The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is leading to an unprecedented level of federal spending, along with a diverse set of new federal programs to assist those impacted by the public health and economic emergencies. While many of these programs are necessary contributions to a robust federal response to COVID-19, it underscores a problem NTU has highlighted in the past: to this day, the federal government does not know how many federal programs even exist.
Luckily, some lawmakers in Congress have been pressing the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make some progress on this front. We wrote in July 2019:
“Though the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) Modernization Act of 2010 requires a single, comprehensive list of federal programs, with a due date of October 1, 2012, one has yet to materialize. Is this undertaking lost to the public forever as the federal government continues to grow?
Not if a bipartisan group of senators has anything to say about it. Last week, they urged the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make good on a seven-year-old requirement to put a list of all federal programs on one, public website. Led by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY) and Senator James Lankford (R-OK), the group includes eleven other Republican senators and four Democratic senators.”
While OMB has been slow to respond to the lawmakers’ requests, a recent pilot project from the agency offers some valuable information on the path forward for a federal program inventory.
In February, Performance.gov - a partnership between OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) - announced the completion of a pilot project on the performance and budget data for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
The team:
“...worked closely with NRC and the Department of Treasury’s USASpending.gov team to combine large NRC performance and spending data sets. The work resulted in two dashboards: [1] Complete Performance Dashboard [2] Budget Analysis Dashboard. NRC’s Complete Performance Dashboard features the data hierarchy found in their Congressional Justification (CJ) and can be broken down by business lines and product line with accompanying location and facility data where applicable. The Budget Analysis Dashboard features the hierarchy reported to USASpending.gov and can be filtered by object class and broken down quarterly.”
One of the important takeaways from the study is that OMB, GSA, and other federal agencies need to establish a more clear data reporting hierarchy. The team reported that performance data from NRC’s congressional budget justifications could not easily be aligned with spending data reported to USASpending.gov.
More encouraging, though, is OMB’s pledge to continue its work on data harmonization. This is one of many steps the agency needs to take to put necessary federal program data in one place. Federal officials, taxpayers, and taxpayer advocates are depending on this effort. Once we finally get a sense of how many federal programs even exist, we can get to work on reducing duplication throughout government.