Watchdog group previews federal spending search tool

A watchdog group previewed a federal spending search tool Tuesday, providing a glimpse into a new system designed to provide user-friendly public access to federal contract and grant information.

The search tool gathers federal contract data from the Federal Procurement Data System and information on federal assistance such as grants, direct payments and loans from the Federal Assistance Award Data System. It resembles a system required under the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. That measure, which President Bush signed into law last week, drew bipartisan support fueled by the backing of an army of bloggers.

The system previewed Tuesday was developed by Washington, D.C.-based OMB Watch. It will be formally launched next Tuesday at www.FedSpending.org.

The system was developed over six months for less than $100,000, according to the group, and is intended to function as a benchmark for the newly mandated government system, as well as a public resource. The government system is slated to receive $9 million in its first two years and $2 million annually thereafter for maintenance, and is subject to requirements for how data must be presented that could make it harder to implement.

The FedSpending.org search tool provides separate tabs for queries on federal contracts and grants. In the contractor panel, users can choose among search options grouped into the broad categories of contractor, place of performance or contracting agency, with additional options for competition type and the item purchased. By clicking on the menu items, users can call up tables, generated in real time from the contracts database, of companies, states, districts or other data fields.

Users can select individual data elements within tables to "drill down" for greater detail, ultimately reaching data on individual companies and contracts.

In the grants view, users can similarly search by recipient, place of performance and agency, as well as by type of assistance. Both views allow easy searching by congressional district, though Adam Hughes, fiscal policy director for OMB Watch, warned that grant data often cannot be resolved to the district level due to vagaries of how particular grants are tracked.

OMB Watch also issued a disclaimer that "data are often missing parts or sections and at times are significantly limited" because of how the government collects and manages information. Gary Bass, the group's executive director, said he hopes the increased scrutiny that federal spending receives from easier public access to the data will lead to improvements in its quality.

In contrast to FedSpending.org, many of the searches a user might want to perform on FPDS-Next Generation or FAADS, the two Web sites where federal spending is currently available to the public free of charge, require significant knowledge of federal contracting and the government in order to obtain a result. Government and industry experts have defended the complexity of FPDS-NG as the result of a design process that focused on expert users, and especially government employees.

FPDS-NG is an update to the previous version of the database, and was launched in late 2004, partly to address usability concerns. It was developed by Global Computer Enterprises of Reston, Va., under contract with the General Services Administration. FedSpending.org uses FPDS-NG data processed for consistency by Fairfax, Va.-based Eagle Eye Publishers Inc., which also processes the data for Government Executive's annual Top 200 Contractors special issue.

It is not yet clear what approach the Office of Management and Budget will take in implementing the newly mandated system, including whether officials will seek to build on an existing contract or will search for a new company to develop the system.