DATA Act in Action: Successfully Leveraging Financial Data to Optimize Spending Decisions

The Data Coalition, DLT Solutions, and OneStream Software hosted a virtual event that focused on how information from the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) has been used in federal agencies with success to optimize spending decisions, identify more efficient strategies for providing government services, and opportunities for future improvements.

 The DATA Act established a foundation for readily-available, comparable information about how the government spends taxpayer dollars. In 2020, the U.S. federal government spent over $6 trillion. The open data resources required by the DATA Act and available on USASpending.gov are equally accessible to Members of Congress, federal agency staff, researchers, and the American people to understand how that funding was allocated and spent. While federal agencies have been implementing the DATA Act for years, consolidating, organizing, and sharing data for use remains an ongoing challenge due to data management hurdles, data quality gaps, evolving standards, and alignment for use of information.