Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. If people call my office and ask a simple question, something as simple as, How much did this cost?, it is difficult for even a Member of Congress to be able to track down all the details. How much was allotted for that grant? How much was actually spent? How much was that contract? How much was actually spent? How much does this agency spend on X number of programs or on this specific program?

An individual hardworking taxpayer should be able to go research that out. Outside groups should be able to research that and should be able to develop some way to systematically research and compare. Right now, we can't do that.

We may do something as labor intensive as mail them something, or email them some things that we found, or maybe get a PDF document and be able to send it in, or send them to an agency Web site, but there is no systematic structured way to be able to compare last year to this year, one agency to another agency, how this contract was done, how this grant was done. This is a great moment to be able to bring all that information together so that every group, including Congress, can pull that data and can research it.

This gets to the essence of why transparency is such a big deal because we want every single taxpayer to be able to look in and be able to see how their money is spent. That's an appropriate way to be able to respond to this.

This also eliminates the duplication reporting from a contractor or an agency that is actually trying to file this information to not have to do it multiple times, to make it more efficient. This deals with the inconsistent requirements of reporting across different platforms. This deals with the basics of grant and contract recipients being able to also report in that data, as was done by the Recovery Board, which has been very successful in getting accurate information in.

This also engages those outside individuals, grant writers, grant recipients, and contract recipients, to be able to come back in and process that data so we get real-time information. And it deals with one of the most basic things: efficient use of money. In this particular bill, it deals with all these conferences, reducing the cost of government conferences, finding some way to be able to put some parameters around them and structure, so that money is not pulled from one place or another to be able to function in conference, a conference that doesn't have a quarter of a million dollars budget spending $850,000 for a single event.

I reiterate what we have said on both sides of the aisle: transparency is not a partisan issue. This is a bipartisan bill, and whoever is in the White House and whoever is running agencies, just like Congress, is accountable to all the American people.

This makes all of what we do publicly available, easy to be able to research, easy to be able to compare. It is a simple way to take this on. I'm strongly in support of this and grateful that it's a very bipartisan act.

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