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

Since President Barack Obama pledged more openness in government, states have been opening records to the public, of stimulus spending and beyond, using online tools to provide a broad range of data. -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

Those awarded stimulus fund contracts are complying with government requirements to post the details of their expenditures online, so far submitting 112,000 reports to the data collection Web site. -DB

NextGov
October 14, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

Stimulus fund recipients appear to be complying with requirements to report their spending activities online.

As of Wednesday recipients had submitted 112,000 spending reports to the federal government’s data collection Web site, according to the board monitoring stimulus spending. In August, the Office of Management and Budget anticipated that about 150,000 entities receiving grants, contracts and loans under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would use the FederalReporting.gov site during the first round of reporting. But some users submitted multiple reports because they received more than one contract award and some state governments filed information on behalf of some recipients, meaning the number of reports does not match the number of users.

The number of users is expected to grow as more awards are disbursed under programs still in the planning stages, such as renewable energy initiatives. Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said in an interview that as many as 1 million users might file by the end of the recovery effort.

The first wave of report information will be published Thursday on Recovery.gov, the public stimulus-tracking site, followed by a bigger batch of data on Oct. 30.

Thursday’s release will cover close to 9,000 recipients awarded contracts directly through the federal government, according to the board. Grants and loan data from states, nonprofits, universities and companies will appear on Oct. 30.

“The recovery board built FederalReporting.gov to receive the recipient reports and Recovery.gov to post them for public viewing in a remarkable time frame of only a few months,” Devaney said in a statement. “I’m very pleased to say that the collection of this data went very smoothly.”

Copyright 2009 NextGov

A Sun Light Labs member examines New Recovery.gov, the government site that tracks stimulus spending, to find a lot needing improvement but a lot to be commended including  contracts and grants in the same venue. -DB

Sun Light Labs
Review
September 29, 2009
By Tom Lee

Recovery.gov relaunched yesterday, and we’ve spent some time playing around with the site since then. The verdict? Well, it’s hard to say — the site’s a bit broken. There are 404s all over the place, most gallingly on the data download page. Parts of the site seem like they work, but don’t: the select boxes on the front page that provide filters for the map don’t actually affect its behavior in any way. It’s hard to see these glaring bugs alongside the totally-unnecessary link to Facebook and not groan (am I supposed to play Scrabble with Chairman Devaney?).

That ESRI map is clearly the centerpiece of the site, and it’s nice enough, though I confess I’m still figuring out how to use it. It also makes the odd decision of plotting contracts by the recipient’s location, not the location of the project itself. For instance, I found a contract plotted in Lovell, WY. But the work was performed across the state in Cheyenne, on Warren Air Force Base — it’s just that the contractor is based in Lovell. There’s a case to be made for each type of view, but the vagaries of corporate organization would’ve led me to make a different choice. At the very least, being able to switch would be nice.

The most important thing to note is that there’s less new stuff here than it might seem. At the moment the site just aggregates information from USASpending.gov, FedBizOpps.gov, Grants.gov, fpds-ng.com, and recovery-specific agency reports that were already available on the old Recovery.gov. Recipient reporting — and with it subrecipient data, job creation information and other good stuff — won’t be arriving until mid or (more likely) late October. The current site should therefore be thought of as an attempt to filter existing information and make it comprehensible to a general audience, not as something wholly new.

So does it succeed in this effort? To some extent I think it does, bugs notwithstanding. Having contracts and grants on the same map is a step forward. The record detail pages may be disappointing to some, but I’ve worked directly with the same underlying data and can say with confidence that the Recovery.gov team has done a decent job of making the best of a bad situation. This glossary could be displayed a lot more prominently, but it’s a useful and welcome document.

Still, I’ve been looking at FAADS and FPDS data for months as part of my work on Subsidyscope, so all of this sort of makes sense to me. I’m not sure that a new visitor to the site is going to understand why some dollar amounts are negative, or what the difference is between an obligation and a contract with exercised options. Some of this complexity is unavoidable — the bookkeeping systems of the largest government on earth are inevitably going to be complicated! But I have to believe that more effort could’ve been done to make the information understandable. And given the lack of genuinely new information, I would’ve liked to see the new Recovery.gov make more headway on this front. It’s no longer enough to shove data at the public, then call it a job well done when the audience walks away in a state of complacent confusion.

