Social Science Statistics Blog

« Nickerson on “How (and how not) to Study Voter Registration Experimentally” | Main | useR! 2008 in Dortmund »

27 January 2008

Opening the government's books at FedSpending.org

FedSpending.org has been on my list of new data resources to check out for a while now. This is a project of budget watchdog OMB Watch that brings government data on contracts and awards together in a single searchable database at www.fedspending.org. After looking into it this week I can report that it looks like a very useful resource, interesting not only for the data it provides but as yet another example of the phenomenon of private groups repackaging government data for public use in the name of transparency and accountability.

First, on the data: you can use FedSpending.org to get pretty good detail on contracts handed out by the federal government, including the contracting agency, the company to which the contract was awarded, the size and purpose of the contract, the location of the company, and the location where the contract was carried out. You can subset it in interesting ways, searching by congressional district or by contractor. You can even specify contractor characteristics. For example, this search will return contracts awarded to minority-owned businesses in Massachusetts. Finally, you can output search results in various formats (including CSV), and there is even an API that allows you to generate your queries programmatically so that, with a little bit of code to parse the XML, you could systematically build an interesting dataset without spending time clicking and downloading by hand.

I view this site as part of a phenomenon where data released by the government is being repackaged and publicly released in a useful format by private actors. Another intriguing example is GovTrack, a project built by a Princeton undergrad several years ago (he's now a linguistics grad student) that parses the congressional record and a bunch of other public information and provides email notifications so that you can track any legislator or issue. A more professional recent attempt to bring transparency to Capitol Hill is OpenCongress.

I'm interested in whether academics and other researchers find useful ways to exploit these new resources. I suspect the pretty presentation that these sites provide will be of limited use to researchers, who are used to grappling with the raw data, but other aspects of cleaning up the data for public consumption (for example, tagging elements of the congressional record based on which members are mentioned) seem like they could save us some steps. And the reach and effectiveness of this kind of transparency effort is itself a topic worthy of research in my view.

One of the interesting things about FedSpending is that last month OMB released its own website providing public access to data on federal contracts and awards, at USASpending.gov. On the surface, USASpending looks pretty different from FedSpending -- the government site's design is clean and patriotic, prominently featuring a US flag and the White House facade, while FedSpending's design stays true the site's watchdog roots with a green color scheme and a washed-out dollar bill as a header. But look more closely and you find that USASpending is basically a clone of FedSpending, identical down to the examples in the documentation. It turns out that a piece of 2006 legislation (the bill co-sponsored by Obama that was held up by the notorious "secret hold") required OMB to build a website to publicly disclose data on federal contracts and awards. But at the time OMB Watch was already almost done with a site of its own that would do essentially everything specified in the legislation. So in a bizarre twist, OMB decided to hire OMB Watch (which, as the name suggests, usually makes its bread by criticizing OMB) to lend its technology to the government project. Based on the outcome, it looks like OMB is basically running a clone of the OMB Watch site. So much for legislating transparency.

Incidentally, can anyone use FedSpending (or USASpending) to find the contract in which OMB hired OMB Watch? I couldn't. The Washington Post article where I learned about the arrangement says there was an intermediary contractor, and the contract appears not to have been sourced from OMB, so I wasn't able to locate it either by the contractor or the contracting agency. Oh well.

Posted by Andy Eggers at January 27, 2008 2:49 PM

Comments

Posted by: Patrick Brandt at January 28, 2008 9:49 AM

Posted by: Ben at February 18, 2008 11:22 AM

Notification

Post a comment