Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Russell for yielding time.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by thanking Representative Jimmy Gomez for his comments tonight and for helping all through this piece of legislation, the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act, or GREAT Act. Representative Gomez has been an outstanding partner on this bipartisan bill to create more transparency, efficiency, and accountability in the Federal grant reporting process, and I thank him very much for his hard work.

The GREAT Act represents bipartisan legislation to modernize the Federal grant reporting process. It would do so by mandating a standardized data structure for information that recipients report to Federal agencies.

Unless the reporting requirements for Federal grants are searchable, the auditing process will continue to yield waste and inefficiency at best, allowing fraud and abuse at worst.

Mr. Speaker, in 2017, the Federal Government awarded $662.7 billion in grants funding to State agencies, local and Tribal governments, agencies, nonprofits, universities, and other organizations. Roughly translated, this equates to the gross domestic product of Switzerland or more than the GDP of every country outside the G20.

Within our Federal Government, there are 26 agencies awarding Federal grants, and all of them continue to rely on outdated, burdensome, document-based forms to collect and track grant dollars. Society has moved into a new age of information and technology, and it is time that our government follow suit.

Adopting a governmentwide open data structure for all the information grantees will report will alleviate compliance burdens; provide instant insights for grantor agencies and Congress; and enable easy access to data for oversight, analytics, and program evaluation.

Digitizing and, therefore, automating the reporting process would have a twofold effect. First, it would allow greater scrutiny of how the money is being spent. Second, it allows grantees to maximize every dollar they receive from the government to ensure it goes back into communities supporting local businesses, organizations, and education.

In order to fix the way Federal grants are reported, we must move from a document-centric reporting system to a data superhighway. I urge my colleagues in the House and the Senate to support the GREAT Act and bring grant reporting into the 21st century.

Again, Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Representative Gomez for his hard work on this bipartisan bill. I would also like the thank Representative Darrell Issa for his authorship of the DATA Act of 2014. It laid the foundation for the GREAT Act by applying data standardization to a pilot universe of Federal grants. And I thank him for his original cosponsorship of this bill.

I would also like to thank OMB Director Mulvaney for his office's advice on this legislation and leadership in advancing open data in the grant reporting process this year through the President's management agenda.

Lastly, I would like to thank Leader McCarthy for bringing this bill to the floor and for his broader leadership in pursuing an innovative agenda this Congress.

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