Yesterday was the 200th day since Obama signed the Recovery Act into law, and the White House is celebrating the occasion with another report from its Recovery Act czar, Vice President Joe Biden. You might remember Biden's last Recovery Act report, from the bill's 100 day anniversary, which consisted of a collection of news reports on Recovery Act projects. Pretty much everyone roundly panned the report as a PR move with little useful information, and one would hope that they took the criticism to heart.

Sadly, this new report doesn't seem to reflect that.

The report consists simply of a list of "objectives" from the 100 days report, and purports to give a status report on each objective. Unsurprisingly, we've met all of the objectives. But it isn't too difficult to meet an objective such as "begin improvements at 90 veterans medical centers across 38 states," especially when you don't define what "begin" means. Have the shovels begun to hit the dirt on these new projects, or has the VA just opened a file on it? Beginning a project can mean anything from that the construction has just started or that the construction will begin in five years. And since 6 out of the 10 objectives deal with "beginning," "starting," or "initiating" construction projects, this is an important detail to get straight (three other objectives deal with funding initiatives, such as starting funding for 5,000 law enforcement officials, which is just as vague a concept).

Even worse, none of the data points in this new report are backed up with information. There isn't much of an explanation for any of the objectives, beyond simply stating that the objective has been met. It isn't clear where the data came from, since there aren't any citations in the report. None of the spending information cited is on Recovery.gov, USAspending.gov or the agency websites. Does Biden have information that we don't have? Or is he simply taking press releases announcing new spending, and turning them into data points? My guess is the later, since the 100 days report had a similar M.O. And if you are reading this blog, you probably know that there is a large difference between announcing spending and actual spending.

All in all, it's a pretty sad report. If I had ever handed in something like this in school, I would have failed the assignment. More likely, my teacher would have handed it back to me to try again, saying I clearly must have misunderstood the project. Certainly, I appreciate that the administration is trying to set benchmarks for the Recovery Act, but this report doesn't add anything of value to the debate. The really interesting, and really valuable information, will be coming from October's recipient reporting deadline, and this report only seems like a sorry stopgap measure for until that data comes in.

Image by Flickr user World Economic Forum. Used under a Creative Commons license.