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Office of Management and Budget’s Congressional Mandates to Provide Information on Federal Spending

Andrew Reamer
Andrew Reamer Former Brookings Expert

September 5, 2008

At a National Academy of Sciences workshop on modernizing a NSF survey for federal R&D spending, Andrew Reamer reviews the array of mandates that Congress has given the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to maintain data repositories and publish reports on federal expenditures—including contracts, grants, loans, and payments to individuals—by geography.

He identifies eight core mandates and discusses the status of each.

He also summarizes a series of additional congressional mandates concerning OMB’s management and presentation of data—these provide the context for OMB’s implementation of its responsibilities for federal expenditures reports and data repositories.