2.1: Agencies
Other Information:
Federal agencies are the "agents" of Congress and the president. They carry out federal policy and spending decisions. Accordingly,
one of the building blocks of data about spending is going to be a definitive list of the organizational units that do the
spending. Is there such a list? Yes. It's Appendix C of OMB Circular A-11, entitled: "Listing of OMB Agency/Bureau and Treasury
Codes." This is a poorly organized PDF document that is found on the Office of Management and Budget website. Poorly organized
PDFs are not good transparency. Believe it or not, there is still no federal government "organization chart" that is published
in a way amenable to computer processing. There are almost certainly sets of distinct identifiers for agencies that both the
Treasury department and the Office of Management and Budget use. With modifications, either of these could be published as
the executive branch's definitive list of its agencies. But nobody has done that. Nobody seems yet to have thought of publishing
data about the basic units of the executive branch online in a machine-discoverable and machine-readable format. In our preliminary
grading, we gave this category an "incomplete" rather than an F. That was "beyond generous," according to Becky Sweger of
the National Priorities Project. We expect improvement in publication of this data, and the grades will be low until we get
it.
Stakeholder(s):
Indicator(s):
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