A new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) examines whether federal agencies have complied with a 2006 law that was intended to increase transparency in the contracts, grants and other awards made by these agencies. The GAO's verdict?

The excerpts below from the GAO report provide a good overview of what has happened -- or not happened. (Note: The term "awards" applies to all grants, loans and other disseminated funds.):

While USAspending.gov currently contains required fiscal year 2008 information ... 9 agencies did not report a total of 15 awards.

... Without a more effective approach to ensuring that all agencies report applicable awards, the utility of USAspending.gov will be impaired by gaps in the required information.

In a random sample of 100 awards, GAO identified numerous inconsistencies between USAspending.gov data and records provided by awarding agencies.

In other words, the federal government is providing more information than it used to provide, but agencies have yet to fulfill the intentions of the 2006 law. The Obama administration needs to make this compliance a priority.

I wish I could say this is a new dance, but the hypocrisy shuffle has been around for a long time. And it's an easy dance to do. Just say one thing in public and then say something very different in private.

The Obama administration's stimulus fund offers a good example of how this works. As Washington Times reporter Jim McElhatton writes:

Sen. Christopher S. Bond regularly railed against President Obama's economic stimulus plan as irresponsible spending that would drive up the national debt. But behind the scenes, the Missouri Republican quietly sought more than $50 million from a federal agency for two projects in his state.

Mr. Bond was not alone. More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government's many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.

Melanie Sloan, CREW's executive director, was quoted in the Times article, and she offered this take:

"It's not illegal to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but it does seem to be a level of dishonesty troubling to the American public."

In the spirit of the holiday season, the CapitalEye blog at OpenSecrets.org is giving away a book to the first person who can name three of the top 10 highest-spending PACs during the 2008 election cycle.

The only hint the blog gives us is that the top 10 PACs each gave more than $2.5 million to federal candidates during the 2007-08 cycle.

On a related note, check out CREW's Fix the FEC website, which monitors complaints to the Federal Election Commission and related campaign-finance news.