Treasury Begins to Sell Citigroup Stock

As discussed in a recent Watcher article, Treasury is starting to divest itself of Citigroup assets. The news came out on Monday, with Citi's stock price at $4.86, but at the close on Tuesday, the price had plunged to below $4.40 a share.

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Senate Budget Committee Passes Budget Resolution With Larger Spending Cuts

On Thursday, the Senate Budget Committee passed the FY2011 budget resolution on a 12-10 vote. As predicted, the resolution calls for $4 billion in discretionary spending cuts, on top of President Obama's budget, which already proposed a non-security discretionary spending freeze for the next few fiscal years. The Committee's budget resolution would reduce the deficit to $575 billion in 2015, down from its current level of $1.4 trillion. Since OMB Watch already came out against the President's budget proposal as fiscally irresponsible, it's disappointing that the Budget Committee felt it necessary to outdo the President in spending cuts at a time when unemployment is still in the double-digits.

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OMB Watch Releases Fourth Quarter Recovery Act Data

Over on Fedspending.org, our government spending database, we just updated our Recovery Act tab to include the fourth quarter 2009 recipient reports. Users can now search through reports from February through December 2009, and can sort, sift and download it to their hearts' content. And be sure to check out some of our pre-cooked searches, including congressional districts ranked by Recovery Act spending and a list of the top 100 prime recipients.

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CEA: No, Seriously, the Recovery Act is Working

I feel sorry for the economists over at the White House's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). Every quarter, they run the numbers and find that the Recovery Act is significantly helping the economy. Last quarter, the CEA found that the Act increased GDP between 1½ and 3 percentage points and created between 1½ to 2 million jobs. This time around they found that it created between 2.2 and 2.8 million jobs and raised first quarter GDP between 2.5 and 2.9 percent. In other words, the Recovery Act is pretty consistently helping the economy improve, and in fact its effects may be growing. But no one listens to them! It must be a frustrating job.

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New Open Government Directive Memo Limits Depth of Spending Transparency

We're generally pretty happy with the new Open Government Directive on federal spending transparency. Specifically, we're pleased to see that the administration is moving to comply with the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA). Among other things, FFATA required sub-award reporting information on USAspending.gov, the government's spending website, as of 2009. But for more than a year, the Obama administration has not complied with this aspect of the law (in defense of the current administration, the Bush administration also did nothing to add sub-award data onto USAspending.gov, making this a bi-partisan screw-up). The new memo changes that, and mandates that agencies submit sub-award data to USAspending.gov starting October 1 of this year. The only problem is that the Open Government Directive memo limits the reach of this sub-award reporting.

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Fatally Flawed Stimulus Report Ignores Subrecipients

The great thing about the Recovery Act is that it provides us with a great deal of data on hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending. Anyone can go to Recovery.gov, the stimulus tracking website, download data for their state or the entire nation, and see each and every report submitted by recipients of the funds -- all 230,000 of them. Sifting through that amount of data can be like drinking from a fire hose, but it's an important feature of any spending transparency system. Anyone can take the data and do their own analysis, greatly expanding the uses of the data.

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Gentlemen, Start Your Reporting!

Today starts the third round of Recovery Act recipient reporting.  Contractors/grantees/loanees (is that a word?), if you have anything you want to tell the Recovery Board, you have just over 9 days left to report in.  The reports from this cycle will be published on April 30.

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Recovery Act Website: $6.8 million. Moving Towards a Transparent Government? Priceless

Here's a little news tidbit from the Recovery Board: in his latest "Chairman's Corner" post, Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney disclosed that the website Recovery.gov has thus far cost $6.8 million. This is out of a $9.5 million contract with Smartronix, a Maryland IT company, meaning that the Board has about another $2.7 million left in its contract. After that, the Board has the option of extending the contract through 2014, for about another $9 million. Now, $6.8 million isn't exactly cheap, but for creating a website to show a brand new type of reporting in an extremely compressed time frame, it's not too bad.

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Recovery Board to Amend Two-Time Loser List

Responding to a smart ProPublica article from a couple weeks ago, the Recovery Board will be removing 79 of 389 awards from the "two-time loser" list, which documents Recovery Act recipients who twice failed to report on their use of Recovery Act funds. Turns out these 79 reports were in fact filed for one or both of the two reporting quarters.

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Court Rules Fed Must Release Bailout Recipient Names

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan handed down a ruling ordering the Federal Reserve to give up the names of the financial firms that used the Fed's emergency lending window during the financial meltdown in 2008. Bloomberg News requested the names in November 2008 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which the Fed denied. The Fed argued that releasing this data would discourage companies from using the program, as it would essentially identify which banks were in danger of failing. With its ruling, the Appeals court rejected this argument, and upheld a lower court ruling also ordering the Fed to disclose recipient names.

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