5 takeaways:
➀ Develop a strategy for examining the massive numbers of federal COVID-19 contracts. While direct payments to households and small business loans received the bulk of the public’s attention, the federal government committed another $38 billion for everything it needed to buy to help fight the coronavirus. Derek Willis, an investigative reporter and data expert for ProPublica, dove in to try to understand how the government was spending its COVID money and quickly realized the enormity of the challenge. “We found ourselves kind of scrambling right at the top to say, okay, so the government’s going to just throw a bunch of money out the door,” he said. “Where’s it going to go?” Traditional reporting methods — checking in with sources — became unsustainable, since there was so much money it was like a “fire hose.”
➁ Automate repetitive tasks. Faced with the need to digest and synthesize all the federal contracts, Willis developed a program that would access the Federal Procurement Data System every day and add in new COVID-related contracts. The procurement system has a code for different functions — COVID contracts were all tagged with “P20C” — and Willis was able to pull new records each day to see what had been added to the system since the day before. He used the open-source web application framework Ruby on Rails to build his contracting database, which as of May 2021 had 17,734 contracts with 8,070 vendors. “If you’re doing a manual task with a computer and it’s repetitive … I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re using the computer wrong,” Willis said. “Ask yourself, is there a way I can automate this?” (His description of the technology powering the contracting database begins here.)
➂ Look for the new kids on the block. Once the database was populated with new COVID contracts, Willis and his colleagues began looking for anomalies. One of the simplest ways was to look for firms that were new. “Not only are they new to the federal contracting game, they’re just new,” he said. “… How do you go from not existing to getting a federal contract during an emergency sort of scenario? And it turns out one of the ways to do that is if you know people in the government.” One story that emerged was of a former White House aide who won a $3 million federal Indian Health Service contract to supply respirator masks to Navajo Nation hospitals — 11 days after he created a company to do so.
➃ Zero in on contracting by agency or business characteristics. The Federal Procurement Data System is packed with fields of information, including the awarding agency, the industry code for the service or product, and characteristics of the company, such as whether it’s a sole proprietorship, minority owned or veteran owned. Getting more details — such as the contract itself — can take a bit longer. You can use the award identification number for the contract to request a copy of the contract. One potential snag: Getting bumped from office to office to office within the federal bureaucracy, as officials pinpoint which division actually has it. Willis has some Freedom of Information Act requests that have languished since last year.
➄ Journalists can piggyback on ProPublica’s work to review Paycheck Protection Program loans. The high-profile PPP program was aimed at small businesses, although the definition of “small” was loose enough that well-funded companies with multiple branches or subsidiaries were able to qualify. ProPublica’s database is free to use and includes 10.7 million loans totaling $779 billion. Other databases complied by the National Press Foundation to track government spending, and background resources for tracking COVID relief funds, can be found in this guidebook.
This program was funded by the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
