduced data capacity is noteworthy, he said.
“Back in May, the Data Foundation learned about a survey that DOGE was conducting of the federal statistical agencies, in particular data collections. And we thought this was a bit peculiar, in part because decisions typically about statistical activities are protected due to requirements for independence from the political processes,” Hart told Federal News Network. “And that’s not to say that we don’t use values and different perspectives to determine what information to collect and how to manage it. But typically, the leaders of statistical agencies or the chief statistician of the United States would be making those determinations about both what to collect and what not to collect, and when to end terminations. There are a number of federal statistical agencies that have been reducing data collections because of attrition in staff and also limited resources. That includes things like reducing the ways that we collect the CPI, the consumer price index, for inflation. And that will have potentially some impacts on users around the quality of the information in the years ahead.”
Indeed, maintaining federal agencies’ capacity to collect and make use of data over time was one of the foremost concerns on the minds of the DATA Act’s sponsors when the law was first passed.
“We have got to stay on this,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in 2015 as the law’s implementation was first getting underway. “As a business guy, you have got to invest to actually save money in the long run. Trying to make sure the agencies have the resources to do these reviews, set up these systems in a way that makes sense, will obviously save us resources in the long run and make our jobs as policy makers in making these budget decisions more accurate and appropriate.”
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