The Office and Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo (PDF) today under President Obama's Open Government Directive that features a handful of goodies for federal spending transparency aficionados.

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.

Earlier this month, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced legislation that would require the government to fire federal workers who fail to pay their taxes, and prevent the government from hiring those with "seriously delinquent tax debts." According to Chaffetz, his proposal is perfectly in keeping with President Obama's recent effort to prevent tax delinquent companies from winning government contracts. Chaffetz's reasoning, however, is grossly oversimplified, and his bill, which is resultantly flawed, looks like a knee-jerk attempt at retribution for the private sector.

The Center for American Progress has put up a neat interactive federal budget chart.