[usaspending-forum] Problems with Congressional District Information

["Stroud, Cedric" <Cedric.Stroud@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The USAspending.gov site has the potential for being a great site, but there are some major reporting problems
that need to be addressed first. 

My understanding from reading the mandatory requirements for the USAspending site that congressional district
Information is supposed to be reported for each transaction.  Having worked with this data for many years, I know
that there are difficulties in ascertaining congressional districts if that information is not entered initially at the time of submission from the

applicant or upon submission from the Federal agencies to GSA, but at the minimum, GSA can validate some of the unknown
Congressional district records by matching against a nine-digit zip code database with congressional districts assignments.

A five-digit zip code is only accurate when it falls completely into a particular congressional district.  When more than one

Congressional district shares the same zip code, then matching has to be done against nine-digit zip codes.   There will still be

some records that can't be distinguished using this method, but thousands more records can be determined this way. In the USAspending.gov

site currently, there are many five-digit zip codes that show being assigned to a particular district when the zip is actually split.  In other case,

There is no assignment at all when there should be.

So far from my research while just looking at a small sample of States, one to four billion dollars per congressional district are not being

assigned that could be if nine-digit zip code processing is implemented.Zip code databases by congressional district are available from the US Postal Service

or from numerous vendors at relatively low-cost.

To highlight this data validation problem, 38 of the 53 districts in California do not show any transactions in the Assistance database.

On the USAspending.gov site right now, there are zero records for the Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi's California Eighth District.

If you do an advanced search on the "Unknown" California congressional districts and use one of the zip codes for the eighth district, such as

94101 or 94014-1088, you will retrieve transaction records for those zip codes. These records should be reassigned to her district.

There are many more instances of this type for almost all of the Representatives.

When Congress passed the the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Transparency Act), one of the

expectations was that the public web site created would make congressional district information more readily available to the

American people, but with so much congressional district data that is underreported, it is not quite there yet.

Cedric Stroud, Sr. Software Engineer
U.S. House of Representatives
Chief Administrative Officer
House Information Resources
2nd and D Sts., S.W., Room 640 FHOB
Washington, D.C. 20515
202-226-6438

 

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