Increased Oversight for Climate Infrastructure Law Falls Short - Sean Moulton

Sean Moulton is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). We’ve invited Sean to discuss his recent report on how Increased Infrastructure Oversight Falls Short for the Biden Administration’s infrastructure law, while still being an important step forward. Sean explains how new oversight measures are implemented via executive order, which means they can easily be dismantled by future administrations, lacking the permanence and manifestation of consensus of legislation. Also, the new measures rely on executive branch officials accepting the advice of Inspectors General and fail to provide consistency across the multiple f ederal departments, state, county and local governments, and contracts, grants and loans across which trillions of infrastructure and climate money will be spent. These observations echo those in past podcasts by retired U.S. Treasury Inspector General  Eric Thorson, and Contra Cost County Supervisor John Gioia.

Prior to POGO, Sean worked for over a decade on transparency and government accountability issues, leading the Center for Effective Government’s open government work for 13 years. The Center for Open Government, previously known as “OMB Watch”, pioneered making federal government spending visible to taxpayers through an online database. (“OMB” stands for Office of Management and Budget, an office within the White House that oversees the implementation of the President’s financial vision across the executive branch. OMB eventually licensed OMB Watch’s database technology to create usaspending.gov, a detailed, comprehensive and official accounting of federal government spending that’s open to the public.

Transcript

Greg Williams: 0:10

Thanks for joining us for another episode of climate money watchdog. Today's guest is Sean Moulton, senior policy analyst at the project on government oversight. He oversees the effort to deliver to develop a blueprint that the current and future presidents can use to build a more open and accountable administration. He emphasizes transparency and federal spending, a topic that climate money watchdog is made. The forefront of climate spending, starting with recently passed$1.2 trillion infrastructure law for Pogo Shan worked for over a decade and transparency and government accountability issues at the Center for effective government's open government project. And that was for 13 years. This organization is recently merged with Pogo. And for for full disclosure, Dina and I both worked at at Pogo Dino fat Dena founded the organization. And Pogo was was actually my first job out of college. So at this point, Shawn, would you like to save, say anything else. So in the form of introduction,

Sean Moulton: 1:19

it's a pleasure to to be here, I will stress one of the things I did while at OMB Watch, which which transformed and became a center for effective government was we built a website that tracked federal spending used databases, and it predated USA spending, which, which is the kind of Premier portal now for the federal government to put out data on contracts and grants and all that, and they actually wound up licensing our software or our programming to use as their starting stepping stone. And so I have been in the thick of spending transparency for for most of my career.

Greg Williams: 2:06

Yeah, and I want to point out that what one thing that's really important to us here at climate money watchdog is to emphasize the tools that are available to taxpayers and voters to better understand what government is doing, and USA spend along with bill.gov. And last week, we spent a lot of time talking about the General Accountability Office. You know, as as much as we would like to see a government be more transparent and more careful with the way it spends money. There are many very rich tools available to the taxpayer to understand what the government is doing. So recently, Biden is announced a new set of oversight standards for the recently passed infrastructure law, of which about half the $1.2 trillion in that that law is specifically dedicated to the major climate projects, more recently issued an executive order and his office of management of the budget. That's That's what OMB stands for, as an OMB Watch, also issued guidance to provide more details to the various departments to add extra oversight capability. And what we'd really like to hear from you is how those new measures stack up against what we would want, ideally, and how they might compare with the extra oversight that was put in place for the American Recovery Act during the Obama administration. So hopefully, first, you can share with us the good news about these new oversight measures, and then we can talk a little bit more about where they fall short.

Dina Rasor: 3:50

But before we do that, I say that because we are making these for, for climate, people, activists, you know, other people that aren't well steeped in the language, explained that this was passed by a, this was passed by, done by executive order. And then they put out a guidance in the American Recovery Act, which was during the Obama administration, which by the way, it was overseen by Ron Klain and Joe Biden, that the most of that was put in the legislation. And this is why we've been we up until this came out. We've been we have been ringing the alarm bells because they legislation passed with nothing in it. So explain the difference between when it's done by executive order, and is done by legislation, and the pros and cons of each because otherwise the rest of this conversation might not be, you know, it's clear.

