The federal government issues more than $660 billion dollars in grants each year. But the way it collects and generates data about those payments is a mess. It’s scattered in various databases throughout the government, and different agencies have different lexicons for the same information.
Not only does that complicate efforts to track federal spending, it makes life extremely complicated for grantees who have to deal with more than one agency. But there is hope — There’s hope, however. For one reason: the Office of Management and Budget is beginning to create a governmentwide data structure for grant spending.
Hudson Hollister, president of the Data Coalition, and Frank Landefeld, Public Sector Market Lead at MorganFranklin Consulting, recently published a paper exploring the government’s challenges and opportunities in the area of grant-related data. They joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk more about it.