Online Budget Database Planned by White House

prostoalex writes "The President of the United States feels Americans should be able 'to Google their tax dollars', and has signed a law that will create an online database to track federal spending. According to the Associated Press, the 'law is aimed preventing wasteful spending by opening the federal budget to greater scrutiny. The information is already available, but the Web site would make it easier for those who aren't experts on the process to see how taxpayer dollars are being spent.'"

Comments

Meh.

[TheCabal]

Nothing will come of this. There will be no data in the database due to either "national security" or creative accounting.

Re:Meh.

[WhatsAProGingrass]

I work for the military and even in our little shop, we can't keep track of our spending habbits. We can't keep track of man hours. Every piece of data that goes "higher" up, is definately skewed to show the "right" numbers. Absolutely nothing that gets sent up is actuall data. But let them keep spending millions trying to track it. When they find faults, they will yell at the people "below" and tell them to fix the problem. Well, now the people below will "fix" the numbers for the higher up guys. Wow, great ideas.

Re:Meh.

[overunderunderdone]

Actually (IIRC) it's that the story is wrong. It's not a database of the budget but a database of "earmarks". Earmarks are set asides of dictating that particular money must be spent on specific projects rather than going into the general fund of the department being funded. So if congress says the Department of Transportation gets 200 billion dollars that's not in the database... but if it says "the DOT must spend $225 Million on a bridge to Gravina Island, Alaska" that IS in the database. The administration doesn't decide what gets into the database or not, congress does by either earmarking spending or not.

This is purely a political move.
Yes but so is most earmarking. It's hoped that it will put pressure on congressmen to give up the worst of their pork barrel spending. Sadly though this might backfire. I'm sure most lawmakers don't want to be known as the biggest spenders of pork on the hill, but the whole point of pork is that it gets votes. Many an election has been won by saying "I wasted the rest of the countries money on meaningless projects and jobs for you guys in my district"

Half Empty, Half Full.

[Mateo_LeFou]

I suspect you're right. Enron made their income & expenditure information public, too. For funzies here's a story about how they evade being specific here in Dallas: Schutze rules, by the way.

Re:Congress cuts funding

[Tackhead]

> Senator Bridge To Nowhere said, "It is not as if these morons can stop us from spending the money. Then why waste money helping them find the wasteful spending?"

...whereupon Senator McBridge was promptly set upon and flayed alive by enraged representatives - for his first sentence contained a truth, and the second was the foulest blasphemy his fellow politicians had ever heard.

Already been done

[Aqua_boy17]

http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/view.html