Statement for the Record
Demian Brady, Vice President of Research, National Taxpayers Union Foundation
U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
Regarding the Committee’s Hearing Entitled
“Sunshine Week: Bringing Secret Government Spending to Light”
Hearing Date: March 18, 2026
Dear Chair Ernst and Ranking Member Markey,
Thank you for holding this hearing.
Transparency is an important safeguard for ensuring oversight and accountability of taxpayer funds. Over the past decades, Congress has enacted several reforms to improve visibility into federal spending, including the requirement for a program inventory. These reforms have made it easier for taxpayers, watchdogs, and policymakers to track federal spending, but transparency gaps remain.
Congress first required the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to publish an inventory of federal programs in an update to the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, entitled the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010, but, for years, implementation lagged and the public still lacked a clear picture of the federal government’s full footprint.
Additional momentum came with the enactment of the Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act in 2020, which helped clear roadblocks while adding reporting requirements for each program to include basic budgetary information.
More than a decade after Congress first required an inventory, OMB—building upon work under both the Biden and Trump Administrations—is finally delivering meaningful progress toward a government-wide list of programs.
OMB launched a limited pilot effort in 2020, but the program inventory, available at fpi.omb.gov, currently identifies 3,963 federal programs—1,340 more than when the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards analyzed the dataset last fall.
Further improvements are needed. In a March 2026 report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the inventory remains incomplete and inconsistent across agencies and issued 17 recommendations to improve its usefulness. These include ensuring that all program types are captured, preserving archived data, linking programs to their statutory authorities and related regulations, and improving the consistency and accessibility of the data.
Congress and the executive branch need a completed program inventory to enhance oversight. A comprehensive inventory would provide a foundation for reviving performance-based budgeting by linking spending to measurable outcomes and program effectiveness. A useful model is the Program Assessment Rating Tool implemented during the George W. Bush Administration, which systematically evaluated federal programs based on purpose, performance, and results.
In addition, a more robust federal program inventory would:
Improve oversight of fragmented and overlapping programs. GAO has long documented areas where multiple programs pursue similar objectives across agencies with limited coordination. A more complete and standardized inventory would make these overlaps easier to identify and address.
Help Congress tackle unauthorized spending. Each year, appropriations continue for programs whose authorizations have expired or were never enacted. Linking programs to their statutory authorities would allow lawmakers to better evaluate which programs should be reviewed or reauthorized.
Enhance the usefulness of existing transparency tools. Platforms like USAspending.gov are most effective when spending can be clearly tied to the programs responsible for administering those funds. A stronger inventory would make federal spending data more consistent and easier to interpret.
A more complete program inventory could also support ongoing legislative efforts to strengthen oversight. For example, Sens. Rand Paul and Maggie Hassan introduced the Duplication Scoring Act (S. 2733), which would require the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to identify potential overlap in its cost estimates of new proposals under consideration in Congress. This would be more effective if CBO, working with GAO, had access to a comprehensive and standardized inventory of federal programs.
Sunshine Week provides an important opportunity to reaffirm a basic principle: taxpayers deserve a clear and complete accounting of how their money is spent. Congress has already taken the first steps by requiring a federal program inventory. Now the focus should be on ensuring that this tool is fully developed, consistently implemented, and actively used to improve oversight.
Completing and strengthening the federal program inventory would not only improve transparency—it would help policymakers identify duplication, address unauthorized spending, and make more informed budget decisions. Transparency is key to improving oversight and strengthening accountability to root out wasteful or redundant spending.
National Taxpayers Union Foundation appreciates the Committee’s continued focus on strengthening government transparency.