Recent press reports have indicated that the "high road" contracting process may be gaining momentum, possibly foretelling adoption of the policy by the Obama administration. Last week, Government Executive published several stories on the topic, including an article on congressional members requesting a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the costs and benefits of adopting "high road" contracting guidelines, and a story outlining documents obtained by GovExec that they purport give further details on how the administration might implement such a policy.

The great thing about the Recovery Act is that it provides us with a great deal of data on hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending. Anyone can go to Recovery.gov, the stimulus tracking website, download data for their state or the entire nation, and see each and every report submitted by recipients of the funds -- all 230,000 of them. Sifting through that amount of data can be like drinking from a fire hose, but it's an important feature of any spending transparency system. Anyone can take the data and do their own analysis, greatly expanding the uses of the data.

Have you filled out your 10-question Census form and mailed it back to the government yet? If you haven't, you better get to it, because the questionnaire is due today. Over the next several weeks, the Census Bureau will begin dispatching some 650,000 workers to track down those that haven't returned their form to collect the laggards' information manually. Why, you may ask, does this matter? Because, other than forcing people to deal with friendly government employees, taking the time and energy to track down citizens drives up the cost of the effort...a lot.

Today starts the third round of Recovery Act recipient reporting.  Contractors/grantees/loanees (is that a word?), if you have anything you want to tell the Recovery Board, you have just over 9 days left to report in.  The reports from this cycle will be published on April 30.