ABC reports on jobs that Recovery.gov lists as created in non-existent Congressional Districts. There are several such cases. Although ABC claims an exclusive, Townhall had something on this earlier today.
For all we know, these are real jobs and there was just a small mistake when the recipients reported their Congressional District. That’s why we haven’t added these to our Stimulus Inflation Map. But this is a very clear example of the low-quality job done in creating the Recovery.gov website.
This is a data quality issue, and a much simpler issue than the question of whether the jobs are real. It isn’t too hard to limit input fields so that non-existent Congressional Districts don’t make their way into a government website. The developers of Recovery.gov didn’t bother.
Beyond the data quality issues, I find this site to be nearly useless. Until now, I’ve been hesitant to write about this, because I might just be revealing myself as a technological incompetent, but I can’t help it anymore.
Among the reasons I hate Recovery.gov:
- Its lousy search engine fails to find things that I know are there.
- Because the search engine is so bad, your only option is to search for contracts by the awarding agency or by state. Unfortunately, it’s not intuitive how to find the page where you can do this. The first few times I used the site, it was trial and error. (The trick is to bring up the big map and then find the small link down in the bottom left hand corner that says “Text View of Data.”)
- Once you find that, you can start looking at a state’s grants. But you cannot change the number of results per page, nor can you filter or re-order the search results. You might have 100 pages of results, and you just have to wade through several pages before you find the right one.
- In the text search, you cannot change the categories that come up with the results. Let’s say, for example, you want to look at contracts in a given state ordered by the number of jobs they supposedly created. I can’t figure out any way of doing this on the site. When you search by text, the number of jobs isn’t even available as a category.
- Your other option is to use the map and find the precise dot that represents the contract you’re looking for. I’ve resorted to this a couple of times now. Good luck with that.
I may be doing something wrong. Perhaps I should be barred from ever using a computer again. But I’ve really lost my temper several times so far using Recovery.gov. Considering that the government spent $18 million developing this debacle, you’d expect that even I could figure it out.
