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TRANSPARENCY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY: EVALUATING FEDERAL OPEN-GOVERNMENT EFFORTS

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION

POLICY, INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS AND

PROCUREMENT REFORM

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT

AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

MARCH 11, 2011

Serial No. 112–17

Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM

DARRELL E. ISSA, California, Chairman

DAN BURTON, Indiana

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

JIM JORDAN, Ohio

JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah

CONNIE MACK, Florida

TIM WALBERG, Michigan

JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma

JUSTIN AMASH, Michigan

ANN MARIE BUERKLE, New York

PAUL A. GOSAR, Arizona

RAU ́ L R. LABRADOR, Idaho

PATRICK MEEHAN, Pennsylvania

SCOTT DESJARLAIS, Tennessee

JOE WALSH, Illinois

TREY GOWDY, South Carolina

DENNIS A. ROSS, Florida

FRANK C. GUINTA, New Hampshire

BLAKE FARENTHOLD, Texas

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland, Ranking

Minority Member

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

JIM COOPER, Tennessee

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia

MIKE QUIGLEY, Illinois

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa

PETER WELCH, Vermont

JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut

JACKIE SPEIER, California

LAWRENCE J. BRADY, Staff Director

JOHN D. CUADERES, Deputy Staff Director

ROBERT BORDEN, General Counsel

LINDA A. GOOD, Chief Clerk

DAVID RAPALLO, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION POLICY, INTERGOVERNMENTAL

RELATIONS AND PROCUREMENT REFORM

JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma, Chairman

MIKE KELLY, Pennsylvania, Vice Chairman

JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah

TIM WALBERG, Michigan

RAU ́ L R. LABRADOR, Idaho

PATRICK MEEHAN, Pennsylvania

BLAKE FARENTHOLD, Texas

GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia, Ranking

Minority Member

CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

JACKIE SPEIER, California

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on March 11, 2011 ............................................................................ 1

Statement of:

Miller, Ellen, co-founder and executive director, Sunlight Foundation;

Danny A. Harris, Chief Information Officer, Department of Education;

Christopher L. Smith, Chief Information Officer, Department of Agriculture, accompanied by Jon M. Holladay, Acting Chief Financial Officer, U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Jerry Brito, senior research

fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University ............................... 15

Brito, Jerry ................................................................................................ 43

Harris, Danny A. ....................................................................................... 27

Miller, Ellen ............................................................................................... 15

Smith, Christopher L. ............................................................................... 33

Werfel, Daniel I., Controller, Office of Management and Budget ................ 65

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Brito, Jerry, senior research fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason

University, prepared statement of ............................................................... 46

Connolly, Hon. Gerald E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Virginia, prepared statement of .............................................................. 8

Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Maryland, prepared statement of ............................................................ 12

Harris, Danny A., Chief Information Officer, Department of Education,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 30

Lankford, Hon. James, a Representative in Congress from the State

of Oklahoma, prepared statement of ........................................................... 4

Miller, Ellen, co-founder and executive director, Sunlight Foundation,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 18

Smith, Christopher L., Chief Information Officer, Department of Agriculture, prepared statement of .................................................................... 35

Werfel, Daniel I., Controller, Office of Management and Budget, prepared

statement of ................................................................................................... 68

(1)

TRANSPARENCY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY:

EVALUATING FEDERAL OPEN-GOVERNMENT

EFFORTS

FRIDAY, MARCH 11, 2011

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION POLICY,

INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS AND PROCUREMENT

REFORM,

COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 2154,

Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. James Lankford (chairman of

the committee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Lankford, Chaffetz, Walberg, Labrador,

Meehan, Farenthold, Kelly, Connolly, Lynch, and Murphy.

Also present: Representatives Issa and Cummings.

Staff present: Ali Ahmed, deputy press secretary; Molly Boyl,

parliamentarian; Benjamin Stroud Cole, policy advisor and investigative analyst; Gwen D. Luzansky, assistant clerk; Christopher

Hixon, deputy chief counsel, oversight; Hudson T. Hollister, counsel; Ryan Little, manager of floor operations; Justin Lo Franco,

press assistant; Mark D. Mann, senior professional staff member;

Tegan Millspaw, research analyst; Laura I. Rush, deputy chief

clerk; Peter Warren, policy director; Jill Crissman, minority professional staff member; Carla Hultberg, minority chief clerk; Adam

Miles and Amy Miller, minority professional staff members; Donald

Sherman, minority counsel; and Cecelia Thomas, minority counsel/

deputy clerk.

Mr. LANKFORD. The committee will come to order.

This is a hearing on Transparency through Technology, Evaluating the Federal Open-Government Efforts.

Let me read our mission statement for this committee, so it will

be very clear why we are here. We exist as the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to secure two fundamental principles.

First, Americans have a right to know that the money Washington

Takes from them is well spent. Second, Americans deserve an efficient government that works for them. Our duty on the Oversight

and Government Reform Committee is to protect these rights. Our

solemn responsibility is to hold government accountable to taxpayers, because taxpayers have the right to know what they get

from their government. We will work tirelessly and in partnership

with citizen watchdogs to deliver the facts to the American people

and bring genuine reform to Federal bureaucracy.

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This is the mission of the Oversight and Government Reform

Committee.

I will make a quick statement of what I think we are headed toward today on that. The focus of today’s hearing is Transparency

through Technology. The Oversight Committee has a strong history

of promoting advancements in this area. During the 111th Congress, under the leadership of then-Chairman Towns and Ranking

Member Issa, the committee worked on a bipartisan basis to pursue technology-driven transparency initiatives. I look forward to

continuing that work and joining the administration in its efforts

to fully implement its Open Government Directive and other transparency-related initiatives.

President Obama, while in the Senate, joined Senator Coburn in

shepherding the passage of the Federal Funding, Accountability

and Transparency Act. This act required the administration to create a single, searchable Web site, accessible by the public at no

cost, that will provide information on all transactions over $25,000.

The result was USAspending.gov, first launched in December 2007.

President Obama and Senator Coburn deserve great praise for having the foresight that the Federal Government use available technologies to meet the public’s right to know how their tax dollars

are being spent.

Unfortunately, despite a number of expensive makeovers,

USAspending.gov still fails to achieve the total goal at 3 years after

its launch because of some well-known data quality issues that we

will discuss, I am sure, as we go through. Data from

USAspending.gov comes from two sources, one that collects information from Federal agencies on contract expenditures and one

that collects information from Federal agencies on grants, loans

and other spending. GAO has reported that these two data sources

are riddled with errors, largely due to human error and a lack of

agency oversight over its data submissions.

The administration’s Data.gov initiative is similar to

USAspending.gov. It is a commendable area and one that in principle, I agree with wholeheartedly. The Federal Government collects and generates an enormous amount of data that is largely invisible to the American citizen, but was paid for by the American

citizen. This data is also invisible to the reporter or watchdog

group that is trying to hold the Government accountable, or the entrepreneur who might be able to take that data and create new

products, services or jobs in ways never contemplated by the Federal bureaucracy.

Unfortunately, the implementation of Data.gov has not matched

its promise. The administration required agencies to publish at

least three high value data sets that had not previously been published. There was little guidance, however, as to what constituted

a high value data set. As the Sunlight Foundation’s director has

said of this, ‘‘The Government has some pretty interesting ideas

about what they regard as high value data. The Department of the

Interior seems to think that the population count of wild horses

and burros is a high value, but records of safety violations is not.

We want to see data that can be used to hold the Government and

entities that report to it accountable.’’

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Data about spending. Department missions and personnel are

noticeably absent from Data.gov. If this data was public, it would

save time and expenses as groups request basic reports and data

from their government. This is highlighted by an article in Politico

yesterday detailing how a watchdog group has been requesting

long-term budget projections from OMB that were available in previous years, but they are now being withheld.

In addition to data quality and data value, I hope to discuss with

our witnesses today the issue of data standards and interoperability among Federal data systems. If a taxpayer wants to look at

how much an agency plans to spend on a particular program, from

and how much Congress ultimately appropriates, and then matches

that figure with the information from USAspending.gov on organizations that receive from the program, and then compare that with

the information on the impacts of the program from information

published on Data.gov, he or she simply couldn’t do it.

These data systems lack the common data standards; they are

not interoperable. Not only do they lack a common data standard,

they sometimes violate even the most basic data standards in areas

like separating the State field from the address field to allow for

easy searches.

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses today and hope that

we can begin a fruitful discussion of what is working, what isn’t,

what are the next steps each of us should take to ensure the Federal Government is utilizing all the technology available to provide

true transparency to the American public.

I do want to take this moment to commend the work done by

OMB for Recovery.gov, Data.gov and USAspending.gov. This is the

first administration to make this kind of data available, and the

first attempt will always have some errors. It is not our intent

today to belittle the efforts of this administration, only to discover

the important lessons learned and to hear the steps that are being

taken to move things forward.

I will now defer to the ranking member for his opening statement.

[The prepared statement of Hon. James Lankford follows:]

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5

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Mr. CONNOLLY. Thank you, Chairman Lankford. I want to applaud you for your decision to hold this hearing and for the tone

you have set in your opening statement about the subject matter

and the administration.

Too often oversight focuses only on failures when our role should

be to rectify failures while publicizing and encouraging the dissemination of best practices. In the case of Federal transparency and

technology, consider where we were four short years ago. There

was no centralized site for citizens to read about Federal spending,

projects in the congressional district, or summaries of investments

for major bills like the Recovery Act.

Today, citizens can access comprehensive Federal spending information at USAspending.gov. As a result of House rules adopted

under the previous Congress, all earmarked requests have also

been posted on each Member’s Web site for each of the last 2 years.

Finally, thanks to Recovery.gov, all Recovery Act investments have

been readily accessible to anyone with an internet access.

These reforms have been a collaborative effort. Then-Senator

Obama and Senator Coburn wrote legislation to consolidate information on Federal spending, the result of which was

USAspending.gov. The House adopted rules to require public disclosure of earmarks to be posted online. President Obama undertook an unprecedented effort to make public his administration’s

implementation of the Recovery Act as well as information technology and other investments.

Finally, non-governmental organizations have monitored the accuracy of those reporting instruments and their efforts have identified the suggested ways to improve the reliability of the reported

data. As we continue to expand these transparency initiatives, I believe we should demand that we are receiving the greatest possible

utility for these programs. Resources dedicated to reporting should

lead to greater public understanding and promote accountability.

As the Government works toward achieving transparency goals,

we need to consider any impact that greater reporting costs may

have on the infrastructure and educational investments this country needs. During this period of budget uncertainty, these potential

tradeoffs are real considerations that I hope all of our witnesses

today will also address.

Another question is how we report and consider the benefits of

Federal spending programs. It is important for our constituents to

understand what they are getting from a Federal investment as it

is to understand how much money is being spent. Because not all

spending is the same. Not all spending has the same impact on the

quality of life or on the economy.

In addition, as we consider the results of different expenditures,

it is important to treat all Federal expenditures equally, that is, including those buried in the tax code. Tax expenditures account for

over $1 trillion in foregone revenue annually. While tax expenditures differ from other spending in form, in reality these are simply

spending and policy programs administered by the IRS.

Of course, many tax expenditures have a valid purpose, but as

a whole, they do not receive the same scrutiny as direct expenditures, even though they have the same impact on the Federal

budget. They are not listed on USAspending.gov, and they are not

7

subject to the accountability mechanisms that apply to other forms

of spending.

The Fiscal Commission recommended that Congress carefully

consider the impact of tax expenditures on the budget. I believe

that this committee should look into those opportunities to make

sure these IRS-administered spending programs are working for all

Americans and not just those receiving the tax break.

I look forward to working with members of the subcommittee and

with you, Mr. Chairman, to ensure that we are working toward

this comprehensive presentation of Federal expenditures and their

impacts. I yield back.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Gerald E. Connolly follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

I would like to recognize, as many of you know, this is a subcommittee of Oversight and Government Reform, we do have the

chairman for the committee as a whole here, and I would like to

recognize Chairman Issa for an opening statement.

Chairman ISSA. I thank you, Chairman, and I would also recognize that the full committee ranking member is here.

This is the most important issue of this committee in the long

run. We are a committee that on a day to day basis obviously deals

with the events, the failures in Government, and the need for reform, short term. Today, like every other hearing that is about

oversight, transparency and getting it right, particularly in data reporting, we are dealing with what is ultimately going to be the fix.

I came from the private sector, where the idea that there would

be data entry errors, and that those data entry errors would be different than the actual payments, was unheard of. If someone is

typing in something for a report, rather than taking the actual

data as it went out on a purchase order, an invoice, or some other

disbursement, then by definition, you are not giving people the

honest results of what Government did. You are giving them somebody’s interpretation of the honest result.

If they are completely accurate, then all you have wasted is a

huge amount of human capital. If they are inaccurate, then you

have data which is worthless.

Today, I am very proud that I have a panel of four here, both

Government and very responsible people within the watchdog community, to talk about transparency, to talk about reporting, and to

continue with our process of getting it right in the future. I regret

we have a second panel. We have a second panel for an inexplicable

reason that OMB has told us that they will not sit with non-government entities, that they have a longstanding policy.

