OMB Watch, the liberal non-profit advocacy group that has played a key role in advancing the ability of citizens to know how their tax dollars are being spent in Washington, is set to announce a new upgrade of FedSpending.org.
The site is already one of the most unique and important on the Internet but the new enhancements promise to make it even easier and more accessible for anybody interested in public policy issues. The improved site goes active later today with these improvements:
The upgraded FedSpending.org site includes the following improvements:
- Updated Data – FY 2005 now contains all four quarters of federal assistance data; the most recent publicly available data for FY 2006 has been added for both contracts and assistance (but the data for both remains incomplete at this time); many problems in older data have been corrected.
- Summary View – This level of detail has been designed to provide a better overview of contractors, recipients, congressional districts, states, and agencies, as well as other data categories, such as recipient type, assistance type, grant programs, products and services contracted for, and extent of competition. The summary view also includes a new Trend bar chart to quickly compare changes over time. The view is brand new for contracts and significantly upgraded for assistance.
- XML Output – Thesite now provides an XML format for data which will allow advanced users and programmers to design their own interfaces to pull and display FedSpending.org data.
- More Searchable – Improvements in page titles and implementation of sitemaps protocol should make it easier to find FedSpending.org data through online search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.).
- New Home Tab – The side bar navigation now includes a separate “folder tab” for the home page of the website, making it easier for visitors to navigate among the different sections of the website.
OMB Watch is also promising additional improvements later this year, including a mapping function, an inflation adjuster and an application to allow marrying federal spending and census data.
