If laws produced virtue, we’d all have halos. In reality laws sometimes produce next to nothing, at least initially.
Case in point: the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. That well-intentioned piece of legislation was supposed to bring transparency by having agencies adopt uniform standards for tagging spending data. But as implemented, it’s not working out that way.
Those pesky Government Accountability Office auditors checked out the data posted at USAspending.gov. Under the law, GAO is supposed to check things periodically. When it comes to budget data, agencies get about a “C.” GAO is 95 percent confident that three-quarters of the website data matches agency records. But on contracts and grants spending, forget about it. GAO found that between 0 and 1 percent of posted data matches agency records.
Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2017/11/data-act-so-far-so-meh/