I have been here only going on 11 years. But it is not that long

a policy. I would hope that in the future, we can have the responsible people who are in the data use business and the data transparency business as often as possible, when appropriate and vetted,

with the Government people who are charged with working to do

that.

Today’s hearing is not the first, and it won’t be the last in this

process. Until every dollar from the time it leaves the taxpayer’s

account or for that matter, the dollar deposited when you want to

go into a Federal park, until the last dollar is spent or disbursed,

either used to pay a Federal employee or disbursed through the

system in the private sector, until that is accounted from womb to

tomb, we will not have done our job.

When we get to that point, then the job that we all want done,

which is full accountability with virtually no loss, theft or waste,

will be possible. Today it is not possible. This hearing is important

because the failure to get the data right is the reason that ultimately we are not getting the responsible government. And day

after day, we are told $100 billion, $200 billion, $300 billion would

be saved if we simply stopped disbursements to people or to entities which do not deserve them.

So until we get there, this committee will have no more important issue than the one we are here today. This is a subcommittee

10

hearing, but you have both of the chairs and ranking members for

the reason that the work you are doing is the most important work

of the Congress.

Thank you, and I yield back.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would also like to recognize the ranking member of the entire

committee as well, Mr. Cummings. Glad that you are here. We

would be open to receive your opening statement.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. To Chairman Lankford and Ranking Member Connolly, certainly to Chairman Issa, and all the members and the panel. It is certainly a

pleasure to have all the witnesses here.

I was just listening to all of what has been said. It is true that

you play a very important role. Right now, we are in a big struggle

here in the Congress. Just this morning I had to explain to some

Morgan State University students why it is that many of them may

not be able to go to school next year, because the Pell grants are

being slashed.

It is painful, because many of those students will never return

to school. They will never go back. I sit on the board of that school

and have been there for the last 12 years. And we were losing students even with the Pell grants as they are. But when they get

slashed, it gets worse.

Then I thought about, as I was just sitting here, I thought about

a town hall meeting I had on Saturday, where people came up to

me and said, we have 250 kids in Head Start. But we have 750 on

the waiting list.

And so what does that have to do with all of this? It is about accountability.

I agree with Chairman Issa that we need to account for every

single dime. If money is not being accounted for, there is a major

problem. And that is a sad situation, particularly in a country

where we can send folks to the moon, but we can’t keep up with

where the money is going. That is a major problem.

So I am grateful for this opportunity to examine the administration’s ongoing efforts to bring increased transparency to the Federal Government. I want to thank Chairman Lankford for giving

this President some credit for something for a change. This is an

issue of critical importance, and the Federal Government must be

held strictly accountable for its expenditures of taxpayers’ hardearned dollars.

On April 15th, there will be people figuring out, trying to figure

out how they are going to pay the taxes. There are folks who, at

the end of a week or 2-week period, look at their pay stubs and

scratch their heads. They are barely making it now, if they have

a paycheck. So we owe it to them to get it right.

The passage of the Federal Funding, Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 and the establishment of USAspending.gov, as

required by the act, have given the average American unprecedented ability to track Federal contracts and grants. This transparency increases the public’s ability to hold elected representatives and Federal Government accountable for distribution in the

use of Federal funds.

11

Further, the act and the Government’s experience with

USAspending.gov paved the way for creation of additional Web

sites that allow the public to track specific types of spending, including Recovery.gov and Data.gov.

The administration’s ongoing efforts to improve the quality and

breadth of data being reported are to be commended. In particular,

I am pleased that in October 2010, the administration began publishing sub-awards on USAspending.gov for the first time. However, the Sunlight Foundation’s September 2010 report shows that

there is an opportunity to continue improving transparency and

make additional information publicly available. In other words, we

could always do better.

During the last Congress, I supported legislation that moved

through this committee to enhance the usability and interoperability of Federal financial data. I look forward to working together

in a bipartisan manner to advance such legislation in the Congress.

OMB must also work to ensure that USAspending.gov implements mechanisms to improve the timeliness and accuracy of its

reporting to the public. However, we should also be mindful that

pursuit of perfection in the reporting of spending data imposes real

financial costs, both in dollars and manpower. And such costs must

be weighed against the benefits they will yield.

I look forward to the witnesses’ views on the issues today.

And finally, let me say this. Any accounting of costs of Government spending is inherently incomplete unless it also includes data

detailing the revenue loss to the Government through tax breaks

and incentives to the wealthiest individuals and businesses, including businesses that move jobs overseas, as children will be thrown

out of Head Start, or never get a head start, and as young people

are thrown out of colleges.

I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses and to working

with Chairman Lankford, and certainly Chairman Issa and Ranking Member Connolly, to identify and address areas where the Federal transparency efforts can continue to be improved.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I thank you and I yield back.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

All the Members will have 7 days to submit opening statements

and other materials for the record.

I would like to now welcome and introduce the members of the

panel. Then I will lay some basic ground rules and we will receive

your testimony from there.

Ms. Ellen Miller is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the

Sunlight Foundation. She is the founder of two other prominent

Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics,

the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign, and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of

money in politics. Thank you for being here.

Mr. Chris Smith is the Chief Information Officer for the Department of Education. Mr. Smith previously served as the Chief Information Officer for Rural Development and the U.S. Department of

Education and as the Information Technology Director for Financial Information at the General Services Administration. Thank

you.

Switching people back there, Mr. Harris is the Chief Information

for the Department of Agriculture—did I get those two reversed?

I did, actually. I got those two reversed. I apologize for that. So

take all the Education stuff and apply it to Mr. Harris, and let me

switch to Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith is the Chief Information Officer for the Department

of Agriculture. Mr. Smith previously served as the Deputy Chief Financial Officer for the Department. I understand that Mr. Jon Holladay, the CFO for the Department of Agriculture, will also be advising Mr. Smith. So when everyone stands to be sworn in, if you

would also stand and be sworn in as well.

Mr. Jerry Brito is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of several published scholarly articles, and a contributor to the Technology Liberation Front, a leading tech policy blog. He is also the creator of

Unclutter, a popular blog about personal organization and simple

living that is read by a quarter million people each month. That

is a nice reading list.

Let me give you the ground rules for our hearing itself here.

Each of you has been asked to submit a written statement for the

record. We have also asked you to prepare an oral statement no

longer than 5 minutes. We will allow time for questioning on your

statement after that.

You will see on your desk a series of lights and a clock which

will count down from 5 minutes. The lights will change from green

to yellow to red when your time is expired, and it will be time at

that point to quickly wrap up.

After all the panel has given their oral statements, each Member

present will have 5 minute to ask questions of the panel. Many

Members may have several questions, so it is very important that

you answer your questions very concisely. Do not feel you have to

give a lengthy answer on anything.

Please also forgive the members of this committee as we excuse

ourselves. Most of us have multiple committee assignments going

on this morning. We are juggling concurrent meetings. Mr.

Connolly had to slip out and head to the floor of the House as we

15

have things going on there right now. Your testimony will be recorded and it will be available for review by all of us. I can assure

you, it is written down, every bit of it, and we will be able to review

it in days to come. So thank you.

Each Member completely chooses the content of their 5 minutes

of questioning. I would ask the Members to honor our guests’ time

and attendance by prioritizing answers and information from them,

instead of making speeches. I would also ask all of our Members

not to ask a question past their 5-minute time. Once it is expired,

as the chairman, I reserve the right to remind everyone that time

is expired and ask for proper decorum in our hearings.

We will have two panels this morning. The first will include Ms.

Miller, Mr. Smith, Mr. Harris and Mr. Brito. The second one will

have only Mr. Werfel. It is my understanding that the Office of

Management and Budget did not want to sit on a panel with nongovernment witnesses, so we have honored their request for Mr.

Werfel to be separated from the other witnesses. We will hear the

testimony of the first panel, and when we conclude that testimony

and our questions, we will immediately move to questions and testimony from Mr. Werfel individually.

We are very grateful for all the time you have committed in preparing your written and your oral statements, and the time you

have been away from your family for this hearing. Do you understand all the ground rules of this hearing?

[Witnesses respond in the affirmative.]

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

It is the policy of the committee that all witnesses be sworn in

before they testify. For all of you that are going to be doing any

testimony, would you please rise. Please raise your right hands.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you. Please be seated.

I would like to recognize Ms. Miller for 5 minutes. Thank you.

STATEMENTS OF ELLEN MILLER, CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION; DANNY A. HARRIS, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION; CHRISTOPHER L. SMITH, CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, ACCOMPANIED BY

JON M. HOLLADAY, ACTING CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER, U.S.

DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE; AND JERRY BRITO, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, MERCATUS CENTER AT GEORGE

MASON UNIVERSITY

STATEMENT OF ELLEN MILLER

Ms. MILLER. Thank you, Chairman Lankford, Ranking Member

Connolly, and Mr. Cummings and members of the committee.

Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.

My name is Ellen Miller, and I am co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to using the power of the internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. We take our inspiration from

Justice Brandeis’ famous adage, ‘‘Sunlight is said to be the best of

disinfectants.’’

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The public has a right to know how its government works. Recent Congresses deserve congratulations for taking concrete steps

toward embracing a 21st century vision of transparency. Initiatives

from this administration, like the Open Government directive, are

emblematic of the willingness to take transparency seriously.

Unfortunately, the Open Government directive’s value has proven to be largely aspirational. While establishing positive transparency norms is hugely important, we believe that government

must now focus on the harder challenges. It is no longer enough

to acknowledge transparency’s importance; transparency initiatives

must be accurate, complete and useful as well as timely.

There is perhaps no better example of the tension between show

and tell than USAspending.gov. Disclosure of the ways in which

the public’s money is spent is among the most important types of

government transparency. Congress recognized this in 2006, with

the passage of the Federal Funding, Accountability and Transparency Act, which required that information about Federal grants,

contracts, loans and insurance be placed online in a searchable

Web site known as USAspending.gov.

In the course of their work, Sunlight researchers have become

deeply familiar with the data powering USAspending.gov. As we

began to examine these systems, we were aware that the quality

of the data sets was widely considered problematic. Our work

quickly confirmed that data suffered from irregularities. However,

we were anxious to reach an even more complete understanding of

the problem, so we dug in.

In order to do so, we needed a reference point against which we

could compare the USAspending.gov data. Unfortunately, the complexities of the Federal budget make both the budget and Treasury

expenditure data unsuitable for that use. We found our yardstick

in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, an index of many

Federal programs, including program descriptions and yearly obligation amounts. Although not strictly designed for this use, CFDA

has been used for comparative analysis by GAO in the past.

We took their methodology and expanded it. Like GAO, we

looked for mismatches in amounts between CFDA and

USAspending.gov data, allowing a generous margin of error to account for differences in the systems. We also looked for instances

in which reports had been made within statutory deadlines, and for

incomplete reports. Finally, we automated GAO’s sample-based

methodology, so that we could examine the entire data base which

consists of hundreds of thousands of records.

The results were sobering. We found over $1.2 trillion of mis-reported spending in 2009 alone. Some of the most serious problems

appeared to be caused by the agency’s failure to meet their reporting obligations. The USDA Web site lists the cost of their school

breakfast program and lunch programs at $12.7 billion. But only

$250,000 of these costs are reported on USAspending.gov.

The Maritime Administration has never reported spending associated with any of its loan or insurance programs and reports only

a fraction of its grant activity. These are just two examples. Almost

every agency has one or more programs that failed to report their

spending.

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And the spending that is reported is often incomplete or incorrect. For example, each loan record is required to include both a

subsidy cost and the face value of the loan. Unfortunately, the subsidy cost is incorrectly reported as zero for over 85 percent of the

loan records. And the face value of all fiscal year 2010 student

loans was reported as $6.9 trillion, an amount greater than the entire Federal budget. Clearly, that number is wrong.

We do not believe that these problems are the fault of the

USAspending.gov Web site or the people that maintain it. Indeed,

USAspending.gov deserves praise for its growth and improvement.

When we conducted this analysis, we had to send a hard drive out

to Maryland to get the data. Today, we can download it directly

from the Web site.

Similarly, we are pleased to see the administration finally begin

to offer the sub-award data maintained by FFATA. But these improvements will be meaningless for the vast majority of users if the

underlying data is not reliable. Agencies typically use purpose-built

internal systems for managing their spending that are separate

from the public reporting systems and much more accurate. In essence, they maintain two sets of books, one of which is habitually

neglected.

But this latter system is vitally important for both the public and

Government planning efforts. And until the agencies begin to take

these responsibilities more seriously, Federal spending transparency will remain an unfulfilled promise.

We welcome the committee’s attention to this issue and encourage you to continue to spend time in engaging oversight and legislative efforts on this important topic. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My colleagues and I, Tom Lee and Kaitlin

Lee, look forward to your questions. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Miller follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

Dr. Harris, I am going to appropriately recognize you at this

point. Thank you for being here. We will receive your testimony.