Sean Moulton: 4:55

Sure, sure. And I know a lot of people out there probably do go little confused as to, you know, which is which is better? Which is stronger executive order or law? And the quick answer is, it's always better to do it through legislation to do it as a law. Laws survive beyond an administration executive orders may, but they don't necessarily, especially if you have a change in party affiliation in between administrations, often, the other party will will rescind a lot of the executive orders. The good news about executive orders is they can be compared to legislation that could be faster and a little bit easier. You don't have to get the same level of consensus, you have an administration who, you know, let's face it, to some extent, they're all on the same page, hopefully, and so it's about you know, getting the language right and figuring out what you want to put in there. So they're a little bit easier lift. But I agree, I was very disappointed at the extent of oversight. That was in the infrastructure law. There was some funding for inspectors general, they do the audits and the investigations, track down fraud, they do amazing work. And so we were really glad to see a lot of dedicated funding for all the various agencies, inspectors general, there wasn't much beyond that there wasn't a lot of reporting requirements or other other oversight provisions in the law. And so I think the Biden administration is trying to step in and, and fill that gap a little bit.

Greg Williams: 6:39

So I want to point out that we, we did another podcast episode with a retired inspector general. And we spent a lot of time talking about what it means to track down waste, fraud and abuse after it has occurred versus preventing you know, it's building a better barn or chasing the horse after it's left the barn. And inspectors general are all about chasing the horse after it's left the barn.

Sean Moulton: 7:04

Yes, yes. And that's a great analogy. But I will say that one of the sort of bright spots in this Biden administration's guidance is that they, they turn that a little bit or they close that loop a little bit, what they have said is they want the inspectors general, to consult on program design, for all new programs, new infrastructure programs, that money is going out. So they will help build a better barn. And it's it's a great idea. And I mean, as happy as I am that they're doing it, it, of course, makes me immediately scratch my head and wonder, have they really not been talking to the people who have been chasing down this waste, fraud and abuse and asking them? How do we do a better job in the past? And and apparently they haven't. But that is a really great thing, that they're gonna they're gonna bring them in and say, What kind of checks and balances can we put in place? Now, before we spend the money to maybe make your jobs a little easier?

Dina Rasor: 8:14

Yeah, well, I can really identify with that. And, and because the Inspector General's learn a lot by their investigating, they see where all the problems are. And if you can ask them and use their expertise and their history. I've been, I spent a good portion of my career working with whistleblowers on false claims qui tam false claim Mac lawsuits. And it was always very frustrating, because you learn all this stuff, and then you see the government doing it again, and your your, your, the lawyers are happy, just wait a few years, we'll get more money, you know, but and then also the same experience, I would have whistleblowers who thought they could go out and do it themselves. And they did everything wrong. You know, I mean, they they got themselves in such a pickle, and they were being retaliated against. And they come to me, it's like a basket case. And I'm like, Okay, I wish you had come to me five months ago, because I make your life easier, but then we have to rehab it out. So my frustration in this whole process of oversight is, you only get 10 cents on the dollar. If you go after with a qui tam case, if you win, and, you know, and or settle. And it is just so much easier to prevent it. You know, I used to say to people, you know, I have to look at the water that's gone under the bridge, but I'd love to find the water before the bridge because and make it make sure that that doesn't go in the wrong direction. So I really think that that's something that I'd like to emphasize here to any activist any reporter anybody's looking at it. This this is a really important thing. It the Biden people have done is to say to the program managers don't you know, this, let me emphasize a lot of this is new programs, new new bureaucracies, new spending, you know, there is not they don't have a template for a lot of this stuff. It's all climate. It's not, there's never been this much money put towards climate $600 billion people, lot of money, and a lot of sharks. And so I just really glad that, that and hope the bureaucracy is not, you know, sometimes that gets a bureaucrat, or program managers knows that a drain, I know what I'm doing. I'm a professional, you know, but I think it's great if you can go ask if you can go ask somebody what's happened before. So I don't fall into this problem with you know, contractor. So anyway, I just wanted to say that I think that when you talk about the good news, when I saw that I said finally, finally, go talk to the people that have to clean up the mess after the aid.

