Republicans support it, Democrats support it. Libertarians and good-government watchdogs support it. In fact, when a House committee approved legislation on Wednesday to greatly improve the tracking of federal spending, the critics appeared limited to just one group: universities.
The bill (HR 2146), approved unanimously by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, would create a unified computer system that would let both taxpayers and policy makers see where all federal money goes.
A single tracking system, making detailed spending data available on the Internet, would be “less burdensome and more effective for all,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California.
Beyond the committee room, however, three groups—the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and the Council on Governmental Relations—raised their voices in protest.
The university groups said they supported improved governmental openness but feared the costs. They cited “preliminary data” from the Federal Demonstration Partnership, an association of research universities and federal agencies, as showing that tougher reporting requirements included in the government’s 2009 economic-stimulus package had added an average of $7,900 to the cost of each research grant.
“The public rightfully demands that its tax dollars be spent usefully and wisely,” the associations said in a jointly issued statement. “Money is wasted, however, when researchers and administrators are forced to spend their time making needless calculations and filling out forms.”
Bipartisan Push
The university groups’ complaints drew little attention from members of either party during Wednesday’s consideration of the bill by the House oversight committee. Mr. Issa briefly mentioned that while some critics might complain about additional costs, “nothing could be further from the truth.”
In fact, the most vocal opposition to Mr. Issa’s bill came from those who endorsed it but suggested it didn’t go fast or far enough. The committee’s top-ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said he disliked language that would eliminate the current Web-based system for tracking federal spending, the USASpending.gov Web site. That, combined with sunset language that would automatically terminate the new framework after seven years if not renewed by Congress, could eventually leave taxpayers without either system, Mr. Cummings said.
That fear was endorsed by OMB Watch, an advocacy group that helped create the USASpending.gov site and said it wouldn’t back Mr. Issa’s plan if the sunset provision remained. Otherwise, the bill has enjoyed a broad range of backers, including the Cato Institute, which wants less government, and the Project on Government Oversight, which tries to promote better government. Sen. Mark R. Warner, Democrat of Virginia, is pursuing a similar bill in the Senate. And the Obama administration has encouraged the efforts.
The Issa and Warner bills would extend expenditure-tracking efforts contained in the economic-stimulus package approved by Congress in February 2009. That measure provided $787-billion in public spending to increase employment, with some $21-billion going to research universities.
Studies by government auditors have concluded that the scrutiny enabled by those tracking efforts helped ensure unusually low levels of waste and fraud in the money distributed through the stimulus package. That’s especially surprising given how much stimulus money was given out so quickly, said Gary D. Bass, executive director of OMB Watch.
The current governmentwide reporting system, however, needs improvement, as analyses have shown the USASpending.gov site is only about 35 percent accurate, Mr. Issa said.
Uncertainties Fuel Opposition
The opposition from universities appears to hinge largely on uncertainties about what exactly the new reporting system would require. A more uniform system of computerized reporting would be welcome, said Susan Wyatt Sedwick, associate vice president for research and director of the Office of Sponsored Projects at the University of Texas at Austin.
But the stimulus bill imposed a whole additional layer of reporting on the job-creating aspects of grants awarded under the bill, and that appears to be replicated in the Issa bill, said Ms. Sedwick, who also serves as chair of the Federal Demonstration Partnership.
Universities have been working with several of the major federal agencies that finance academic research, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, to create a data-reporting system known as Star Metrics. The Star Metrics approach emphasizes the compilation and mining of existing databases at universities to produce information on the success of federal grants, including job creation, while keeping the paperwork burden to a minimum.
Universities involved in Star Metrics have embraced the concept, and Ms. Sedwick said she and other participants would now try to incorporate its elements into the legislation being pursued by Mr. Issa and Mr. Warner.
Any position of outright opposition to Mr. Issa’s efforts would seem shortsighted, Mr. Bass said. University research should be considered no differently than other federal spending, in which growing taxpayer suspicion of waste is making it harder for Congress to support such investment, he said.
And a unified format for reporting expenditure data to all government agencies should actually reduce and simplify demands on universities, especially if states later adopt systems that mesh with it, Mr. Bass said.
At least some officials on Capitol Hill, however, question whether lawmakers want to know the details of what a researcher has bought with every federal dollar he receives. At a conference on government support for scientific research, held here on Monday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Christopher J. King, the Democratic staff director for the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the House science committee, said lawmakers don’t usually vote for programs that are proved most efficient.
Factors such as local job creation are typically more important, Mr. King said. And so, when lawmakers set up procedures to evaluate program effectiveness, he said, they typically do so “not because we want to know the answer but because we want to force the process.”
A staff officer in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, Sharon D. Drumm, told Mr. King she agreed lawmakers may not use spending data directly. But outside parties, such as watchdog groups, can still use the information to help improve the work of government, Ms. Drumm said.