In response to the US Federal Register consultation for implementing the DATA Act, Publish What You Fund and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) have submitted a document, with the four key points as follows:

1. Agencies like USAID and the State Department should use their IATI files to comply with the requirements of the DATA Act. Any additional fields required should be incorporated in addition to their IATI file. This will likely reduce the burden on the agencies whose core mission is foreign assistance.

2. For other agencies that spend a smaller amount on foreign assistance it is critical that the information required by the DATA Act is tagged as either domestic or foreign assistance. This will facilitate the exchange of data to and from usaspending.gov and the foreignassistance.gov sites.

3. Encouraging automated data transfer will be an important way of ensuring that data is high quality and timely.

4. It is important not to displace the efforts of international standards where there are strong use cases and highly developed standards. Agencies for which a large part of their total spend is foreign assistance should be strongly encouraged to continue to automate their publication to IATI, or begin to do so in the short term if they have not already published.

You can read the full submission here: MFAN-PWYF response to Federal Register Notice on DATA Act