OMB needs to provide public details on its plan to finish federal programs inventory, GAO says

The Office of Management and Budget has not fully completed requirements from a 2011 law to create and manage an inventory of all the federal government’s programs, a new report says. 

A provision in the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act required additional information about program spending and performance to be included in the inventory and set a deadline of January 2025. However the Government Accountability Office, in a report published on Sept. 25, found that OMB has not made public a plan to implement the inventory by that date or otherwise provided a time frame for completion. 

“A comprehensive listing of programs, along with related funding and performance information, would help federal decision-makers and the public better understand what the government does, what it spends and what it achieves each year,” investigators wrote. “It could also be a critical tool to help decision-makers better identify and manage fragmentation, overlap and duplication across the federal government.”

OMB in 2024 did release an inventory of federal financial assistance programs, which covered $4.47 trillion in obligations for fiscal 2022. But the report noted that federal agencies spent about $9 trillion that fiscal year. Therefore, approximately half of federal spending is not currently represented. 

Specifically, the inventory currently doesn’t include information about acquisition, defense and regulatory programs. OMB also has not included the additional information that is required by the 2021 NDAA for the programs already in the inventory.

The partial inventory is largely the result of the first of four planned pilots that were part of OMB’s 2021 implementation plan for the full inventory. That implementation plan, in turn, was prompted by a 2017 GAO report on the stalled development of the inventory. 

In 2021, OMB estimated that it would need $20.5 million to finish the inventory. GAO reported, however, that OMB did not explicitly request that funding nor has it updated the estimate since then. 

GAO also found shortcomings in OMB’s rules for managing data in the incomplete inventory, including that it hasn’t documented roles and responsibilities for the team developing it as well as quality issues with data from SAM.gov and USAspending.gov. The two websites cover information about federal contracts, grants and loans, and OMB used existing data from them to create the partial inventory. 

The watchdog recommended that OMB fully develop a data governance structure for the inventory of federal programs and publicize its plans to finish implementation and that such plans should identify any necessary actions, resources and timeframes. GAO said that OMB “generally concurred” with the recommendations.