Recovery Act recipient reporting has received a great deal of attention in the media, and while some of this coverage has been critical (reporting on non-existent congressional districts or ZIP codes, unreliable job creation numbers, etc.), many news articles portray comprehensive oversight of the act because of transparency requirements in the law. However, approximately two-thirds of the spending in the Recovery Act bypasses these requirements, leading to a dearth of information about how the money is being spent. As time passes and Recovery Act spending continues, this lack of data is becoming more apparent, as highlighted by a recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) report showing that millions of dollars in Recovery Act tax breaks are vulnerable to tax fraud.

On Dec. 29, 2009, President Obama signed an executive order (E.O. 13526) to prescribe a uniform system of classifying and declassifying government information. The new order was welcomed by open government advocacy groups and will go into effect on June 27.

In 2008, we heard a lot about "change." In this 2009 year-end summary, we use another type of "change" to rate the Obama administration's transparency efforts thus far.

Federal fiscal policy has been front and center throughout 2009 as the Obama administration and Congress have gone to extraordinary lengths to bring the country's economy back from the brink of disaster. It seems like every week, we saw a crucial vote or major policy proposal released. A massive Wall Street bailout, an economic stimulus effort with unprecedented transparency provisions, an attempted reform of the financial regulatory system, a new presidential effort to reform the contracting system, significant gains in proper enforcement of the tax code, and a Congress that continued to fail at passing appropriations and tax bills in a timely manner have made for a pretty exciting, if not chaotic, year. Below is a review of some of the major developments in federal fiscal policy in 2009 from an OMB Watch perspective.