Author Archive
Last Thursday, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued its long-awaited report on reducing compliance burdens for recipients of federal grants and contracts. Its main recommendation is simple yet powerful: the federal government needs to adopt a standardized data structure for all the information that grantees must submit.
At the Data Coalition's fourth annual DATA Act Summit, we no longer had to point to the future and predict the ways open spending data would benefit government and society. The future had come and the benefits were all around us - a world of new ways to visualize, analyze, and automate information about how taxpayers’ money is used. But we are never going to do this again. Here is why.
Today, for the first time in history, the U.S. federal government's spending information is one single, unified data set. Under a deadline set by the DATA Act of 2014, today every federal agency must begin reporting spending to the Treasury Department using a common data format. And Treasury has published it all online, in one piece, offering a single electronic view of the world's largest organization. Today, we celebrate Darrell Issa, Mark Warner, Christina Ho, Tim Gribben, and all the other leaders who caught Jefferson's dream of a single, unified federal spending data set, and didn't let go.
Alex Pollock - former president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago - told the 2017 Financial Data Summit that "the time has really come" to standardize financial regulatory data.
Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), and Randy Hultgren (R-IL) headlined our third annual Financial Data Summit last week - and their new proposal in Congress is going to transform financial regulatory reporting.
Last Friday, the General Services Administration, which manages the government-wide database of grantees and contractors and which administers the government-wide contract with D&B, released a Request for Information on alternatives to the DUNS Number.
Last week, on Feb. 2, leaders from 22 tech companies fanned out across Capitol Hill. We crossed from Senate office buildings to House, and back again. We sat down with eight members of Congress and nine groups of staffers. We walked nearly ten miles. We ended our fourteen-hour day with a well-deserved beer. To enact our wonky agenda and realize our ambitious vision, we may have to invest many more Groundhog Days. But that’s okay. With each year of the same Capitol Hill treks and similar policy chats, real change is happening.
FROM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR HUDSON HOLLISTER: "We call on the new Trump Administration and the 115th Congress to enforce (and expand) the DATA Act, embrace a government-wide transformation of all information resources through the OPEN Government Data Act, and initiate regulatory reforms that use open data to reduce burdens, governed by the Financial Transparency Act and other reforms. I am optimistic that we will realize all three goals."
Standard Business Reporting programs are in place in the Netherlands and Australia. SBR applies open data to regulation by adopting consistent data standards across multiple agencies' reporting requirements. SBR can reduce compliance costs while avoiding political battles over the substance of what companies are required to report to regulatory agencies. The 115th Congress and the Trump Administration should take notice.
Today the Center for Open Data Enterprise has released its Transition Report, with recommendations for the next presidential administration's first steps on open data. The Transition Report is the first time anyone has managed to capture all of the promise of open data to improve our government and society. Since these opportunities are as broad as government itself, creating the Transition Report was a major challenge and is an impressive accomplishment.