I’m not shocked that the D.O.G.E. efforts have discovered that the federal government spends tens of millions to fund luxury accommodations for migrants. Nor am I surprised at how easily people could be fooled into wrongly believing that the government spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza. Just like I wouldn’t be shocked if taxpayer money was used to start overseas NRA chapters or fund a multimillion-dollar “Bibles for Baghdad” program.

As objectionable as these real and imagined programs are, what most upsets me is that it took the uproar over D.O.G.E. for me to realize that taxpayers deserve this type of real-time fiscal transparency. Someone (or groups of someones) in the government has access to every penny that is spent. That information should be made available to the public in an easy-to-use format. Do you think Congress would have appropriated billions in funding for expired federal programs if members knew that every specific federal disbursement would be in a searchable public database?

This level of transparency should extend to the local level as well. Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is spent, down to the details. Instead of vague categories in an annual PDF report, we should be able to see specifics. For instance, who are the specific businesses and individuals that received the $11.5 million the city of Knoxville spent on Community Development in 2024? Unlike the federal government, it is unlikely that Knoxville or Knox County is using Visit Knoxville or the Public Building Authority to funnel weapons to a Central America counterinsurgency militia. But rather than know the Knox County government spent $64 million on “Other General Government” last year, we should know how much went toward, say, lobster lunches to-go from Ruth’s Chris. And this information shouldn’t come months after the fact—it should be available in real time.

Don’t tell me this is too difficult to implement. If a handful of 20-something-year olds living on energy drinks and pizza rolls can search, collate and make public real time, granular spending data for a $7 trillion organization, a local government can do the same.

In fact, some municipalities already offer this transparency. It’s pretty clunky, but San Francisco’s SF OpenBook website allows anyone to search local government spending down to the vendor level. So far this fiscal year, San Francisco has paid $36 million to something called Episcopal Community Services and $3,849 to Brenda’s French Soul Food. San Francisco should be lauded for this effort.

If a government’s accounting department can’t access detailed transaction data about how taxpayers’ money is spent, they need new systems or people. And if they can access that information, there’s no excuse not to share it with the public. Taxpayers deserve nothing less.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.