Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Ms. FOXX of North Carolina. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Virginia sharing his comments with us, and I would like to continue my remarks by thanking Representative Jimmy Gomez for helping author 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 for his hard work.

Madam Speaker, in 2017, the Federal Government awarded $662.7 billion in grants funding to State agencies, local and Tribal governments, agencies, nonprofits, universities, and organizations. This is a lot of hardworking tax dollars, even in terms of Washington-speak.

Within our Federal Government, there are 26 agencies awarding Federal grants, and all of them continue to rely on outdated, burdensome, document-based forms to collect and track grant dollars.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 follows suit.

The GREAT Act represents bipartisan legislation to modernize the Federal grant reporting process. It does 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, and potentially fraud and abuse at worst.

Adopting a governmentwide open data structure for all the information grantees 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 allows grantees to maximize every dollar they receive from the taxpayers to ensure it goes back into communities, supporting local businesses, organizations, and education.

Lastly, the GREAT Act has received broad support from an array of good government groups. The coalition endorsing the GREAT Act includes the Bipartisan Policy Center, American Association of Law Libraries, American Library Association, Association of Government Accountants, Association of Research Libraries, Data Coalition, Demand Progress, Government Accountability Project, Government Information Watch, Grant Professionals Association, National Grants Management Association, National Taxpayers Union, Native American Finance Officers Association, the Project on Government Oversight, R Street Institute, Senior Executives Association, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

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 Senate to support the GREAT Act and bring grant reporting into the 21st century.

Madam Speaker, again, I urge my colleagues to support the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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