Americans had a hard time finding out where their hard-earned tax dollars went. Until December 2007.
Now we can track contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans, thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 of Tom Coburn and Barack Obama.
What's at the site? Read on for 13 examples (contracts with KBR/Halliburton, VECO, and General Atomics, Tom Delay's pork and Duke Cunningham's backers, no bid contracts with defense contractors, contracts with shadowy Blackwater subsidiaries, declining support for homeless veterans with increasing support for abstinence programs, spending on guided missiles, maintenance of dams, and stranger things including flags, perfumes, hand tools, and boll weevil eradication).
I also talk about how this fits into Sen. Obama's broader plans to make government transparent.
This diary is an updated version of an old writeup. In now includes, among other things, many new examples, fixed links, and updated content.
One of the reasons I support Barack Obama is that he has been working on these issues for many years and has a very strong record on ethics reform and government transparency. The opening of the USAspending.gov site is another example of Obama's real results, and gives us confidence that Obama can and will follow through on cleaning up Washington, taking on special interests and lobbyists, and restoring Americans' trust in the federal government. (I know both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards proposed transparency plans, and I'm glad they did.)
Another kossack said it well:
I don't just want someone who will not be like the Republicans. I want someone who will make it so a George Bush administration and a Tom Delay Congress can never, ever happen again. That doesn't just mean partisan victory, it means changing the hard-and-fast rules and shoring up our defenses against abuse of power.
The bill faced serious opposition, including anonymous holds by some of the biggest porkbarrel spenders (including our friends Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd), but in the end, Coburn and Obama prevailed. Some have expressed surprise at Coburn cooperating with a Democrat, but as many have pointed out, this bill is another fine example of Obama reaching across the aisle to find common ground without sacrificing his progressive principles.
Much has already been written about Obama's technology and open government plan to make not only spending but meetings, policy discussions, and pending legislation open to the public for comment - a plan that was praised by Lawrence Lessig and others. Check out the great diary by kid oakland on this subject.
Let's look at the site and see what it can do for us.
The primary goal is for the site to be a complete database of government spending - all contracts must be entered into the database within 30 days (as opposed to only select contracts, within 6 months, as it used to be).
The site self-analyzes its completeness and accuracy, and lists which agencies are reporting incomplete data. It's clearly a treasure trove of data and is a huge step forward towards government accountability, but this isn't a one time deal - this is necessarily an imperfect and ongoing process. What is nice is how user friendly the site is. And, to my surprise (especially for a government site), an API is available to make it easy to extract data.
Time for some examples.
Example 1:
The list of transactions with KBR, Inc. (formerly part of Halliburton) in 2007. This came out to a paltry sum of $4.3 billion, which is nothing compared to previous years as the bar graph from the summary page shows:
Example 2:
Tom Delay's porkbarrel spending (in Texas's 22nd congressional district) is another fine example of government gone wrong. As pointed out by psericks, Tom Delay was elected majority leader in 2003 and resigned in 2006. What does the graph show? A peak in 2005 of $3.4 billion sent straight to Delay's district.
Example 3:
No bid contracts are among the darkest corners of federal spending - the lack of competition in these contracts is in large part what leads to overcharging by contractors and waste of taxpayer dollars. Well, there was $107 billion in no-bid contracts in 2007, including money to some companies I had never heard of, including $4 billion to Armor Holdings, Inc. (now owned by BAE Inc.) and, strangely, $276 million to the government of Canada.
Example 4:
Half of the difficulty in keeping our government accountable is being able to separate the wheat from the chaff - that is, being able to get at the data for the above-the-board stuff that goes on so we can focus in on the under-the-table dealings that are inevitably taking place. Without the data, it's hard to separate the two. So, drilling down a little more into no bid spending, we find $6 billion for guided missiles, mostly to Lockheed and Raytheon.
Example 5:
Sometimes, the trend in spending leaves us asking questions. For example, take a look at spending on dam operation. The graph's trend, with a huge dropoff in spending after 2000 leading up to 2005 may say a lot about priorities.
