Justin Marsico

With agencies drowning in more data than they know what to do with, a new tool from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service aims to help the public keep tabs on government spending.

Every quarter, roughly 100 agencies submit trillions of dollars’ worth of federal spending data to the Data Lab on USASpending.gov. Organizing that data, and helping researchers and the general public alike make sense of it is its mission.

The Treasury Department is launching a series of new data analysis tools to let people have access to a treasure trove of contracts, grants and other spending information like never before.

Five months after the DATA Act rollout, agencies are able to look back on lessons learned and what the future holds for standardized federal spending reports.