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US Government Transparency on IT Spending

Since I could not have said it better myself:

The IT Dashboard provides the public with an online window into the details of Federal information technology investments and provides users with the ability to track the progress of investments over time. The IT Dashboard displays data received from agency reports to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), including general information on over 7,000 Federal IT investments and detailed data for nearly 800 of those investments that agencies classify as “major.” The performance data used to track the 800 major IT investments is based on milestone information displayed in agency reports to OMB called “Exhibit 300s.” Agency CIOs are responsible for evaluating and updating select data on a monthly basis, which is accomplished through interfaces provided on the website.


You can view major investments in IT projects by several government agencies, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Veterans Affairs. You can get a lot of information about individual agencies like the agency head and CIO, average days late per milestone, investment phase, prime contractors, and fiscal year spending amongst much more data quickly and easily available.

The IT Dashboard allows for quick analysis between the years of 2002 and 2009. With visual graphs of a few different styles, you can compare the overall IT budget and the change in IT spending across several agencies and see how it all lines up. You can export the data into a CSV or subscribe to it as an RSS feed to be kept up-to-date.

The transparency and accountability provided by this website certainly deserves praise and attention. You might be able to find answers to your questions with their FAQ page or by watching this tutorial they created on YouTube:

Check out the IT Dashboard under the USAspending.gov umbrella that provides the same sort of thing for an even broader scope of government services.