Example 6:
The spending also starts getting a bit absurd once you dig into it. Consider the spending on flags, perfumes, toilet preparations, and powders, and hand tools.
Example 7:
I should point to paper shredding contracts that have gone through the roof during the Bush administration (as discussed in a story a little while back).
Example 8:
The VECO corporation has been involved with some serious bribery in Alaska. (Bruce Weyhrauch and Pete Kott, both former Alaska state Republican legislators, have been arrested and accused of soliciting and accepting bribes from VECO.) Fortunately for us, plenty of the money that was being funneled into their pockets was ours - to the tune of $2 billion. (VECO is now owned by CH2M Hill.)
Example 9:
We all know the story of Duke Cunningham: congressman from the 50th CD in California, resigned in late 2005 and was sentenced to prison for accepting over $2 million in bribes from corporations. First, it's interesting see that in 2005 alone, $4 billion went to the 50th CD. (I was surprised, because to me the 50th is a rich North San Diego bedroom community, and what industry is prominent there, such as Qualcomm, isn't getting much in the way of contracts.) Of course, the company, MZM Inc., that was bribing Cunningham first changed its name to Athena Innovative Solutions and then was purchased by CACI International Inc., which has its own black marks, and gets its own hefty $1 billion a year.
Example 10:
Enter the shadowy world of rendition. Well-sourced details are hard to find, but from some reports, the company Presidential Airways, a (temporary?) subsidiary of Blackwater Worldwide Inc. that is technically based abroad, has been involved in rendition as part of our war on terrorism. From what I can tell, we gave $28 million in contracts in 2007 to some other shell company, EP Investments LLC, which is the parent company to Presidential Airways, but also does business as Blackwater Aviation. Ugh. (Now we just need someone to create a nice cross-site mashup with a genealogical database of businesses complete with their parents and subsidiaries and shells.)
Example 11:
The database also tracks assistance programs, which includes grants and other similar spending. On that front, we can find some weird trends in spending, including a disappearance of spending for homeless veteran reintegration and veteran life insurance (assistance?). At the same time, we began spending $6 million on abstinence programs.
Example 12:
Perhaps the most obvious statement on Earth is that we spend a lot of money on Social Security each year. Maybe a less obvious statement is that we have given nearly $1 billion in loans for Boll Weevil eradication in the last 7 years. (No doubt it is a useful program for cotton growers, but the amount of money lent is still staggering. And while they're loans, who's going to guarantee the loans besides the government itself?)
Example 13:
One would expect that a corporation such as General Atomics (manufacturer of the Predator UAV) that lives off the federal government and engages in questionable lobbying wouldn't be the recipient of grant money, but they are.
There are a million more examples, and I'm really looking forward to seeing them in the coming weeks and months. It's hard to say whether this will change the ways contractors behave and porkbarrel spending is done, but it will expose no-bid contracts to a greater extent than has been done in the past, and moreover, will enable ordinary Americans to help be watchdogs.
Finally, a few asides. First, my goal is in no way to diminish the great work done by many open government sites and anti-porkbarrel advocacy groups, and the information that is available on their sites; however, the great thing about this bill is that it combines the best of both worlds - access to hard data from government and technology from advocacy groups. Second, I have seen claims that this was Coburn's bill and not a fully co-written "Coburn-Obama" bill (a common claim I see to dismiss any of Obama's legislative accomplishments), but that claim is easily debunked by both Coburn's press release and Obama's press release. Third, I know there was some discussion about whether there are a few agencies that will try to evade this legislation by claiming special circumstances; this is a matter of enforcement, and Sen. Obama's campaign has stated that this legislation will be enforced by an Obama White House.
I'll close with one more quote:
He's speaking to the one overlooked issue on which his record and his plans give him a clear-cut advantage over the other candidates, ethics reform. That may be a little meta for some people, not quite bread-and-butter enough, but it will very strongly improve the government's ability to handle those bread-and-butter issues for many decades. You can't bake bread with a broken oven.