In his latest Chairman's Corner, Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney announced that Recovery.gov is now the first "government-wide" cloud computing system. Sounds impressive, right? Well, sort of. Essentially, this means that Recovery.gov, which used to be housed on servers operated by the Board and used solely for that purpose, is now hosted on "cloud" servers run by Amazon.com.

On Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a new guidance on Recovery Act recipient reporting.  The memo expands on several earlier memos on the same topic, but it lays out more concrete steps for agencies to follow.

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.

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.