Terry Gerton POGO has a new report out that looks at usaspending.gov, and particularly how well it documents where public assistance funding is actually spent. What specifically were you looking at and looking for in this report?

Sean Moulton What we wanted to try and figure out is how well can we follow money from federal agencies all the way down to the community level. It’s a critical function. I mean, we don’t want to just know what money got spent in what program. We want to know where it went. We want know what it was used for. We want details. You know, it’s one thing to say it was spent on highways. Was it spent on my highway? Was it spent a highway I know needs it? And so It’s good that we have a window into this through usaspending.gov. But how good is that window? How clear is it? How far can we see? And so that was really our goal here because we’ve been advocating for years for improvements. I love USA Spending. I use it all the time. I think it’s a great website, but there are limitations. And this was really an exploration into those limitations.

Terry Gerton You looked at 60 of the largest domestic-focused federal assistance programs. Which ones are we talking about there? You mentioned highways. I’m assuming Medicare and Medicaid have got to be in that list, right? What else were you looking at?

Sean Moulton Absolutely. A lot of big ones people would know, social security benefits, disability benefits for veterans, assistance for some of the big housing programs, mortgages, mortgage assistance, things like that. And so we’re talking education programs like Title I, SNAP, which goes out to almost every community in the country. And these are big, big programs and that 60 program, you know, what it got us was more than I think 95% of federal assistance spending. So even though we looked at, I mean, there’s more than, I think, 2,000 assistance programs. But even if you just look at the top piece, you get most of the spending by far.

Terry Gerton And as you followed the trail on those 60 programs, the headline finding here is that more than 74% of grant program funding could not be tracked to the local level. How does that even happen?

Sean Moulton So grants, especially the big grant programs, a lot of it goes from federal agency to a state agency. So it goes, from D.C. to a state capitol someplace. And that’s, you know, whether it’s education or transportation, and very often that prime award, that first award, because it’s going to a state agency and it’s probably covering a lot of different work inside that state, it doesn’t have any information about where the money’s going because it’s a really big pot of money. What the website has, though, it has the ability to report subawards, so then the state agency can then report in, what do we do with it? Where did it go after we got it? And that’s where I think a big part of these breakdowns happen, is that we’re not seeing that subaward data reported reliably, accurately, completely. And so that’s why grants were such a big, big problem. The money kind of went to the state agencies. We see it. We see those prime awards and then it disappears.

Terry Gerton And so why does that matter?

Sean Moulton Because just knowing that your state got the money really isn’t enough. I mean, most people, they want to know where it went. And there’s all kinds of reasons for that. I mean we’re talking about money that can be defrauded after the states get it, questionable spending, spending where some communities are left out, some communities get award after award after reward for their roads or their schools, and there’s a community that needs the money and is getting left behind year after year. And if we can’t see where the money’s going, then we can see those patterns, those question powers, outliers, strange decisions. And so being able to follow this money all the way down really is about having some accountability, having some answers to very fundamental questions.

Terry Gerton Sean Moulton is senior policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. I would imagine it’s also instrumental in being able to articulate the impact of these programs. There are multiplier effects when highway refurbishment grants get spent in a particular place, it makes a difference economically. Same sort of thing with disability insurance and social security payments and all of those things.

Sean Moulton That’s a great point. I mean, this really is about, you know, delivering a benefit to communities, benefits. Their taxpayer dollars, you know, went into the federal government, and they want to know, how much is my community benefiting from those dollars? What did we get? How much help did we get? And I think that it’s important for people to see that benefit. They hopefully feel better afterwards. If they see real benefit, hopefully they feel better than the next time they see that their paycheck has a bunch of money missing from it that went to the federal government, they think, oh, well, we get a lot from that too. But Right now, it’s a big question.

Terry Gerton We’re talking here about the 74% of grants that can’t be tracked. What about the 26% that maybe can? What are they doing right?

Sean Moulton So the majority of that 26% that can be tracked, it’s good reporting on those prime awards. It’s that they’ve been able to attach some local place of performance information to that prime award. So it’s that the federal government is doing a little bit better job. There’s some transportation programs like some of those highway ones, highway planning and construction. They’re doing a better job of not just giving one big payment to the state, but breaking it up into project payments so they can literally say it’s for this road in this community, and not all of it but a much bigger percentage. And so that’s what we’re getting, but the sub awards really not working for almost any programs out there, as far as we can tell, not consistently, and that’s how the grant successes that we were able to see that 26%. I hesitate to use the word success, because it’s such a small one, but that’s where they’ve done better.

Terry Gerton Sean, this administration is looking to increase the scrutiny of grant awards before they’re approved, specifically by political appointees in the chain of command. Your report looks at accountability after the money leaves federal agencies. Where do you think the federal government has the larger accountability gap today? Is it on the approval side or the accounting side?

Sean Moulton It’s a great question. I think the accounting side is a bigger gap right now. Not that we can’t do better about detecting fraud before it happens, there have been recommendations after all the COVID spending, things like that, things that we could improve. I balk at political appointees reviewing because I’m not sure that’s about fraud and mismanagement. I think it’s about a political agenda and those change administration after administration, it’s just probably not an effective way to manage money. But fraud, that stays the same administration after administration. There is fraud and we do need to detect it, hopefully before the money gets spent. But that’s, I mean, even in its worst, fraud is a small percentage, as it turns out. I mean always is a small percentage of federal spending. But on the accounting side, as you can see, we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that we have very limited accounting for. One of the things we haven’t mentioned on the direct payments, they had good information on where they went, but there were three major programs, three Medicare programs that were over a trillion dollars that have systemic problems in their reporting every year about their location. The location information is there, but when we looked at it, we knew it was wrong. Highly wrong. And so we had to give them credit because of our methodology. They filled that, that information in, but we knew it was wrong. And that’s a trillion dollars. And we look back 10 years and it was wrong every year. The patterns were all off. And so there’s a lot of very big improvements, a lot money that we are missing good accountability for on the, after-we-spend-it side.