STATEMENT OF DANNY A. HARRIS

Mr. HARRIS. Thank you, and good morning, Chairman Lankford

and members of the subcommittee.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the subcommittee

today. My name is Danny Harris and I am the Chief Information

Officer at the U.S. Department of Education, a position I have had

the privilege to hold since October 2008. I am very pleased to discuss the Department’s transparency efforts specific to the Open

Government initiative.

On his first day in office, the President sent a memo directing

all Federal agencies to create unprecedented levels of openness in

Government. The Department of Education has taken this directive

very seriously. Our Open Government plan makes our efforts more

transparent, participatory and collaborative. I am personally committed to these goals, and the Department looks forward to building upon the solid foundation put in place during the first 2 years

of this initiative.

For decades, the Department has collected, analyzed and used

data to inform our delivery of services. At the Department of Education, we collect data about the overall condition and effectiveness

of education provided by the States, local educational agencies and

institutions of higher education. A key part of our mission is to provide useful information to States, assisting their efforts to allocate

resources to education citizens in the most effective and efficient

way.

Equally important to our mission is supporting the use of Federal resources toward ensuring fair access to education for all.

Open Government efforts place special emphasis on providing information to the public leading to increased transparency and to the

information we and States use for decisionmaking.

At the Department of Education, we have established a crossfunctional team to develop our Open Government plan, which is

available on our Web site. Also, we have established a governing

body to oversee departmental execution of the Open Government

plan and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all of the information collection and dissemination activities at the Department.

Decisions and recommendations from this board will and do affect IT spending. This coordinated effort will effectively manage duplicative data requests, it will reduce burdens to the States and

local agencies, and it will optimize Department-wide data aggregation. At the end of the day, it is not just about the data that we

deliver, it is about delivering tools to drive innovation.

Prior to implementing Open Government efforts, we provided

similar information and tool sets, allowing citizens to view the information in ways that we thought were useful. Open Government

altered this framework, and now we deliver the same information

in a raw, machine-readable format, allowing citizens to analyze the

data and transform those data into useful, aggregated information.

This access to data has undoubtedly created new insights and

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views, enabling previously unthought of ways for citizens to understand, view and track Federal dollars.

The clear benefit is that citizens can now view the delivery of

services with comprehensive information and the public’s ability to

access and analyze these data make Federal spending transparent.

In turn, this helps ensure departments are accountable for results

and outcomes.

The challenge for the Department is to ensure the quality of this

data. We view key attributes of quality as timeliness, accuracy and

most of all, privacy. The challenge for our stakeholders is to establish proper awareness and context for these data. We have already

seen positive outcomes as a result of these initiatives. For example,

in our Race to the Top program, we provided a detailed description

of the process used to review and select the winners of that program. The Department, in implementing Race to the Top, has demonstrated unprecedented transparency by posting all of the applications as well as peer reviewer scores and comments to the public

for review.

To help spur innovation, our Investing in Innovation team created an open innovation portal, a Web site where education

innovators can share ideas and collaboration, where funders and

educators can point out their needs, and where people can gather

to propose, develop, fund, implement and more than anything else,

improve solutions inside and outside of the classroom.

We take the commitment to transparency seriously at all levels

within the Department. For example, in 2009, Secretary Duncan

launched his Listening and Learning Tour. He did this to engage

the public directly in discussing education reform in America. The

Department used the input we received to prepare a blueprint for

reauthoring the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Transparency through technology provides an opportunity to engage with the public in making the Department of Education more

accountable. Specifically, the Department has a significant role in

complying with the Federal Funding and Accountability Transparency Act, due to the very large number of grants, contracts and

loans that we administer. These funds go to numerous recipients

and sub-recipients in States and territories, and the public should

know where these funds are going, for what purpose, and most importantly, what results they should expect. We submit grant and

loan funding transactions on a bi-weekly basis from our grant system in the Federal assistance award data system file layout.

Additionally, we provide our contract funding transactions to the

Federal procurement data system in real time during our contract

award. Both our grants and contract systems are integrated with

the Department’s general ledger. This ensures that the transactions that we submit to USAspending.gov are directly traceable

to our financial systems.

Finally, the Privacy Act and Federal guidelines govern how we

protect personally identifiable information while at the same time

complying with the Transparency Act and other public reporting

requirements.

In conclusion, I believe that Open Government,

USAspending.gov, Federal reporting and other recovery Web sites

all work together to put more and better information in the hands

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of the public. The benefits are tremendous, because these efforts

lead to increased accountability, transparency, and more than anything else, recognizable links between spending and results.

Thank you, chairman and members of the subcommittee, for your

attention to this important issue. I would be happy to answer any

questions you may have.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Harris follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you, Dr. Harris.

Mr. Smith.

STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER L. SMITH

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Chairman Lankford, Ranking Member

Connolly, members of the subcommittee, Chairman Issa, who was

with us here earlier. Thank you for this opportunity to share with

you our progress on the implementation of the Open Government

initiatives, transparency and accountability in the use of information technology to further these important goals.

I am joined today by my colleague, Jon Holladay, who is the

USDA Acting Chief Financial Officer, just behind me.

USDA programs touch every American and many others around

the world every day. We are focused on the activities that ensure

an economically thriving rural America, that we are conserving our

national forests and private working lands, and promoting sustainable agricultural production and biotechnology exports to ensure

and increase food security and to provide access to a nutritious diet

for all Americans.

Full and easy access to information on Government spending promotes accountability by allowing detailed tracking and analysis of

deployment of these resources. Tracking and analysis allows the

public and public officials to gauge the effectiveness of expenditures

and to monitor spending patterns to achieve the best possible results. Transparency also gives the public confidence that we are

properly managing its funds.

From the Transparency Act of 2006 to the Open Gov directive of

2009, Government transparency has become the cornerstone for information access to facilitate participation and collaboration across

Federal, State and local governments and with the public. USDA

is a strong advocate of Government transparency and is striving to

meet both the letter and intent of the Open Government Directive.

On December 8, 2009, the White House issued the Open Government directive, requiring Federal agencies to take specific action to

promote transparency, collaboration and participation. The Open

Government directive puts accountability and accessibility at the

center of how Federal Government operates. It instructs agencies

to share information with the public through online, open and accessible, and as my colleague has stated, machine readable formats.

USDA fully supports the administration’s directive for open government and is actively engaged on this front in making the Department more accessible and accountable to our citizens. To foster

accessibility, USDA launched its OpenGov Web site in spring of

2010 and published an open government plan describing how

USDA would improve transparency and integrate public participation and collaboration into its activities.

With the launch of our Web site, citizens are able to learn about

and comment on USDA information and post their ideas on transparency and collaboration, and actively participate with the Department. The public can also post ideas to help USDA become

more efficient and more effective in everything that we do.

Additionally, to improve outreach initiatives, USDA has established an open government communication plan, which describes

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USDA’s interaction and collaboration and details the activities that

we are taking.

USDA is leveraging information technology to improve transparency and increase citizen interaction and participation. Two

good examples are USDA’s My Pyramid and Apps for Healthy

Kids, which are innovative approaches to USDA reaching out and

encouraging collaboration with the private sector and the public.

The Applications for Healthy Kids competition was a collaborative project to challenge the general public to design online mobile gaming tools and educational applications to educate people

about the importance of healthy eating and physical activity.

USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, Department of Health and

Human Services, First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative

and the NFL’s Fuel Up To Play 60 played a vital role in this challenge. Over 45,000 participants submitted 95 games and applications, with 12 submissions selected as the ultimate winners.

Additionally, as a part of the USDA Open Government flagship

initiatives, the Forest Service directly improved transparency, collaboration and participation by increasing public participation in

the development of its land management planning rule by

leveraging information technology to improve collaboration and

interaction. Using Web 2.0 technologies and online collaborative

environments, the agency provided the public with updates on the

planning rule process and enabled them to submit comments.

The agency also held public meetings and listening sessions all

over the country to gain input from these citizens. More than 700

individuals were not able to attend these in person. Using collaborative technologies, they were able to participate remotely.

The development of this proposed rule involved more than 26,000

comments on the notice of intent and more than 40 public meetings

with over 3,000 participants, including the National Science

Forum, tribal consultation and Forest Service employees submitting comments. This increased focus on accountability and transparency built upon our commitment to strong financial stewardship

as evidenced by USDA compliance with the Transparency Act.

In September 2006, the Transparency Act was enacted. As required by the act, the Office of Management and Budget established the USAspending.gov Web site to provide transparency of

Federal spending by disclosing entities receiving the funds. USDA

sends bi-weekly transmissions to the Federal Financial Assistance

system, reporting any award over $25,000. We report the key data

elements regarding Federal award within 30 days after that award.

And USDA data being reported to the public includes grants, cooperative agreements, direct and guaranteed loans, direct payments,

insurance and contracts.

USDA has a comprehensive information technology modernization strategy that encompasses the improvement of this data collection and the sharing of that with our citizens. I look forward to

your questions and discussion, sir.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Smith follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you. You could not have been closer on

time as well. Thank you, Mr. Smith.

Mr. Brito, pleased to get your oral testimony in 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF JERRY BRITO

Mr. BRITO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee.

Thank you for inviting me to testify on transparency through

technology.

As someone who believes that Internet-enabled transparency can

lead to better and more accountable government, I am gratified by

Government’s efforts in this base for the past 5 years. Transparency is an issue that has been genuinely embraced by both sides

of the political aisle. What was once an esoteric concept, that meaningful transparency requires disclosures to be online and open,

searchable in machine readable format has become a generally accepted ideal. Those are great strides.

However, despite the Obama administration’s technological efforts and congressional legislation like the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, whether government is performing effectively is still not completely transparent. That is because the vast majority of newly available data is not about government, and disclosures that are about government tend to report its

activities, not data on program outcomes. When program outcomes

are reported, they tend to be suspect because they are self-measured and self-reported by program managers.

On Data.gov, the government has compiled wonderful, never before available data sets about regulated industries but little about

its own performance. Excluding the 305,000 datasets that pertain

to geodata, the Data.gov data catalog makes available just over

3,000 ‘‘raw’’ datasets. Of these, about half are related to the Toxic

Release Inventory compiled by the EPA. These are disclosures

about regulated entities that, while very valuable to individuals

and researchers, tell us little about the performance of government.

A quick scan of the remaining 1,500 datasets reveals that only

200 to 300 report on the activities or performance of government.

There is plenty of smoke, but little fire.

One of the better datasets available is Research.gov. This National Science Foundation data base of federally funded science and

engineering research allows users to search for grants by keyword,

location, or grantee; see which grants were awarded and for how

much; and learn about the results of each specific, federally funded

research project. This information is useful in holding Government

accountable for its performance.

Less useful, although no doubt valuable to some researchers, are

datasets like one from the U.S. Geological Survey on the effects of

fire on Rocky Mountain Olive-Side Fly Catcher Bird nests. Spending-transparency sites like USAspending.org and the Recovery.gov

site are also useful because they disclose government’s actions.

They allow citizens, watchdogs, bloggers and reporters access to the

raw data of the business of government. It allows them to make

creative uses of the data, including making interesting mashups

and allowing them to crowd-source accountability.

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However, these types of sites are not perfect. As the Sunlight

Foundation and others have pointed out, the quality of the data

available can be sorely lacking. Also, until recently, only information about the primary recipient of a contract or grant award was

available on USASpending.org, thus limiting the usefulness of the

site.

More broadly, while spending sites can help uncover instances of

fraud, waste, and abuse, which is very important, they are less

helpful in measuring performance because they simply disclose outputs, amounts of money disbursed to recipients and simple descriptions of contracts or grants. To determine whether a program is

performing as intended the public needs information not only about

outputs, but also about outcomes.

With a Federal spending crisis on our hands, Congress must soon

decide which programs to cut and which to keep. Voters will have

to decide if they support Congress’ choices. The whole process

would be much easier if information existed about the relative performance of Government programs.

In the private sector, a corporation must disclose its earnings as

well as its expenditures and assets on a quarterly basis. Such an

objective measure of performance not only allows the market to set

a stock price, but it also allows shareholders to hold management

accountable.

Now, think of Government transparency. All agencies and programs disclose their expenditures in an annual budget and through

sites like USAspending.gov. What Government does not report are

earnings figures, for the simple reason that there are none. Therefore, a Government program may be transparent, and yet the public sees only half of the balance sheet.

Congress tried to solve this problem with the Government Performance and Results Act. The problem with GPRA performance

reporting, however, is that the very managers of the programs are

charged with developing performance measures, measuring their

own programs and writing self-evaluating performance reports.

Even in the NSF’s Research.gov site, which I mentioned, it is the

award recipients who write the performance reports.

In the private sector, Congress has recognized that this doesn’t

work. Congress has required that publicly traded companies must

hire independent third party auditors to help prepare and certify

reports. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, corporate managers are

personally liable for the veracity of those reports. Congress might

want to consider similar, independent audits of agency performance

reporting.

I am looking forward to the launch of the new Performance.gov

initiative by OMB, which promises to provide data-driven reviews

of progress toward clearly defined goals at Federal agencies. Those

reviews, however, won’t be very meaningful if they are self-reported or based on shaky data.