Greg Williams: 11:03

So a couple of things I wanted to clarify for our outside the Beltway listeners, people who don't not familiar with, with some of these terms, when we talk about key tam cases, Ki tam is Latin for on behalf of the king. And it refers to the False Claims Act, which is a law that allows private citizens to sue on behalf of the government, when they think that a contractor has engaged in in fraud. And individuals can be entitled to big awards, sometimes up to three times whatever is recovered. Or the government is entitled to up to three times what 30 The amount of the fraud and then the individual will bring the case is entitled to a small portion of that. But with with a million or billion dollar projects, that can be pretty, pretty attractive. And so there are legal firms that make a business of, of basically suing on behalf of the government. But to Dana's point, you gotta catch him. And at the end of the day, what you're able to prove is often a small percentage of what you suspect is the overall fraud. The other thing that I want to point out is that while it's great to have IGS inspectors general ed is consulting on individual programs. The kind of work that John has done in the past with the spending database that became USA spend, creates standard ways of reporting across programs and across departments. That makes it much easier to compare how well money is being spent across programs and make it much simpler, both for members of Congress and for taxpayers and voters to understand what the government is doing. And so as much as we appreciate the fact that the Biden administration is, is getting this engagement from the Inspector General and funding them, it's still not as good as legislating standards for how or how spending is tracked.

Sean Moulton: 13:14

Yeah, I think what you're, what you get here is a question of implementation. And you you may have some agencies that that implement this very well, but listen very closely to their inspectors general and, you know, really take some of those lessons learned and, and build them in as guardrails on future programs. But you may get other agencies that, you know, politely consult with their inspectors and say, well, thank you, but we know what we're doing. And we don't need you to tell us how to design this program. And so, you know, there isn't, as you're saying, there's not really a standard here, there's not really a requirement, aside from the consultation, but there's there's not a they don't have to approve it. The inspectors general, they don't have to sign off on it. They don't have to agree that enough, you know, accountability provisions are in place. The consultation is all that's being required here.

Dina Rasor: 14:13

And another area that hitches right onto that is there's going you know, people in Washington, there's between various departments and even sub departments, there is a lot of turf wars, and a lot of siloing people said, you know, that's what happened in 911. And then 911 is they weren't talking to each other because this is my data. Oh, I'm not gonna give my data out somebody else. And so the two biggest organizations, departments that are going to be doing this is doe and do t and I think it's great that Granholm who's head of Doa and Buda judge who's the head of DOJ? Oh, they get together and drive electric cars together, and they're all buddies. But those are political appointees, and what's going on underneath, and they are, they are making a joint office, which, you know, I can just see the turf wars going there to, to to say certain things jointly. And because in a bureaucracy you know, you don't want to you want to do it your way your culture and the D. O. T. 's culture is so different than the doe. Doe has mainly been science contracting out to scientists, you know, they don't, they don't they don't do a lot of bending metal and pouring concrete. And do T is all about freeways, so, so it's a different tools and things. So here, we're asking them, number one, listen to your IGS. Number two, you're now you're going to have to give do these these programs jointly working with people who have a totally different culture than you are? So maybe Greg has one that wants to say something about that. And I just I just think that that's something I'd like you to address to Sean.

Greg Williams: 16:04

Yeah, I again, for people who are less familiar with these bureaucracies that maybe some of us are the Department of Energy, you might think, naively is all about hydroelectric dams and windmills and how energy is generated, but much of their work over the last 50 years, has been building nuclear weapons. And regardless of how you feel about weapons, warfare, and nuclear weapons in particular, it is a culture that is very dominated by people with PhDs who understand subatomic physics. And they have driven I think it's fair to say much more in the areas of supercomputing and super advanced computer modeling, then they have, you know, relatively simple things like hydroelectric dams, and then Department of Transportation, as you say, is about pavings. You know, and both are valuable undertakings, but they are culturally very, very different.

