Federal agencies now use dashboards both for internal organizational management and to disseminate performance measures for transparency and accountability.

In February 2009, a month after President Obama’s inauguration, his administration implemented Recovery.gov, incorporating a dashboard for transparency and accountability in federal stimulus funding under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Subsequently, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, implemented the IT Dashboard in June 2009 for accountability and transparency in federal IT investments. The Open Government Directive, issued in December 2009, required the creation of an “Open Government Dashboard.”

In August 2010, in advance of the 2010 GPRA Modernization Act (GPRAMA), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) launched Performance.gov, a central website with dashboards to track key performance metrics of federal agencies. Performance.gov is currently open only to federal government employees. Several additional federal agencies (e.g., the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the United
States Patent and Trademark Office) have implemented dashboards to track performance metrics. As described by Tim O’Reilly, “the dashboards are an incredibly ambitious undertaking.”