‘Tis a momentous day for followers of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA) as the Web site that meets the January 1st deadline stated in the law has been launched! USASpending.gov allows users to search grants and contracts (loans will come later), and even offers an interface so users can extract and manipulate data for their own sites.

As Jason Miller reports in FCW, OMB has beaten the deadline by some two weeks with this launch. Given the scope of the task and the many different hurdles they’ve needed to jump through, this is a big achievement and one to be applauded. OMB started with a great platform — OMB Watch’s FederalSpending.org site — but has added some neat‑o features, including a wiki and the aforementioned data interfaces.

The weak link in all of this is agency’s reporting to the various systems that feed USASpending — it can only search the information that’s made available — but I know that OMB and all agencies are working to improve that. In the meantime, you can search data through the end of FY2006. More granularity, including sub-grants and so on, will be added over time.

Kudos to OMB for getting this done!