Sean Moulton: 17:10

Yeah, and I think I mean, that that culture challenge that you're talking about, it's a definitely with with merging, do a D, D, o, t, having a joint office, but but also just this idea of having a new layer of accountability added yet all the agencies it becomes becomes a cultural change, and one that is is resisted, not necessarily for nefarious reasons. I'm not trying to paint these bureaucratic, you know, officials, as you know, doing this because they they are trying to waste money. It really is because they think they've done their way for a long time. Their way works from their perspective from their silo. And you know, that they think all these all these new requirements, all this new working together, between two agencies, it's all just a fad. I'm going to be here. When all this is gone, I'm going to keep doing it my way. And so to get that culture change in this, we saw this back, Greg, you asked about the Recovery Act years ago, when we had a lot of money going out the door during the economic recovery efforts. 2009. And it was the same thing, we tried to get transparency and accountability there. And it really required a lot of authority and energy to be a spotlight to be maintained on the agencies to kind of keep them moving in the right direction, because there was just this natural tendency to come back to the same way they've been doing it for, you know, for years for decades. And so we'll have to see if that that focus stays in the Biden administration. One of the things in the guidance was a senior accountable official at each agency, someone had to basically be named as the one responsible, that could help. But it will really probably take something more something like White House intervention and concentration and, you know, keeping that keeping that spotlight focus, so everyone knows, they've got to do with this this new way, regardless of their personal opinion, regardless of how they they feel it might be better.

Greg Williams: 19:20

Yes, it's very, very quickly, I wanted to point out that, in terms of culture, Department of Energy is responsible for some of the most closely guarded secrets on the planet. And their culture reflects that. The Department of Transportation builds roads that you can see from space. And their culture reflects that.

Dina Rasor: 19:38

Yeah. And then I wanted to, I wanted to also say that it's, it's kind of like, I always like to give analogies. It's kind of they are so different that I don't think this is overstating. It's kind of like telling a Catholic Church and a Protestant church, that they're going to have services together from now on and trying to fit figure that out, you know, and all the hoo ha on that. And so and then of course, you've got turf with the Inspector General's Offices even. So I, I worry about this. And this is these are things we're bringing up, because the three of us have a lot of knowledge. We're sort of like the IG type people thing, we've seen what can go wrong. And I, this is the thing that I keep saying, every time, every every tweet, I put out, every podcast I do, is we don't have time to do do overs. We don't have time to do do overs, because, you know, we are on a timescale that is going faster than anybody thought. And so now we're asking these be are these state bureaucracies with their little turf, you got to start working together? Now I'm suggest whoever Biden got to go out there and say, we're getting vaccines out the door. He's the kind of guy or she's the kind of person that you need, because I've never seen the government move faster. Have you shown?

Sean Moulton: 21:09

Now it was, I gotta say the vaccine rollout was very impressive.

Dina Rasor: 21:14

Somebody went in there and just start pulling levers knocking heads, and we went from practically nothing to everything. You know, really, I've never seen the federal government move that fast. Even with hurricanes and natural disasters. Yeah.

Sean Moulton: 21:29

Maybe think of back in the recovery under under the Obama administration. I mean, they came in and basically got given this recovery effort, almost immediately. And and he put at the time, Norm Eisen, who eventually became an ambassador over to the Czech Republic, but he put normalised and who was a personal friend, in charge of this, as you're saying, This person who could pull the levers and point fingers and knock heads, and everyone knew that normalizing, you know, he was, you know, old law school friend of the President and could have lunch with them at any time, like, you listen to this person closely, because you knew they had the ear of the president. And they were talking and that meant this had had the President's attention. And you're right, we need somebody like that, to come in.

Dina Rasor: 22:18

And that's one of the reasons I was so surprised that they didn't put the Recovery Act type of oversight in the legislation. And I kept calling everybody in Washington saying, Where is it? Where is it? And the reason is that the other piece to people that were in charge of the Recovery Act, and the execution of it was Vice President, Joe Biden and his chief of staff, Ron Klain, and now he's president and claimed his chief of staff. And so I was hoping that they would have that same understanding, and they probably do, but they put it out like this, and it probably may have got come down to that they can't lose even one vote in the Senate. Maybe they couldn't, you know, maybe mansion or somebody or cinema or the usual suspects said, No, I'm not doing that. Or if you're going to do this, you're you know, you can't do it for big fossil fuel, or, you know, whatever. And they just probably thought, You know what, this is so messy, let's just do it by executive order. Okay, so I think we've kind of established the macro on that. And I'd like to see if we can go to the micro now tell us that. Tell us the good news. Tell us the good news that you think the things that you think that are gonna going to do. Okay.

