Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Clearspending Calls Out USASpending.gov

The Sunlight Foundation's Clearspending.org reports that USASpending.gov sucks.

"In the past three years there has been an increase in the number of programs reporting to USASpending.gov. However, the reported data suffers from an abundance of errors. There are also serious problems with the data’s timeliness and completeness. Of the $1.9 trillion the government spent on grants in 2009, $1.3 trillion – 70% -- was incorrectly accounted for on USASpending.gov."

Details are here.

Clearspending puts it in some context. "But there's also a larger point that I want to make about this analysis: it's not news -- not really. People have known that this data is bad for a very long time. Not in this level of detail, perhaps. But they've known there were problems. Yet instead of fixing those problems, the folks behind USASpending decided to build new websites on top of the same lousy data, collecting superficial plaudits from advocates who were excited about the apparent potential of the site but didn't have sufficiently direct access to the data to see its flaws."

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