I think that's actually a great question. I think what I should do is explain that I'm a huge fan of what we have. It's called, nonetheless, a RAT board. It's a bad acronym, but that's the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. I think they've done a great job, and I think Recovery.gov has really been a game changer in how transparency works in this country.
The criticism I have is much more about the implementation phases of that. For example, what I think is a paradigm shift in this country is that through the Recovery Act, for the first time ever, we had the recipients of federal awards report online in a timely fashion around what money they received and what they were doing with it. Under the Recovery Act, the key issue is about jobs. Another key issue involved certain equity issues. So those kinds of data were reported on a quarterly basis for the first time ever from the recipients, and on top of that, if the state received the money and sub-awarded the money to someone else, the sub-recipient had to report. This is a huge change.
The weakness, and our concern, is that it stopped there. The ultimate recipient of the dollar did not have to report. It was only the first two tiers. In addition, there is no check on the data quality. There is only a quick look at whether or not the entity reported and whether or not the numbers looked bad. What we should be doing is tying that data with what the cheques are that the treasury cuts, so that we have an accountable structure.
I'm now at the level of really detailed implementation of what the Recovery.gov site has done, but I think it is a great effort. It is enormously important for long-term agendas in this country I think, and it's also becoming a model in many others right now, at least European countries.
I should add, by the way, just one quick aside. I also had the good fortune, if you will, way back in the days of yore, 2006, of working with then Senator Obama and Senator Coburn to create legislation that required a searchable website of all government spending, which I mentioned is called USAspending.gov. This was, if you will, on our political axis, left and right. I didn't think we could get the legislation done, so we built a website called FedSpending.org that approximated what the bill would have done, and it became a huge success—huge. And in fact the government ended up simply just taking our website and using it as the vehicle for moving forward.
So I'm a huge fan of what the recovery board has done.