Which brings us back to limiting the criteria by which we judge the site. Is it a perfect tool for tracking recovery dollars? No, not really. But the limits of the legacy systems it was built upon made that goal unrealistic from the start — Recovery.gov was never going to solve the data quality problems of USASpending, for instance. But it is a step toward making those systems comprehensible, and perhaps setting the stage for improving them — or it can be, at least. So kudos for that.

We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on Recovery.gov as the October data release draws closer. Have any of you had a chance to check out the site? What do you think?
Copyright 2009 Sun Light Labs

Montana Senator Jon Tester asked Homeland Secrity Secretary Janet Napolitano for details of how money will be spent on remote border stations amid criticism that that millions will be wasted overbuilding facilities. -DB

The Missoulian
September 20, 2009
By Michael Jamison

KALISPELL, Montana – Amid controversy over the high cost of building northern border ports, Sen. Jon Tester has asked federal agencies for an “exact cost breakdown” of the work.

In a letter sent late last week to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Montana Democrat wrote that while the aging ports surely need refurbishing, her agency has “failed to demonstrate with sufficient detail how these funds will be spent.”

In fact, no funds are currently being spent, as Napolitano – in response to the cost criticisms – has enacted a monthlong moratorium on new bids related to the projects. The delay should not, however, hinder companies that already have won work on the northern border jobs.

“The last I had heard, we were authorized to move ahead,” said Ken Richardson, from Montana-based CTA Architects and Engineers. “We’re already pretty well along in starting that work.”

Richardson’s firm, which was selected last month to help reconstruct some of the northern border stations, has previously built ports in remote areas, and he said construction costs “depend on what your needs are. Is it a 24-hour port, or a seasonal port, or what? Certainly, I think ports have been constructed for less than $15 million, but it just depends on what you’re building.”

And what they’re building along Montana’s rural Hi-Line is simply too much, critics say. Leading the opposition is Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who said last week that “it doesn’t do anything for our border security to waste tens of millions of dollars overbuilding facilities.”

He pointed to ports in his home state where only a few dozen vehicles pass per day, yet proposed border station construction pushes

$14 million. And in Montana, much criticism has focused on the little-used Whitetail port, which handles only a handful of travelers per day but comes with a projected cost of

$15 million. CNN even sent a reporter to Whitetail last week for part of a lengthy piece headlined “Stimulus Shame?” (See video on Missoulian.com.)

Much of the price tag, all agree, results from regulations passed by the Bush administration, but Dorgan has said such spending “defies common sense.”

And Tester – a champion of northern border security – now is likewise questioning the Homeland Security cost projections.

“I strongly disagree with those who have stated that these improvements ought not be made to northern border ports,” Tester wrote in his letter to Napolitano. After all, he wrote, the northern border has proved porous and in need of bolstering.

“However,” he wrote, “the fact that the department has not produced any detailed documentation as to the reasons for the costs associated with the reconstruction of these ports suggests that perhaps further reconsideration is needed. We must bolster security along the northern border, and we must do so as responsibly and efficiently as possible.”

In response to critics, Napolitano ordered a 30-day review of all stimulus-funded port projects. “During the period of this review,” she wrote in a letter to Dorgan, “no new contracts will be let on these projects.”

Tester has urged Napolitano to use those 30 days to enhance transparency – not only on how the money will be spent, but on how the projects were chosen. Some have complained that he pressured Homeland Security to move Montana projects up on the priority list, a charge he has repeatedly denied.

“I had no role in determining where this work would be done,” Tester wrote, “and I have never been briefed on how these decisions were made,” adding that he would like to see congressional hearings on how projects were prioritized.

It is not the first time Tester has brought the Senate’s weight to bear on the northern border projects. Last spring, he waded into the fray when Montana contractors learned they would not be invited to bid on the border station work. Instead, federal agencies announced they would select from a short list of pre-approved contractors – mostly large firms from out of state.

Officials at Homeland Security insisted that an open bidding process would delay the work, which was on a fast track to stimulate the national economy.

Tester ultimately helped local firms gain a foothold in the process, and held an open house in Great Falls to directly connect contractors with agency officials.

He has remained adamant that “our borders are only as strong as our weakest link.”

The Whitetail port is riddled with asbestos, he said, and lacks modern equipment and facilities. Staffers at Homeland Security have confirmed the water well at Whitetail is contaminated, and many of the ports scheduled for rebuilding date back to the early 1960s, with no facilities for inspecting rigs or detaining suspects.

