Experts: Fed data not always usable

The Obama administration may have launched a series of websites making thousands of federal agency data sets publicly available, but the information isn’t always usable or accurate, a House panel was told Friday.

Agency data are sometimes entered into spreadsheets in an inconsistent manner, weakening the quality of the data sets and rendering many of them unusable, said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that urges using the Internet to catalyze government openness.


“I don’t think there’s a single agency that’d get an A,” Miller told lawmakers.

The comments came during a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing. Experts testified that government data released online aren’t always what the public wants and sometimes paint an inaccurate picture of how government is performing.

One example Miller cited involved student loan information. The organization found USASpending.gov reported that the face value of all student loans last year totaled $6.9 trillion dollars — an enormous overestimate.

The data released by federal agencies don’t always help inform taxpayers how government is doing, according to Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at George Mason University. Brito said agencies are audited internally and should be subject to the same performance reporting requirements as a U.S. corporation, in which an independent auditor is brought in to measure a company’s work.

Without independent auditing, Americans can’t get a clear picture of how well the government is doing its job, Brito argued.

The vast majority of newly available data is about the government’s activities and not about data, said Brito. “There’s plenty of smoke but little fire,” he said.

President Barack Obama touted the idea of increasing transparency of government when he first came into office and promised his administration would shine a light on how government works and where taxpayer money is spent. Data.gov, USASpending.gov and PaymentAccuracy.gov are among the sites the administration created to put more data into Americans’ hands and give them a closer look at how the federal agencies are performing.

Friday’s hearing had two separate panels, and the only witness on the second one was Danny Werfel, a controller at the Office of Management and Budget. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) lashed out at Werfel for refusing to testify with the other witnesses on the first panel, which included the chief information officers of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education, in addition to Miller and Brito.

Americans “expect us to say what we mean and mean what we say,” said Kelly. “They do not expect to be given the runaround on things, but I would appreciate in writing the answers for why you could not appear on the panel.”

Werfel kept reiterating that he was present at the hearing and ready to answer any questions from lawmakers.

“I recognize the fact that you’re here. In the world I come from, I absolutely hate tap dancing,” Kelly replied. He added that it “seriously discredits a proposal that we want to be open and transparent.”