President George W. Bush signed into law two decades ago the landmark Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), thus mandating creation of the USASpending.gov website and enabling every American with internet access to see for the first time ever how trillions of tax dollars are spent by the central government.

The revolutionary new website first went live on December 13, 2007, in an atmosphere of anticipation about its potential. “This sort of transparency breeds accountability among those entrusted with spending the public’s money,” said Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Jim Nussle in a statement that day. “Even though this new site is chock full of data, it remains a work in progress. We’ll continue to work with agencies, Congress and the public to make improvements that ensure the site is as user-friendly as possible and that data uploads are timely and accurate.”

The enthusiasm grew steadily, as seen in the response nearly two years later with release of an update.

“Twitter has practically exploded with excitement over what, if you think about it, is a relatively dry and fusty government data source,” reported Fast Company’s Kit Eaton on June 30, 2009, when a specialized version focused on tracking government spending on information technology went live.

Today, USASpending.gov drew a record 6.8 million visitors between September 30, 2024, and October 1, 2025, with academic researchers, journalists, government officials at all levels, and citizen activists being among the most prolific users of the site.

And no wonder, since, as John Hart told a celebration of FFATA’s 20th anniversary during a panel discussion hosted Friday in the nation’s capital by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), “with FFATA, we unlocked what could become a civic renaissance where evidence and data reign in the public square.”

Hart should know because, as communications director for former Senator Tom Coburn, he was a key strategist in a bipartisan campaign beginning in 2005 that saw the Oklahoma Republican uniting with another freshman, Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama, to secure congressional approval of what was then deemed in many corners of official Washington to be an impossible challenge.

“With FFATA, our ambition wasn’t just to enact a law but to create a norm, an exception that government spending should, of course, be searchable on the internet. We also wanted to crowdsource oversight and ensure that We the People would continue to be the center of gravity in a free society. Once that genie is out of the bottle it’s hard to put it back. Even though more spending needs to be exposed, reversing what we started would be harder than accelerating it,” Hart explained.

Coburn and Obama were an unlikely pair, with the former earning early in his first term the sobriquet “Dr. No” owing to his profession as an obstetrician and being a forceful, determined opponent of waste, fraud, and corruption in federal spending. For his part, Obama was a progressive new young voice in the Democratic Party, who championed bigger, more aggressive government on his way to becoming president in 2009.

To succeed, this unlikely duo needed another equally odd couple, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Tom Harper (D-Del.). And behind them all was a coalition of conservative and liberal nonprofit advocacy players who normally were determined opponents. Among the leaders of the coalition were POGO’s present executive director, Sean Moulton, who moderated the Friday panel, Gary Bass, founder of guerilla media outlet OMB Watch that focused on federal bureaucracy, and this author, who then served as director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Multiple other advocacy groups from across the ideological spectrum would join the cause as the campaign developed.

“We often forget that FFATA was a foursome — it wasn’t just Coburn and Obama. The team also included Tom Carper and John McCain. McCain’s role was important because we were getting our share of grief for collaborating with someone on the other side who clearly had higher ambitions,” Hart told the Friday gathering.

“McCain knew what we were doing, and McCain certainly knew what he was doing. Sure enough, half of our foursome would face off in 2008. But in 2006, we put First Principles like transparency and self-determination ahead of party. We harnessed the star power of that era to ignite a light that could endure,” he continued.

“In hindsight, FFATA feels like an obvious no brainer — who could possibly argue against Googling your government — but it wasn’t at the time. Agencies told us they could never merge datasets, and we had to expose and overcome secret holds by Senators Byrd and Stevens,” Hart added.

Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) were influential lawmakers who for reasons they never publicly disclosed in detail opposed expanded public access to federal spending data. During the Senate debate on FFATA, both Byrd and Stevens placed “Holds” on the proposal to prevent debate on the proposal. McCain and Harper played pivotal roles in nullifying the holds.

As popular as USASpending.gov has become, panelists agreed that there remains much in the way of upgrades in the system that would advance the transparency and thus accountability of government. Bass, whose organization compiled, designed, and managed fedspending.org, a precursor web site to the government’s new creation, told the Friday panel’s audience that Americans should be able to “find out if we’re getting bang for the buck. For example, Republican Senator Dave McCormick pointed out in a Washington Post commentary that NIH’s Diabetes Prevention Program cut Type 2 diabetes by 58% over a three-year period. And that every [National Institutes for Health] NIH dollar generates roughly $2.50 in economic activity. I didn’t know that, but spending transparency should tell us this information.”

In addition to equipping USASpending.gov to disclose how much the government spends toward a particular goal, the website should also connect users with official documents that describe what Congress intended a particular appropriation to achieve and measures of the actual performance, including compliance with the law, of the funding. “Billions are going out in contracts to corporations and other entities. Let’s find out if those who are getting the money are complying with laws and regulations,” Bass said.

Bass also suggested that USASpending.gov should be upgraded to provide transparency on the costs of tax expenditures, or the amount of tax revenue that lost from credits, exemptions, deductions, or preferential tax rate.

“Over the past 20 years, they have been rising at a slightly faster rate than spending. The congressional JCT estimates in FY 26 we will lose $2.3 trillion in tax expenditures. Like financial assistance awards, there may be good and bad tax expenditures. But we should understand how this unseen part of federal spending is being used,” Bass insisted.

Hart and other panelists agreed on the need for a renewal of professional and personal unity of purpose and that the celebration of the success of FFATA could serve as the ticket to gaining a renewed sense of acceptance of efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions.

“It’s unconscionable that the world’s most advanced and successful democracy in human history has so little transparency and so much opacity, especially with the advent of AI,” Hart emphasized. “There’s no excuse for not having real-time transparency at every level of government, complete with chain of custody tracking that allows tracking every public dollar down through layers of subcontractors. The technology exists to do both and the national security question should not be used as an alibi for inaction. Public spending data should belong to the public. Full stop.”

Hart gets genuinely excited when talking about the potential of USASpending.gov, telling The Washington Stand that “with artificial intelligence (AI) and its power to do pattern recognition and pattern prediction, we can give every citizen the power of super-intelligence.”

He also disclosed that he is working Paul Allen, the co-founder of Ancestry.com and other technologists “on a project called ‘Aqueduct.’ This project will merge datasets related to inputs (i.e. spending) and outputs (i.e. economic performance) to train AI for predictive analytics. The chemistry field has already done this with a Nobel Prize-winning effort called AlphaFold, which is overcoming a bottleneck in the drug-development process related to protein mapping.”

He believes that means “in the near future, almost certainly sooner than 20 years, any citizen will be able to assess a policymaker’s claim and ask Aqueduct to predict its multiplier effect or ‘bang for the buck.’ USASpending.gov helped set the stage for this work by making government spending more accessible, but much more work remains.”