Federal transparency improved on paper; key gaps still undermine integrity: GAO

Terry Gerton GAO recently testified before Congress that the executive branch still has some pretty significant work to do to meet the targets for transparency around information about federal spending and programs. From GAO’s perspective, what really are the high-level headlines and highlights related to that testimony?

Jeff Arkin Well, I think the key point is improving the transparency of information on federal programs and spending is really key to increasing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government, but also increasing the public’s understanding of federal programs and how their tax dollars are spent. And while the government has made progress towards those goals, it still has some work to do, particularly in a few areas that we covered in the testimony. One is the USASpending.gov website, which is the government’s official public source of federal spending data. Another area deals with information available on the magnitude of improper payments made by federal agencies. An improper payment is one that shouldn’t have been made or was made in the incorrect amount. Third, we have also found issues with what is known as the federal program inventory, which is another website where the government is required to include and annually update an inventory of federal programs. And finally, we found some issues with access to federal government information through requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, which is known as, in short, by FOIA.

Terry Gerton Those are four pretty important topics and I know GAO has done an incredible depth of reporting and analysis on each one of them, but it is interesting to me that you tied them together in this testimony to give a pretty comprehensive perspective on government transparency. So let’s take each one in order and start with USAspending.gov. Agencies are legally required to report spending data on USAspending.gov, but your work shows recurring problems with completeness and accuracy. Why is it so difficult years after those requirements were put in place to get good data on USAspending?

Jeff Arkin As you mentioned, the requirements have been in place for a while, and the government now has quite a bit of information available on USAspending. But we have found some gaps in a couple of areas that I can highlight. One is with what are known as sub-awards. So when an entity receives an award from the federal government or an agency, like a grant, they can pass through part of that award to another agency to help carry out the work. And that pass-through award is known as a sub-award. In addition to grantees being responsible for, or agencies rather being responsible for reporting the amount of grants and who they are going to, when a grant recipient passes part of that award along, it also has to report on USAspending. And that’s where we’ve really seen some gaps, missing information, numbers that are impossibly large, a lot of duplicate information. And part of the problem is, while the agencies are responsible for ensuring that information gets reported, it’s actually the recipients who are responsible for seeing reporting, that the reporting on sub-awards makes it to USAspending. And the agencies don’t have that direct relationship with the sub-awardee. And so there are some problems, I think, with agency understanding. We’ve made recommendations about improving guidance and hopefully that will help address the problem.

Terry Gerton It’s not just a data management issue, because that then gets to the issue that you raised about improper payments. GAO has noted that that number is almost $186 billion across 64 programs in FY25, and that figure still doesn’t capture the full scope of the risk. So how does this incomplete or unreliable data limit agencies’ ability to prevent and detect improper payments?

Jeff Arkin In not having complete and accurate improper payment estimates, there’s a few effects of that. So without them, it’s more difficult for agencies to understand what are the causes of why those improper payments occur? Is it because of fraud? Is it there’s not sufficient documentation for a payment or some sort of administrative error? You don’t know what you’re dealing with until you do the work to try to estimate the extent of the problem. Another thing is you also don’t have a metric to even evaluate whether your efforts to reduce those improper payments are effective. And finally, I would say it’s really important that the public has confidence in the federal government and that the money that their taxpayers and how they’re being used is being used for lawful reasons and not being made in a way that it shouldn’t.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Jeff Arkin. He’s director of strategic issues at GAO. Well, Mr. Arkin, let’s take the third piece, the inventory of federal programs. We talked about this on the show actually a couple of weeks ago, but from GAO’s perspective, why is a complete program inventory so foundational to transparency and accountability?

Jeff Arkin The inventory is supposed to include a couple types of information. One is just how much is being spent on a particular program. And then the other thing is, how is that program helping an agency achieve its goals, which are usually goals that Congress has put in place for the agency to achieve to further something for the American people? Without having that inventory, it’s really difficult to answer some basic questions. A simple one, in terms of how many programs support a given goal and which agencies administer them, what a program costs, and are there multiple programs delivering similar services to the same communities? That latter part is really important in terms of trying to identify programs that might overlap with other programs or may even be duplicative with other programs. And if we can identify and address those, there may be ways to reduce unnecessary costs and really facilitate service delivery to the American people.

Terry Gerton The fourth point that you mentioned at the top was FOIA, and the testimony points to persistent FOIA backlogs across the government. The 2025 report is just out recently on FOIA backlogs, and it’s a combination of both staffing reductions and increased requests that has driven the backlog up even further. So again, from GAO’s perspective, what are the big issues, the main bottlenecks in the FOIA program? And what does that tell us about how agencies are managing transparency?

Jeff Arkin Well, you mentioned one key one, which is staffing. And when we talked with agencies even a couple of years ago about their efforts to address the backlog, which means there are a number of requests from Americans that are not being processed within the required time frames, and that backlog has been growing and growing, even though the government tends to respond to about 80% or plus within the require time frames. That still leaves hundreds of thousands of requests that are not responded to in a timely way. And we’ve seen that there’s the potential for that problem to get worse. What agencies have been reporting in their 2025 FOIA reports is further reductions in staffing and continued challenges with staffing. And so we’ve made some recommendations to agencies about addressing the backlog, about focusing attention, and making sure that they have the staff they need to respond to requests from the public within the required timeframes.

Terry Gerton So when we look at each one of these, spending transparency, program inventories, improper payments and FOIA, GAO has issued numerous recommendations in each of those areas over many, many years. I have two questions here. The first is, what is the implication of all of these shortcomings for the American people? What did they not know that they should know about how their government is operating?

Jeff Arkin I would say that on one hand, I think it’s commendable that we have laws that try to increase transparency to the greatest extent possible. We have a lot of action over the years from Congress and agencies to do that, but we still don’t have the complete picture. You know, this is the federal government is the American people’s government. It’s their tax dollars being spent and they should know how much of their money is being spent and on what and who is receiving it. That’s, I think, a common theme with all of these different areas that we talked about today. It’s really about, one, better-functioning government, but also making sure the public really understands where their tax dollars are going.

Terry Gerton My second question, then, is with all of the recommendations on GAO’s lists, whichever parts are on the high-risk list, if you could just ask agencies to do one or two things that would really help close these gaps, what would be at the top of your list?

Jeff Arkin I think, you know, it may depend on the type of program, but certainly with the improper payments, really analyzing and coming up with the estimates that, one, are required by law, but also will really help them to minimize fraud, waste and abuse; fraud obviously being something on which there’s great tension these days. It’s something that we’ve flagged in the past. Those are hundreds of billions of dollars that could be either collected or that are being paid improperly. That could be used for something else, whether it’s deficit reduction or providing services to the American people. That is an important consideration for government agencies to take.

Terry Gerton Did you get any sense following the testimony that Congress was ready to take any action that would help address these gaps?

Jeff Arkin We have seen a number of bills that were introduced in this current Congress that touch on some of the areas that we found, and I think that’s an important point in that there’s responsibility for agencies, but there’s also ways that Congress can address problems by changing the law, particularly if there are gaps in the law that either prevent agencies from doing what they need to do or can facilitate them from doing that. And so I think there are some where we’re hopeful that the passage of those laws will have some impact on addressing the problem.