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.

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.

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.