USASpending.gov

This is a relaunch of www.fedspending.org, and is meant to provide information to on how our money is spent at the Federal Level. There’s interesting data here, including info on:

• contract actions (you can check by company, see the list of Top 100, or look at contracts in your CD, among others)
• micropurchases

• spending in various sorts you can define

• loans direct and guaranteed

• and a whole section on IT purchasing.

There’s more at the site with varying ways to sort out this data, and some discussion of Data Quality.  This is not meant to be the final version of this site, with many more refinements (probably not enough) and additions to come.  For a first shot, this is pretty impressive — and impressive that they took an application already developed by OMB Watch to build from.

Another site, www.data.gov, is in beta (but is live, mostly) and seems to seek to be a complete repository of many of the datasets developed by or maintained by the Government.  I can’t tell you how complete this is — no idea if datasets maintained by contractors for varying reasons are here — but this is pretty promising too.  It will be really useful if this repository is complete (minus black program data I suppose), and it refreshed as the datasets are updated.  These are just datasets, so you’ll need to have the right software to make use of it (like GIS for those datasets specific to it) and need to be able to interpret some of this, but this may be real progress on transparency.