On April 1st, some reporters, open government advocates and people in industry may have hoped that a new redesign of USASpending.gov, the flagship financial transparency website of the United States government, was just a poorly conceived April Fool’s joke. Unfortunately, an official statement about the USASpending.gov redesign at the U.S. Treasury’s blog confirmed that the redesign was real. Analysts, media and businesses that rely on the contracting data on the site were loudly decried the decreased functionality of USASpending.gov.

A week later, there’s a still no evidence of deliberate intent on the part of Treasury not to publish accurate spending data or break the tool, despite headlines about rolling back transparency. Rather, it looks more likely that there were been a number of mistakes or even unavoidable errors made in the transitioning the site and data from a bankrupt federal contractor. There was certainly poor communication with the business community and advocates who use the site, a reality that Luke Fretwell helpfully suggested at Govfresh that other government agencies work to avoid next time.

Today, as Fretwell first reported, the federal government launched a new repository for tracking issues on USASpending.gov on Github, the social coding site that’s become an increasingly important platform for 18F, which committed to developing free and open source software by default last year.

In an email to the White House’s open government Google Group, Corinna Zarek, the senior advisor for open government in the Obama administration, followed up on earlier concerns about the redesign:

The USAspending team has been working to improve the usability of the site and has made some great strides to make it easier for average citizens to navigate information. But at the same time, we all understand that some of our expert users (like a lot of you) seek more technical information and the team is striving to meet your needs as well.

This is definitely a work in progress so please keep working with the team as it iterates on the best ways to improve function of the site while maintaining the content you seek. Your initial comments have been really helpful and the USAspending team is already working to address some of them.

Zarek also said that several of the problems with data that people have reported been addressed, including the capacity to download larger data sets and define specific dates in search, and asked for more feedback.

Specifically, this week the team addressed data export issues to allow the ability to specify date ranges to download data, added the bulk file format API, and modified the download capability so larger datasets can be downloaded. Additionally, data archives are being added continually. This week, they loaded the 2014 and 2015 delta files that show the new transactions in the last month. You can keep track of the ongoing improvements on the “What’s new” page.

Please keep sharing your feedback and continue working with the USAspending team as it makes improvements to the site. You can do this through the site’s contact page or on the new Github page where you can report issues and track them in the open.

If you find bugs, let the feds know about them on Github so that everyone can see the issues and how they’re addressed. As Mollie Walker reported for FierceGovernmentIT, there’s still missing functionality yet to be restored.

[Image Credit: Govfresh, via USASpending.gov]