The progress Congress and the Obama administration have

made in making transparency, and especially online transparency,

a key objective for Government cannot be overstated. The culture

of secrecy that has long pervaded Federal agencies is beginning to

change. However, we must make sure that Open Government is

first and foremost about transparency. And that transparency is

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clearly understood as disclosure of Government performance in the

service of greater accountability.

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Brito follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you very much. I thank all of you for preparing a statement.

I would like to begin, I have 5 minutes allotted, I am going to

yield those 5 minutes to my vice chairman, Mr. Kelly, for him to

start our opening questions.

Mr. KELLY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you all for being

here today.

I come from the private sector, so I have a little bit of an idea

about having skin in the game. And Mr. Brito, I am really interested, when you talked about the principal and the agent reporting

program, because I have always thought, in my business, you don’t

want the fox watching the hen house.

So could you expand a little bit more on where we should go with

this? Because I am having an awful tough time following some, we

talk the talk but we don’t walk the walk in Government? And we

tell you how you should do it, but we never do it ourselves? So if

you could just expand a little bit on what the purpose would be in

having an outside agency looked at. Because in my business, I always bring in outside auditors. I would never, ever do it internally.

It gives you a false picture. It gives you a completely unrealistic

idea of what is going on with your business.

And I will tell you, the No. 1 thing that I find out when we hire

a new person, they come in after their first pay and they say, I

thought I was getting paid more. I say, well, this is what we paid

you. Now, look through all the deductions and this is what you are

taking home.

So there is a huge difference between what we pay and what

they take home. And they ask me, where did it go? And I say, well,

take a look and you can find out, it went to the Government. And

they say, well, what the heck are they doing with my money? I say,

you know what, that is anybody’s guess, isn’t it?

So if you could just tell me a little bit about what you would suggest as far as outside auditors.

Mr. BRITO. Sure. Economists will talk about a concept called

principal agent problem, which is very simple. Let’s say you have

a corporation which is owned by shareholders, thousands of shareholders. They hire a board of directors to manage a corporation and

the board hires a CEO and the management.

Now, the board can’t be behind watching the CEO all the time.

And so for that reason, that is the very reason they hire managers,

to manage corporations. Quarterly, yearly, the board meets to review the performance of management. What sort of data do they

look at? Well, they look at profit and loss. And it is very clear.

With Government, we don’t have profit and loss. So we need to

develop performance measurement. And the way that works is very

simple, this is what Congress did in the Government Performance

and Results Act, which is that, for a program, the agency, before

it begins a program, needs to say, these are the results we expect

to achieve. These are the data-driven measurements that we will

use to determine whether we met those results. And then at the

end of the period, whether it is a year or quarterly, you measure

and you see whether you met those results.

If you didn’t meet those results, well, then, Congress can go look

at that program, see how it can be fixed, see if it needs to be elimiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:37 Aug 11, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00058 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\KATIES\DOCS\67567.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
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nated. Unfortunately, the responsibility of creating the measurements, of measuring and of reporting is all on the very same agency that runs the program. And so that creates, again, this principal

agent problem.

In the private sector, you wouldn’t expect simply to take management’s word about the performance of the company. You bring in

a third party auditor. That is required by Congress.

But even if it wasn’t required by Congress, I would suspect that

shareholders and board members would want to audit the information presented to them by management. So that is what I am suggesting, that we take a lesson from that, in the private sector, and

bring it into Government.

Mr. KELLY. And I respect your statement that we don’t have

profit. I would say we do have loss. And I have never seen any

business that could run this way consistently, a trillion dollars in

the red for three straight years, and feel that, hey, we are doing

all right.

Ms. Miller, one of the things I found interesting is in your written testimony it says that one of the goals of the mission statement, ‘‘Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.’’ I would ask

you, and also Mr. Brito, USAspending.gov and Recovery.gov have

been criticized for not containing the information that citizens are

most interested in. What information do you think is most important, what should be made more public?

Ms. MILLER. I will be glad to answer that. I think our criticism

with respect to the availability of data really applies to Data.gov.

We certainly agree with Mr. Brito’s assessment in terms of the

amount of data that is actually on that site.

Sunlight advocated, with the administration, that all the data

that is made available by Government be made available in machine readable formats. As you heard from our Government colleagues here, the administration has done that. But there is just

very little information that is made available. It is hard for me to

sit here, as a resident of Washington, DC, and say what someone

in your city would be most interested in. But Sunlight has been exploring some of this, and we know people are interested, desperately, in health care issues, they are interested in education

issues, they are interested in consumer-related banking issues. So

we are beginning, actually, to develop apps from the publicly made

available, the data that has been made available either on their

own Web sites or on Data.gov, to move into this sort of consumer

facing information that our best instincts tell us need to be there.

It has not been easy to find this kind of data immediately accessible. We need more of what citizens need. I think the administration and the various agencies have been asking citizens, what do

they need. Again, to their credit, we have to sort of pull back and

maybe in another 6 months try to assess that as Government.

Mr. KELLY. Thanks very much. My time is expired. Thank you,

Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

I recognize Mr. Lynch for 5 minutes.

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank the members of the panel for helping the committee with its work.

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I listened closely to your testimony. I just want to ask, Ms. Miller, you reported that from the USDA Web site they had listed the

school lunch program, the cost of the school breakfast and lunch

program here in the United States was $12.7 billion. However, according to the USDA, their Web site lists the cost at about

$250,000. Actually, I think it was USAspending.gov that actually

listed it that way.

And then we have Mr. Smith, God bless him, and it sounds like

everything is just going great over there. I am just wondering if,

is that how you have assessed the accuracy of the USDA reporting?

How would you grade them, I guess?

Ms. MILLER. Well, we don’t grade the agencies. Because I think

all of them are struggling. So if we had to say which was better

than the others, as I mentioned in my testimony, I don’t think

there is a single agency that would get an A. So there are failures

of different kinds and substance throughout the agencies.

Why those spending amounts are recorded so differently I honestly cannot answer. But I suggest Mr. Smith might be able to answer why we see such discrepancies.

Mr. LYNCH. Well, let me ask you then, you say that across the

board, that agencies are keeping two sets of books. And this might

be one example of that.

Ms. MILLER. It may be.

Mr. LYNCH. They keep a set of books for operational purposes,

but then when they report to the taxpayer, to the public, it is in

a different format, and it is difficult to reconcile. How do we require that the agencies reconcile that difference and give us usable

information? Because I do agree with my colleagues that sunlight

is the best disinfectant. And that is the responsibility of this Oversight Committee, to find out how much is being spent, where it is

being spent, is it being spent wisely.

We had the Director of the Office of Personnel Management here

earlier this week. He could not tell me the number of contractors

that we have for the U.S. Government. He thinks it is around 10

million. But I can’t even find out how many folks we actually have

out there working for the Government. There is a lot of pressure

on Federal employees, but here we have these 10 million contractors, at least, I guess, working for different aspects of our Government. It just doesn’t seem like we have a handle on this at all.

I applaud your efforts, and I don’t mean to single anybody out.

But we need a lot more work done on this.

Ms. MILLER. Yes, absolutely. And I think the first step to that

is oversight. Well, perhaps the first step was the analysis which

the Sunlight Foundation has done in expanding that analysis. Sunlight only looked at grants. We have not looked at any of the contract information that has been reported. So we have no idea of

how much that would be.

Mr. LYNCH. Well, get on that, will you? [Laughter.]

I am kidding.

Mr. MILLER. We have actually requested of the administration

the necessary documents that we need to do that, and they have

told us that we could not have that information. So we FOIA’d it

6 months ago and we are still waiting. Because we would very

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much like to move into examining the grants, the quality of the

grants.

Mr. LYNCH. Thanks, Ms. Miller. I do want to give Mr. Smith, in

fairness, an opportunity to respond. Because I used his agency as

an example of the filing there, as a glaring example of mis-reporting. So Mr. Smith, have a whack at me.

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Congressman Lynch.

Let me first say, with transparency comes another set of eyes, always another set of eyes. I think it is exceedingly important that

as people identify those things, if we have an anomaly, we identify

them, we work through them. I think that is the value of transparency. So I think we appreciate the outside view and the particular question that you asked and that Ms. Miller brought up in her

statement on child nutrition programs in particular.

When looking at the legislative intent of the FFATA Act, and

that individuals would not be reported for awards, the school lunch

program, and also being below $25,000 for the first 3 years of that

act, we did not report individual awards. We have reassessed that

as we have gone along, as questions were raised, and at the beginning of this fiscal year, child nutrition programs will be reported

in there.

So again, I think it is a matter of, what is being asked, how we

are reporting it and then how do you track that back to the authoritative records. And to the point on audits, we are strong believers

in audits. Every year we go through a financial audit. We also do

audits on our financial systems, SAS–70, to account for that.

Mr. LYNCH. Thank you. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you very much.

I recognize the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Farenthold, for 5 minutes.

Mr. FARENTHOLD. Good morning, and thank you all for coming

to visit with us.

I just have a broad overview question. Do you think part of the

data problems, and I guess I will direct that to Mr. Smith or Dr.

Harris, because you work within the agencies, is there some level

of accountability for the data that you report? What procedures do

you have in place to check that the stuff you are publishing, both

on your Web site, and sending to some of these collector Web sites,

is accurate?

Mr. HARRIS. Thank you, Congressman, for the question. At the

Department of Education, we are actually very proud of the quality

of the data. I say that because we have a four-way match. We do

an extract before we submit data to USAspending.gov. And we

match that against our financial system, we match it against the

data stream that we send, and then we match it against what is

actually in USAspending.gov.

Now, it does go through a treatment when it hits

USAspending.gov, and that is when we get the opportunity to actually make those changes. But I do think at the core, and someone

spoke about it earlier, I think at the core of data quality is having

integrated systems such that human beings do not touch that data

between source and reporting. I think a large part of the reporting

problem lies there.

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Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Congressman. I would just echo my

colleague, Dr. Harris’ statement, we want to go to the authoritative

data source. We don’t want to reconcile it multiple times along the

way. So put it in once, read it many times and do the reporting.

I think the issue we face is there are sometimes subsets that we

are looking at, when you don’t have the whole picture, and we are

trying to recreate that, is where we start to get differences, and

when one group is looking at one thing and the other.

But we put a very repeatable, rigorous process in. Any time there

is a new requirement, we try to go back to that authoritative

source so we are not reworking it. We check from the agency’s subfeeder systems into the core financial system, do the edit check

there, then we check it at OMB before it goes into

USAspending.gov. So there are multiple checks in place, and then

certainly our first standard is high data quality and no rework.

Mr. FARENTHOLD. And I guess Mr. Brito may be the one to ask

this next question, but if anybody else wants to jump in, feel free.

When we look at these, and maybe Ms. Miller might kick in here,

too, when we look at these aggregationsites, are we comparing apples to apples? Is there equivalent of generally accepted accounting

practices for the Government? Or are we just getting thrown data

as each individual agency sees it, and there is no real standard or

accountability where we know we are looking at accurate data and

able to do comparisons that are reasonable?

Mr. BRITO. Well, I would defer to the Sunlight Foundation. But

it is obvious they had to FOIA information to do the reconciling.

Ms. MILLER. The answer is, the data is widely dissimilar. And so

whether the GAO’s initial study that they did, or the more complete analysis that we did, we are finding all kinds of inconsistencies, whether it is consistency of how the data is entered, whether it is completeness of the data or the timeliness of it, there are

lots of problems.

I have been thinking that USAspending.gov is a relatively new

phenomenon. It was passed in 2006, I think it was available in

2007. So I think the agencies are having trouble adjusting to these

aggregationsites. But we have to figure this out further downstream. I would certainly agree with the notion of the less human

hands involved in this, the better and the more consistent reporting we will have across agencies.

Mr. FARENTHOLD. And Ms. Miller, let me ask you this. You had

to Freedom of Information Act these agencies for information. Do

you have an overall sense that the agencies are friendly to publishing this information? Or are you running into noes, and agencies

saying, we don’t really want this information out?

Ms. MILLER. Let me clarify. We did not have to do a FOIA for

any information for the original analysis that we did that focused

on the quality of the grants reporting to USAspending.gov. We

have had to create a FOIA to get the FPDS data for, in order to

do the contract analysis that we wish to do.

Mr. FARENTHOLD. Are the agencies being cooperative, or are you

running into stonewalls?

Ms. MILLER. We actually don’t receive the data from the agencies

directly. We have not had that kind of interaction. We are taking

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the data from USAspending.gov and comparing it to other sources

of Government information.

Mr. FARENTHOLD. Thank you very much. I am out of time.

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Murphy, 5 minutes.

Mr. MURPHY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Just a few quick questions. Ms. Miller, I am interested in your

experience with the Department of Defense data in particular. This

is the one agency that still cannot get a clean audit at the Federal

Government level. It is obviously the largest procurement agency

at the Federal level. There is an enormous amount of very important data there that I think even as Members of Congress, we don’t

always know whether we have proper access to.

