From: CTOvision.com
CTOvision Editor’s note: Hudson Hollister is the executive director of the data transparency coalition. His insightful update below covers issues of interests to technologists in and out of government. -bg
Sweeping change and open data are dawning for U.S. federal spending.
On Thursday 10 April 2014 the U.S. Senate passed the DATA Act — unanimously. In the House, Majority Leader Eric Cantor has signaled that he intends to bring the Senate bill through to final passage without changes. The House has passed the DATA Act twice already, so it seems likely that this bill will soon be on President Obama’s desk for his approval or veto.
We expect President Obama will join a unanimous Congress, the Government Accountability Office, the tech industry, all of the major nonprofit transparency advocacy groups and open data advocates from across the spectrum — and sign the DATA Act.
No further changes are expected. Nearly three years after Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) first introduced it, we now know what the final DATA Act will look like.
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What data standards are Treasury and OMB going to establish? The final DATA Act requires them to adopt “common data elements for financial and payment information required to be reported by Federal agencies and [by] entities receiving Federal funds.” This is an invitation to transform the whole disconnected landscape of federal spending reports: financial, payment, and budget reporting by agencies and accountability reporting by grantees and contractors.
Can we be more specific about what data standards will be set up? Yes. Congress does not force Treasury and OMB to establish any particular identifier or format, but it does make its preferences clear. The data standards to be established must “incorporate a widely-accepted, nonproprietary, searchable, platform-independent computer readable format” and “include unique identifiers for Federal awards and entities receiving Federal awards that can be consistently applied Government-wide.” This language favors XML, XBRL, and the Legal Entity Identifier, but it doesn’t permanently impose those standards.