[wdmmg-discuss] USASpending.gov is broken

Wed Sep 8 11:49:10 UTC 2010

Ellen Miller from Sunlight on USASpending.gov:

"It's pretty impressive ... looking. Unfortunately its data is almost
completely useless."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNQteT9Bu2w
(thanks to Tom Steinberg for link)

And goes on to describe Sunlight's new project ClearSpending.com,
which checks reliability of USASpending by comparing it with a
separate database of total spending by categories.

Found $1.3 trillion dollars of broken reporting - half of the spending
for a year (numbers don't add up, reported months later than required
by law etc.)

"The data is broken. You can't trust any of the aggregate numbers you 
get from the site."

Francis