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.

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.

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.

Thanks in no small part to the 1,146 emails you sent in the past 48 hours, the Senate just voted down the Sessions-McCaskill amendment, which would have instituted draconian discretionary budget caps for the next three fiscal years. The amendment lost on a 56-40 vote, failing to reach the 60-vote margin it needed by only four votes.