Updated below.
Today, the Congressional Budget Office, Congress' independent budgetary analysis arm, released a report on FY 2009 Recovery Act spending. Back in February, the CBO predicted that federal agencies, which are tasked with spending the stimulus funds, would spend $106 billion in FY 2009. Today's report confirms that approximate number. According to the CBO, agencies spent $108 billion (excluding tax provisions), within 1 percent of the original predicted value. Not too shabby.

It appears that the Recovery.gov search engine improved over the weekend (my guess is that the indexing service took a while to organize all the data). When I search recipient reports for "alpha," "Alpha Building Foundation Corp" still isn't found, but some 110 results are displayed for other awards containing the word "alpha." And when I search for "Savannah River," "Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC" is returned, unlike what I was seeing on Friday.

Finally, at long last, the Recovery Board has now released the totality of recipient reports to the public through Recovery.gov. Today's release covers grant and loan data, as the Board published the contract data on Oct. 15. This new batch of data, though, is magnitudes larger.

Ever since the Recovery Act passed back in February, we've been encouraging the Recovery Board, which operates Recovery.gov, to make its data as open and accessible as possible. The idea is that, the government could set up the greatest recipient reporting system in the world, but if that data is then locked into a proprietary system that is closed to the public, it's really no good. Unfortunately, so far, the Board has not made the recipient data itself readily available, but it has provided a KML file for the data feeding into its mapping applications. This file is a decent start, and the smart folks over at Sunlight Labs have taken advantage of it to create their first Recovery Act-focused application.