A New System Won’t Boost Transparency — Fix USASpending.gov

President Donald Trump’s recent executive order, “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative,” authorizes the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in collaboration with the heads of federal agencies, to create a centralized federal award payment system for each executive agency. According to the administration, the executive order aims “to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable.” However, the directive is riddled with exemptions and, even if executed fully, would fail to address real issues in federal spending transparency. Instead of creating a new system, it would be more worthwhile for executive agencies and Congress to improve USAspending.gov and determine the oversight roles of the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget in spending data reporting. 

The Inefficiency of Creating a New System

For years, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has worked with the Treasury Department, the Office of Management and Budget, and members of Congress from both political parties to make it easier to track federal spending. Trillions of taxpayer dollars are spent every year and the American people do not have full visibility into where that money goes. Without proper tracking, it’s more difficult for our government to identify fraud and abuse and makes it harder for the branch of government closest to the public — Congress — to track and evaluate spending in constituents’ communities.

Based on the executive order’s language, every applicable agency would be required to build a new “centralized technological system” to record each grant and contract payment issued by the agency, along with a written justification for each payment. However, much is exempt from the order: direct payments to individuals (for example, Social Security), in addition to all spending by the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence community, and the military. Each agency would also be required to issue their own guidance on implementing the new system, which could create over 100 different standards on what constitutes a written justification, or how the system works. And there is no mention that this information would be available to Congress or the public.   

The Trump administration’s decision to create a new system is not novel. The Biden administration also sought to create new tools to tell the stories of federal spending without addressing underlying issues in the data. Creating a new system by requiring agencies to report spending information at least twice is inefficient and unnecessary. We already have a system that tracks agency expenditures: USAspending.gov.

Improving USAspending.gov

The creation of USAspending.gov was driven by an appetite for increased transparency around federal spending and accountability to the American public, very similar to the goals stated in Trump’s executive order. USAspending.gov is public and managed by the Treasury Department, Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration. It provides information on federal awards, agency profiles, subawards, and includes interactive tools that allow users to filter data and download datasets. Spending information on the site is extracted from multiple government systems, using over 400 data entries.     

Building USAspending.gov required years of work, and improving this system will require more. Federal agencies and Congress must continue to invest in this important tool that helps elected officials, states, policymakers, journalists, researchers, and the public identify how the government spends taxpayer money. Keeping information public, accurate, and comprehensive is the kind of “radical transparency” the public needs to identify wasteful spending, not building new agency systems that may make data private and unreported.

USAspending.gov is more comprehensive than the systems the executive order suggests and is a strong foundation upon which improvements can be made. Executive agencies and Congress should address issues with the current system by implementing solutions developed by experts and researchers, including POGO. 

One of the challenges of ensuring federal spending transparency is determining who is responsible for overseeing agency compliance. Currently, there is a lack of oversight between Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget for which agency should be held accountable for data quality. In 2023, the Government Accountability Office recommended that Congress amend the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) to explicitly assign Treasury the responsibility “to periodically assess and determine which agencies must report data to USAspending.gov and to oversee the completeness of reporting by all required agencies.” This would address the persistent question of who is responsible for the quality of data in the system, but it has not been pursued by Congress or via administrative action. 

To improve the information on USAspending.gov, Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget should establish clearer guidelines on what constitutes a comprehensive award description, and the Government Accountability Office or the General Services Administration’s inspector general should conduct an audit on subaward reporting. On the legislative front, Congress should pass legislation expanding data collection and requiring that all agencies report spending data. Congress should also consider legislation focusing on oversight improvements and expanding subaward data, including Representative Nick Langworthy’s (R-NY) bill, the Federal Subaward Reporting System Modernization and Expansion Act (H.R. 7598), endorsed by POGO.

Congress recognizes the importance of giving the public access to information on how taxpayer dollars are used. Since 2023 (from the last Congress to the current one), a total of 424 bills have been introduced focused on enhancing federal spending transparency. The appetite for improvements is clear, but these efforts remain futile if there is no action. 

Past attempts to create new spending tracking systems and the recent executive order fail to seriously acknowledge the fact that USAspending.gov requires larger, collective contributions from both Congress and the executive branch. If Congress is serious about making federal spending more transparent, it needs to pass legislation to address the shortcomings of USAspending.gov. And if the administration is serious, there is much it can do without Congress that does not require creating a new technological system within agencies (and leaving out some agencies altogether). 

The Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse, which means it has the authority to decide how our tax dollars are used. The executive branch must acknowledge this by carefully outlaying the money as directed by Congress. USAspending.gov’s foundation already tracks trillions of dollars in federal spending — and has the capacity to track more and better data — compared to the Trump administration’s flawed executive order. 

The American people will be better off when Congress and the administration address the issues of our current tracking system rather than creating a duplicative and disruptive one that fails to enhance overall transparency in government spending. POGO will continue to rely on its expertise to advance greater federal spending transparency, and we know that this executive order simply would not achieve that aim.