The Recovery Act's Real Legacy: Transparency

Yes, today is the Recovery Act's birthday, and to celebrate, everyone and their uncle are rushing to "evaluate" (translation: put their spin on) the Act. Did the Recovery Act create jobs? Did it avert the Great Depression II? Are we getting anything for the $862 billion? The answer to all these questions is "Yes" (see here, here, and here for some good evidence), but the debate ignores the more lasting legacy of the entire Act: its transparency provisions.

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Board Releases New Features for Recovery.gov

While the entire rest of the fiscal policy world is obsessing about the budget, I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the other major event of the week, the release of the second round of Recovery Act recipient reporting. We're still working on sifting through the reports themselves, but the website, Recovery.gov, also received an overhaul this weekend. While many of the site's new features still have a long way to go, it's encouraging to see the Recovery Board, which is responsible for the site, actively working to improve the website, despite the fact that public attention has largely moved on.

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Second Round of Recovery Act Recipient Reports Released Saturday

As a reminder, tomorrow the Recovery Board will release the next batch of recipient reports on Recovery.gov. The new reports will be released along with a limited overhaul of the site, which will feature a new search option, a "diversity map," and a job search function. We'll be reviewing these new features, and the new reports, on Monday.

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CBO Recovery Act Cost Estimate Rises to $862 Billion

I'm sure you all already read all of the Congressional Budget Office's 2010 Budget Outlook since I blogged about it the other day, but in case you missed it, the outlook also included a special section on the Recovery Act. The main take away from this section is that the CBO predicts that the overall cost of the Act will be higher than initially estimated, thanks to a couple of factors.

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CBO: 2010 Deficit to Fall to $1.35 Trillion

In case you missed it, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its 2010 Budget Outlook, its yearly look at the health of the federal budget. CBO's director, Doug Elmendorf, provides the basics of the report:

CBO projects, that if current laws and policies remained unchanged, the federal budget would show a deficit of $1.35 trillion for fiscal year 2010. At 9.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit would be slightly smaller than the shortfall of 9.9 percent of GDP ($1.4 trillion) posted in 2009.

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Bernanke Gives GAO Permission to Do Something It Already Can Do

This past Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wrote a letter to the Government Accountability Office, calling for an audit of "all aspects of our involvement in the extension of credit to AIG." The letter sparked a storm of interest, with pundits saying it was a move by Bernanke towards supporting increased Fed transparency, a hot topic these days as Bernanke waits for the Senate to confirm his new term as Fed chair (waiting which is getting harder...). There were literally hundreds of articles about the letter, with every major news outlet writing it up, making the letter a major piece of news.

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A New Year, a New Reporting Cycle Begins

Just a friendly reminder that on January 1, the clock began on the second Recovery Act recipient reporting cycle. Prime and sub recipients have from January 1 to January 15 to submit their reports to FederalReporting.gov, recipients will edit these reports from then until January 22, and agencies will then have until January 29 to review the reports. Everything will be published on Recovery.gov on Saturday, January 30.

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OMB Releases New Last-Minute Recovery Act Jobs Guidance

While most of the nation's attention seems to have been focused on health care and budget issues as of late, the Office of Management and Budget has been hard at work on the Recovery Act recently. With the start of the second recipient reporting cycle rapidly approaching, on Friday OMB put out a new Recovery Act guidance, this one specifically addressing job creation estimates and data quality issues. These two areas have been huge problems for OMB and the Recovery Act in general, with many of the story lines from the last cycle focusing on terrible data quality and suspect job creation estimates. With the new guidance, OMB is hoping to head off some of these stories for the coming reporting cycle.

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Bernanke Endorsed by Senate Banking Committee, Supports Limited Fed Audit

Yesterday, in a bipartisan vote, the Senate Banking Committee approved Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's nomination to a second term as Federal Reserve chairman. The vote wasn't in any doubt, although the closeness of the margin, 16 to 7, does indicate the contentiousness of Bernanke's nomination. The nomination now heads to the Senate floor, where, barring some crazy unforeseen calamity, he will be nominated to another four year term in January.

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House Finishes Year in a Blaze of Controversial Legislation

Yesterday, in what most news organizations are calling a "flurry" of legislative action, the House passed a relatively large package of contentious bills, including the Defense appropriations bill, an increase to the debt limit, and a jobs bill. The Defense bill, originally thought to be the most difficult of the four bills, easily sailed through the House, 395 to 34, and the Senate immediately began its debate on the bill. The other two bills, however, proved to be much closer, and foreshadow legislative confrontations in the beginning of 2010.

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