Sean Moulton: 23:31

So I mean, obviously, the the the inspectors general consulting, a programming a big, a big positive. I think some of the other things that I've already already mentioned, senior official involved getting someone who's, you know, it's their job or their responsibility to make sure the implementation goes through. Well, that's also positive. They want to improve some of the data, which of course, I am. So happy to even hear them talk about, they acknowledged that two of important things are award descriptions, which are just terrible. And sub award data, which, if you can believe it makes award descriptions look good. And so those are two really good things. If you're if you're going to only focus on two things, they were good things to focus on. But there's a there's a downside to that I'll talk about in a moment, I guess. They also talk about some post award reporting, which is a real I don't want to say it's a real positive but it could be a real positive there's not a lot of meat on that bone right now. But it you know, this this idea of having some sort of reporting afterwards, could fill in some of these these questions. We have some of these data gaps that we have. But But I have concerns about that. And as I as I said it, it will come down to implementation and and You know, I, I'd love to see more guidance from from OMB to come out and set and give more more details and more specify specifics about what they what they are expecting from agencies on that. So, and hopefully this this guidance, I should say, did talk about future guidance that there could be future guidance. And, and we saw that during the recovery act it you know, it was coming from legislation, but OMB was in charge a lot of overseeing a lot of the overall implementation, and they were rolling out guidance, every few weeks about different things about reporting and about using the money and agency's responsibility and recipients responsibility. So maybe we'll start to see that that would certainly also make me more hopeful if we start to see additional guidance, and more details coming out for agencies.

Greg Williams: 25:49

Alright, so some quick translations, in order to spend money through some entity outside the government, like a private contractor, the government has to award a contract. And so when they do that, how they describe what that award is, is the award description that John's talking about. And then very often, that contractor or other entity is going to rely on lots of subcontractors. And that's what that sub award description is talking about. And then, as we've described in other podcast episodes, that's just spending the money now that the federal government in particular likes to manifest progress as how quickly they spend the money. But really, if you want to know what that money did, you need that post award reporting that John just talked about, so Sean's talking about, you know, tell us who you giving the money to tell us who they're giving the money to? And then tell us what you did with it. Yeah,

Sean Moulton: 26:53

that'd be nice to say that the award descriptions are were poor. I mean, you sometimes were lucky to get a description, a lot of times, you would get the name of the program. Let's say it was, you know, federal highway money, it would say, you know, highway money, or highway construction money, and then the year. And so, you know, from from the public's perspective, if you look this up, and I mean, this would be hundreds of millions of dollars that would be under that, that description, you have nothing to do with that you don't know if it was, if it was paving a road, if it was widening the road, if it was doing a bridge, and they and the sub award money, it just didn't add up. You know, you knew this money, a lot of us money goes to the states state agency, a state D O T, a state, housing, state education, whoever it would be, it would go there. And then they would divide it up out to counties to cities. And so if you really want to know, did, did my area get money? And how much did we get compared to your neighboring areas or an area up north, then you need that sub award data. And for some of these programs, there was there was almost none as that would be subbed out. And then for others, weirdly, it would be multiple times the prime award is the state government would get, let's say 100 million dollars. And then the sub awards would add up to 400 million. Because there were all these duplicative awards, that that somehow the system was was, you know, making multiple awards, records of the same award. And so then you didn't know what to trust, you know, suddenly, you had more money than then they could be spending. And it didn't make any sense. And so the sub award data, I mean, from a from a ledger perspective, from an accounting perspective, it is just unusable.

Dina Rasor: 28:43

Well, that kind of goes into the next thing we're going to talk about, and where you're talking about the data tracking, and I'm not really a big data tracking person, Greg is, but when I used to work with whistleblowers, and we're doing databases, and X people are experts in it. I remember this one old guy came up to me and said, there's one cardinal rule about databases. And he said, it's not hard to figure out and I'm kind of rolling my eyes think he's gonna go off on some equation, he said, garbage in, garbage out. Your database is only as good as what you put into it. And if you do not put it in, consistently, you know, methodically, with the same kind of rules and descriptions and everything else, that computer is not going to be able to piece together everybody's little thing. So he he really emphasized that and I just it just came to me when I was looking at this about the data track tracking meeting be transparent and the enforcement of making it enforcing a standard. And so I wanted to talk to you about that because that's one of the things that you talked in your article which by the way, we will have on our website. What's going wrong?

