The response to COVID-19 is not just record-level spending and borrowing. It may already constitute a wealth reallocation of historic proportions. The implications for equity, future growth, and climate are tremendous.

The health and economic crises – and in some cases, the government response to them – have not only been felt more acutely in particular businesses and industries. They have also disproportionately hurt black- and minority-owned businesses and the communities they serve.

The 20th century transparency toolkit will not be enough by itself. Moving forward, the “holy trinity” of transparency and anti-corruption reform – fighting against waste, fraud, and abuse – needs a fourth element: striving for equity. The case for this approach remains fundamental; more efficient spending means money for other programs or lower taxes that benefit the average citizen.

To capture the differential impacts of federal actions, oversight institutions must ask and answer the right questions as a matter of racial, social and economic justice. They must be able to gather and generate the data they need and guide implementation at agencies. This will help inform citizens about who received the money, why, and who benefited from it.

Americans deserve transparency about whether their money was leveraged effectively. While many have done yeoman’s work of researching these difficult issues, it should not primarily remain the work of non-governmental actors alone to ask basic questions about whether tax dollars are driving people together or apart.

Critics on the left and the right, as well as non-partisan observers have raised questions of distributional appropriateness in stimulus spending. The concern, then should not be partisan, but rather a basic element of policy analysis.

Read the full article about improving equity in COVID-19 spending by Joseph Foti and Norman Eisen at Brookings.