The Senate Passes the DATA Act

The Digital Accountability and Transparency (DATA) act, which was introduced to the Senate last year, was unanimously passed on April 10th. The act is an overhaul of the previous information reporting system used by various government agencies, which was paper-based and not always easily accessible by the public. The DATA act sets government-wide standards for data reporting, and will require all agencies to publish information online at USASpending.gov. This fully searchable, public website will make government spending more transparent to everyone, and even offers visualization tools that display government spending trends.

Source: USASpending.gov

This bill still needs to be passed by the House of Representatives and signed by the President, but it is expected to be approved with no issues.

Once implemented, the website will become a resource for businesses, the government, and private citizens, as spending data will be freely available to download. As this article mentions, big data analytics can be used on these data sets to generate insights into government spending patterns. Opportunities for such uses are numerous, and could include ways to find and address waste in federal spending. Perhaps this could be the platform to react to the growing national debt problem.