Sean Moulton: 29:59

Yeah. mean, he's 100%? Right. And it is a long held rule of computer people, you know, and, and database people. And the reality is we've got some good data, I don't want to say that the USA spending data is, is, you know, not useful it is it's got a lot there. But it falls down in certain areas. And in other areas, it's just, it's just not even there. We're not even putting anything in. We're just missing data, data that we know we need to data that we report for contracts, but we don't report it for grants and loans to companies. And, you know, it makes you scratch your head and say, Well, wait a minute, if we're collecting this information for a company that gets a federal contract, why aren't we collecting it for someone who gets a federal loan? And those are things simple things like, what industry sector are you in, and people we just had, we still have a lot of money that we're looking at around the COVID Awards, but a lot of people were always asking, you know, you know, which industry sectors are we missing? You know, how much went to the restaurant industry or the, you know, the the lumber industry or whoever. And the reality was decided the from the paycheck Protection Program loans, which did collect industry sector information, all the rest, because they were assistance, we didn't collect anything, and we had no idea where any of this money was going, like how much went to each particular industry sector. And so we really need to fill in some of those gaps, you know, and, and it probably will once, when we first fill in some of those gaps, we're probably gonna have some data quality problems. When people first start reporting, we'll have some garbage. But if we stay on it, we can start getting good data in and start filling some of these gaps. But but also, you know, the the award descriptions, the sub award data, just just the amounts and who's getting it right now. You're right, Dena, that is garbage.

Greg Williams: 31:58

I just want to point out for our listeners, they will have links in the description of this episode, to prior episodes where we talked about the distinctions between loans, loan guarantees, grants and contracts, we've covered that with retired inspectors general with Scotts Collie, I'm sorry, Shawn's colleague, Scott AMI, and in with a number of other elected officials.

Dina Rasor: 32:22

Yeah, and, you know, the one environmental program that the that the the anybody who's anti climate picks up in, in waves, like a bloody flag is that was the solar system, Solyndra program. And that really, we had the Inspector General of the Treasury Department tell us, you know, the DOE, just didn't even do the due diligence, but it was a loan program, which would not be come under this. And, you know, they, they lost, you know, half a billion dollars. And I looked up the DoD new loan program, which they're gonna get loan things out to companies, guaranteed loans, and people are going to be trying all kinds of stuff for the climate, it's over $40 billion. So there you go out of the 600 billion I bought, you know, that probably going to mostly going climate, there's 40 billion of it, that's not going to show up on that database. I think it was from the database, but,

Sean Moulton: 33:27

but it's not complete. I mean, it really has a lot of missing components to it. And so you're not going to be able to figure out, you know, in terms of those companies, you know, what industry sector they were in, were they owned by a minority owner, or a woman or veteran, you know, and these are the kinds of things that, again, we track for contracts, because we know how important is how useful it can be to figure out these breakdowns, and to figure out exactly where the money's going, who's getting it, and what industry sector they're in. And so we need to fill in some of those gaps for for loans, and even for grants.

Dina Rasor: 34:06

Paying for grants. And I want to explain here a little bit about growth and why I think grants are so important is so much of the climate money is getting and it's gonna go to big experimental things and you're trying to suck carbon out of the air, there's a lot of big things, but it's gonna go down farther clear down to micro grids cleared into neighborhoods, you know, and grant state grants are going to do to counties that are going to do cities, you know, down to this and if you if you are an activist or your local activist and you think oh my god, this you know, the state and federal government is screwing up here. They don't have any idea you know, or or else we've got me utilities in California be pg&e after us because they don't, you know, they don't want us to have a microgrid these activists have to be able to go somewhere and see where is the money going and that and those are mainly grants So grants are another really important thing, because anytime it gets down to the grassroots, that's where you can fix it before it goes bad. Because the people who the local people who are trying to do it and trying to do it right, like, you know, a bike path, but they put bike path through a factory or something, you know, something ridiculous that makes it her hazardous or whatever. Local people know what's going on there. And they, if they have this in the database, they can do figure out who is doing this, how's it doing, you know, who's got the contracts to do this? And so that when they go to talk to their local official during a town hall, if you don't have that kind of information, they're like, oh, yeah, I'll look into it, and they won't. But if you have the act, you can name the act bad actors, or name this and name that, then suddenly that politicians like, ooh, they have some information. So the grant things concerns me too. And I think that a lot of the success of local stuff is going to be on activists.

Greg Williams: 36:05

So I want to make sure that we we reserve time for Shawn to tell us what can be done now? What should we be calling our members of Congress about what we what should be? What should we be calling our local assembly people about? What would you do if you were king for a day?

