Here's a report summary:
The PRAC is required by the CARES Act to maintain a website that provides detailed data on pandemic relief assistance worth more than $150,000. To meet our mandate, we get most of our pandemic relief data from USAspending.gov, which federal agencies use to report how funds are spent. A required piece of information is a plain language award description that tells taxpayers how their money was used.
We looked at 51,000 awards worth $347 billion that supported the pandemic response (as of June 15, 2021). We found more than 15,400 awards worth $33 billion with meaningless descriptions that make it difficult to know how the money was used.
This is not a new problem. Vague, technical, and meaningless award descriptions have always plagued government award data. As far back as 2009, the Government Accountability Office recommended that agencies improve the quality of award descriptions. Back then, major economic recovery packages were $800 billion. Now that’s the same amount as just the Paycheck Protection Program. With the $5 trillion scale of the pandemic relief response, a lingering problem is now a larger one.
We found some other issues with the information on USAspending.gov.
- Federal agencies track pandemic response awards to "prime recipients" (like a state), but the prime recipient often distributes most of its money to subrecipients (like a school district) to spend. Prime recipients report subrecipient award information in a different system that doesn’t distinguish between an award used to respond to the pandemic versus a non-pandemic award. They’re all lumped in the same general category. It's a transparency dead end.
- Some prime recipients didn’t report data on awards to subrecipients. For example, California distributed more than 1,600 awards to subrecipients from the Education Stabilization Fund. These awards are all listed on the state's website but were missing from USASpending.gov. When that happens, we can’t tell if that money has even been spent yet, let alone tell the public what it was used for.
The public deserves to know where their tax dollars are going, and the oversight community needs to be able to tell policymakers if the spending was effective. We've recommended that the Office of Management and Budget consider allowing the PRAC to jointly oversee award description submissions and work with Federal agencies to fix existing descriptions that use jargon or ambiguous descriptions.
Click here for the full report.
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