A government website meant to track federal spending is off by more than $1.3 trillion, says the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit watchdog.

When the watchdog compared data posted online at USASpending.gov, a congressionally-mandated site meant to track all individual federal disbursements for contracts, grants and loans, with another federal database that just tracks government grant and loan spending by program, it found more than $1.3 trillion worth of inaccurate or incomplete fiscal 2009 records in USASpending.gov.  

"Some of the numbers are too big, some are too small, some are missing completely," said Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation executive director, speaking Sept. 7 at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C.

"The data powering USASpending is broken," she said. The foundation counted in its $1.3 trillion figure any USASpenging.gov record that was inconsistent with other data, that was filed late, or that lacked required detail. However, inconsistency accounted for most of the $1.3 trillion figure, Miller said.

"When we say things just don't add up, we mean it," she said. An example on the Sunlight Foundation website called ClearSpending, meant to draw attention to USASpending.gov's shortcomings, cites a failure by the Agriculture Department to report $9 billion in school lunch subsidies.  

Federal officials, Miller added, know about the problem but rather than resolving it, have instead merely redesigned USASpending.gov several times, "each one flashier than the next."

"We are beginning to worry that the [Obama] administration is more interested in style than substance," she added. Perhaps ironically, USASpending.gov is the result of 2006 legislation co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

During her speech, Miller also criticized other government transparency efforts of the Obama administration. Data.gov, meant to be a one-stop-shop for high-value data sets, remains mediocre despite its also improved design and somewhat improved organization, she said.

"It turns out that the government has some interesting ideas about what counts as 'high value' information. The Department of the Interior seems to feel that population counts of wild horses and burros are 'high value' but records of safety violations like the ones that seem to have led to the Upper Branch Mine disaster are not," she said.

In all, Obama's open government efforts face a danger of being forgotten rather than truly heralding a transformation, Miller warned.

For more:
- read a transcript of Miller's speech, or watch a video of an excerpt
- go to ClearSpending, or watch an introductory video about it
- go to USASpending.gov or go to data.gov

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