Sean Moulton: 36:21

Well, that would be wonderful. I know, there are a lot of things that that we could be doing. And, and some of it is stuff that the Biden administration could be doing. One of the things I would say is, you know, brought up the post award reporting, get some specifics on that. I mean, I think, you know, it's, it's gonna happen. And so let's make sure it's as good as possible. And so, you know, what I would love to see is consistency, Greg, you brought this up earlier about, you know, different agencies doing doing different things and meeting requirements. And I think that's what we need here. Right now, it sounds like it's going to be each agency figuring out what would be most useful for them to collect and post award reporting. And I certainly would be fascinated to think, to hear what they each think would be most important. But what would be even better is if there was some sort of central process where they kind of collectively all talked about it, and then figured out what would work for everybody. And let's collect it so that we can compare apples to apples, you know, grants at DOE grants at DOD, and see, you know, how well they're doing, because we're collecting the same post award data. So that would be that would be a big thing. And I do think Congress has a big role here. I mean, obviously, I would have loved to have seen some of this in the legislation. But Congress also has a big oversight role, by the administration has kind of given themselves a standard here, you know, hopefully, it'll get even more detailed. But Congress gonna have that oversight role to start asking some tough questions and setting some expectations about what they think implementation of this guidance is going to look like. And agencies, you know, will, you know, kind of be called on the carpet and know, if we're not doing xy and z, then, you know, we're just going to be yelled at by Congress in six months. And so it'd be great if Congress came in and said, you know, we want to see improvements in the data quality, we want to see improvements, we want to see some consistency in the postal board reporting. You know, we want to see some of these these gaps filled in. I think one of the other things that I haven't brought up is, I mean, I mentioned it a little bit, but it's requirements going down to the state level being passed along a lot of this money, it goes to the states, to the state agencies, and then they get to the side. And tracking the information would be helpful, though, sub sub award data, it would allow us to see how well it's going in the States, you know, you know, are there communities that are being missed, there's been a lot of talk around equity, you know, is the money being distributed equitably inside a state. But if each state is allowed to do kind of what they want with it, and have a lot of discretion, then what we're probably going to see is what I've been talking about for the agencies, we're going to see states having different performance levels. And and that's, you know, we can come in afterwards, you know, again, after the barn, the horse has left the barn and complain and check our fisted states that did a poor job of it, but the money's gonna have been spent. And so is there a way to, to have some requirements on the states to have them know that the spotlight is on them, and that there's an expectation that they spend this money equitably that they spend this money responsibly and, you know, across the these communities, and I think that's going to be A key factor too. And of course, that runs into some federalism concerns, which which federalism is when, you know, the federal government comes in and tries to tell states what to do. And it's generally considered something that's not supposed to happen. But I do think that when it's federal money, they can put some requirements on that money. They they've done it before they have it for other programs. And so having some equity requirements built into these to these funds for the states would be another component that I feel has been missing that if I was king for a day, I would certainly be putting in there.

Dina Rasor: 40:36

Okay, well, that's another area that I have very fear, because the fact is, there, we've we've seen diversions, you know, I mean, I alerted pogos executive directors, a good friend of mine, about how Alabama Governor COVID money, she had $100 million to spend on schools to, you know, make better circulation of air and everything. She said, Okay, I'm gonna take 10 I'm gonna take 10 million to do that. And we're gonna spend the rest on building prisons. And I'm like, what? Because, you know, it's very clear that you're not allowed. You know, you're not, you're just not allowed to spend it on something that hasn't, that's totally different than the appropriation that Congress wanted it for.

