Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014
Floor Speech
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Mr. ISSA. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I rise in support of S. 994, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, or DATA Act.
As chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, I have looked to tackle major problems pervasive in the Federal Government.
Over the past 4 years, our committee, the majority and the minority, has taken up and moved several bills designed to reform the Federal Government.
Majority Leader Cantor has worked with leaders on both sides of the aisle to take most of those reforms and advance them through the full House, often on a unanimous basis.
All Members of the House can be proud of the work we have done to improve the Federal Government. Without a doubt, the most important transparency reform we have pushed over the last 4 years has been the DATA Act. The DATA Act is but a first shot of a technological revolution that will transform the way we govern.
Just 3 weeks ago, the GAO's Comptroller General Gene Dodaro came before our committee and testified that the status of the Federal data programs is abysmal. Agencies have no standardized performance metrics for their programs. Agencies cannot tell us how many programs they have. But most importantly, agencies do not and usually cannot tell us how much taxpayer money has been spent on any given program.
The spending information that is provided is often incomplete, out-of-date, and very often inaccurate. The American people deserve to know if their taxpayer dollars are being wasted or whether they are being spent wisely. Even the meager amount of performance information collected today is useless if it cannot determine how much resources any given program truly consumes.
This information disadvantages not only Congress, but in fact the President's administration. Presidential administrations one after another consist of but a few thousand officials to oversee a workforce of nearly 2 million people and trillions of dollars.
Regardless of political party affiliation, each Congress and every President is frustrated by this large, permanent, unaccountable class of bureaucrats.
Some scholars have even deemed the permanent bureaucracy as the ``fourth branch'' of the Federal Government.
In order to better oversee the Federal Government, Congress, and even the President and his appointees, must better leverage the technology available today. The DATA Act will allow us to do just that.
I introduced the first version of the DATA Act in 2011. Its inspiration came from a relatively small expense in the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus spending bill, a bill that I overall did not approve of but which did have this important accountability standard.
The stimulus temporarily established an entity called the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. The Board was chaired by a respected inspector general, Earl Devaney. Under Chairman Devaney's leadership, the Board established direct reporting requirements for stimulus projects and standardized Federal agency reporting. This allowed inspector generals and other law enforcement agencies to more effectively prosecute fraud and prevent improper payments.
Furthermore, this information was made available to the public online in an easy-to-download, easy-to-manipulate format so that journalists, academics, and government watchdogs could more easily analyze stimulus spending.
I met with Vice President Joe Biden in November of 2010, prior to even becoming the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Despite possible disagreements on some aspects of the stimulus, we found ourselves very much in support of the Recovery Board's successes and knew that it could be replicated across the entire Federal Government.
I want to thank Vice President Biden for his continued public and private support for the kinds of reforms embedded in this legislation today, and particularly for continuing to be a champion of the Recovery Board's work and the transparency it brought.
In order to do what we agreed to back in 2010, the Federal Government would need standardized data and reporting by all Federal agencies and improved recipient reporting. That is the only way that you could accomplish this, and legislative action was needed.
After months of working with leading experts in the field of standardized reporting, I introduced in July of 2011 the first version of the DATA Act, H.R. 2146. Later that year, I joined with Ranking Member Elijah Cummings to refine the legislation and mark it up through our committee.
I want to thank Representatives on both sides of the aisle here today for the bipartisan nature in which we worked on this kind of transparency work. It is technical. It is sometimes hard. Of course, it is a pushback from bureaucrats, but it is what Congress is supposed to do: make the institutional changes that make government more accountable.
In April 2012 we brought it to the floor on a bipartisan basis and passed the first version of the DATA Act unanimously. While a companion version, S. 3600, was introduced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio that year, the Senate did not act on either it or the House-passed bill.
Last year we reintroduced the DATA Act as H.R. 2061 and approved it unanimously out of our committee. We made significant changes to streamline the bill, but we maintained the focus on its core elements. Simultaneously, Senator Warner and Senator Portman introduced a new Senate companion, S. 994, the bill before us today. The House acted quickly again and approved H.R. 2061 by a vote of 388-1.
Knowing that the legislative calendar was short, House and Senate sponsors worked with Senator Carper and Senator Coburn in a preconference process that ensured the bill would be taken up by the full Senate and which anticipates our passage here today.
We also were able to bring to the table those reformers in the administration--both political appointees and career civil servants--to offer technical improvements to the bill, and they are incorporated in this legislation.
While the bill does not contain all reforms the House advanced in its two previous votes on the DATA Act, the bill before us today does contain the core elements of the two prior versions of the bill and maintains the most important step: common data standards and recipient reporting.
