Abraham Lincoln said, “Let the people know the facts and all will be safe,” so the Great Emancipator would certainly cheer an unlikely group of United States senators who have recently joined forces to push a potentially landmark measure. That measure is designed to put every American citizen within a few mouse clicks of knowing the facts needed to track federal spending as never before.
This measure should receive top-priority attention in Congress and be signed by President Bush at the earliest possible opportunity. The proposal is known as the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590).
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is the original architect of the proposal, which was quickly co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Tom Carper, D-Del., and John McCain, R-Ariz.
Their bill requires the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to establish a publicly available, searchable and downloadable database of all federal contracts and grants. Access to the federal spending database would be free and would include comprehensive information about federal contracts; block, formula and project grants; cooperative agreements; direct, guaranteed and insured loans; direct payments; insurance and indirect financial assistance.
No information about credit-card transactions or minor purchases would be on the site.
The Coburn-Obama-Carper-McCain measure stipulates that within 30 days of awarding federal tax dollars, the government would have to post the name of the entity receiving the funds (excluding individuals receiving federal assistance), the amount of funds received by the entity in each of the past 10 years, detailed information about each of the transactions during the previous decade, the location of the entity, where the goodsor services purchased with the federal dollars will be performed or purchased, and a unique identifier, such as the Dun & Bradstreet number commonly used by the private sector.
Uncle Sam spends more than $250 billion annually on contracts to buy everything from aspirin to zirconium needed for its daily operations.
Billions of additional tax dollars flow from Washington to state and local governments, pension payments and interest payments to holders of the bonds used to finance the government?s chronic deficits.
In the meantime, a liberal advocacy group isn?t waiting on Congress and the president. OMB Watch expects to have its own Federal Contracts and Grants Database up on its Web site later this year, thanks to a grant by the Sunlight Foundation. OMB Watch is doing the hard and expensive work of linking the U.S. Census Bureau?s Federal Assistance Awards Data System and the General Services Administration?s Federal Procurement Data System. When it?s completed, the OMB Watch database will mark a major advance in the ability of the public to hold the federal government accountable for how it spends our tax dollars.
But the Coburn-Obama-Carper-McCain measure would be even better, and if Congress and the president act now, odds are good that OMB could have the more comprehensive spending database available to the public in two years.
There are no legitimate reasons to delay.
