The long-anticipated roll out of federal agency spending reporting required by the DATA Act is set for May, but that hasn't kept transparency advocates from looking for new ways to make data work for government.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee weighed the legislative merits of several transparency measures in a March 23 hearing, and DATA Act supporters are backing a bill to put analytics on a bigger stage.  

The Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary — or OPEN — Government Data Actaims to take all agency data not federally restricted and place it in an open source format what would allow for standardized use by the government and accessible to the public.

"Our federal government is not just the largest organization in human history, it’s also the most complex," said Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Coalition, a trade association that supported the DATA Act as well as other data standardization efforts throughout the federal government.

"To conduct oversight across such scale and complexity is a daunting challenge, fortunately, that is where transparency comes in. By giving Americans direct access to their government’s information, we can deputize millions of citizen inspectors general to help this committee fulfill its mission."

The OPEN Government Data Act, which was introduced in House and Senate companion bills in 2016, follows much of formula for success that the DATA Act did — standardizing federal data to make it easier to use and compare while making it transparent to the public.

Hollister said the shift to open source data would require the government to jettison the Data Universal Numbering System, or DUNS Numberas the data standard for contracts and grant programs because it is maintained as a propriety system by Dun & Bradstreet, Inc.

"Most of the expense of Big Data projects comes from extracting information from different sources and transforming those datasets into the same format and then loading them into news systems to be analyzed," he said.

"If federal datasets were consistently available, using machine-readable formats to begin with, those expensive one-off projects would not be necessary."

Dun & Bradstreet officials disagreed with Hollister's assessment, saying in a statement that the DUNS system already provides the government with analytic capabilities to capitalize on Big Data.

"Our DUNS Number

®

is widely recognized as the global standard for business identification and is the gateway to unique insight on businesses. Dun & Bradstreet’s partnership with the GSA enables increased accountability and transparency into the government’s grantees and partners, which is of critical value to American taxpayers."

Both bills have yet to emerge from committee, but drew bipartisan support in the hearing.

"The OPEN Government Data Act will take another step toward expanding the availability of government data," said Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., noting that the bill would codify an Obama-era executive order calling on the federal government to make its data machine-readable.

Hollister stressed that passing the bill now could provide the public with a powerful transparency tool, going as far as to say that if government had standardized data formats a decade ago, it would have uncovered the Bernie Madoff scandal, which was obscured in part by data incongruities within investigating offices at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"That’s why it’s important now, when there is not a political controversy for Congress to affirm as a political matter, that we are going to publish and standardize federal data," he said.

Agencies will begin posting their spending data in DATA Act-required standardized formats in May 2017.

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