In his 2008 campaign, President Barack Obama promised to produce a public database that would show information about federal contractors and their lobbying habits.

But Obama's proposed "contracts and influence" database never came into being.

He made some effort to make federal contractor spending and other data more transparent. For example, his administration created the website ethics.data.gov, a central location to find ethics and influence-related data sets, like lobbying disclosure reports. For this, we said in 2012 that Obama kept his promise to centralize ethics and lobbying information for voters.

And the administration has continued to develop usaspending.gov, a website launched in 2007 to make information about federal government spending public.

However, none of these efforts resulted in a database that puts a particular federal contractor's dollars spent on lobbying next to the contractor's grant dollars received.

"While laudable, this is well short of the idea Obama was describing in the campaign and the transition," said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation.

Obama's pledge to build a public "contracts and influence" database remains a Promise Broken.