On DOGE and Transparency: A Note From Our CEO

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

A century ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote those words about the power of transparency into government, and they are words we believe in deeply at GovSpend.

Since the new administration introduced DOGE, many people have asked for my reaction, from the perspective of a company dedicated to increasing transparency into the US government’s use of our tax dollars. Resisting the temptation for influence by my political leanings, my take is actually fairly uncomplicated and sits outside the battle between right and left.

Simply put, when change is upon us, as happens politically at least every 4 or 8 years, uncertainty follows, and our instinct is to look for truth. Done right, one can find truth in high-quality data.

During the 2008 financial crisis, I worked for a financial data provider, and the same was true then. As everyone from Wall Street analysts to CEOs to individual investors and consumers scrambled to understand the implications of what was happening on the national stage, financial data and transparency were in high demand.

While today’s landscape is very different, the sunlight Brandeis calls for is similarly necessary. Data is the unbiased, unemotional signal in the storm, and in a moment when government transparency and efficiency are front and center in the political sphere, it’s more important than ever.

While the Trump administration has formed DOGE in the name of government efficiency, its pursuit is not a novel concept at the national level. Thankfully, the construct for producing and exposing the data is already in place, as the Federal government has long enacted robust programs to offer citizens timely, straightforward views into spending. For example, at fpds.gov and usaspending.gov (and its associated API toolkit), anyone can view spending for all agencies in one place. Save for a carveout for spending related to national security concerns, our federal tax dollars, distributed through contracts, grants, loans, and direct payments, are thoroughly accounted for with a healthy amount of detail.

Congress, formally in charge of the purse strings, directs its investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). And the President appoints each agency an Inspector General. Meant to be non-partisan and independent, they work to identify and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. I do not have a view on their effectiveness, but the structure is in place. 

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is also foundational. It outlines expectations for the government’s compliance with requests for government records and documents. 

While well-intentioned, the practical implementation is of course imperfect and plagued with inefficiencies. For example, at GovSpend we find that getting access to the actual B2G contracts is difficult, with our (often voluminous) FOIA requests taking too long for responses, frequently being declined, and often coming back either not fully fulfilled or heavily redacted. 

Further, while the Federal government is doing the work to offer up the data, it comes from many sources, is not standardized or connected, and is not easy to analyze. This is where GovSpend’s Fedmine platform comes in. Fedmine aggregates data from dozens of sources and delivers it inside a platform designed for analysis and visualization, ready to be exported into third party applications.. 

GovSpend excites me because we operate around the tenet that data is the great equalizer.

While no one can predict whether FEMA will be abolished or the Department of Education or any other agency will be disbanded, there are some clear indicators that more funds will be distributed to states instead of spent at the Federal level. And with state and local governments, transparency and access to spending data is much trickier.

Contrary to popular belief, FOIA does not apply to state, local, and education (SLEd) agencies. Instead, each state has its own set of public records laws, and they are interpreted inconsistently across the tens of thousands of government agencies to which they are applied. And while the letter and spirit of these laws make clear that the citizenry is owed details on the use of our tax dollars, acquiring that information is arduous, not timely, and sometimes expensive. 

GovSpend’s mission is to facilitate better accounting for our tax dollars, with the result being a database full of public sector intelligence – on use of funds, on competition, on pricing.

We send tens of thousands of public records requests per week to counties, municipalities, K-12 schools, public colleges and universities, hospitals, utilities, libraries, airports, retirement systems, law enforcement, fire departments, correctional facilities, departments of transportation, technology, transit, parks & recreation, and so on. And we follow-up actively on them in order to assemble the most thorough compilation of government spending available. Our product then layers in analytics and visualizations to help customers identify insights to better understand their parts of the public sector marketplace. 

Transparency makes for healthy government, which means better competition and greater opportunities for the suppliers and service providers that help keep it running.  

It is unknowable at this point whether some of the rhetoric around Federal government reduction will come to fruition. But one thing is certain – the data will show the impact of these changes along the way. Government contracts at every level of government will reflect how our tax dollars have changed hands among our representatives and leaders, and GovSpend is committed to delivering this intelligence.