Embracing the Hard Path

Remarks as prepared for delivery

I am honored to give the closing remarks at this monumental decennial celebration. Given my current role at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, I need to make a disclaimer that the views I express here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the PCAOB Board, other Board Members, or PCAOB staff.

The DATA Act was a gift to the government and the American people for obvious reasons. It was also a gift to me in so many ways. It changed my career trajectory, my passion, and my life. I often reminisce with feelings of gratitude for this once in a lifetime opportunity to lead the implementation of the DATA Act when others could have been chosen. But I did not always feel that way, especially when I was with many of you in the trenches. Implementing the DATA Act was hard because it challenged and fundamentally changed the status quo. I remember the Chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the late Earl Devaney, once told me that transparency work was not for the faint-hearted. He was right. Truth be told, I tried to quit more than once, but I decided to finish the work largely because of two U.S. Department of the Treasury leaders:  the Fiscal Assistant Secretary, Dave Lebryk, because of his steadfast commitment to good government and unwavering faith in the power of interagency collaboration, and  Renata Miskell who at the time led the Program Management Office team that patiently and tirelessly did the hard work despite unrelenting resistance. Many people referred to the DATA Act as transformational because of the outcome. I agree but for a different reason. I think that it was transformational not only because of the successful outcome, but also because the individuals involved chose not to take the path of least resistance, but instead embraced the hard path to do hard things, over and over again. When we choose the difficult journey, we are transformed in the process.

Therefore, the extraordinary individuals who conceived, drafted, designed, and implemented the DATA Act are why it is a gift to the government and the American people. The idea was initially conceived by a few visionaries like Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) and their staff Amy Holmes and Hudson Hollister, who had deep-seated faith that it would be a game-changer for the government, and who acted in a bipartisan way with great courage and perseverance to push it through the legislative process. Getting the law passed took three years and the implementation took another three years. The government-wide implementation was led by many federal leaders who empowered their staff to develop and implement new ideas, to challenge the status quo, and who held themselves accountable for delivering outcomes. Most importantly, they all had a passion to make government better and to serve in the public’s best interests.

Not only was the final DATA Act product innovative, but the entire process was also innovative. It was the first governmentwide agile, user-centered and open-source development project when the agile development concept was neither widely understood nor embraced in the Federal Government unlike today. Peter Drucker, who is considered the single most important thought leader in the world on management and who wrote extensively about innovation, stated:

“No one can foretell whether a given innovation will end up a big business or a modest achievement. But even if the results are modest, the successful innovation aims from the beginning to become the standard setter, to determine the direction of a new technology or a new industry, to create the business that is—and remains—ahead of the pack. If an innovation does not aim at leadership from the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough.” 

I think we can all agree today that the DATA Act project was the standard setter of its time and led the way to innovation in government.

And it can continue to lead the way. While it is extremely rewarding to see both the progress made and the validation of our original vision, there is more work to be done. The vision for a 360-degree spending lifecycle is not fully realized yet. Since the DATA Act, a few other open data laws were enacted including the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Public Law 115-435) which requires federal agencies to publish information online as open data and improves evidence-based policymaking; the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency (GREAT) Act of 2019 (Public Law 116-103) which aims to strengthen oversight of federal grants through open data, and the Financial Data Transparency Act of 2022 which mandates, among other things, the establishment of data standards for regulatory reporting using structured data and common non-proprietary legal entity identifiers. As I am now working in the regulatory space, I see tremendous potential to connect the data between the government and the private sector if there is a standard legal entity identifier. The entity identifier is the lynch pin to connect all data across multiple domains.

With the advent of AI, the opportunity to accelerate value creation has never been greater. I recently wrote an article for the AGA Journal to share my thoughts on how AI could transform public sector financial management. I described some high-level areas where AI could be beneficial including document processing, user experience, and fraud detection. The DATA Act provided a foundational structure in linking financial data and award data. Its focus was on structured data. With that foundation, AI now can enrich the structured data with unstructured data (e.g., contracts, grant agreements, and financial disclosures). It also provides a baseline for AI to be trained on the context of federal financial management and then perform additional tasks. Of course, AI should be used ethically and responsibly. We are living in an extraordinary era. The amount of “good” that could be generated using AI is significant. The amount of “bad” can also be frightening. I recently watched a talk by Jeffrey Hinton who is known as the godfather of AI. He compared the developing superintelligence of the “immortal” AI and the “mortal” biological intelligence of human.¹Imagine a machine that learns and retains all the knowledge for generations. In his opinion, we are only years, not decades, away from the reality of superintelligence and someday the superintelligence may overpower humans. I do not know if his controversial prophecy will come true, but I know that to solve these big problems our government, country, and world need more DATA Act pioneers, with the spirit of dedication, integrity, curiosity, and most importantly, courage.

Thank you again for this opportunity to speak.