Advocacy group puts federal spending search tool online

Tuesday marked the launch of a new federal spending search Web site, designed to provide simple, one-stop visibility into most contracts and grants issued by federal agencies.

The search tool, located at www.FedSpending.org, was built by advocacy group OMB Watch in about six months for a price tag of just under $200,000, according to the group. It includes many of the functionalities that Congress ordered the federal government to develop under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which President Bush signed into law last month.

"When you buy something at the store, you get a receipt," said OMB Watch director Gary Bass. "FedSpending.org is that receipt for government spending -- we can examine it and see just what kind of deal we're getting."

The new search tool, whose functionality was previewed last week, mostly provides easier access to data that already is available through the government's central contract and grant databases. FedSpending uses data from the Federal Procurement Data System on contracts, and information from the Federal Assistance Award Data System on grants, direct payments and loans.

The contracts data is additionally processed by Fairfax, Va.-based Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. (which also processes the data for Government Executive's annual Top 200 Contractors special issue). That processing primarily matches contracts to the congressional district where the money is slated to be spent, according to Bass. It also links companies with their subsidiaries so that, for instance, a search for "Halliburton" would include contracts awarded to its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root.

Bass has said that FedSpending is not intended to compete with the newly mandated federal tool, but he hopes it will set a standard for what the government tries to achieve. For example, he said, FedSpending shows what type of competition was used for contracts ultimately awarded to each contractor, information that is available in government databases but not specified to be included in the federal search tool under the new legislation.

Sean Molton, OMB Watch's director for federal information policy, said that while the biggest portion of its functionality is complete, FedSpending remains a work in progress. Features that he hopes to add over the next year or more include interactive maps, links to census data that would allow spending to be viewed on a per capita basis, and searches that facilitate side-by-side comparisons of spending in congressional districts.

Building on an existing feature that presents profiles of individual contractors with an overview of what agencies they work for, their contracts and grants, competitive award overviews and other company information, Molten said he also hopes to develop analogous agency profiles.

The federal contracts database administered by the General Services Administration, called FPDS-Next Generation, has been criticized for not being user-friendly, despite the fact that it is free and publicly available.

Designer and web developer Kathy Cashel, who designed FedSpending, said she "tried to approach [the information] the way a normal mortal would approach it, not a database person." That approach created a color-coded system that presents information through clicks and drill-down links, minimizing the prior knowledge a user needs in order to get results. An advanced search feature allows more complex queries.

David Lucas, director of government relations for Global Computer Enterprises Inc. of Fairfax, Va., which developed and maintains FPDS-NG for GSA, has said that widespread criticism of the quality of data in the system has unfairly targeted his company when agencies are responsible for entering information on contracts they sign.

Lucas says OMB Watch's system simply creates a new interface to access existing data, and that development of a federal search tool should focus on agencies' processes of collecting and digitizing contract and grant information. Much of the data on sub-awards that the federal system is required to include starting in 2009 is not currently available, and FPDS does not include many interagency contracts.

Lucas thinks OMB would do better to focus its use of the $9 million allocated for the search tool in 2007 and 2008, and $2 million annually thereafter, on incorporating data not already available.

"It's a trivial event to set up a Web site, and it's not a difficult thing to put a search tool up," Lucas said. "What's hard is if you have to build infrastructure to collect data from systems across the federal government."

OMB spokeswoman Andrea Wuebker said that planning for the new system is under way and OMB "will provide public updates on the progress of the Web site as they become available."