USAspending's Limitations

Allison Stanger, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, had an interesting piece in the Washington Post yesterday about the limitations of the much-vaunted USAspending.org site, the official federal Web portal for government spending data. Her beef is twofold: that the information it contains is a constantly moving target (it's impossible to tell when a year's data has been "closed out") and that the Office of Management and Budget says it is "cleansing" the data, but doesn't make clear exactly what that means.

There are other issues with the USAspending.gov. Here's one: it's hard to tell exactly how much money some companies get from Uncle Sam. Do a simple search for information on Boeing, for example, and you'll get 14 different results, because data on some of the company's subsidiaries and joint ventures is listed separately. You'd need to add all of those figures up to get a more accurate picture of Boeing's contract dollars.

These are among the reasons why we at Government Executive continue to work with our friends at Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. to refine the federal contracting data we publish each year in our annual Top 200 Federal Contractors issue. In fact, we're doing so right now, in preparation for publication of the special issue in August. Information about how we use the data is available here.