What are we getting for our $300 billion? OMB is supposed to tell us.

July 1, 2007 was the deadline by which the Office of Management and Budget was supposed to launch a pilot website to track what happens to federal grants. Can anyone find it? I can’t.

Last September President Bush signed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. NRO editorialized in support of the Senate version of the legislation, a bi-partisan effort jointly put forward by Barack Obama, John McCain, Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Thomas Carper (D-DE). The modest goal of the bill (now PL 106-107) was to give the public an easily readable list of “all entities receiving federal funds,” including the names and locations of recipients and the amounts.

What brought this on? Senator Coburn’s website offers some sobering numbers: “The federal government awards roughly $300 billion in grants annually to 30,000 different organizations.” The Office of Management and Budget reports that in fiscal years 2005, federal agencies reported $37.3 billion of this was in the form of “improper payments.” Realistically, the $37.3 billion per year figure is low-ball.

So what has OMB done? It appointed a committee, chaired by Tom Cooley, which came up with a plan.

The “pilot project” was refined to a July 1 deadline for a “pilot on subcontracts and subgrantee data.” The announced date for the finished website is now January 1, 2008. The public database ought to be an important tool—not least for bloggers—to track federal research dollars. These things take time, although a watchdog group called OMB Watch launched its own database of federal grants last October, less than a month after the bill became law. Still, it would be nice to see what OMB has by way of its own pilot. Senator Coburn, you’ve been on top of this. What’s going on?