A website that Congress set up to track federal spending contains mostly inaccurate data and internal inconsistencies, according to a new report Wednesday from a bipartisan group of senators.
Congress created the website, USAspending.gov, to allow the public to understand and monitor where the federal government’s trillions of dollars in spending goes.
But the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations checked the website’s numbers and found that they aren’t correct. People who actually used the site to learn about federal spending would be misled.
In particular, more than half of the data that federal agencies submitted to the site for the second quarter of 2017 was inaccurate, based on inspector general reviews of the numbers. Site users would see different spending numbers based on how they searched for them. And 96 percent of the data submitted by the Treasury — the department responsible for ensuring the accuracy of agency submissions — was itself inaccurate.
“It is troubling that most federal agencies failed to comply with this law, and more than half of all the spending data federal agencies submitted was inaccurate,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the chairman of the subcommittee.
Portman produced the report with Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the subcommittee. They called on the Treasury and Office of Management to require better data from agencies.
