Will this work in practice or is it an election year stunt?
The call for a line item veto seems to be a stunt.
It should definitely work in practice. Most of the information that is required to build such a system is already located at several unconnected sites - grants are at
Grants.gov , some contracts are at
FPDS . The problem is that the data is difficult to search, spread across multiple systems, suffers from poor data quality, and usually lacks subcontract/subgrant information. The system proposed by this law should correct those problems. Now that the bill has been signed, Coburn and Obama need to stay on top of the OMB to make sure that the final product is delivered on time and to spec.