Obama and Coburn built the receipt. It’s time to demand the itemized bill

Maybe you keep a checkbook or update a spreadsheet to track your spending — well, so does the government. From agency spending to grants, this is laid out on a website called USAspending.gov. This September marks the 20-year anniversary of the bipartisan legislation, spearheaded by the late Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), that created this key oversight platform. We work hard for our paychecks, and we want our government to work just as hard to put our tax dollars to good use. USAspending was created to provide an easy-to-use window into the federal government’s spending, allowing the government and the public to assess how funds were spent and identify systemic waste or fraud. While USAspending was a marked improvement, it’s still not providing a full picture of exactly how and where taxpayer dollars are being used, nor is it updated in near real time like your personal account. As the Trump administration considers ways to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse, it should start by improving data collection. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and there can be no accountability without visibility. According to the Project on Government Oversight’s analysis of publicly available data from USASpending.gov, more than 74% of the reviewed federal grant funding could not be tracked to the local level. If you or I wanted to find out how our taxpayer dollars are supporting Medicaid recipients in our own town, for instance, that data isn’t available. On top of that, the federal government awards money to intermediary recipients, who are then charged with further dispersing the funds to the grant’s ultimate beneficiaries. And we have far too little information on those middlemen. All we know is that the funding, on a high level, exists. This is dangerous for a couple of reasons. When we don’t know which communities are receiving federal funds, we don’t know if these government programs are making an impact. For example, the government has two programs that pay companies to make improvements to broadband access. But the government has not published data showing exactly where those funds were ultimately spent. How do we know if the money is helping our communities?Vague data also make it harder to detect when there’s genuine fraud and waste. Without a clear understanding of where and how the government is spending money, it becomes easier for bad actors to pilfer federal grant money over time. Taxpayers have no idea how billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grant money — which is supposed to support states, local governments, school systems, doctors’ offices, and nonprofit organizations that do important work in communities across the country — gets spent. Americans deserve to know where their tax dollars end up, who benefits from them, and whether they are achieving the results the government promised. USAspending.gov was an important first step, but we need a new bipartisan effort to pass legislation that allows any American to access detailed information about the way the government is using their money. We also need to speed up the reporting time to USAspending from 30 days to as close to real time as possible. Taxpayers should be able to track their tax dollars as easily as they can track their personal accounts online. After all, it’s their money. Reps. Josh Brecheen (R-OK) and Jimmy Panetta’s (D-CA) Expedited Transparency Act would be a big step in the right direction by shortening the reporting time to USAspending to three days.AMERICAN PATIENTS SHOULDN’T FOOT THE BILL FOR THE WORLD’S MEDICINESAs we celebrate America’s 250th, we don’t have to look back to our founding to find examples of consensus and serious governance. The bipartisan legislation that created USASpending gave us an example and a foundation upon which to build. Our great experiment in which government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed works only when citizens have access to information. That’s an experiment worth perfecting. Sean Moulton is a senior policy analyst at the Project On Government Oversight and an expert on federal spending transparency. John Hart is the CEO of Mars Hill Strategies and a former staffer to the late Sen. Tom Coburn.