And maybe you don’t have an answer to this question, but I

wanted to know about your experiences with the quality of data

and the amount of data that comes out of the Department of Defense and how relevant that is to individuals that are trying to understand the decisions that are being made there, and how that

money is being spent.

Ms. MILLER. Let me consult with my colleagues just briefly to see

what their experience has been with respect to DOD data on

USAspending.gov.

My colleague, Kaitlin Lee, reports that most of what happens at

DOD is done through contracting. They do very little direct grants.

We have only looked at the grants. But if we receive this FOIA information that we have requested, we will be able to report on that

in about 6 months. So I am sorry, we don’t have that information.

Mr. MURPHY. I bring that up, because as we try to grapple with

a lot of complex spending questions, I think what Members find is

that even we don’t have access to important data. Certainly the

public doesn’t, and Mr. Brito is nodding his head. So I am happy

to give you a chance at this question as well.

But as a for instance, when it comes to contracting decisions,

what we have found is that over the last several years there has

been a massive outflow of contracts to overseas companies. And we

get just a shadow of data regarding those contracts. We know, for

instance, from year to year how many waivers to the requirement

to purchase here in America are granted, but we don’t know anything more. We get a report on the number of waivers, but we don’t

know what type of waivers they were, why the waivers were granted.

And so there is a larger conversation from a statutory perspective that has to happen about what kind of data the public receives

from the Department of Defense. But I will be very interested to

hear the results of your contracting audit going forward. Because

I think there is a frustration in the public, especially with regard

to DOD data. And Mr. Brito, you are nodding your head, so I am

happy to give you a chance at that as well.

Mr. BRITO. The only point I would like to make, bringing it back

to performance data, is that DOD is one of the least successful

when it comes to performance data. One reason perhaps is that

they have a quadrennial review process. They sort of feel that is

the place to do it.

When we talk about having requirements that an agency head

certify performance data, the Secretary of Defense for, let’s see,

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during the Bush administration, never signed the certification.

Never did. So that is something that we need to focus on.

Mr. MURPHY. And just to switch topics, back to you, Dr. Harris,

on this issue that was brought up earlier on student loans, the

total amount in student loans on USAspending.gov is somewhere

just south of $7 trillion, it is clearly not the right number. And I

wanted to just before the panel was up, to give you a chance to

maybe explain why that number appears on the Web site, and

what happened there.

Mr. HARRIS. Thank you, Congressman Murphy, for that question.

In fact, I was going to jump in when Congressman Farenthold

raised the issue of aggregation.

In my investigation, while I certainly agree with the assessment

by the Sunlight Foundation that there is a tremendous amount of

work we need to do in improving the timeliness and especially the

quality of the data, in the instance of the $6 trillion loan anomaly,

in my investigation, I have found that it is more an issue of aggregation. Here is what my investigation led to.

When we report the loan amount to USAspending.gov, the instructions tell us to report it at the face value. And in fact, every

single time we report for that specific loan, we report it at the face

value. Sometimes it goes up, and sometimes it goes down, based on

activity against that loan.

But if you aggregate that, unlike other data elements that you

can aggregate and they give you an accurate amount, if you aggregate that amount over time, you are going to come up with a ridiculous number. But this is where context becomes the biggest issue

we have with Open Government reporting. We have to do a significantly better job at informing the public on not what just the

dataset means, what the data attribute means.

So we believe it is the aggregation that was incorrect. When I

look at the data on USAspending.gov, it is accurate for the Department of Education.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

Mr. Walberg, 5 minutes, please.

Mr. WALBERG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you to the

panel for being here.

I want to followup on Mr. Farenthold’s questioning of Ms. Miller.

I listened to that question, but I want to move to Dr. Harris and

Mr. Smith with this question. Has the Obama administration been

helpful in assisting your Department in creating your Open Government plan, and your efforts to meet the Open Government directive? And I would ask you both, maybe we can start with Dr.

Harris.

Mr. HARRIS. Absolutely. I think the No. 1 help, if you will, would

be in the way of a challenge. And we look at the Department of

Education, we look at Open Government in two ways. Probably a

slightly unconventional way. One is certainly providing data to the

general public in a way where they can take the data and do what

they need to do with it.

But the other piece that we push hard on is collaboration. And

when you initially hear the word collaboration, you are thinking of

the public collaborating with the Government. But when you look

at our Race to the Top program, and you look at our innovation

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program, we are actually providing data to the public that they can

collaborate with each other. This is where we feel true innovation

in education comes from, not just interacting with the Federal Government.

So the Obama administration has helped us with that kind of out

of the box thinking.

Mr. WALBERG. Mr. Smith.

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Congressman. Yes, I think it was a

very collaborative effort, as Dr. Harris has said. The Secretary

asked me to serve on a working group that the White House convened, and I think every agency was asked to do that. And we

worked through, and I think a testament to that is Ms. Miller and

other groups, such as OMB Watch, being invited also to comment

as we developed these plans, to make sure that we had a full and

open conversation as each agency developed their plans and we

shared those plans across the Federal Government and sought to

put out the best product. Then we iterated those as we went forward.

I think one of the most important things is that as we are looking at transparency, collaboration and participation, how does that

drive the mission forward? What is the economic impact? If we are

putting data out there, what is the ability for citizens to take that

and have an economic impact for us in those rural areas? Or if it

is food safety, how do we push the Nation forward by being more

open, transparent and accountable?

Mr. WALBERG. Very important, with both entities, to have that

transparency. And the administration as well.

Let me continue the questioning with the two gentlemen. Under

OMB’s directive, each agency selected a ‘‘high level’’ official to oversee the Open Government initiatives. How did your agency select

its high level official, and what considerations did you undergo in

the selection process?

Mr. HARRIS. At the Department of Education, we certainly did

not see the issue as a technology issue. It was more of a business

processing issue. I am currently the senior accountable official for

data quality at the Department of Education. I wore, for many

years at the Department of Education, the chief financial officer

hat. But I am a technologist.

But what is more important is, as the official, I bring together

individuals, subject matter experts from the program offices, subject matter experts from finance, and subject matter experts from

technology to make sure that we get it right. So that is kind of how

we did it.

Mr. WALBERG. Mr. Smith.

Mr. SMITH. Sir, the Secretary asked me to take the lead. But it

was very clear that I myself was not going to get this done. So we

had a team-based approach. We built a rigorous governance structure around it. It was myself and the Deputy Under Secretary for

Natural Resources and Environment. And we actually have a meeting standing, executive steering committee made up of under secretaries, deputy under secretaries, across all the mission areas, to

ensure that we continue on this effort and make steady progress.

Mr. WALBERG. Thank you. I yield back my time.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

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I am yielding myself 5 minutes here. And I think we are approaching a time for a vote, just to give you a heads-up. It should

hit about the time we hit the break in between. But I have several

questions I want to be able to talk through with Dr. Harris and

Mr. Smith, especially. How do you choose the datasets? From what

I am seeing, what is coming out, there was a requirement to get

at least three high value data sets. How are those chosen? What

was the process you went through? If you could be brief, I have a

ton of questions.

Mr. HARRIS. Sure. As you are well aware, Mr. Chairman, we

have a very, very visible Secretary in Arnie Duncan. Mr. Duncan

spends a tremendous amount of time on the road, and he is constantly asking the citizens what information do you want. Much of

our information flows down from senior leadership in that way.

And that is kind of how we decided.

Mr. LANKFORD. I will come right back to that. Go ahead, Mr.

Smith.

Mr. SMITH. I think I just alluded to it, we try to apply a lens to

all our datasets that said how are we pushing the economy forward, what is the value of these datasets from safety and security

of the food supply, and every mission area increasing exports. How

can we put information out there that furthers the goals of the Nation as we move forward.

Mr. LANKFORD. Would that be for Data.gov or USAspending.gov,

or would that be the same for both of those?

Mr. SMITH. We applied this to any data, any information asset

within our mission areas.

Mr. LANKFORD. When you are choosing, as far as priority of

where to put things, obviously your agency has a very good Web

site, for both your agencies, and the information that is out there.

When you are choosing information, where does it land? The agency Web site, Data.gov, USAspending.gov, all of the above? There

are multiple other portals that are out there as well.

Mr. HARRIS. Actually, all of the above. In fact, prior to

USAspending.gov, Data.gov provided 20 toolsets and datasets out

there for our customers and clients to use. We actually looked at

how that data was being used and asked the question, what part

of this data do you like, what don’t you like.

Mr. SMITH. Yes, we apply it, again, to the whole portfolio. Let me

give you a quick example, the farmer’s markets. We expose the information on where all the farmer’s markets are in the Nation. We

have seen maps produced, so we are having an impact on small

business and farmers to sell fresh produce throughout the country,

and hope that increases traffic to those markets.

Mr. LANKFORD. I spend time, obviously, going through a lot of

the things that are out there as far as information and try to get

a good handle on it. But one of the interesting things, I am sure

you have done the same thing on it, when I go to Data.gov and I

input agriculture, or I go through the search features, and there

are multiple different vehicles for that, or education, on that, when

I go to Data.gov and ask for just raw data on it for education, it

comes up with nine datasets that come up for education. And for

agriculture, it comes up with 20 total. And the 20 that are out

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there, the farmer’s market one you just illustrated, all of them are

from previous years. They are older data on that.

So just trying to process through, obviously there are multiple

places I think it is located. It is just having Data.gov, the goal of

it was to have a place where you type it in, it all comes up there.

And it is actually not coming up there when you start doing a

search on it.

Mr. SMITH. I will certainly go back and take a look at that. The

point is to have a kind of a one stop shop for information portals.

So we will certainly look at that.

Some of the datasets were existing, but there were others that

had not been exposed through that manner. One is USDA nutritional data base, and that is one I talked about, in which people

are now making mobile applications in order to reduce obesity and

increase the health of our constituents.

Mr. LANKFORD. Sure.

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Chairman, I think you are actually highlighting

the very important issue of context. For example, when you look at

the CFDA data base, and you look at USAspending.gov, the average citizen would expect to see the exact same number in both

places.

Mr. LANKFORD. Correct.

Mr. HARRIS. But in fact, the reporting is done at different periods

of time. Are we doing a good enough job in explaining to the average citizen the period of time, the context of the data, the answer

is no, we need to do a better job.

Mr. LANKFORD. I think what we have created, it is the energy

that the Obama administration has put out, saying, let’s get this

out there. But now we have created so many different sites, dot

gov, that are out there, no one really knows where to go to get it.

And we don’t have a single portal to say, go here, and it will link

to everything else. We are missing that. So that is a big piece I

think we have to be able to resolve on this, just getting the basics

of where it goes from there.

As far as searchable pieces, and this is another thing from

USAspending.gov, one of the things I found often when I go

through it, USDA had a piece of it, there is an Excel file that would

come up, multiple different versions of it, but it would have the address, for instance, all in one file. So when I wanted to search for

Oklahoma, and say, what are all the different grants that are out

there for Oklahoma, it is not possible to do. Because if I just type

in OK as a search, I get every look, crook and hook coming up as

well in my search. And so just the basics of breaking up the fields

becomes very important.

What data standards do you put out there to say, this is how

every single data base is going to be put out to make it consistent

and searchable?

Mr. SMITH. I think you are pointing to one of the challenges

many of us face in large Cabinet level agencies, or any large organization, corporate or public. There are multiple systems brought

up over time, and many of them in non-standard manner. So it is

a very large lift to go back and standardize in each and every area.

So we are very focused on that, in particular, the areas we are focused on right now are transparency and the reporting areas you

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have talked about. We have been able to take the existing data, put

it into a readable format and get it out there.

When you throw that net even more largely, there are challenges

out there, and we consistently strive to work on those. A good example of what we are doing in the Department of Agriculture is

farmers report acreage, are reporting multiple different ways

across multiple programs. So we have set out to use the national

information exchange model as the standard, not only that the

farmer uses, but agribusiness and Government, so that everybody

can report and share information in the same manner.

Mr. LANKFORD. Right. I would assume every different one of

those groups, as well as every grant that is out there, has a unique

i.d. that it is using. It is difficult to even track, is this the same

vendor as this, they might have a similar name and they might

have a little difference on it. Is there a way to be able to set it up

and say, this is the unique i.d., so if we are searching, no matter

if they have a subset underneath that general agency, we can still

track it and say, all of those that have this name, they are all here

and we can search all of them? Is that possible to be able to do?

Mr. SMITH. The CCR, and Don’s effort, looked to get one master

vendor data file in which that solves the issue of contractors and

who we are working with. And I think we have made great strides

on that front. But it remains an issue that we are working on constantly, to keep that data clean.

Mr. HARRIS. Certainly this is pointed out, I believe, in the Sunlight Foundation’s report, something that we have known for many

years, that an entity could have multiple DUNS numbers. And oftentimes, if they are not linked properly, and you are making decisions based on aggregate data, you are not making good decisions.

So a lot of work needs to be done in a unique identifier.

Mr. LANKFORD. Give me your timing on that. Give me your

thinking as far as work to be done. I know this has been going on

for a while. How does that get resolved, and what kind of time period is needed to resolve that? I hate to say it this way, is that up

the food chain from you? Someone from OMB is going to have to

be able to handle some of those things, or is that something that

is within the agency?

