Documents/GST/1: Budgeting, Appropriating, and Spending Data/5: Budget Documents/Indicator:1

Indicator: 1

Measurements in/of Budget Documents

Type Target Actual Actual
StartDate
EndDate 2011-12-14 2011-12-14
Machine-Readable Format B+ D
Description [To be determined] The president's annual budget submission and the congressional budget resolutions are the planning documents that the president and Congress use to map the direction of government spending each year. These documents are published authoritatively, and they are consistently available, which is good. They are kind-of machine-discoverable, but they are not terribly machine-readable. The appendices to the president's budget are published in XML format, which vastly reduces the time it takes to work with the data in them. That's really good. But the congressional budget resolutions have no similar organization, and there is low correspondence between the budget resolutions that Congress puts out and the budget the president puts out. You would think that a person - or better yet, a computer - should be able to lay these documents side by side for comparison, but you can't. For its use of XML, the White House gets a B+. Congress gets a flat D.