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Data and Government: The DATA Act – Making Federal Spending Transparent
The May of 2017, Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (the DATA Act) mandated that data be reported from federal agencies. That data is collected and is then made available so that the public can begin to track government spending. The intent is to make government spending more transparent and to make it possible to track how federal funds are spent and to determine whether or not there is duplication and waste in spending.
Christina Ho, the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for accounting policy and financial transparency, said that “our tagline is better data, better decisions, better government.”
Tim Gribben, Chief Financial Officer and Associate Administrator for Performance Management , said that “I said in the very beginning, I thought it was a boondoggle… But through my experience of working through the pilot and then through submission, I would say that I don’t feel that way at all anymore. I definitely see the benefits to the DATA Act… It’s definitely not a boondoggle.”
But expect the government to go even further. Frank Brizzi, director of resource management transformation at DHS’ Office of the CFO, said that “the DATA Act just kind of primed the pump… It’s great, the next phase of our data management approach is to go after unified investment data. We want to see a unified view of capital investments across the department. That’s huge. That’s accounting-line level data that we’re going to be collecting. We’ll bring that into a data warehouse, and we’ll connect it with other data such as DATA Act, we’ll connect it with tier submission data, we’re going to connect it with our budget formulation data, we’re going to connect it in any way possible, and allow the analysts to come in and pull the data how they need it. It’s revolutionary for us. Without a single financial system, we have no single repository for financial data and that’s what we’re embarking on, and this is DATA Act pushing that effort forward.”