Mr. HARRIS. I believe it is up the food chain, but I believe it is

also a partnership with the public. Because they are the ones who

have to do business with the Federal Government, they are the

ones who actually have to get these identifiers. And they have to

concur that one identifier for the entity makes sense, and that they

are willing to do it.

But to answer your question, how far away is that, I don’t believe

we have even started in really aggressively attacking that issue.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thankfully, we have someone from OMB who is

going to be hanging out in the next panel, and we will get a chance

to ask that question in a moment.

Let me just see if there are other Members. My time has expired,

but I want to thank you very much for coming. We will have a

panel that will be following. If you would like to stay around, we

have votes that are going to be happening momentarily. You would

be able to hear Mr. Werfel’s comments, or you may leave, as well.

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Thank you very much for being here. If we have additional followup questions, we will try to contact you directly.

With that, this panel is concluded.

Mr. Werfel, if you could come to the dais here, and we could have

a quick chat.

[Pause.]

Mr. LANKFORD. In the interest of time, I am going to go ahead

and swear Mr. Werfel in in just a moment, and restart this second

panel, and allow him to do his opening statement. We will watch

time on votes and see what happens. You are welcome to sit in and

be a part of this as well. We will get started in just a moment.

[Recess.]

Mr. LANKFORD. The second panel for this subcommittee will

begin again now. We are going to recognize this panel. Mr. Danny

Werfel, he is the Controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management, OFFM, within the Office of Management and Budget. He

is responsible for coordinating OMB’s efforts to initiate Government-wide improvements in all areas of financial management,

which I would assume would be a very large, complicated task.

So thank you for being here. Pursuant to all committee rules, all

witnesses are sworn in before they testify. If you would please rise

and raise your right hand.

[Witness sworn.]

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you very much. You may be seated. Let

the record reflect the witness answered in the affirmative.

Mr. Werfel, I am going to allow you to do your opening statement

as well, then we will watch carefully for the vote time. Hopefully

we will be able to get questions and your statement in all at once,

and we will just see how time moves from there. Thank you.

STATEMENT OF DANIEL I. WERFEL, CONTROLLER, OFFICE OF

MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET

Mr. WERFEL. Thank you, Chairman Lankford, Ranking Member

Connolly and members of the subcommittee, for the invitation to

discuss our progress in creating a more open Government.

On his first day in office, President Obama signed a memorandum on transparency and open Government that set forth a new

paradigm for an open and accountable government. Since then, the

administration has been unwavering in its commitment to increase

transparency, participation and collaboration to make our Government more open, accountable, and efficient.

A lot has happened over the last 2 years. The administration

launched the Accountable Government initiative, which outlines a

performance management approach that drives agencies’ top priorities, cuts waste, reforms contracting, closes the information technology gap, promotes accountability and innovation through open

government, and continues our efforts to attract and motivate top

talent to the Federal Government.

Federal agencies are becoming more open, publishing detailed

Open Government plans and road maps in compliance with our

Open Government directive. Final agency plans feature key openness initiatives, the identification of data the public would consider

highly valuable, and new agency Open Government Web pages to

facilitate greater transparency.

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The Federal Government’s data has become the public’s data.

Data.gov is a Federal one stop data sharing platform designed to

democratize access to data with hundreds of thousands of datasets

in a common format housed in a central location. Federal spending

clearly is becoming more transparent.

We launched paymentaccuracy.gov in June 2010. This contains

information about current and historical rates and amounts of improper payments, information on why improper payments occur,

and information about what agencies are doing to reduce and recover improper payments.

Recovery.gov presents unprecedented levels of transparency and

accountability, so that citizens can monitor the progress of the Recovery Act, to track Federal contracts, grants and loans, to an unprecedented degree, and to provide feedback on the status and results of those investments at the community level.

USAspending.gov is a one stop site that provides the public with

an understanding of how Federal dollars are spent, accounting for

billions of dollars spent across the executive branch agency. The

site not only contains valuable information on Federal spending,

but has been recently expanded to include data on sub-awards. The

public can now see where Federal grant and contract dollars go

down to the sub-grantee and sub-contractor levels.

Providing easy access to information is critical to ensure that the

Government is held accountable for how it uses taxpayer dollars.

While much progress has been made, going forward we need to continue our efforts to fulfill the President’s State of the Union promise, to build people’s faith in the institution of government. We

need to continue to refine the collection of data, provide easy access

to information, collaborate with our stakeholders and encourage

participation in how we conduct business.

The administration’s commitment to open government is firm.

The mechanisms that have been and continue to be implemented

constitute a new way of doing business that will persist for decades

to come.

While we have accomplished many things, there is still much

work, as I have mentioned. The public cannot realize the full utility

of transparent Federal information if the data across our agencies

are incompatible. Demonstrating our commitment to quality assurance, we have already identified potential methods for data standardization, particularly within Federal spending information. Data

standardization will not only increase the usability of the information for the public, but will also achieve long-term benefits across

Federal agencies.

Current efforts to provide quality and real-time data to the public can consume many resources, and at times, manual process to

ensure the data from multiple systems and sources reconcile. To

sustain and improve upon these efforts, inter-agency work groups

have been launched, with the commitment to drive high quality

Federal spending information and reevaluate and realign the underlying data standards.

As we continue to buildupon the solid foundations of an open

government, we must constantly gauge our progress against the

guiding principles of transparency, participation and collaboration.

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We embrace the opportunities to work with all of our stakeholders

to reach the shared end goal of an open government.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify today, and I look forward to answering your questions.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Werfel follows:]

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Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you very much.

I am moving to recognizing Mr. Kelly, the vice chairman, to

begin our questioning time.

Mr. KELLY. Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Werfel, both President Obama and the OMB have stressed

the importance of government that is transparent, participatory

and collaborative. How is OMB enacting this guidance, and what

role does OMB believe public citizens have in the process?

Mr. WERFEL. The public citizens have a central role. I think one

of the tenets of open government is that accountability is necessary

to push the types of results and improve government performance

that citizens demand, and that we have a responsibility to reach.

What we see day in and day out is that the more information is

shared publicly about Federal activities, in particular, for example,

where our Federal dollars are going, the more not only do citizens

participate and engage in helping keep us accountable for those

dollars, but the Government agencies themselves feel more accountable. As was mentioned in the previous panel, sunlight is a

great disinfectant. We certainly see that happening throughout

Government. I think the Recovery Act, in particular, is a great example of that.

Mr. KELLY. OK, and I appreciate that. But my question is, if we

are really looking for transparency and we are looking for participation and collaboration, why weren’t you willing to go ahead and

appear with the rest of the panel today?

Mr. WERFEL. For the record, Congressman, I would state that I

am here now, answering your questions and can be——

Mr. KELLY. That wasn’t my question, and I understand what you

are saying. But we keep talking about, we want transparency, we

want people to have access to us. And then when we have an opportunity to appear on a panel with other folks, you decline that.

Makes no sense to me.

But I come from the private world. I don’t come from this world.

I really am trying to understand why we talk one way and we act

an entirely different way.

Mr. WERFEL. I think the elements of the administration’s policy

in terms of witnesses and how they appear is something that I am

happy to spend more time with you on, and get more information

for you. Again, I will repeat, the bottom line is I am here and ready

to answer any questions you have.

Mr. KELLY. And I recognize the fact that you are here. But I really do, in the world I come from, I absolutely hate tap dancing.

When I can’t get an answer, and you do not have to be diplomatic

with me, you can be direct, and I would hope you understand, I am

that same type of person.

So whenever we have an administration that says, we want to

be open, we want to work with you, we want you to know everything, and then we invite them to sit here with us in the panel,

with the public, and they don’t show up, and the answer is, I will

get back with you, I don’t think that is fair to the American people.

I think it does a disservice, and it certainly discredits a policy that

is supposed to be open and transparent.

I yield back my time, Mr. Chairman. I don’t think you can answer that, right? Or we are going to go back on what you did say?

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Mr. WERFEL. My direct answer to you is, you have requested is

that I am not the correct OMB official to answer the question on

the administration’s policies with respect to witnesses testifying before Congress. Therefore, I have to go back and get the answer to

your question.

Mr. KELLY. Bad policy leads to bad process leads to a bad image

of what the people in this country really expect of us, and they

really do expect us to say what we mean and mean what we say.

That is just a real basic definition of integrity. And I would suggest

to you that in this town, we had better start understanding what

it is the American people expect from us. And they do not expect

to be given the runaround on things.

So I appreciate the fact that you are here, and the fact that you

can’t answer. But I would appreciate, in writing, the answers to

why you could not appear with the other panel.

Thank you, and I yield back my time, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you, Mr. Kelly.

I hate to tell everyone this, because it is going to cause a significant delay, but we have votes that have already been called on the

floor of the House. We have also been asked by the people that we

represent to vote for them. So we are expected to be there as well.

We are going to recess temporarily. This hearing will resume in

probably about 40 to 45 minutes. We will resume again with the

questioning and then be able to address our questions.

With that, we will stand in recess.

[Recess.]

Chairman ISSA [presiding]. The hearing will come to order.

The subcommittee chairman will be here in a moment. But one

of the few great prerogatives of the Chair is I also have the ability

to bring it back to order.

Thank you for staying over the voting break. You will see Members straggling back shortly.

I have a short series of questions for you. And they really have

to do with the work that the RAT board has been doing. As far as

we can tell, and both myself, the former chairman and the current

ranking member, have all gone over, reviewed it, seen some of the

discoveries. But particularly seen what we see is the first time in

which there has been a direct outreach to get reporting, to get it

in a format that is consistent and usable, and then use it against

other data bases that detect fraud, at the current time, OMB, from

what we can tell, has no comprehensive plan to bring a similar recipient reporting system across the Government. Can you comment

on that?

Mr. WERFEL. Yes. First of all, I would say that we are completely

committed to carrying forward some of the important accomplishments that the Recovery Board has had. One of the major areas

where they have been successful, as you have noted, is the deployment of a forensic data tool and a fraud detection tool. It is for that

reason that the President’s budget includes a proposal to move into

the Department of Treasury——

Chairman ISSA. You are talking about the $10 million?

Mr. WERFEL. The $10 million for the do not pay solution, which

would adopt very similar approaches that the Recovery Board has

adopted in terms of having a central place where the Treasury DeVerDate 11-MAY-2000 13:37 Aug 11, 2011 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00079 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\KATIES\DOCS\67567.TXT KATIE PsN: KATIE
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partment, in this case, would be assisting agencies and looking

across all data sources where we can get access to, both public

and——

Chairman ISSA. That is where I want to stop you.

Mr. WERFEL. Please.

Chairman ISSA. The President, by executive order, could require

all the agencies, I have been told, at least, to cooperate in a way

in which the reporting would be assumed, and thus that $10 million investment would be able to guarantee that it would have access subject to data integrity and ability to transmit it to do the

kind of work the RAT board has done. As you know, the RAT board

leveraged basically Katrina-Rita data. They leveraged existing onetime events in order to get more access.

They have been unable, except anecdotally, by transfers that

they have been able to get, they have been unable to get the real

access that would allow cross-platform. And Treasury certainly

would have the authority and the confidence.

Are you prepared to, either legislatively or through executive action, get that kind of buy-in? Or will it be, with all due respect, the

old mealy mouthed, we are OMB, we do things collegially, we get

buy-in, which is crap, it never works. And if you say it does, I will

have Mitch Daniels sitting in your seat, explaining that it doesn’t

work by Sunday morning.

That is my question to you, because your teeth are not sharp

enough to cut through the bureaucracy. Are you asking for something that would give either you and/or in this case Treasury the

teeth to make this a reality?

Mr. WERFEL. I think the answer to that is yes. We have to balance, as we break down data silos that exist in Government today,

and create the, enable us to do the type of analytics that are going

to drive more powerful assessments around finding anomalies,

fraud and error, there will be other public policy balances that need

to come into place, including, for example, privacy and other implications and data security. It is my position that we can achieve a

far greater efficiency and streamlining of data share and date

interoperability across Federal agencies, while still meeting important privacy and security objectives.

Chairman ISSA. What data does the Federal Government have

which you are prohibited from accessing for purposes of analysis?

Mr. WERFEL. For purposes of, well, there are, for example, one

of the more protected data bases is the IRS data base, as an example. And to the extent there is personally identifiable information

or tax information, Section 6103 of the Code would prevent that

type of movement of data.

Another great example is the National Directory of New Hires.

Chairman ISSA. Right, but let’s go through, because the IRS is

the best known by the American people. The IRS routinely takes

information in, digests it and responds to State laws, Federal and

State laws. If you have a deadbeat dad in Minnesota who leaves

and goes to Florida, or any other State, the Minnesota input data

leads to an output data that confirms the availability of the dollars,

allows for the grabbing of the tax return and thus the movement

of it, either to public entities that have taken care of the mother

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and child, or directly to the individual, or for that matter, even to

a State coffer on a State tax.

