The Open Government National Action Plan 2.0 is a good starting point for addressing the gaps in federal spending transparency, but much work remains.

We don't have a complete picture of where our tax dollars are going or who gets them. The DATA Act is part of the fix to this problem.

Last week, I attended the Data Transparency Coalition’s inaugural conference: Data Transparency 2013. Although the usual open government data suspects from nonprofits and the public sector attended, the conference was largely sponsored by and attended by private sector companies hoping to profit from government data. The meat of Data Transparency ...

Kaitlin Devine from the Sunlight Foundations guest posts with an update on the 2013 version of the DATA Act, intended to improve federal spending transparency.

Guest blogger Anthony Holley reports on the Hack for Western Mass project to reconcile federal spending data in USASpending.gov with numbers reported in the federal budget.

Today, the White House is issuing a new Executive Order on Open Data -- one that is significantly different from the open data policies that have come before it -- reflecting Sunlight's persistent call for stronger public listings of agency data, and demonstrating a new path forward for governments committing to open data.

The Medicare program accounts for around 14 percent of the entire federal budget, but you wouldn’t know it from USAspending.gov, a website that’s supposed to make government spending transparent. If you use it to investigate how much the government spent on Medicare benefits last year, you’ll find a surprising number: zero.

Despite the multitude of current debates about how the U.S. spends money, it’s actually very hard to track how much money the U.S. is spending. The DATA Act would help fix that, which is why it should be re-introduced in the 113 Congress.

This is a guest post from Hudson Hollister, Executive Director of the Data Transparency Coalition and former Counsel for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. President Obama appears to agree that the Recovery.gov model is the future of federal spending transparency. In June 2011, he established a new panel of ...

Having access to a single, comprehensive source for U.S. federal spending data isn't a partisan matter. We support the DATA Act because accurate spending information is critical to an informed budget conversation.