The Website Built to Track Federal Spending Cannot Trace $712.6 Billion in Federal Grant Spending, a Watchdog Found. The Money Was Headed to Local Communities.

WASHINGTON - The federal government publishes a website called USAspending.gov, built roughly two decades ago for a single purpose: so that any member of the public could follow federal money from the agency that awarded it to the place it landed.

The Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, analyzed the site's own data and published its findings in a report titled "Tracking Taxpayer Dollars: Fixing a Flawed System for Federal Spending." It found $712.6 billion in fiscal 2024 federal assistance spending that the public cannot follow beyond the state level. The review covered the 60 largest domestic federal assistance programs, which together accounted for 92.3 percent of all federal assistance spending that year.

The money in question is not abstract. It is federal grant money directed to local communities: support for schools, health care for children, services for veterans and the elderly, and clean drinking water.

What the finding actually is

This is a data quality finding, not an allegation of theft.

The specific failure is subaward reporting. Federal grants often pass through an intermediary, a state agency or a prime recipient, before reaching the community that uses the money. Federal law requires that the onward flow be reported. Sean Moulton, the senior policy analyst who wrote the report, found that subaward reporting adds very little meaningful transparency in practice, so the record shows where a grant started and not where it ended. POGO used fiscal 2024 data because a completed year gives programs time to file, which avoids counting late reporting as missing reporting.

The distinction matters and it is the whole story. Nobody in this report is accused of stealing anything. What the analysis describes is a recording system in which the identifying information required to follow a dollar from an agency to a recipient is incomplete, inconsistent, or missing, so that a member of the public working from the official record cannot answer a basic question: where did this go.

That is a different problem from fraud and in some ways a more corrosive one. Fraud can be investigated and prosecuted once identified. A tracking system that cannot produce an answer prevents the question from being asked in the first place, by anyone outside the agency.

Why a Memphis newsroom is publishing a story about a federal database

Because this is the layer underneath most of what local accountability reporting depends on.

When a city announces a federal grant, when a school district reports federal revenue, when a utility assistance program is funded from a federal block grant, the public verification path usually ends at a federal reporting system. If that system cannot reliably identify recipients and amounts, then a resident of any city has no independent way to check what their local government says it received, or what it did with it.

Every local government in the country is downstream of this. So is every newsroom that tries to check one.

The counterargument, and it is a real one

Federal spending data is genuinely hard to assemble. It flows through 97 agencies with different systems, different reporting cycles, and different definitions of a recipient. Grants pass through states to counties to subrecipients to vendors, and each handoff is a place where an identifier can break. Some records are incomplete because a program is new, some because a recipient is a pass-through entity, and some because the reporting standard changed.

Agencies have also been operating under sustained budget and staffing pressure. Data quality work is invisible when it succeeds and expensive always.

None of that makes the finding less true. It makes it a systems problem rather than a scandal, which is the right frame for it and the reason a fix is plausible rather than hopeless.

Why It Matters

The federal government has published its spending online for two decades specifically so that citizens would not have to take an agency's word for anything. That is the entire premise of the site.

A tracking system that cannot track is not a neutral shortfall. It quietly converts public information back into private information, held by the agency that holds the records, available to the public only when the agency chooses to describe it.

The remedy is unglamorous and well understood: consistent recipient identifiers, enforced reporting standards, and someone whose job is to check the data before it publishes. Those are the same controls that any local government needs and that any local government can cut without a resident noticing.

Accountability Watch

Who is accountable: The federal agencies that report spending data. The Department of the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget, which set and oversee federal spending reporting standards. Congress, which mandated the reporting system.

What is pending: Any agency, OMB, Treasury or congressional response to the report's findings and recommendations.

Timeline: USAspending.gov established roughly two decades ago. Project On Government Oversight report published July 2026.

Status as of August 3, 2026: The 901 Report has identified no formal agency or congressional response to the report.

How to verify: The Project On Government Oversight publishes its reports in full at pogo.org, including methodology. USAspending.gov is public and searchable, and readers can test the finding themselves by tracing any grant to a recipient in their own state or county.