The DATA Act is more than just better tools to fight waste and fraud. It requires agencies to report their financial information in standard formats program by program. The DATA Act also gives policymakers in Congress and in the executive branch better information to make better decisions. More importantly, we give the American people better information to evaluate our performance.
In addition to the strong data standards and requirements for agencies to produce program-by-program information, the House-Senate agreement contains two key provisions from previous versions of the DATA Act.
First, the bill authorizes the Treasury Department to establish a cutting-edge data analysis center modeled specifically after the successful Recovery Operations Center, also known as the ROC. This is the center I spoke earlier about that was established by now-retired but still-distinguished friend of government Earl Devaney as part of the Recovery Board's stimulus transparency efforts.
This new center will build on the innovative technology and ideas of the ROC and expand their use throughout the Federal Government. The DATA Act specifically provides for the transfer of that technology still in place at the ROC.
This new Treasury Department data analysis center will be a vital tool for law enforcement agencies and the IGs in their criminal and other investigations. The new center will also serve agencies who strive to prevent improper payments.
Second, the DATA Act agreement before you today establishes a pilot program to develop consolidated reporting for recipients of Federal funds. And I want to emphasize that, Madam Speaker. Federal recipients, people who get taxpayer money, will now have a transparent and consolidated way to send the information as to how they are spending it so you and the public will know.
Hundreds of billions of Federal taxpayer dollars are spent every year by State, local, tribal governments, universities, and private institutions. These institutions end up inevitably wasting millions of taxpayer dollars complying with duplicative and complicated reporting requirements.
At the end of a 2-year pilot program where some recipients will report to a single entity in a standardized manner, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget will issue guidance to all Federal agencies on how to streamline and consolidate reporting requirements. Just like with stimulus funds, the same data standards that apply to Federal agency reporting will apply to recipient reporting.
The DATA Act will give the American people the ability to track how we spend their tax dollars. Instead of sifting through PDFs--a form of visual, nondata-based standard--posted online that only let's
you see a picture of the spending--and many different formats--you now will in fact have all Federal spending information available for bulk download in a single, machine-readable format.
That is a big mouthful, Madam Speaker, but what it really means is that both individuals and entities, large and small, will be able to create tools where, on your iPhone or Android, you will be able to ask a question and get back an answer as successfully as the programs that have previously been made available.
The DATA Act will give lawmakers and public watchdogs powerful tools to identify and root out fraud, waste, and excess spending in the government. It will put at the American people's fingertips today the kind of information that only long and arduous research could unveil.
More importantly, by simply opening up this information, we will enable journalists, academics, and even private sector businesses to use the data to create products that will deliver real value to the American people.
This is just one example:
The National Weather Service some years ago did just what we are proposing by opening up their data, making it freely available to the public some years ago. Today it supports a multibillion-dollar weather analysis industry, and every American with a smartphone or a computer can find out what the weather is and what it is forecasted to be at any location in America. That wouldn't be possible without that open data standard.
I am very proud that it was a start, but there is more to do.
The DATA Act will have the same ability to create jobs, which is why this bill is so important. It is endorsed by dozens of private sector technology companies.
New York University Business School Professor Joel Gurin wrote in a recent book that ``the value of government open data is that it's a long-term, permanent resource that innovators can use for decades, developing new ideas and new companies as technology makes them possible.''
That is a mouthful, but it says what we need to say, which is that this is going to create new industries that are able to leverage the information that today is not available to the American people and not available to the innovators in Silicon Valley and around America.
I ask that my colleagues join with me today in sending this bill to the President for his signature, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. ISSA. Madam Speaker, in closing, this last weekend, the Associated Press talked about the waning days of this Congress and expected to have a do-nothing Congress.
That is easy to say, but in this case, today, we are showing, on a bipartisan, bicameral basis, with our friends in the Senate, that there are major pieces of legislation that will save countless billions of dollars and provide better information to the American people and to the watchdogs who want to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in our government.
So this is not a controversial bill because it has taken years of hard work to get it right. But, in fact, this is a major piece of legislation.
I want to close by thanking Senator Carper, Senator Coburn, Senator Portman, and Senator Warner, the author of the bill today, in addition to Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, and of course, my ranking member, Congressman Cummings.
This has been bipartisan. It is one of the many pieces of bipartisan legislation that take a long time, they hold a lot of hearings, but at the end of the day, the American people can trust that the American people's work does get done, in spite of some of the things we are unable to do. This is a major piece of legislation.
I want to thank, lastly, leadership for bringing this to the floor today in a timely fashion so that we can get it to the President's desk for signing next week.
Madam Speaker, I urge support and yield back the balance of my time.
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