The Pew Charitable Trusts launches Subsidyscope, an effort to aggregate information on federal subsidies from multiple sources into a comprehensive, searchable, open-source database. Government transparency group Sunlight Foundation joins Pew as its technology partner responsible for constructing the technical infrastructure, compiling data and building Subsidyscope's database.
When Congress
approved the $700 billion Emergency Economic Stabilization Act on October
to bail out Wall Street, it marked a major expansion of the government's role
in the markets. Unfortunately, as taxpayers have already discovered, just who
got what out of the bailout is still unknown, even to members of Congress.
The Pew Charitable Trusts hopes to change all that, announcing Dec. 15 it
plans to develop a publicly accessible database called Subsidyscope to focus public and
policymaker attention on the size and scope of all federal subsidies. Pew
said it would release regular reports, aggregating and analyzing subsidies to
various industry sectors.
Pew has engaged the Sunlight
Foundation, a government transparency group, to construct the technical
infrastructure, compiling data and building Subsidyscope's database. Among
Sunlight's other projects are PublicMarkup.org,
which seeks to open legislation to online and public review; Earmark Watch, an open review of Washington
spending; and OpenCongress, a
government transparency effort with news and blogging about Capitol Hill.
"This project represents an exciting opportunity to shine a light on
various ways that increasingly scarce federal resources are being spent,"
Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation,
said in a statement. "While we don't know precisely what the project will
find, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, 'Sunlight is the
best disinfectant.'"
John E. Morton, managing director of Pew's Economic Policy Department, said Washington
subsidies increasingly flow through the tax code and are not subject to the
same level of public oversight as other federal expenditures.
"Too often policymakers speak as if subsidies are limited to direct
expenditures on assorted social programs," Morton said. "In our
fiscally constrained environment-and with government interventions shifting new
burdens onto American taxpayers-there is more need than ever for a
comprehensive and transparent fact base to inform future discussions about
subsidies."
Noting that federal subsidies go well beyond direct
payments from the federal government to private businesses, Douglas Hamilton,
deputy director of Pew's Economic Policy Department, added, "They also
include tax breaks for individuals and corporations, loan guarantees, stock
purchases and other financial interventions. And they're massive."
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