DATA Act (Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014)

How It Works

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (Public Law 113-101), known as the DATA Act, was the most significant expansion of federal spending transparency since FFATA 2006. It required the Department of the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to jointly establish government-wide data standards for 57 spending data elements (award IDs, recipient identifiers, program activities, object classes, budget authority vs. obligations vs. outlays, and many more) and to publish all federal spending data to USASpending.gov in standardized, machine-readable form with a public API. Agencies were required to begin reporting under the new standards by May 2017, after a three-year implementation period during which Treasury built the Broker platform that validates and ingests agency submissions. The DATA Act expanded what USASpending.gov tracks from just award-level spending (under FFATA) to include account-level budgetary resources, allowing users to trace spending from the appropriation level down through agency programs to individual awards and recipients. The law also required agency IGs and GAO to audit data quality biennially, reports that have consistently found errors, omissions, and cross-system reconciliation gaps even years after implementation. The DATA Act framework underpins current federal spending transparency and was the statutory foundation for pandemic-era tools like PandemicOversight.gov (run by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee). Subsequent laws (GREAT Act 2019, FDTA 2022) extended similar open-data requirements to grant reporting and financial regulation, building on the DATA Act precedent. The DATA Act Information Model Schema (DAIMS) defines the 57 required data elements (Treasury Account Symbol, Object Class, Program Activity, PIID, FAIN, Recipient DUNS/UEI, CFDA number, and many more) that agencies must include in each submission, and Treasury's Broker validates every submission against the schema before publication. TaxDollarData's data pipeline consumes the USASpending.gov API, itself a direct product of the DATA Act infrastructure.

Related Terms

• USASpending.gov, The official U.S. government website that tracks all federal spending, contracts, grants, loans, and other financial assistance, searchable by agency, recipient, and location.
• Obligation, A legally binding commitment by the government to spend money, the point at which funds are formally committed to a contract, grant, or other agreement.
• Outlay, The actual payment of money by the U.S. Treasury, the moment dollars leave government accounts and go to a contractor, grantee, or beneficiary.