For the last ten years, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has been a leader in bringing scholars, policy experts, and government officials together to help improve government transparency and efficiency.  

This morning, Senator Warner joined officials from the Mercatus Center as they released their 10th Annual Performance Report Scorecard, which evaluates and ranks Congressionally-mandated performance and accountability reports of two-dozen of the largest federal agencies according to:

• How well an agency discloses successes and failures;
• How well it documents tangible public benefits it claims to have produced;
• And whether it actually incorporates the performance information in order to improve outcomes.

The Mercatus report recognizes the U.S. Departments of Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and Labor as top performers when it comes to “supplying citizens and their elected leaders with the information they need to make informed funding and policy decisions.”

Senator Warner said tools like the Scorecard “give us a steady analysis of what we can do at the federal level to improve accountability and transparency in how we’re spending taxpayer dollars.”  

But he said the next step is even more important: what do policymakers do with that information?  

He said it is up to Congress to push the Administration to match their rhetoric about being open and transparent. He pointed to his own legislation called the TARP Transparency Act, which requires the Treasury Department to create an online database to keep better track of where $700 billion in bank bailout funds have gone.  

“We must not waste this opportunity to demonstrate to the American people that we can combine bold action with innovation and transparency by giving them assurance that we are not wasting their money.  We must continue to use the information from the Scorecard as a check on our efforts at transparency and use agency performance data and information in the budgetary and funding decisions of the federal government.”