Sean Moulton: 41:25

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's certainly a big factor. I mean, we've, we've seen in a variety of programs, where different states will will allocate the money differently differently. And even if it's not on something, outside of of the area, maybe they're going to spend it on roads, but whose roads are they repairing? You know, are they are they repairing the roads of the most affluent? neighborhoods and communities where the roads are already pretty good? Or are they looking at a sort of genuine need, in terms of roads and and communities and when they've been served the same for all sorts of money, I mean, education money or the broadband, I mean, that's something that in the legislation, there was a good emphasis on this idea of the digital divide. And that, that poor communities, rural communities are struggling, we're moving into an information age, and we've got communities that are being left behind, because they don't have the money. And so corporations aren't serving them as readily because the profit margins aren't as big. And so the government is trying to step in and, and close some of that gap. Because it's so critical to keeping those people a part of, you know, modern society. And again, uh, you know, looking at some of the past broadband efforts, including under COVID, you know, it's very hard to figure out where that money actually went, and which, which communities it reached. And so I really worry that, you know, Will, we're going to have those same questions with with all of this money that's coming out now. And if you don't have the data, if you're not collecting the data, you know, and the sub award data, if you can't follow it down, as you're talking about Dina the micro grids, you can't get it all the way down to the neighborhood, then you can't really figure out, you know, who benefited and who did. And then you know, you could you can say you want to spend the money equitably. But you won't know if you did or you didn't.

Greg Williams: 43:32

So I think this is all provided a great taste of the much richer detail that that's in the report that you just published, which again, we will provide a link on on our website to that report. Is there anything else that you would want to call attention to? But before we wrap this up today?

Sean Moulton: 43:52

I think the last thing I would probably call attention to is, you know, I want to see a lot of these things improved now for this infrastructure spending. And there is that opportunity. And so people people should get involved they should they should demand these higher standards. But somewhat even more importantly than that, you know, going back all the way to the very beginning of our conversation, I would I would consider it a massive victory if even a few of these lessons were genuinely learned this time around. If if the next time we have a big spending deal come through Congress, that they they immediately default to putting in some of these these accountability and oversight provisions that that that maybe before the next spending bill even better in before the next spending bill that we fix some of this infrastructure said like the spending oversight infrastructure, and that they they create some standards that they fill in some of these data gaps that they create a permanent role for IGS to be handled. out in the in program design and providing feedback, you know, and basically getting reports back from Jesus, whether or not they're being listened to. I mean, let's, let's try and fix the overall system. You know, one of the other things, I mean, it was big in the COVID Awards, a lot of sort of stolen identities, both personal and corporate identities, people pretending to be companies are making up companies and getting money, let's come up with a system of verification that we can use very easily and quickly. Whenever we're spending money, the next hurricane, the next, whatever it is, we have a system in place where we can verify that someone is who they say they are, before we send them a check. And these are all very basic things that we should have in place. And we don't, and every time we come to this urgent rush of spending, whether it's COVID, or infrastructure, something, we get caught where company where we get agency saying, Oh, but we've got to spend this money now and your ideas around accountability, they're just gonna slow us down, and we don't have time for it. And we need to fix it, so that it's not something new or being added, it's already in place.

Dina Rasor: 46:19

Okay, well, great, Shawn, I'm really, this is really good. And we are going to be doing this, we're going to be traveling along in this and you're going to be doing this. So please come back, you know, we've got a, we've got a 10 year journey there, I don't know 10 years, but when we please come back, because what we can do is, you know, we can alert you if we see something or whatever. And also, if you see something that looks like, you know, when you're just reading through some program on climate, you know, red flag comes up, you know, let's, let's do that. And then have you back on the podcast and, you know, find a situation and say this look, this is look, all you activists out there, your money's gonna get blown away. You know, there's sharks, there are people you know, this is not all a kumbaya, environmental movement. Now, this is spending real money. And so if you want to do, you've got that 1.5 degrees Celsius, you want to stay under, then you better start learning everything that that Shawn was telling you about. Because if you don't, somebody else will and use it to their advantage.

Greg Williams: 47:29

And likewise to our listeners, you know, if you see money being spent poorly or or you're trying to understand how the money is being spent, call your congress person call your Selectmen, we have contact information on our website about how to report things anonymously.

Dina Rasor: 47:47

Before you do something, so that we do not have to play clean up afterwards to protect you call climate one call and contact climate MoneyWatch because I've been working with whistleblowers for 40 years and I just love to get them when they're fresh before they before they have also stood over from being fed on fire.

Sean Moulton: 48:07

Well, I would love to come back anytime and I will I will certainly keep in touch and let you know as things develop. What what we're seeing out there.

Dina Rasor: 48:15

Right now close to our listeners send us questions and if we can't answer a more bass monotone

Sean Moulton: 48:20

Yes, happy to. Alright, thanks again, everyone.

Dina Rasor: 48:23

Thanks a lot.

Sean Moulton: 48:24

Thank you