The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) was signed into law by President Obama in 2014. The act draws on lessons learned from the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The main goals of the DATA Act are to set data standards that improve the quality of spending data and create a data exchange to codify this data in standard computer-readable formats.
Once the DATA Act is fully implemented in May of 2018, a single place (USASpending.gov) will house information about the broader spending life cycle for the entire federal government.
The public will be able to:
- Track dollars spent against the dollars appropriated by Congress
- Track overall spending by high-level categories such as personal compensation and contracts
- Find out how much money is available in a Treasury account
You can learn more about the DATA Act by visiting http://fedspendingtransparency.github.io/index.html.