Americans had a hard time finding out where their hard-earned tax dollars went.  Until 2 days ago.

Now, thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama, anyone can discover the pockets of federal dollars.  The site tracks contracts, grants, earmarks, and loans.

What can we dig up? Read on for 7 examples (contracts with KBR/Halliburton, Tom Delay's pork, no bid contracts with defense contractors and even the government of Canada, spending on guided missiles, maintenance of dams, and stranger things including flags, perfumes, and hand tools).  I also talk about how this fits into Sen. Obama's broader plans to make government transparent.

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos.)

I know that both John Edwards and Hillary Clinton have both spoken about cleaning up Washington and making government more open, and I applaud them for speaking up on these causes.  One of the reasons I support Barack Obama is that he has been working on these issues for many years and has a very strong record on ethics reform and government transparency.  The opening of the USAspending.gov site is another example of Obama's real results, and gives us confidence that Obama can and will follow through on cleaning up Washington, taking on special interests and lobbyists, and restoring Americans' trust in the federal government.

Another kossack said it well:

I don't just want someone who will not be like the Republicans.  I want someone who will make it so a George Bush administration and a Tom Delay Congress can never, ever happen again.  That doesn't just mean partisan victory, it means changing the hard-and-fast rules and shoring up our defenses against abuse of power.

The bill faced serious opposition, including anonymous holds by some of the biggest porkbarrel spenders (including our friends Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd), but in the end, Coburn and Obama prevailed.  Some have expressed surprise at Coburn cooperating with a Democrat, but as many have pointed out, this bill is another fine example of Obama reaching across the aisle to find common ground without sacrificing his progressive principles.

Much has already been written about Obama's technology and open government plan to make not only spending but meetings, policy discussions, and pending legislation open to the public for comment - a plan that was praised by Lawrence Lessig and others.

Let's look at the site and see what it can do for us.

The site self-analyzes its completeness and accuracy, and lists which agencies are reporting incomplete data.  It's clearly a treasure trove of data and is a huge step forward towards government accountability, but this isn't a one time deal - it is necessarily an imperfect and ongoing process.  What is nice is how user friendly the site is.  And, to my surprise (especially for a government site), an API is available to make it easy to extract data.

Let's look at a few examples of what we can dig up.  (I mentioned three of these in a previous diary.)

Example 1:
The list of transactions with KBR, Inc. (formerly part of Halliburton) in 2007.  This came out to a paltry sum of $2.7 billion (so far this year), which is nothing compared to previous years as the bar graph from the summary page shows:

Example 2:
Tom Delay's 22nd congressional district in Texas porkbarrel spending is another fine example of government gone wrong.   As pointed out by psericks, Tom Delay was elected majority leader in 2003 and resigned in 2006.  What does the graph show?  A peak in 2005 of $3.4 billion sent straight to Delay's district.

Example 3:
No bid contracts are among the darkest corners of federal spending - the lack of competition in these contracts is in large part what leads to overcharging by contractors and waste of taxpayer dollars.  Well, there was $30 billion in no-bid contracts in 2007, including money to some companies I had never heard of, including $1.2 billion to Armor Holdings, Inc. and, strangely, $163 million to the government of Canada.

Example 4:
Half of the difficulty in keeping our government accountable is being able to separate the wheat from the chaff - that is, being able to get at the data for the above-the-board stuff that goes on so we can focus in on the under-the-table dealings that are inevitably taking place.  Without the data, it's hard to separate the two.  In the "unknown" category of spending includes $2.6 billion for guided missiles, mostly to Lockheed and Raytheon.

Example 5:
Sometimes, the trend in spending leaves us asking questions.  For example, take a look at spending on dam operation.  The graph's trend, with a huge dropoff in spending after 2000 leading up to 2005 says a lot about priorities.

Example 6:
The spending also starts getting a bit absurd once you dig into it.  Consider the spending on flags, perfumes, toilet preparations, and powders, and hand tools.

Example 7:
Last but not least, I should point to paper shredding contracts that have gone through the roof (as discussed in a story yesterday).

There are a million more examples, and I'm really looking forward to seeing them in the coming weeks and months.  It's hard to say whether this will change the ways contractors behave and porkbarrel spending is done, but it will expose no-bid contracts to a greater extent than has been done in the past, and moreover, will enable ordinary Americans to help be watchdogs.

Finally - I have one challenge to everyone - find interesting, strange, or otherwise noteworthy pieces of spending using the site, and post them in comments.