In emphasizing the need to invest in small ports as well as large, Tester points to several border arrests made this summer: the $34,000 in undeclared cash seized at Portal, N.D. (pop. 131); the 577 pounds of marijuana seized at Maple Falls, Wash. (pop. 277); and in Montana, the $11,000 worth of cocaine and marijuana seized at the port near Havre.

Napolitano also has said the small northern ports, while expensive, can be refurbished at a fraction of the cost of busier ports (upgrades at southern ports can cost hundreds of millions of dollars).

Still, Dorgan and other critics argue the projected costs are too much for the expected benefits, especially at remote and rural crossings. “I support efforts to boost security on our northern border,” Dorgan said, “but we need to do it in a way that is fiscally responsible and follows some principles of common sense.”

And Tester appears to agree, at least in principle.

“There is no doubt that the five Montana ports are deficient, inadequate and need to be rebuilt,” he wrote in his letter to Napolitano. “However, they need to be rebuilt in a way that meets both legitimate national security needs and realistic regional commercial needs.”

The earlier decision by Homeland Security to include local contractors in the bidding process proved a good deal for both local businesses and taxpayers, Tester said, and “if the decision to re-evaluate this funding gets DHS to reconsider how to handle 21st century threats while saving money, that’s an even better deal for taxpayers.”

Copyright 2009 missoulian.com, Missoula, MT

A Washington research firm representing 35 public interest groups has found deficiencies in the Web performances of states as they track stimulus spending. Only four states were found to provide employment data when job creation is one of the chief goals of the recovery plan. -DB

NextGov
July 29, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

A study released on Wednesday criticizes most state Web sites that track stimulus spending, specifically finding fault with their coverage of job creation, contract awards and geographic location of projects.
Good Jobs First, a Washington research center that co-chairs the Coalition for An Accountable Recovery, issued the report as part of its effort to hold President Obama accountable for enacting what he called “a plan that will be implemented with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability.” The nonprofit coalition consists of nearly 35 public interest groups.

The average score for general Web site performance was 28.2 on a scale of 0 to 100. The study evaluated the sites’ disclosures on planned spending totals in broad categories, geographic distribution of that spending statewide, and specific contracts intended to create jobs.

“The paramount objective of the Recovery Act is to address mounting unemployment through job creation and retention,” the report stated. “Yet only four states—Colorado, Maryland, Washington and West Virginia—currently provide any employment data for individual projects on their main [Recovery Act] site.”

The administration has called on all 50 states and the District of Columbia to create individual stimulus-tracking sites that supplement the official federal site, Recovery.gov. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is responsible for the quality of Recovery.gov, but not the state sites.

The authors acknowledged that the overall responsibility for reporting transparency rests primarily with the RAT board, which maintains Recovery.gov, but said, “at the very least, the state sites should mirror the information provided by the federal sites.”

The findings also noted that states failed to use widely available Web tools, such as geographic information systems software. California-based ESRI, a major provider of GIS modeling and mapping technology, has customers in every state that already are using its software, according the report.

“It may be that they are not aware of” the GIS capacity the state already has, said Philip Mattera, the center’s research director and the principal author of the study.

Among the handful of exceptional states that scored 50 or higher were Maryland, which scored 80, and West Virginia, which earned a 60. Meanwhile, Illinois and Utah failed to score any points for their sites.

“There is a role for the states that complements what the board is doing at the federal level, and we think most of the states could be doing a better job in that regard,” Mattera said.

“We’re not blaming the federal level about any shortcomings at the state level,” he added. “The states have a role in providing more detail on individual projects than a site that’s providing [data] on the whole country.”

Only a few states, such as Maryland and California, juxtaposed the geographic disbursement of funds with patterns of economic distress, such as county unemployment rates or foreclosure levels, the report noted.

The study also looked at the states’ reporting of highway projects, in particular, since those contracts are expected to kick-start the economy. Those scores, 37.8 on average, were higher than the overall scores. Many states displayed information on transportation projects outside of their main recovery sites, on a separate page, or on their transportation department’s Web site.

Alabama, the District of Columbia, Kentucky and Vermont scored very low on both their overall sites and their highway reporting, dispensing few specifics on how they are spending stimulus funds.

Most states—42—did a relatively good job of providing data on the broad categories of spending, which included energy, housing and transportation. Breakdowns by county were less common on sites, with only 18 states providing such location-based information. Oregon, Tennessee and Washington displayed data by counties using interactive maps.

Copyright 2009 NextGov