We're continuing the Sunshine Week festivities with two events dedicated to promoting a more open government. We invite you to join us, and for those of you who can't make it to Washington, DC, we encourage you to watch the webcasts of the events.

Today at 1pm EDT, in conjunction with Open the Government, Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs will moderate a panel to demonstrate new ways nonprofits have made government data open and useful to the public.

The launch of OMB's USASpending.gov, based on the Sunlight funded FedSpending.org, is a huge accomplishment worth celebrating. The Washington Post's story talks about the strange bedfellows that made it happen:

Robert Shea is a Republican insider with a head for business and a yen for federal program performance standards. Gary Bass is a government watchdog with a mean bite who wants openness and knows how to get it.

Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking....

Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking.

We're pleased to have been ahead of this curve -- and one of the prime catalysts for it. At the recent celebration of the one year successes of FedSpending.org (hosted by its creator OMB Watch), it was noted that over 5 million searches of the data occured in the last 12 months. That's not visits or hits, that's actual searches for the data! Now that's some success. At that event, Robert Shea of OMB also promised that the government data would be made available with programming interfaces to make it easy for developers and technologically sophisticated citizens to use the data in ways yet to be imagined. How nice that this government agency really gets what transparency is all about. 

Sunlight grantee OMB Watch is celebrating the first anniversary of their FedSpending.org, a searchable database of almost $17 trillion in federal spending. It's been a big hit, and we want to congratulate our colleagues at OMB Watch for their success. FedSpending.org is a perfect example of transparency in action. It has complete federal government annual data from FY 2000 through FY 2006, and partial data available for FY 2007. It has become the standard for online disclosure of government contracts and grants. For citizens and patriots, snoops, muckrakers, and journalists its become a must. What a service! Coinciding with the anniversary, OMB Watch is releasing new, improved, and even more powerful features of the database. They also have made what they call "major functionality improvements," that includes a "mapping feature on all searches," a "SuperSearch" function for all advanced searching, and other user-friendly functions. With the new features, it appears they are closing in on a warp drive for governmental research and transparency.

ProgrammableWeb recently launched a new central resource of over a dozen government-related mashups and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to improve access to legislative, civic and political information.

ProgrammableWeb is already a major hub for the Web 2.0 technology community around its directories of mashups and Web service APIs. The new site is now listing Web applications that help citizens examine and remix government data to shed more light on the work of the federal government.

ProgrammableGov's APIs and Mashup Dashboard currently offers government information APIs and mashups developed by government agencies and those developed independently by citizens and transparency advocate organizations, including several created or supported by the Sunlight Foundation.

Earlier this month, Texas released a state spending database. The database, “Where the Money Goes,” allows citizens to search state spending by agency and recipient. The Houston Chronicle, makes the point that the bill that created this database was “modeled after federal legislation passed last year.” The Coburn-Obama bill’s teeth went all the way down to state level.

During the build up to World War II and throughout the war, Harry Truman built a reputation investigating overspending and profiteering involving defense contracts. Truman found that favoritism and not merit was the basis for the awarding of huge arms contracts, with the biggest companies with the political influence getting all the contracts. Truman visited military bases and armament plants, finding gross mismanagement of defense dollars. He enlisted other senators to go on tour with him, and this ad hoc watchdog effort soon led to a formal investigation. Becoming known informally as the Truman Committee, the investigation exposed waste and corruption throughout the war effort, saving the country $15 billion.

Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, looks like a one-man Truman Committee, exposing in graphic terms what can only be described as the shocking corruption, sleaze and criminal mismanagement by private American companies contracting with the federal government to do work in Iraq. "How is it done?" Taibbi asks. "How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini?" He proceeds to show how sleazy yet politically connected contractors wasted what they didn't steal of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars meant to supply the troops and rebuild Iraq. Politically connected con men "went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight," Taibbi writes. Contractor fraud in Iraq has been in the headlines since the early days of the war, but Taibbi's expose is especially graphic.

FedSpending.org, the go-to site for all government spending information, has now added some 2006 data--the full set isn't available from the Feds just yet--plus some new and improved features for keeping track of how Washington manages our money. Congratulations to all at OMB Watch on the upgrades and updates. I'm appending the press release below, but what I think might be the coolest new feature is the summary data, which provides a really nice snapshot--here's Lockheed Martin, and here's Halliburton. Compare the trend boxes.