Congressional Budget Justification Transparency Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 22, the Congressional Budget Justification Transparency Act.

The Congressional Budget Justification Transparency Act is a long- overdue reform that would ensure Congress and the Nation's taxpayers can understand the full scope and context of the annual Federal budget.

I thank my colleagues, Congressman Mike Quigley and Ranking Member James Comer, for working together on this important bipartisan legislation.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 22 will truly open up the executive branch annual budget request and provide needed transparency of each agency's detailed budget justifications. The American public and each of their congressional Representatives deserve full access to the annual agency plans to spend their hard-earned tax dollars.

This past year alone, the Federal Government spent more than $6.5 trillion. Public spending transparency resources, like USAspending.gov, are currently helping the public track ongoing agency spending activity. However, the annual congressional budget justifications provide detailed and plain language explanations of how each Federal agency plans to spend congressional appropriations.

Currently, these valuable budget documents are sent directly to congressional appropriators and are then posted across hundreds of disconnected agency web pages. This makes them extremely hard to track down.

H.R. 22 simply requires the budget justifications of every agency to be made publicly available on a single website. To do this, the bill requires the Office of Management and Budget to issue a full listing of agency budget justifications and the individual agency web pages where they are posted. This will assure the public that they have access to the complete publication of these authoritative budget resources.

The bill also requires the U.S. Treasury Department to centrally publish all the materials on USAspending.gov as open data.

As established in 2014 by the DATA Act, USAspending.gov is quickly becoming the primary public resource for the public to track how the government is using their tax dollars. Adding congressional budget justifications to USAspending.gov will provide even better context to agency spending activity.

Thanks to another House Committee on Oversight and Reform-produced law, the 2018 Good Accounting Obligation in Government Act, congressional budget justifications also now list unimplemented inspector general audit and GAO report recommendations. This means H.R. 22 will also help Congress and the public annually track open IG and GAO oversight recommendations.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Illinois (Mr. Quigley). I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. PALMER. Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I am prepared to close.

I strongly urge my colleagues to support this commonsense transparency legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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