PRESS RELEASE
-For Immediate Release-
July 29, 2008

Contact: Brian Gumm, (202) 683-4812, bgumm@ombwatch.org

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2008—In June 2008, the groundbreaking FedSpending.org website reached another milestone — the site saw its 10 millionth search by a person since its launch in October 2006. In that time, FedSpending.org has grown to process more than 1 million searches from approximately 400,000 unique visitors each month. On July 1, Alexa.com ranked FedSpending.org 32,259 in traffic among websites on the Internet.

Sean Moulton, Director of Federal Information Policy at OMB Watch, commented, "Ten million searches is an incredible milestone for any database-driven website to reach. The popularity and heavy use of FedSpending.org among journalists and the general public clearly illustrate that Americans are eager for information they can use to hold our leaders accountable for their spending decisions."

Adam Hughes, OMB Watch Director of Federal Fiscal Policy, added, "OMB Watch has been pleased with the continued overwhelmingly positive reaction to FedSpending.org since we launched the site nearly two years ago. What we're even more thrilled about, however, is the fact that we've seen people put the data to use and ask hard questions about spending priorities in news articles, op-eds, letters to the editor, and blog posts throughout the country."

Today, OMB Watch also released a data update to FedSpending.org, which provides site users with full spending data for federal contracts through the first two quarters of FY 2008 and federal assistance data (grants, loans, and related spending) for the first three quarters of FY 2007. This update also made minor site improvements, including added advanced search functionality and bugs fixes; OMB Watch is planning a second data update for the fall of this year. The FedSpending.org database now contains over $18.7 trillion in federal spending dating back to FY 2000.

FedSpending.org is one of two comprehensive federal spending sites on the Internet. The other, USASpending.gov, was launched by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in December 2007 to meet a requirement of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. USASpending.gov was built using the FedSpending.org software.

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OMB Watch is a nonprofit government watchdog organization dedicated to promoting government accountability, citizen participation in public policy decisions, and the use of fiscal and regulatory policy to serve the public interest