There's an idea floating in Washington that's so good, it's hard to believe it has a chance of becoming law: a bill to require full Internet disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving federal funds.

That's the thrust of S. 2590, the Federal Funding and Accountability Act of 2006, which would create a single, stand-alone, searchable database Web site, free to anyone who wishes to know where federal dollars flow.

Any corporation, association, partnership, grantee, contractor, state or locality receiving taxpayer dollars would be listed. The amounts each receives would be searchable by name, industry, geographical location, amounts received, activity and program sources. Only national security expenditures would be exempt from the easy public scrutiny.

The wicked beauty of such a tool is that both conservatives and liberals see it as a means to their ends.

Its primary sponsor, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, along with his fiscally conservative colleagues, sees it as a way for a disenchanted public to Google oodles of boodle. Liberals, such as his co-sponsor, Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, see it as a way to build voter support for increasingly activist government that does Good Things.

But in the legislative middle, there's a band of opponents who fear that making some of this information so readily available might upset their cushy canoes. The Republican-written House version would omit contracts that go to businesses (whose owners and workers, in turn, frequently contribute to campaigns), but would include the $300 billion or so that go to nonprofit groups in grants. And that, liberals say with some justification, would amount to just another intolerable partisan stab at defunding the left.

That the Coburn-Obama Senate version includes both is one of many reasons it is the superior approach to making the people's check register more accessible to the people. After all, their livelihoods are the headwaters of the budget flood.

True, much of this information can now be found - if one has the time, resources and skills to swim through the innumerable tributaries that feed the federal fiscal flow.

But most of us don't. Most of us are left hopelessly confused by the sleight-of-hand that disburses our treasure. This is an open-government proposal that would bring some clarity to that confusion.

So far, the Senate version has four co-sponsors, among whom are not to be found Ohio Sens. George Voinovich or Mike DeWine. We'd like to think that, as avowed fiscal conservatives, they'd be on board.

In this information age, when nearly any fact is but a few keystrokes away via the Internet, there's no defensible reason why such basic information as where these billions of dollars flow is not similarly accessible. S. 2590 would make it so.

It ought to be the law.