The requirement, set in a law enacted in 2020 and amended afterward, resulted from pressure from Congress and the GAO to produce a comprehensive inventory. Image: Alexandre Tziripouloff/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffOMB has made “substantial progress” toward creating an inventory of all federal programs, GAO has said, but much remains to be done ahead of the January deadline set by a law designed to make the intent, performance and spending of those programs more transparent to Congress and the public.
A report said that the Federal Program Inventory site OMB launched early this year “provides valuable information about what the federal government does and how much it spends for more than 2,000 financial assistance programs.” That site includes programs that provide grants, loans, or direct payments to individuals, governments, firms or other organizations using data sources such as SAM.gov, USASpending.gov and Grants.gov.
That is organized into general categories—of which the income security and social services category accounts for the largest amount of spending—each of which is broken down into sub-categories with listings of the top five agencies involved and the top five eligible applicant types.
However, the report said that while the law requires “a coherent picture of all federal programs,” the inventory covers only financial assistance programs. Programs such as acquisition, defense, direct service, foreign assistance, and regulatory programs account for more than twice the spending of financial assistance programs, it said.
“OMB has not publicly articulated plans for fully implementing the inventory by the January 2025 statutory deadline, nor has it identified a time frame for when it will complete the inventory,” it said. Further, OMB “has not fully implemented five out of the six activities our past work has identified as part of an effective data governance structure,” although it has taken some steps toward that end.
GAO said that OMB generally concurred with its recommendations and said it already is taking steps to more fully develop a data governance structure, although it did not provide formal comments.
The requirement, set in a law enacted in 2020 and amended afterward, resulted from pressure from Congress and the GAO to produce a comprehensive inventory following a series of pilot projects starting in 2012 under 2010 revisions to the Government Performance and Results Act.
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