Enhancing USAspending

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has brought unprecedented public attention to federal grantmaking and contracting, which in turn has led many Americans to the government’s online database for federal spending: USAspending.gov. This is a welcome development. While USAspending is overall a tremendous resource, there are ways to improve and enhance it—specifically in the context of tracking federal funding to nonprofits.

In addition to general website and database maintenance—such as ensuring that pages load quickly and that existing data fields are kept accurate and up to date—here are two additional suggestions: one is relatively simple, but the other considerably more complex.

Include EINs

USAspending currently utilzes an alphanumeric Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) for distinguishing award recipients, which is created through the federal government’s System for Award Management. Previously, the database used DUNS numbers assigned by the firm Dun & Bradstreet, and these still appear as legacy identifiers in recipient profiles.

Those profiles should also include IRS Employer Identification Numbers (EINs), when available. EINs are issued to all organizations that have employees, and in other circumstances. They are also the primary unique identifier used for the American tax-exempt sector and must be included on all varieties of the Form 990, which nonprofits are required to file annually.

Form 990 is open to public inspection, which means that a nonprofit’s EIN is already public information. The IRS tax-exempt database and similar private databases (such as ProPublica’s) use EINs as one of their principal search fields. USAspending should allow federal award recipients to be searched in the same way.

In addition to enhancing the search process, EINs could also help clear up confusion about which award recipients are actually tax-exempt nonprofits. Currently, recipient types (such as “nonprofit”) are self-reported by the recipient, which can lead to errors. EINs could (theoretically) allow USAspending to cross-reference with the IRS tax-exempt database to provide a reasonable degree of certainty as to whether a given recipient is in fact a nonprofit. The two databases could even link to one another, allowing quick access to the financials of nonprofit federal grantees and contractors.

Include Grant Applications

A much more ambitious undertaking would involve making copies of awarded federal grant applications available on USAspending. These are generally subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, although with appropriate redactions applied to personal, private, and otherwise confidential information. Such redactions would need to be made preemptively if funded grant applications were posted on USAspending—obviously a major task. Widespread public access to these applications would greatly enhance government transparency, although this must of course be weighed against the logistical burden of protecting legitimate privacy and/or security interests.

Is there a feasible way to do this, or to make it feasible in the future?