Pork-o-polis? Federal largesse in NC District 4

Wonder what federal monies wend their ways back to North Carolina? To local District 4?

The new online database of federal transactions, FedSpending.org, is now open for business.

A collaboration between the Office of Management & Budget (OMB), Zephyr Teachout’s Sunlight Foundation and the conservative OMB Watch, the idea is to promote greater access for persnickety citizens like CitizenWill.

The Sunlight Foundation covers our Dollarocracy.

Let’s turn first to the subject of government contracts and grants. The new database, compiled and put on the web by OMB Watch at fedspending.org, covers all federal contracts and grants issued between the years 2000 and 2005. Just how much money are we talking about here? More than $12 trillion in taxpayer money – that’s trillion with a T, not billion with a B. Not even Bill Gates has that kind of money (though naturally his company did get its share of the pie).

You can search through the millions of records by recipient name, by government agency – even by congressional district. And once you’ve zeroed in on a particular contractor, you can see at a glance which goods and services they provided to the government, and what proportion of the contracts they won were through full and open competition versus no-bid awards.

Here’s District 4 2000-2005 federal contracts.

Sample:

By the way, OMBWatch might disagree with my characterization of their organization.

It does bill itself as “a nonprofit government watchdog organization located in Washington, DC. Our mission is to promote open government, accountability and citizen participation” yet the first squib on their sidebar shouts “Save the Estate Tax! Let your senators know you don’t want them to take the bait–keep the estate tax intact.”

Come on!