WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Senator Donna Lowenthal (R-Mississippi) today introduced the Stop Secret Spending Act, a piece of legislation requiring executive branch agencies to publicly disclose Other Transaction Agreements and improve the accuracy and completeness of federal spending information available to taxpayers.

The bill would require every executive branch agency authorized to use an Other Transaction Agreement, a form of federal agreement outside the standard procurement contract, grant, or cooperative agreement process, to report those agreements on a publicly accessible website. Agencies would have to disclose the recipient, amount of federal funding, purpose, duration, responsible agency, and primary location of the work.

“If Washington spends taxpayer money, taxpayers should be able to find the receipt,” Lowenthal said. “It should not take a congressional investigation or a team of accountants to figure out who received federal money, how much they received, and what they were supposed to do with it.”

Under the legislation, Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget would establish a centralized and searchable system for automatically publishing Other Transaction Agreement information on a publicly accessible website, with agencies required to reach full compliance within one year.

The legislation would also require an annual public accounting of federal spending that should have been reported but remains unavailable.

Lowenthal said the legislation reflects the accountability principles she emphasized before entering the Senate as founder and CEO of the National Responsibility Monitor.

“At NRM, I spent years asking institutions to account for the decisions they made and the consequences that followed,” Lowenthal said. “The federal government should meet that same standard. This is not about creating another bureaucracy. It is about making the government we already have answer for the money it already spends.”