Wouldn't it be great if you knew exactly how much money the government had budgeted to spend? Where that money was spent?

What if you could look it up yourself without having to rely on a politician to tell you. Maybe a candidate for office wants to brag about money he (or she) secured for any random program she (or he) chooses to champion that election year.

Well ladies and gentleman, we think we may have the bill for you. Senate Bill 2590 is championed by Sen. Tom Coburn and has 17 co-sponsors. It has growing bipartisan support in the Senate in the last week Sens. Hilary Clinton, Bill Frist, Joe Lieberman and Lamar Alexander all added their names to it.

In fact, you can count Rick Santorum and John Kerry as co-signers.

The bill is supposed to require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving federal funds.

It creates, starting Jan. 1, 2007, a "single updated searchable database website accessible to the public at no cost that includes for each entity receiving Federal funding."

It will include the name of the entity; the amount of any Federal funds that the entity has received in each of the last 10 fiscal years; an itemized breakdown of each transaction, including funding agency, program source, and a description of the purpose of each funding action; the location of the entity and primary location of performance, including the city, State, congressional district, and country; a unique identifier for each such entity and parent entity, should the entity be owned by another entity; and any other relevant information.

In other words: more transparency on budget matters. By 2009, fiscal years 1999 through 2005 will be online. The bill doesn't specify whether earlier budgets pre-1999 will be published, but we see no reason to stop at 1999.

What it won't publish is the name of an individual recipient of federal assistance, a federal employee, or a grant or contract that could cause damage to national security if it was released.

Under the bill, the site has to be updated 30 days after an award has been granted and it can't count links to other government sites as full disclosure "unless each of those sites has information from all agencies and each category of information required to be itemized can be searched electronically by field in a single search."

Anytime the public can better access its government, the better our republic becomes.