White House announces spending transparency board

The White House on Monday announced a new initiative to track wasteful and fraudulent federal spending by expanding the oversight board used to track the spending in the 2009 stimulus bill.

The initiative will also seek to eliminate half of the 2,000 federal government websites in order to cut costs and ease access to government information.

President Obama signed an executive order creating a Government Accountability and Transparency Board composed of 11 members including agency inspectors general.

The order does not go as far as a new bill introduced Monday by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) which would create a single website for tracking government spending. Instead, the board is to recommend in six months guidelines toward integrating the “collection and display” of government spending data.

Vice President Joe Biden will head up the initiative and said at a Monday event he will be holding regular Cabinet meetings on its implementation.

“Unless waste, fraud and abuse are at the top of your agenda, it is not going to get done,” he said. 

He said the administration has been working with Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Ct.) and ranking member Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) as well as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va., Issa and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) on the accountability board. 

"They're all on board with the idea of making this governmentwide."

After the annoucement, Issa said legislation was still needed to force the bureaucracy to change.

"There is common ground and bi-partisan support for legislation to increase transparency and openness in all federal spending because the problem we face is not a partisan one, it is a bureaucratic one. The bureaucracy is resistant to change. That’s why we need to enact legislation and establish a permanent and independent board to create transparency in federal spending," he said.

Biden said that the implementation of the Recovery Act changed agency culture toward one of preventing waste and fraud rather than dealing with incidents as they crop up.

“It is never been viewed up until now as that essential,” he said.

Biden acknowledged that tackling waste should not be viewed as a panacea for solving economic problems worldwide or to solving the multitrillion-dollar federal debt.

He said he is confident that the debt talks he is leading with six members of Congress, set to convene again Tuesday, will meet the White House goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 12 years.

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