The General Services Administration has unveiled a $947 million investment plan to support the construction and renovation works on federal courthouses in eight communities across the U.S.

Denise Turner Roth, GSA administrator and inductee into Executive Mosaic’s Wash100 for 2016, said Monday the investment seeks to address security and space challenges in federal court buildings, as well as promote economic development in local communities.

Feasibility studies on the Judiciary’s housing needs in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will get $29.5 million in funds under the investment plan, which requires approval of appropriations committees in both chambers of Congress.

GSA will spend $787 million on the construction of new courthouses in Tennessee, Iowa, South Carolina, Alabama and Texas.

Alteration and repair works on court buildings in Georgia, Ohio and North Carolina will get $160 million in funds under the investment program.

A House bill sponsored by Reps. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) and Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) seeks to establish an “open by default” standard for government data, FCW reported Thursday.

FCW reports the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary Government Data Act would mandate agencies to publish enterprise-wide data inventories online in a machine-readable open format.

Sens. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) plan to introduce a companion bill, the report said.

Kilmer said the OPEN Government Data Act will build on the White House’s open data policy and allow agencies and the public to access enterprise data inventory on Data.gov, Federal News Radio’s Meredith Somers wrote in a separate article published Thursday.

The inventory will include data assets related to program administration, statistical or financial activity and generated by information applications, devices, networks or equipment, according to Somers’ report.

The Government Accountability Office has said the Office of Management and Budget should identify and publicly-report mandatory budget cuts in each fiscal year through 2025 in an effort to give Congress transparency and support required sequestration cuts of $1.2 billion over 10 years.

GAO reported Thursday the government had an estimated $2.9 trillion overall mandatory budget for fiscal 2014 and implemented $19.4 billion in sequestration-related cuts as mandated by OMB.

Those reductions amounted to less than 1 percent of mandatory budget authority, GAO said.

GAO reviewed Agriculture Department, Department of Health and Human Services, Treasury Department and Transportation Department accounts that reported varied effects due to additional administrative activities required to apply the reductions.

Actual sequestered amounts for certain types of mandatory spending cannot be measured until a fiscal year ends because of the variable nature of indefinite budget authority, GAO said.

OMB officials said the BBEDCA does not require it to tally the subsequent availability of temporarily sequestered budget authority in certain accounts or aggregate government-wide data on the actual amounts sequestered.

GAO added that this data — once recorded and compiled — could potentially serve as a benchmark to evaluate the progress made each year towards the overall savings goal.