New spending site debuts

The Treasury released on the new beta version of the USASpending.gov site, designed to show off the financial information collected and disseminated under the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act.

After three years spent in governmentwide preparations for the implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, the site debuted on May 9. The beta site provides standardized machine-readable data on agency appropriations and expenditures, which can be browsed by agency or category, downloaded in bulk or accessed directly through an application programming interface.

The Data Act required agencies to submit their spending data in the new format by May 9, and while not all agencies are yet in full compliance, every CFO Act agency was able to submit at least some data by that deadline. Proponents of the law characterized this initial data call as simply the starting point for increasing financial transparency.

The Beta.USAspending.gov site, which was developed by 18F and the Treasury Department, draws on more than 400 datasets from more than 100 federal agencies. It allows users to trace government spending from appropriation to obligation to payments.

"Starting today, we can finally run data analytics across the whole government, all agencies, to illuminate waste and fraud," Data Coalition executive director Hudson Hollister noted in a May 9 blog post.

The beta version of the site is now available here.  

A version of this story first appeared on GCN, a sister site to FCW.