A recent study by the CGI Initiative for Collaborative Government says that the government needs to build a better context for the data on spending from the  federal stimulus package. As it stands the public could seize on isolated information and draw the wrong conclusions. The Obama administration says it is trying to provide more data especially on the effects of the spending. -DB

An investigation of the government site with reports from stimulus recipients shows that much of the information is not validated and contains numerous errors. -DB

Some online transparency scholars working outside of Washington, D.C. are encouraged by features of the official Web site of Recovery.gov that tracks stimulus spending saying that they are impressed with the site’s ease of use. The site made its first post of stimulus data on October 15. -DB

A number of groups are saying that the first online posting of data on stimulus spending was not accessible to the public difficult to search and incomplete. Critics say the site can be improved by making it so that the public can mount a search by recipient. -DB

Head of the new stimulus oversight board says there will be times that information posted on Recovery.gov will embarrass bodies receiving stimulous money but promises to conduct thorough monitoring of spending to prevent waste and fraud. -DB

National Journal
July 16, 2009
By John Maggs

After 10 years as inspector general of the Interior Department, Earl Devaney is on leave to head up the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, an oversight panel set up to put details of the $787 billion economic stimulus spending online by Oct. 10 and otherwise prevent waste, fraud and abuse of the money. His mild manner belies a zeal for rooting out abuses of the public’s trust, and he believes the retooled Recovery.gov will profoundly raise the bar for accountability throughout government.

Devaney recently sat down with National Journal Group reporters. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.

NJ: Tell us about how you came into this job and what it is.

Devaney: We’ve been in business since mid-February. The president asked me to come over and chat with him, and the next thing I knew I was sitting in this position. It takes about a month and half to find office space and phones and computers and all that, so in mid-April, we got started.

We have two missions. One is more intuitive than the other. The first is to prevent waste fraud and abuse, which is sort of an IG’s mandate. The board consists of myself as the chair and 12 inspectors general. The other mission is sort of less intuitive, and it is quite a mystery to me why Congress would think the building of the government’s largest Web site ever would be something that 12 IGs could do. I think at the end of the day, they said to themselves, what group of people would be more guaranteed of getting the data up—good, bad or ugly, whatever it is—up on this Web site.

So, right now, we have a Web site up and running. We don’t envision what is up there now, which we call 1.0, is what the act envisions. Nor is it something that I’m particularly proud of. But it is up, and it is showing the money flowing out of the government. What has to happen between now and October 10 is we have to have 2.0 up and running. And 2.0, I’m going to suggest to you, is going to be a very attractive Web site, it will have among its features, mapping capacity, which will allow users to drill down into their neighborhood, punch in a ZIP code, if you will, and see where the money is being spent. That is the point when it will be fully operational. We are in the development stage.
NJ: When you say it will be the largest Web site ever, do you have some measurement of how large it will be?

Devaney: Well, certainly the largest Web site designed to show spending. And we’re guessing as to how many recipients there might be out there. It ranges probably between 200,000 and 400,000. And we’re asking each to talk about 44 pieces of data. Do the math, and you can see that this is a fairly robust data set.

NJ: Is there no way to prevent false reporting?

Devaney: Yeah, you could get false reporting. I think the most likely scenario is you’re going to get willful non-reporting, sort of like, “We’ll take this money but we don’t want to spend a half hour on a computer.” I think that agencies that encounter that will have to deal with it. But basically, we are talking about OMB [Office of Management and Budget] guidance, as opposed to a law that says you must report.
NJ: How many investigators are you going to have?

Devaney: It is about 40. I’ve entered this thing with a clear decision that I don’t want to be out doing audits and investigations. I want to be in a coordinating role, and be directing resources to targeted areas—programs that are at risk. When we get hotline calls, we’re going to be referring this out to the 28 IGs.

NJ: When is this going to start?

Devaney: October 11. When we put that information up, we’ll start getting flooded with calls. We’re trying to stay out of [politics], and we should stay out. IGs have no place in the political discussion of whether the recovery is good, bad or indifferent. Our job is to create a Web site that is historically transparent and at the same time user-friendly.

But first and foremost, I want them to come back. This is the first time that the American people are going to be able to see how their money is being spent. It is one thing to hear that a bill is passed—it is a lot of money, you may be mad, you may be happy, but you’re going to forget about it in a week. This money is all tagged—it is all going to be up on the Web site, every reporter in America is going to be looking at it every morning, millions of citizens are going to be looking at it. And I’ve seen a political interest in this money from the administration through the governors and the mayors all making sure this money is looked at carefully. I actually think you’d be kind of a dumb crook if you came around and tried to steal this money. It is too visible.

My feeling is that this cow is out of the barn and running down the street, that no politician is going to stand up and run down the street and say, “Let’s do it the old non-transparent way.” Whatever we are doing, I believe, will become the prototype for the way the government shows the American people how it spends their money. Once the American people get a taste of this transparency, I don’t think they are going to want to go back. I see it migrating government-wide. I don’t see how, you pass a sizable chunk of money, not every piece of money, but certainly the next chunk of money, people are going to say, “Well, why didn’t you do it transparently?”

