September 8, 2010

Contact:
Gabriela Schneider
Communications Director
gschneider@sunlightfoundation.com
202-742-1520 ext 236

NEW ANALYSIS FROM SUNLIGHT IDENTIFIES $1.3 TRILLION IN BROKEN

FEDERAL SPENDING DATA, FULL REPORT AT CLEARSPENDING.COM

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the Sunlight Foundation launches ClearSpending.com, a

new website and “scorecard” that analyzes how well U.S. government agencies are
reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov. ClearSpending is the most thorough
analysis of this federal grant and loan data ever conducted and was first previewed at the
Gov 2.0 Summit yesterday.

Sunlight’s analysis reveals that more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from
2009 is broken. These data inaccuracies account for half of the total $2.6 trillion in
government spending data reported last year. ClearSpending offers a critique on the
reliability of data from USASpending.gov, across three metrics—consistency,
completeness and timeliness—and covers spending from 2007, 2008 and 2009.

While there has been an increase in the number of programs reporting to

USASpending.gov in the past three years, the reported data suffers from an abundance of
errors, as well as problems with the data’s timeliness and completeness. Findings from
Sunlight’s ClearSpending show that a significant portion of the government’s data is
unreliable and that USASpending.gov has not fulfilled its legal requirement of providing the
public access to accurate, timely and detailed information on how federal agencies fulfill
their spending obligations.

Read the full report online at www.sunlightfoundation.com/clearspending.

“The rise of Gov 2.0 brought much excitement for new technologies within government,
including a call to arms for more and better public data. But as ClearSpending proves, first
we need to fix how the data we already have is collected and reported,” said Ellen Miller,
executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “The proper reporting of
government spending is not only critical for curbing fraud and abuse, but it allows state and
municipal officials, and also the public, to see where the money is going and how it is
benefiting their communities.”

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ClearSpending.com’s scorecard offers a detailed view of how federal agencies and

programs are reporting their spending data. The scorecard provides an analysis of more
than 30 federal agencies and how they rank in the following categories:

• Over Reporting—The amount reported in USASpending.gov that is not reported

in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA).
• Under Reporting—The amount reported in the CFDA that is not reported in
USASpending.gov.
• Non-Reporting—The total value of all programs that are completely missing from
USASpending.gov.
• Late—The total obligations that were reported late.
• Incomplete—The total obligations that omitted required information.

While the ClearSpending scorecard does not provide numerical rank for the best and worst
federal agencies, Sunlight’s analysis does show that the Corporation for National and
Community Service, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science
Foundation are among best reporting agencies. The agencies with the least well-reported
data are those with large budgets and those that have programs that primarily give grants
to individual recipients, such as Medicare, unemployment insurance and veterans’
benefits. The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which created
USASpending.gov, does not require individual grants to be reported.

As the ClearSpending report shows, federal agencies need to focus on the quality of data
they collect. If the data is unreliable, then the quality of tools and websites built upon it is
irrelevant. At the moment, USASpending.gov cannot be considered a meaningful source of
information about federal spending. Sunlight will continue to regularly update
ClearSpending.com as data becomes available from USASpending.gov.

For more information on ClearSpending’s methodology, visit

http://sunlightfoundation.com/clearspending/methodology/.

A video explaining more about ClearSpending is available here.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to
make government transparent and accountable. Visit http://SunlightFoundation.com to learn more
about Sunlight’s projects, including http://PoliticalPartyTime.org and http://TransparencyData.com.

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