Track Federal Spending - If You Can!

A tip o' the Blogging Hat to Mark Schaver of The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky for this:

... using the new, free FFATA Portal. A spokesman for Global Computer Enterprises, Inc., the private company that created the site, told Federal Computer Week that "the goal of the search portal is to make the information easy to find by taking out the government jargon." The site explains:

The portal offers free, instant access to contracts and grants awarded across the federal government via a user-friendly free text search and dynamic reporting tool. No login or registration is required – the public has instant access to federal spending information and the ability to create custom reports from that information. This site is not associated with any government agency and is provided free of charge from GCE.

By providing more transparency in government, this site is the easy way to track federal spending and your tax dollars at work. Users are able to search government contracts, grants data, and earmark grants from the appropriations process.

OMB Watch is another private entity that offers a federal spending database.

We need to stay on top of this spending machine in Washington. We may not be able to stop it but we can certainly attempt to expose it.