So if you have that authority within the Code, can’t you, without

looking at it, create a leverage where you send the data in a format

the IRS can absorb, with your request, and you get back only the

limited response? Isn’t it true that you can’t even pierce the IRS,

as long as you don’t extract the data?

Mr. WERFEL. Yes. There are, I am personally aware of situations

in which IRS data transfers can occur in a different format, in

order to protect certain 6103 restrictions. So you are right about

that.

Chairman ISSA. OK, my time is expired. When you said yes, you

are prepared to do it——

Mr. LANKFORD [presiding]. I can yield to the gentleman an additional 2 minutes.

Chairman ISSA. I thank the gentleman, but I will hopefully not

use it all. You didn’t say that you would ask the President by executive order. You apparently historically do not have the legislative

authority. Are you going to come to us for legislative authority, and

if so, when?

Mr. WERFEL. I think, let me step back and say that there are different avenues we can dig to break down these data silos. In some

case administrative, and in some case, we would need legislation.

I believe we are in a, as we move forward on our efforts to detect

fraud and understand more what we need to do to knock down

these data silos, I think we will be back and asking you for help,

legislative help to create these types of data transfers.

I don’t have a date certain by which I know we will come back.

But it is our commitment to work with this committee in particular

on these issues.

Chairman ISSA. OK. My closing question, which I would appreciate just answered for the record, or briefly respond and then expand, forensics clearly are not going to be enough alone. If I were

Visa, MasterCard or any of the other, if you will, world class organizations, real-time, online assessment is how you prevent the loss,

not how you simply see if the courts are too backed up to go after

the person once you find them. Ten million is obviously not for

that.

Do you have a plan to make any portion of the Government as

proactive as Visa, MasterCard?

Mr. WERFEL. I don’t know that I could articulate for you an overarching plan. I will say that I agree with the principle that prevention comes first versus paying and chasing errors after they occur.

Absolutely. There are situations that are emerging today where

agencies are taking more aggressive steps to pause, to review, to

place moratoriums on certain payments before they go out the door.

That is part of the prevention.

But a global, cross-Government plan that initiates the type of

neural networks that you are talking about, we don’t have that in

place yet. I think if we get to a point where we start to knock down

some of these data silos, that will open the door. We need to bring

some smart people around the table to figure out how to enable

such, leveraging such a new data environment.

Chairman ISSA. Thank you.

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Thank you, Chairman. I yield back.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you. I would like to recognize the ranking

member, Mr. Cummings, for 5 minutes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much.

Mr. Werfel, let me ask you this. In the other panel, Ellen Miller

talked about some agencies that were not reporting. Were you

here?

Mr. WERFEL. I was.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Can you talk about that for a moment? And I

was just wondering what we are doing to try to make sure that

they do report.

Mr. WERFEL. Thank you for the opportunity to respond to those

issues.

First of all, I think it is a very important thing that the Sunlight

Foundation is doing by raising these issues to our attention. It is

part of transparency at work. We don’t just self-identify errors, we

rely on the public to be reviewing our reports and finding those

issues as well.

I think in some cases, we are going to find that the public is

going to report, like a group like Sunlight Foundation, an error,

and it is going to have a real, immediate impact and be a legitimate issue for us to address. And sometimes, the error has an easy

explanation and it is not really an error at all. I think there was

an example that was provided around the school lunch program,

where USAspending.gov doesn’t require us to report payments

under $25,000, which is the bulk of the school lunch payments.

That is why there is an absence of information.

All that said, there are criticisms that were discussed in the first

panel that are valid. And we are not where we need to be in terms

of the full completeness of the data. We have issued a policy at

OMB that we think is having an impact on this, that requires Federal agencies to initiate more robust quality assurance programs

around the completeness, accuracy and timeliness of their data,

starting with the senior accountable official and moving forward to

the types of frameworks we see in our traditional financial statement reporting process: risk management, internal control review,

reconciliation of information in our accounting systems to what is

being reported on USAspending.gov.

All of that is underway. But Congressman, it is an evolving process. As we move forward, there will continue to be points in time

which we expect there will be some errors. And we will get better

and better at this as we go.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I often say that there are certain things that are

a project and not a product. Certain things are ever-evolving.

The question is, are we doing, are we moving fast enough? We

just heard from the Commissioner of the SEC yesterday, and in

one of her reports she talked about how folks on Wall Street were

moving so fast and coming up with all kinds of new products. In

some instances, so fast it was hard for SEC to keep up with them.

I am just wondering, do we have, first of all, the technology that

we need? Is it, from what you can see, problems stemming from

folks who are just not doing what they are supposed to do? Is there

a bigger hammer that needs to be hammered? I am just wondering.

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Mr. WERFEL. I think it is a mixture. I would say that there are

moments that I see, in my work, where it is almost astonishing,

the progress that is being made. So for example, I look at Recovery.gov today as an example. The information that is there, the

level of detail, the functionality of that Web site. And I think that

is really a cutting edge tool that is probably far ahead of where I

thought we might be 5 years ago, if I was testifying before you

then.

And so that is exciting. And that, I think, rallies the rest of the

community around what is possible. And really opens the door to

even greater efforts.

At the same time, there are agencies that I could probably say

I would have thought would have been further along if I was testifying here 5 years ago.

To answer your question, I think a bigger hammer is needed. I

think what you have today is a dichotomy that was reported on the

first panel that is accurate. We have what I would argue is a very

robust financial statement audit process that exists today. Started

in 1990, it has been 20 years. We have 20 of the 24 major agencies

in Government receiving a clean audit opinion. A lot of effort goes

into scrutinizing, to the 10th decimal point, the numbers that go

on our balance sheets and our other basic financial statements.

And we have developed a very robust process in response that is

moving forward and achieving important things in terms of financial reporting reliability.

That robustness does not exist with respect to the information as

reported on USAspending.gov. The spend information, as we call it,

is not completely wired into the financial statement audit process.

We think that we need to look at that audit process and that reporting model to potentially realign some of that audit scrutiny

around spending information. I think you would see a difference in

results if agencies felt the accountability of an auditor’s eye on

these issues.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I ask for unanimous consent that I have an additional 3 minutes, as the chairman had.

Mr. LANKFORD. Absolutely.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much.

In your testimony, you also talk about the breadth and depth of

reporting required by the Recovery Act, 200,000 prime and sub-recipients file public quarterly reports, with up to 99 distinct data

fields. As you point out, this is more frequent than other major financial reporting required by the Federal Government. And yet,

Recovery.gov seems to be the best example of Federal spending

transparency. Indeed, 99.6 percent of prime recipients filed on time

last quarter.

So I have to ask you this. Where did Recovery.gov succeed and

USAspending.gov struggle, and why?

Mr. WERFEL. That is a very good question. I think for one, the

Recovery Act represented a point in time where there was tremendous accountability, both vertically and horizontally, across Government and recipients, about getting the information reported in

and getting it correct. There was leadership engagement, congressional oversight, GAO has probably issued 20 reports auditing and

looking at our activities to meet these requirements. There was a

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real sense, and I am glad of it, a real healthy stress that was

placed on the entire Federal environment, and the recipients of the

Recovery Act, that this needed to be done transparently. And it became one of the most major priorities that I have ever been involved in in order to make this work, make it successful.

And we had a very talented individual in Earl DeVaney at the

board, at the Recovery Board, helping us along the way. And the

stars aligned for great success. The USAspending.gov environment,

it hasn’t been as similar. The law was passed in 2006. We did not

see the same type of emphasis, whether it be GAO, congressional

or administration leadership, around getting those data requirements up and running.

When this administration came in, it was confronted almost immediately with the economic situation and the Recovery Act. We

immediately looked at this as a major opportunity to deploy Recovery Act reporting and Recovery.gov successfully, and have it set the

milestone that USAspending.gov would need to follow.

We already see evidence that is following through. Because up

until the Recovery act, we never had any sub-award reporting in

USAspending.gov and now we do. So we are already starting to see

that this arc of, can Recovery Act reporting set a new tone and a

new watermark that would move USAspending.gov in the right direction, it is already starting to materialize. But we still have to

work at it.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

I would like to recognize the ranking member of this subcommittee, Mr. Connolly, for his questions in 5 minutes.

Mr. CONNOLLY. I thank the chairman, and welcome Mr. Werfel.

Welcome back to the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, your second home lately.

Mr. WERFEL. Yes.

Mr. CONNOLLY. We are glad to have you.

You, I don’t think, had joined us yet, but the chairman, Mr.

Lankford and I, in our respective opening statements, both praised

the administration for the transparency initiative, especially with

respect to Recovery.gov. So I think there was public acknowledgment, on a bipartisan basis, that we have made a lot of progress.

Now, nothing is perfect.

You in your testimony talked about the OMB and the CFO counsel developing a new statement of spending to focus on how and

where Federal dollars are being spent. Would that supplant the

current CFS? And how would that work?

Mr. WERFEL. It wouldn’t supplant it. It gets back to part of the

response to Congressman Cummings’ question, how do you, we

have confronted ourselves the following question. How do we drive

more accountability for Federal agencies’ reporting of spending information into USAspending.gov. We feel like we have developed a

pretty strong muscle in the area of basic financial statement reporting. The agencies have been doing it for years. They have set

up IT systems and processes to do it.

So the question is, how do we walk in that game and talk in that

dialog. That is where the concept of the statement of spending

came. Because agencies have the ability and the experience, and

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auditors have the ability and experience, to audit basic financial

statements. We felt that if we can create a financial statement

similar to our other statements that has the foundational information that goes into USAspending.gov that you, in order to get a

clean audit opinion on that statement of spend, it would automatically mean that the underlying source information is accurate and

then the information that flowed into USAspending.gov by definition therefore would be more reliable.

So what we are saying with the statement of spend is, reliability

of USAspending.gov information into what we believe has been a

successful, yet still emerging initiative to improve basic financial

reporting on things like balance sheets.

Mr. CONNOLLY. Are there best practices from USAspending.gov

that can be applied to other Federal agencies, and if so, how does

OMB disseminate that, or inculcate that?

Mr. WERFEL. Absolutely. One of the things that we did when we

started this process of moving forward on a more robust quality assurance program from USAspending.gov is we asked each agency

to submit a data quality plan. And you can look across those plans

and see some agencies really ahead of the game in terms of the

types of reconciliations that they are doing, looking at control totals, doing automated reports right out of their systems. I think

Danny Harris, Dr. Harris did a very good job during his testimony

of explaining how much they have leveraged their transaction infrastructure in a way to make this make more sense.

But other agencies, not as much. Other agencies are still doing

more manual, what we sometimes call cuff reports, putting together the reports separately and therefore, it is not as efficient

and it is not as reliable. So one of the basic missions of my office,

the CFO Counsel, is to share this information across agencies. We

have working groups that are doing that to say, here is what Dr.

Harris and the Department of Education are doing. They have it

wired into a process that is working for them and minimizing errors. And your agency is not doing as well of a job. So how can we

close that gap? So that is part of the mission here.

Mr. CONNOLLY. Let me ask you, because I am going to run out

of time, one more question. In the category of transparency, at

least speaking to this Member, I don’t think we pay enough attention up here to tax expenditures. That is a real, live spending item

by any other name. We just don’t like to talk about it, but it is a

trillion dollars a year.

What is OMB doing to try to make sure that we are shedding

more light on tax expenditures and their relationship to the Federal deficit and their relationship to other aspects of Federal spending?

Mr. WERFEL. This is an issue that I think, it is going to be one

of those times in the hearing when I ask to come back to you with

more information. I would like to consult with my colleagues at

IRS. It is not currently one of the required elements, for example,

within Recovery Act reporting and USAspending.gov. So sometimes

we are so busy dealing with the statutory requirements that are

before us and meeting all those deadlines that some of the other

elements of transparency don’t get on our radar screen as much.

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For me, that is true. My days and nights are spent meeting the

requirements of the various laws before me. So let me, if I could,

consult with IRS and then come back and brief your subcommittee

on this issue.

Mr. LANKFORD. I yield to the gentleman an additional 3 minutes

of time.

Mr. CONNOLLY. I thank the chairman. And I really welcome that,

and Mr. Chairman, I would hope that our subcommittee would welcome that. Because I think if we are going to have transparency

and we are going to have data available to the public, tax expenditures, if you look at how they are accounted and how we address

them in budget documents and so forth, it is woefully inadequate.

And it is a very substantial amount of opportunity cost from a revenue point of view. It may be all good policy, but it deserves the

light of day.

So I would welcome your coming back to us in much more detail.

And let me ask, and I would hope that the chairman would join

me in this, that we would ask also for your recommendations about

how better to capture both the value and the cost of such expenditures moving forward. And Mr. Chairman, I would ask whether

you might be able to join me in that request.

Mr. LANKFORD. Yes, that is a difficult one to track, just because

the IRS Code is nine times longer than the Bible. You think we

have a few exceptions in there? [Laughter.]

Mr. CONNOLLY. Exactly.

Mr. LANKFORD. Gathering all of that and what the values include

I am sure would be quite a task. I don’t know whether it would

be GAO or who that might be to be able to land on and help us

determine those types of things.

Mr. CONNOLLY. Thank you so much.

Mr. LANKFORD. You are welcome.

