Senator chides White House for ignoring existing transparency laws

A Republican senator said on Tuesday that the Obama administration's open government agenda is diverting its attention from existing transparency laws, including a spending accountability act that President Obama co-sponsored when he was in the Senate.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told White House officials at a hearing on Tuesday that they are pursuing a transparency agenda that neglects other initiatives such as building out USAspending.gov, a searchable Web site containing all federal awards that Congress mandated the government to create in 2006.

"Had you put the same effort into USAspending.gov as you've put into everything else, we'd be a lot further down the road right now, wouldn't we?" he said at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services and International Security. "There is only one of these [transparency agendas] that's a law, and in fact we're out of compliance on the law. . . . The others are mandates that the president has set, and I applaud them, but in fact [they've held us up from] achieving what we were trying to achieve."

Coburn, with then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., co-authored the 2006 Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which required the creation of an online database of all federal contracts, loans, grants and other awards. The result of the law was USAspending.gov, which has come under fire in Congress and from the Government Accountability Office for providing incomplete and inaccurate data. A GAO report released March 12 noted that the Office of Management and Budget has failed to include subaward data on the site, information that was supposed to be included by January 2009, and officials overseeing the site have not issued a plan for including the data.

At the same time, the administration has focused on other online features, Web-based events and activities aimed at enhancing open government, which Obama defines as transparency, civic engagement and public-private collaboration.

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told the panel that OMB will specify procedures for reporting subaward information on April 7, as called for by an open government directive the White House issued in December. The directive assigns agencies aggressive deadlines for implementing steps intended to institutionalize Obama's three principles of open government.

Coburn said Obama's open government initiatives, including the directive, are preoccupying the administration. White House officials argue that many of the steps in the directive, as well as the administration's efforts to trace recovery act spending, are helping them carry out Coburn's 2006 law. For example, Web sites intended to hold stimulus recipients accountable for their spending -- such as FederalReporting.gov, which collects data on spending, and Recovery.gov, which organizes the information to track how it is used -- could forever change the way contract information is provided to the public, federal and state officials have said.

"I would submit that because of the recovery investments, we're going to be further along because we would have addressed one of the most complicated issues, which is how do you build a nationwide system that's going to be able to collect subaward data, and how do you do it in a time span where, within a year, you roll it out?" Kundra said. "And we're going to be the beneficiaries as we look forward in terms of leveraging that infrastructure, given the momentum that was behind driving transparency."

Coburn replied, "I don't doubt that. But what you just told me is you choose to do this rather than follow the [USAspending.gov] law. . . . When is it going to be accurate and when is the subaward and subgrantee information going to be on there?"

Kundra said the administration will launch upgrades to USAspending.gov "shortly," although he did provide a specific date.

"Do you have any idea of when?" asked subcommittee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del. "Around here that can be quite a while, you know."

Kundra replied, "In a matter of a month or so."

He noted that agencies have designated a high-level senior official to monitor the integrity of spending information on USAspending.gov and similar sites. In compliance with the open government directive, OMB also has required agencies to submit plans detailing how they will ensure the information is accurate, Kundra added. The plans must spell out technological and procedural changes, as well as how agencies will incorporate the controls into their operations.

He said the challenges in publishing subaward data are technical and logistical. From a technology perspective, the original platform for USASpending.gov wasn't scaled to manage transactions in the trillions of dollars governmentwide. From an organizational standpoint, "it's a pyramid problem," he said. "When you go down one level, you may deal with 100,000 recipients. When you go down the second or the third level, you may start dealing with a million."