June 18, 2012 3:07PM

On Transparent Data: Use It or Lose It, OMB

By Jim Harper

At a recent event on “lessons learned” from the Recovery Act, Earl Devaney, who served as chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, talked about the “crying need for data standardization in government.” (35:00) Good data wouldn’t only help expose waste, fraud, and abuse. It would help prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.


“There was so much sunlight on [Recovery Act] money,” he said, “that the bad guys just sort of said to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll just continue to steal Medicare money…’.” (38:25) That’s entertaining stuff.


But the really interesting comments came from Danny Werfel, controller of the Office of Management and Budget. He criticized the DATA Act, which would create an independent commission to standardize federal spending data. (40:30) “Slammed” it, according to Federal Computer Week.


The OMB has effective and transparent processes in place to create rules for agencies to follow in obligating and spending funds, Werfel said, and it has a history of working with agencies to do so. A new commission would add “a new layer of regulation.” Why would we not “leverage the existing instruments of government”?


Here’s why: The OMB still has not produced a machine‐​readable organization chart for the federal government. There is still no authoritative and reliable set of identifiers computers can use to identify even the top two layers of the federal bureaucracy: agencies and bureaus.


If the OMB can’t do this utterly basic stuff, if it can’t come up with standard identifiers for the programs underneath agencies and bureaus, and if it can’t create a uniform process for identifying and tracking awards and outlays of taxpayer dollars, there may not be as much there to “leverage” as we thought.


President Obama came into office promising great strides in transparency. By the end of his third year in office, he complied with his Sunlight Before Signing campaign promise just 52.4% of the time. President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget publishes the government’s top‐​level organization chart in a disorderly PDF document.


Why wouldn’t the public go looking for a replacement?