Mr. CONNOLLY. My final point, question, would be, I assume that

both the CTO and the CIO, Mr. Chopra and Mr. Kundra, are involved in the deployment of technology with your CFO counsel in

trying to aid and disseminate best practices, eliminate duplication

and improve transparency?

Mr. WERFEL. Absolutely. It is a partnership. Vivek Kundra, the

Government CIO, could have been sitting here today just as I am,

with the emphasis of this hearing on reliability of reporting, potentially on issues of audit. It just made more sense for me to be here.

But we are attached at the hip on these issues.

We have to solve this with a multidisciplinary approach. If it is

just the auditor, just the accountant, not going to get it done. The

technologist is critical to this effort as well.

Mr. CONNOLLY. I think that is a really important point, Mr.

Chairman. With that, I yield back my time and I thank the Chair

for his generosity and consideration.

Mr. LANKFORD. Thank you.

Mr. Werfel, let me just run through a litany of questions here,

and just short answers, and try to run through a couple of things

on it as we finish this out. Thank you for waiting through the

lunch hour to be able to be here as well, as we were finishing up

the voting.

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You had mentioned earlier that there was a need for some legislation to correct some of the data needs that are out there. I would

like for your office to be able to provide to our committee that list

that you would say, here are the legislative fixes that we need to

be able to help resolve those things. If you could get that back to

us, we will make sure that we share that in a bipartisan way. And

that would be very helpful to us.

There are a maze of sites that are out there. Recovery.gov was

very well done. It got the information out quickly. It was so successful that now we have multiplied the dot gov and now we have

Recovery.gov and paymentaccuracy.gov and Itdashboard.gov and

all the agencies have it, Research.gov, Data.gov, and it goes on and

on. I am missing many that I know.

How does an individual go find their information now? We have

moved from, it is out there, go search for it, when originally the

design was, let’s lock in a Data.gov, USAspending.gov and say, if

you are looking for something, go there. Is that still the mission?

If so, how is it going?

Mr. WERFEL. You are raising an enormously challenging element

of open government and transparency. And there are many challenging elements to it. One of them is getting the data out there.

And we are trying, and I think making important progress, in getting more real information and other types of reports public, in

particular through the Web.

Another challenge, and there are numerous, but the other challenge is, sometimes the quantity of the data that is out there can

be overwhelming, and how are we assisting the citizenry in accessing that information. And right now, I think you have hit on something that is part of a strategy. It might not be the most effective

strategy, and it is evolving. But it is the branding of our Web sites

in ways that make sense. If you want to learn about grants, go to

Grants.gov. If you want to learn about where Federal dollars are

going, USAspending.gov. If you are curious about the Recovery Act,

Recovery.gov. And you see the theme of trying to make it logical.

And we do a lot of work with citizens and user group around

these efforts to say, what works for you. We don’t do these Web

sites in a vacuum.

Mr. LANKFORD. Correct. But what is the central portal going to

be? If I don’t know which one to go to, where do I go to say, this

is where I start?

Mr. WERFEL. I don’t think that we have established a consistent

central portal. I know that in the previous administration there

was First.gov, there is USA.gov is available. But I don’t think that

we have championed the starting point portal for the rest of Government.

Mr. LANKFORD. Let me ask you, and obviously I am not going to

order you one way or the other on this, but let me ask you to examine that. Because people outside of the Beltway do not know where

to go. They do not know if they are looking for food stamp information to go to the Agriculture Department. They are not aware that

there are education programs in the Department of Defense. They

don’t know how to be able to search for those things.

So they need a central portal to go be able to ask the questions,

if they are going to get the data, then it can take them to the spot

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it is going to go. It doesn’t have to be all in one place, it can be

these various sites. It does make sense. There are going to be some

watchdog groups that are always going to land on Research.gov,

that is what they research. That is what they want to go after. Or

the Grants.gov.

But there has to be a place for people to be able to go to if the

information is out there that they know. Otherwise, many of the

things that we talked about earlier, Dr. Harris and others, it is on

their agency Web site. It is not on Data.gov, it is not on

USAspending.gov, it is over on their agency. So I can’t go find it.

Mr. WERFEL. So, yes, let me just recommit to the point that we

are working toward that objective. We have, as you mentioned,

some success with the branding in terms of certain stakeholders

who automatically know where to go, and we develop important

partnerships with them. And that efforts are underway to reconcile

the various dot govs. What I would like to do, as you say, come

back, we will show you some of our thoughts on a strategic vision

for that. Then let’s partner together toward the right strategic vision.

Mr. LANKFORD. Let me bounce a couple of other things past you.

There is a great need, we heard from Agriculture and Education,

that some data standards, if things are going to go up, here is how

they need to go up. And I gave the example earlier of an address

field that includes the entire address, including State, city, zip code

in one field. That is obviously not searchable. A single entity, that

is, a contractor, needs to have an i.d. number that someone can

search for that contractor and they can chase them down. There is

a need for OMB to be able to provide that to the agencies, here are

more data standards. Even begging the question, what is a significant piece of data out there.

And the for-instance on that. If someone is going and looking for

how many employees does an agency have, what is their budget,

what are the programs that they are doing, and what is the mission of those programs, there is no place they can go to get that.

They are stuck searching through an agency Web site that may or

may not have that. That seems to be fairly usable data that I think

most American taxpayers would want to be able to look at a site,

like a Data.gov, like something, whatever it may be, and to say,

how many people work there, what is the mission of the departments that are there, what are even the names of the departments

that are there, and what is the budget for that.

To find an established piece on that, if that is something OMB

can begin on, that is something I think we should begin on as well,

to say there is a basic transparency piece that needs to get out

there. Does that seem reasonable to you?

Mr. WERFEL. It absolutely does. I think if you looked at the landscape of data across Government, you are obviously going to find

significant heterogeneity and opportunities for standardization.

You will see some pockets of standardization that are promising

and that we can buildupon. But what you will also find is a lot of

work to be done. We need to move out on a strategic set of priorities. We have started.

85

Mr. LANKFORD. And I will tell you, Ranking Member Connolly

and I have both affirmed that. This is the first administration to

do this level of it. This is the beginning point, we understand.

The criticism is not that we are starting it. Way to go on starting

it and getting it out there. I want to find out, what are the lessons

learned, what are we missing, what are people asking for. Let me

give you a for instance on it. It would be a help to this committee

that when the emails come back as feedback, and there are several

of your sites that say, for feedback or contact us for more questions,

what data are you looking for, basically, if our committee were to

get those things in real time at the same time.

Not that we are going to respond to those things, but hat would

allow us in our oversight role to be able to say, you know what,

these are the data pieces people are asking for. And if our committee could get that unfiltered, and it could be shared bipartisan,

then people could get a chance to say, you know what, a lot of people seem to be asking for this. Why is it that we don’t provide that?

That would allow us to do our oversight a lot stronger.

And let me make another comment to you. You mentioned Recovery.gov. That is a very successful site, you are right, it was very

well done, and the information was unprecedented that was put

out. My feeling on it is, one of the successes of it was the recipients

were uploading information. It wasn’t just a Government entity

that was putting it down there, they have lots of other things. But

the recipients were saying, yes, we received this, this is what we

received and this is the feedback for it.

That is of great benefit. Is that something that is going to continue, and can that be replicated in USAspending.gov and other

places?

Mr. WERFEL. Yes, and there are many, many, a lot of the information that the Federal Government reports today, the source is

the recipient of the Federal dollars reporting what is going on with

the dollars from a financial perspective, a performance perspective.

What was, I think, unique about the Recovery Act was the automated nature of it, the speed of it, all of that.

Mr. LANKFORD. Correct. That is a platform that now exists,

though. What I am asking is, is that a platform that will continue

to be used? Will it be replicated in other areas to say the recipient

can quickly say, yes, we have received this grant, and also be able

to come back and say, this is what was done with it? Because one

of the primary questions that I get a lot about grants and contracts

and other things, was it actually accomplished? Did we do it? What

happened with that?

I think there would be people that could look around their own

neighborhood and could find, this is what happened in my area, I

had no idea that the Federal Government was involved in this area

in positive ways. But they don’t know, unless there is some reporting back on accountability on that.

So that Recovery.gov platform of recipient reporting, is that

something that is going to be multiplied out and used?

Mr. WERFEL. It is, and it is ongoing today. We have more and

more modernized and more seamless ways of collecting information

from non-Federal stakeholders. And that is going on today.

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Mr. LANKFORD. In the USAspending.gov and other places, as has

been referenced by several people, when there are gaps in it, and

information is not showing up, or it is showing up as a contract is

here, or the grant is here, but just zero amount, how are they held

to account in the agencies to get that information correctly? Whether it be a data field that is not done, or the dollar amounts are

completely left out, is there a chain of command? Is there someone

verifying that and saying, hey, we have to get this correct?

It seems that 30 some odd percent accuracy rate is not quite high

enough for us.

Mr. WERFEL. A couple of responses there. First, as mentioned

earlier in my testimony and mentioned on the first panel, right

now the process is a self-assessment. We have asked the agencies

to create a senior accountable official, and then an internal process

to validate completeness and accuracy. And there are some limitations in the self-assessment. An independent eye, whether it is the

Inspector General or an auditor, coming in to review that, is going

to drive improvements and more objectivity and the results will improve.

Second, I want to just, on the record, take a different perspective

on the 30 percent success rate that was in the testimony of one of

the other witnesses from the Sunlight Foundation. We have concerns with the methodology surrounding that. And I don’t need to

go into great detail. But we do not believe the success rate is as

low as the Sunlight Foundation said.

Mr. LANKFORD. It is just the key data coming out. I did a quick

search on just for Oklahoma, my home State, and to be able to look

at it and see some of the things that are in USAspending.gov, and

tracking through the different things that are there. There is just

a for instance. Last year there was a helicopter services contract

that was put out, but there is no amount that is listed on that one.

So we don’t know what that one is.

But there is apparently a peanut butter contract for a little over

$2 million. That seems like a large amount of peanut butter. We

go through a lot of it at my house. But on this particular report,

I could go on and on, there are multiple areas that are zeroed out,

page after page, there are about 17 pages listed, a lot of zeroes that

are listed here. And I don’t know if we bought $2 million worth of

peanut butter in Oklahoma or not, from a Government contract.

But there just seem to be some issues that I can look at, and I

can say, OK, somebody needs to be verifying this data and making

sure it is complete, and there needs to be a process. It is a very

good thing to get the data out there. But to get it out wrong or incomplete raises all sorts of questions.

Mr. WERFEL. Absolutely. And as I think was evidenced during

the first panel, some of the criticisms or concerns about the data

have rational explanations and some of them, it is just a basic data

quality issue that we need to address. I think the more people that

are searching this data and using this data the more we move in

the direction of better quality. The fact that you can go online and

find $2 million of Federal dollars were spent on something related

to peanut butter is something that could not have been done before.

Mr. LANKFORD. That is correct.

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Mr. WERFEL. And for that, we want to celebrate that, leverage

it, make sure that we do have a more accountable government. But

as you point out, there are gaps in the reporting and we are working on closing them.

Mr. LANKFORD. That is the best gift that we can give, is transparency. Watchdog groups, outside citizen groups, the contractors

themselves being able to look at the site and say, was it reported

correctly, is that accurate, is a tremendous asset to them. We want

to continue to multiply that and make sure that does occur.

So with that, Mr. Connolly, did you have additional questions?

Mr. CONNOLLY. If the chairman would yield, I was just going to

add to your point that it may be a good thing to celebrate the fact

that we can now solve the peanut butter mystery. But on the other

hand, we may want more information. And I would, because it is

not intuitively obvious to the searcher why we would be spending

$2 million tax dollars on peanut butter.

So while we are celebrating the fact that one can access that

piece of data, I would hope that, to the chairman’s point, that we

try to make these search engines even more useful by way of, here

is why we are buying $2 million worth of peanut butter.

Mr. WERFEL. Right. And as an example, if I could respond to

that, a legitimate explanation might be, it might be part of the

school lunch program, and therefore, there is an easy explanation.

Mr. LANKFORD. I completely agree. And I would say that the

ranking member mentioned in his opening statement that there is

not a need to be able to track every paper clip. That is not what

I think the American people are looking for on it. But I think it

is these broad categories, to know that it is consistent, we know

what that is, the information is getting out there, it is trackable,

it is traceable.

For instance, if a report is done, people want to know, if there

is a report done on wildfires in a certain bird nest, it asks the obvious question, how much did that cost to do that report? Well, we

know, there was a grant that was given to be able to do that. We

should be attaching that report to the cost of producing that report

so everyone could know and evaluate, is that good use of taxpayer

dollars, and instruct the conversation. That is a good thing for us

as legislators, to be able to look at and be able to see, and for people in our districts to hold us to account on that. That is a good

thing for us to hold you to account, to say we need that information

to get out there for reports done, how much does it cost, can they

find it and be able to track it is a reasonable thing.

If there are no additional questions, Mr. Werfel, thank you very

much for being here. We have a great deal to do. We look forward

to your followup reports on it, and this hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 1:15 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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