President-elect Obama has been touting transparency on the campaign trail. Many people know he was the Democratic voice behind the legislation that created the easy to peruse contracts and grants database, USASpending.gov.
But the acquisition community is already moving ahead with its own attempt at improving contract transparency: the next generation of the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. In the spirit of open government, the acquisition community is inviting user feedback concerning what improvements to the central procurement database are needed.
The current iteration of FPDS is pretty hard to navigate and takes a long time to run requests. There is also a recognized need to make the data in FPDS more accurate and complete.
We suggest the new FPDS allow for faster search capabilities and a wider range of pre-set reports. We also think a meter telling us how accurate and complete the data in the requested report is would be a good idea.
