The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 required that a searchable site of federal spending be online by January 1, 2008. The site is now live at USASpending.gov. It's not perfect, but this is a great step toward more government accountability. The site includes information on how complete its records are (plenty of room to improve), and it has an API so that programmers can extract the data and present it in their own applications.

There's already been some interesting things turned up. For example, since George Bush took office, the government spending on paper-shredding contracts has gone up 600 % (dug up by Radar Online). I'm sure there will be more good finds in the coming months. My hope is that if they know the data will be open to scrutiny, Congress will begin to curb irresponsible spending.

Congratulations are in order for the Senators who introduced the bill that made this site happen: Republican Tom Coburn and Democrat Barack Obama. Great work, guys.