NJ: Isn’t transparency sometimes dangerous to those in power?

Devaney: I think politicians have got their heads around the good sides of transparency. What they haven’t got their minds around is the downside of transparency. Come October 11, there are going to be things up on that Web site that embarrass people, clearly. I don’t think it is one party or the other. Everyone is going to be embarrassed to some extent.

NJ: What about the potential that this flood of data will be used by opponents of the president, or the stimulus plan?

Devaney: I thought about that two months ago. It is kind of a scary thing to think about. We could start, I don’t want to say a revolution, but we could start a big kerfuffle in this town in October. If you think the political environment right now is ablaze, I’m assuming that people will see a lot of good things when they see this [as well as bad things]. I think that it is going to take a while for the American psyche to understand that this has been going on forever. What they are going to see in October, those that have worked in government long enough—I know the way this spending looks, because I’ve seen the underbelly, but I don’t think the American people have seen it yet. It is a sausage factory.

NJ: Can you talk about trends you are going to see? Any sense of that yet?

Devaney: What is a risky program? Well, I’m not going to tell you the names of risky programs, but I will tell you in general that it is not necessarily the program that gets the most money. What really sends our risk flags up are new programs. Programs where there is a ton of money going into a new program where the infrastructure is not in place, where the controls of money are not in place, where they are sort of beginning from scratch. And when you dump money into that—weatherization, for instance, or broadband.

NJ: How much interaction have you had with the president or the vice president?

Devaney: Well, I spent a very uncomfortable evening in the first lady’s box. Did you know those seats were built in 1853, and they are about half the size of these here? Only uncomfortable in the sense that it was stuffy, hot and cramped.

NJ: You work pretty closely with Joe Biden, don’t you?

Devaney: Well, here is the deal. If you were to ask me who I speak to in the administration, it is Vice President Biden. He is in charge of the recovery. So, I meet with the vice president once a week. It is alone, it is in his office, it is for an hour. But our relationship is very much like the relationship I’ve always had with [department] secretaries that I’ve worked for. I consider myself independent. I’ve told him that. Certainly the board of 13 IGs is an independent entity; we don’t work for the administration. He understands that. Like every secretary I’ve worked for, I’ve told them a couple things: that I’m here to tell them what they need to know, not necessarily what they want to know, and the second premise, is I will make them mad. Somewhere along the line I will make you mad, I want to tell you that up front. That was noted, and he hasn’t gotten mad.

NJ: Does the vice president really have operational supervision of this recovery?

Devaney: Oh absolutely, I think so. He has his own separate Cabinet meetings on recovery where he talks to them, he is on the phone a lot with governors and mayors, and there is a nice, bright line between myself and somebody he has hired, somebody named Ed DeSeve who is a former OMB person that was deputy during the Clinton administration. [DeSeve] was brought in to do the political thing, where he sits on the other side of this line, he calls the governors and mayors, and says, “Do you really want to do that? Is that a good way to use the money?” I was very clear that I don’t make those calls. If somebody does something dumb, that is not in our ballpark.

NJ: What is your role, if Biden wants to know what you are doing? Are you required to tell him who you are investigating?

Devaney: Once again, that hasn’t happened yet. I revert back to the way I handled it with a [Cabinet] secretary. I would never want a secretary to wake up and read about it in the National Journal before I had a conversation with the secretary. So I would apply that principle. I probably would not talk about any criminal investigation that hadn’t been announced by the Justice Department; that is just off limits. I might have a discussion in general that nationwide we have blank percent of cases that have gone criminal, but no specifics. General briefings about status and trends and things that are happening, probably. But I don’t know that he would want to know specifics.

NJ: But in order to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, don’t you have to tell decision makers about potential problems?

Devaney: If we were to discern a fraud trend, I would interact with Ed DeSeve, and say, look, you need to speak to the agencies about this kind of spending, because it is resulting in waste or potential fraud. My expectation was that they would do that. They have been very aggressive about not wanting this money spent for unworthy or silly projects.

NJ: What is the punishment if they don’t comply?

Devaney: A little unclear. If they falsely report, there are some possibilities there, but if they don’t report, then they probably haven’t committed a crime, they have probably committed some regulatory [infraction]. I think the ultimate punishment is they get asked for their money back.

NJ: Is it better that the punishment is vague? It does not sound like a very strong incentive to comply.

Devaney: Well I’m a law enforcement guy, so hanging would be good, but I don’t think we’re going to have that. I’ve been involved in other regulatory regimes, like oil and gas, where it is pretty much voluntary that they tell how much oil they pump, and I know the downsides of that activity, but that is the way it is.

Copyright 2009 by National Journal Group Inc.