Granular Oversight: Coalition Urges an Endpoint-to-Endpoint Recovery.gov
BY Nancy Scola | Sunday, April 19 2009
A coalition of some of the biggest and best-known good government groups working has released a new report urging the Obama Administration to insist upon near total end-to-end transparency in tracking the spending of billions in stimulus dollars.
The Coalition for an Accountable Recovery (CAR), comprised of Center for Responsive Politics, Common Cause, Consumers Union, OMB Watch, Project on Government Oversight, Public Knowledge, Sunlight Foundation, Taxpayers for Common Sense, U.S. PIRGs, and dozens of other groups have detailed recommendations in response to OMB's recent call for public comment. The deadline for comment was Friday afternoon, and CAR has packaged together a series of suggestions aimed at ensuring the honest and ethical use of public funds. CAR paints a picture of open and transparent oversight that is at once more granular than what OMB has proposed and reaches farther down into the trenches to track the impact of dollars where they're actually being spent on the ground. Rather than focus on first recipients -- the first stop for federal dollars -- a more transparent model involves tracking stimulus spending at the edges.
Among CAR's recommendations to OMB in the report:
- Rather than defining "recipient" to mean whomever gets stimulus dollars directly from the federal government, the coalition argues that any entity (other than an individual) who collects $25,000 or more in stimulus funds should have the obligation to report directly to the government -- whether that's a state mosquito abatement program or local non-profit.
- Require all recipients to report estimates of how many jobs they've created with stimulus dollars, and post those totals online -- rather than simply aggregating the data that first-level recipients collect.
- Lower the threshold of which contracts have to be posted to Recovery.gov from half a million dollars to $200,000. And rather than posting contract summaries, make full contract language available online.
- Make contracts easily searchable by various criteria, such as location, dollar amount, and name of recipient.
- Be sure that the contracting data posted online to Recovery.gov and FederalReporting.gov -- the coming reporting tool for recipients -- also be published in data feeds that are easy to find, cumulative, and well-structured.
- In what looks like a major change, the coalition recommends that should OMB sticks with its plan to stick with state-level reporting, then instead of letting states report back to the federal agency from which they got the money, state-level contractors (such as a state agency) be required to report back to one central federal clearinghouse.
Tracking stimulus dollars all the way down to the ultimate recipient is an ambitious approach. The CAR coalition here is setting a gold standard for transparency and accountability. Now it's up to OMB to figure out how to make it work.