Preventing Fraud Requires Better Data on Federal Awards

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Dear Mr. Vice President, Vice Chairman Ferguson, Senior Advisor Miller, and Members of the Task Force:

Over the past several decades, Project On Government Oversight (POGO) and National Taxpayers Union (NTU) have supported executive and legislative branch efforts to better identify and address fraud in government programs. In the course of your work, we urge you to focus on augmenting and sharpening the existing transparency tools that can often make a vital difference in conserving and recovering taxpayer resources.

Each year, the federal government spends trillions of dollars in contracts, loans, grants, and other forms of financial assistance. It is essential that elected officials and the public have transparency into how and where those funds are spent. To that end, Congress passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act in 2006, which required information about federal awards to be posted on a searchable, publicly accessible website.¹ The George W. Bush administration quickly launched USAspending.gov, which has since served as the primary public portal for information on federal awards.

For the past twenty years, good government watchdogs, taxpayer advocates, and academics have worked with Congress and the federal government to expand and improve this reporting. This public data is a critical oversight tool to help eliminate fraud by allowing broader review to identify questionable spending. But too frequently, missing or incomplete information mars the practical usage of USAspending.gov.² POGO and NTU write to urge you to improve this essential system.

While the administration has the authority under existing statutes to make many needed fixes and improvements, we would encourage the Task Force to work with Congress to establish stronger statutory requirements around award reporting to ensure that future administrations continue to meet the higher standard. There are a number of notable pieces of legislation focused on USAspending.gov already proposed that we encourage the Task Force to support.

The Expedited Transparency Act (H.R. 7974), introduced by Representatives Josh Brecheen (R-OK), Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), and Chip Roy (R-TX), would require that all disbursements be made public on USAspending.gov within three days, accelerating the path to transparency.³ The Federal Subaward Reporting System Modernization and Expansion Act (H.R. 7598), introduced by Representatives Nick Langworthy (R-NY) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), would update the federal subaward reporting system, providing a more complete picture of spending.⁴ Other reforms we recommend the Task Force consider include requiring robust award descriptions, explicitly requiring agencies to report on spending, and bringing the data collected for contracts versus non-contract awards into parity.

There is bipartisan appetite to improve USAspending.gov, and we are eager to work with you to make our federal funds more transparent. Support from the administration on legislative proposals would be immensely helpful in moving forward. The administration also could move forward under existing authority to immediately begin implementing the improvements proposed in legislation with the hope that the statutes would eventually be updated to match the new standards.

If you have questions or want to discuss further, please contact Brandon Arnold, executive vice president at NTU ([email protected]), or Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst at POGO ([email protected]).