Recovery.gov

Devaney Letter Causes Ridiculous Stimulus Data Quality Brouhaha; Media Bark Up Wrong Tree

Nov 18, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

Earlier today, Earl Devaney, Chairman of the Recovery Board, stated in a letter to House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Darrel Issa that he was not able to "certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable." The statement came in response to a letter Issa sent Devaney in advance of the Committee's stimulus oversight hearing on Nov. 19, a letter which asked Devaney if he was "able to certify personally" that the Recovery.gov number was accurate, and if not, if the Board would prominently display a warning on the site to that effect. Devaney's apparent disavowal of the jobs numbers became instant news, with Politico and ABC News jumping on it immediately, and Issa used the statement as evidence that the Administration could not validate the job numbers it has been citing over the past month. The truth is, Devaney's comments are not news in any way.

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ProPublica Answers Recovery.gov Questions

Nov 16, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

If you haven't navigated around through Recovery.gov since the Recovery Board added the recipient reports on Oct. 30, the truth is it isn't the easiest site to use. Having access to the recipient reports is great (and rather historic), but the data are stored in various disparate sections of the website, and searching the site to find exactly what you're looking for is tedious. The real problem, though, is that the site's help section isn't very helpful, since it only provides general background info on the Recovery Act, and nothing about how to actually use the website.

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MSNBC’s Dubious Insinuation of Job Data Manipulation

Nov 12, 2009 by Craig Jennings

A paragraph in an article written by Mike Stuckey on MSNBC.com insinuates that the White House manipulated the Recovery.gov job count total to match its previous claims of job growth numbers. I can't tell if Stuckey simply has his facts wrong, is intending to mislead to create controversy, or has been misled by an unscrupulous source.

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About Those Recovery Act Job Numbers

Prominently displayed in a large, green font on the front page of Recovery.gov is the number 640,329. That is the number of jobs created or saved as reported by the recipients of some $150 billion in Recovery Act funds. The placement, font size, and accompanying press release from the White House have drawn immense attention and copious media reports. However, questions about the number's accuracy degrade the count's usefulness as a gauge of the economic impact of the Recovery Act. The figure itself remains only a fragment of the information that describes how the act is improving the economy and helping unemployed workers.

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CBO Reports $108 Billion Spent on Stimulus

Nov 3, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

 

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.

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Recovery.gov Search Finds More Stuff

Nov 2, 2009 by Craig Jennings

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.

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A Note on New Recovery.gov Features

Oct 30, 2009 by Craig Jennings

We've been pawing at Recovery.gov for a couple of hours now and the results are...mixed.

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Recovery Board Releases Rest of Recipient Data

Oct 30, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

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.

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AP's Limited Review of Recovery Act Job Numbers

Oct 29, 2009 by Craig Jennings

Updated.

The Associated Press unleashed something of a firestorm earlier today, when it published an article critiquing the recent Recovery Act jobs data. Performing a "limited review" of "some" of the recipient reports of Recovery Act contracts on Recovery.gov, the Associated Press concluded that the "government has overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts" under the Recovery Act. A bold claim certainly and one not supported by the facts.

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Sunlight Labs Unveils Recovery Act Augmented Reality Mashup App

Oct 28, 2009 by Sam Rosen-Amy

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.

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