When President Barack Obama signed into law a $787 billion economic stimulus package on Feb. 17, he also approved an unprecedented set of transparency and oversight provisions. The law calls for the establishment of a Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to oversee the disbursement of more than $500 billion in federal cash outlays and a website to publicly track the spending.

Obama announced on Feb. 23 that Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney will be tapped to head the Board. Devaney, labeled the "busiest gumshoe inside the federal bureaucracy," has been lauded for investigating and uncovering corruption in deals with Native American tribes by former uber-lobbyist and now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff. Obama's selection of Devaney indicates the degree of seriousness with which Obama is approaching stimulus spending oversight, but it is just the first step in ensuring that the nation's resources are not squandered on waste, fraud, and abuse.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) also requires the board to establish a website that will be a “portal or gateway to key information related to this Act.” Provisions from the law require the website to include “data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information;” “detailed data on contracts awarded by the Government;” and “a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts.” The Obama administration has already launched the website, Recovery.gov, which will serve as the board's online portal to recovery spending. Since none of the stimulus funds have been spent yet, the website only contains some overview data and policy statements at this point.

While all of the oversight and transparency provisions in the act will provide much needed accountability to federal recovery spending, Obama has set a high bar for transparency and accountability. Accordingly, on Feb. 18, the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) issued implementation guidance to the federal agencies. Impressive for its speed and comprehensiveness, the guidance still leaves many unanswered questions and raises potential flaws. OMB says this is the first of several guidance documents.

Specifically, the initial guidance issued by OMB indicates that reporting of spending may be limited to one level of sub-recipients. The guidance only requires the first subsequent recipient (the sub-recipient) of federal recovery money to report on the use of the funds. For example, if the federal Department of Transportation gives a grant to the state of Georgia to repair and build roads, and Georgia then gives some portion to the city of Atlanta for area roads, there would be no requirement for companies receiving contracts from the city to report on the use of the money or the number of jobs created. Sweetheart deals between officials and their friends may go unnoticed without a federal requirement that reporting follow federal funds for multiple levels of contracting or grantmaking.

Another potential oversight weakness stems from the failure of the law to require that full contract or grant documents for recovery spending be made available online. Instead, it calls for summaries of contracts or grants totaling more than $500,000, as well as those that were not competitively bid or not awarded as fixed-price agreements, to be posted on the Recovery.gov website. OMB Watch has published an analysis of the act's transparency and accountability provisions, which details these and other oversight mechanisms.

In addition to analyzing the act's oversight measures, OMB Watch is also actively working with the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery (CAR), a group of more than 30 organizations and individuals who believe transparency and accountability are essential to ensuring that hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending is disbursed fairly; spent with minimal waste, fraud, and abuse; and can be assessed as effective or ineffective. The coalition is chaired by OMB Watch and Good Jobs First; the Project on Government Oversight is leading CAR's legislative oversight work; and the Sunlight Foundation is spearheading transparency issues.

A top agenda item for the coalition is strengthening the potential ability of the Recovery.gov website to provide robust transparency to the public, journalists, advocacy organizations, and federal and state government overseers. CAR has developed a vision for a comprehensive federal and state data collection and dissemination system. Now it is preparing to describe the architecture needed to reach this vision. Accordingly, the coalition is collecting viewpoints on:

• Data Needs: All the specific data elements that are critical to ensuring accountable results
• Reporting Formats and Interface: Which information (e.g., unique entity identifiers, a parent company identifier) should be registered with a central data repository and in which format (e.g., XBRL) should that information be reported
• Machine Readable Access: How web developers can access the data; the standards and methods for accessing the data (e.g., XML, APIs, RSS, Atom); and whether both cleaned-up data (corrected for typos, etc.) and original data should be available
• People Readable Access: How the public can obtain data and what analytic tools will be provided, including what type of tools should be available on the website (e.g., mapping, downloading of searches, etc.)

To offer comments on any of these items, visit OMB Watch's CAR headquarters.