A private company based in Seattle that specializes in business intelligence is providing what appears to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date web source of information on where your $787 billion are being spent and by whom under the Obama administration’s economic recovery program aka as the stimulus package.
The company is known as Onvia and the web site is called recovery.org. Yes, the official site put up by the government is recovery.gov. The contrast between the two sites could not be more complete. Essentially, the former is a web-based tool for making an extraordinarily data-intensive topic accessible to anybody with an Internet connection. The latter site is little more than a propaganda tool for the Obama administration.
Consider, for example what you find quickly at Recovery.org. Say you live in Carroll County, Maryland, which is a beautiful, still-somewhat rural exurban area with lots of folks who commute long distances to jobs in Washington, D.C and Baltimore. When I select Maryland and Carroll County in Recovery.org, I get a list of 17 links to projects being paid for in Carroll County with federal recovery funds.
When I click on one of the 17 links, say the one for a $600,000 “Traffic Detection at Signalized Intersections,” I find the agency responsible for the project, the date it was announced, the location, including a map, and a brief description that includes the amount to be spent and the claimed number of jobs supported by the project.
By contrast, if I enter Maryland in the search line for Recovery.gov, it takes me to a handful of links, none of which include information about how stimulus money is being spent in Maryland. What is easily found on Recovery.org is lots of colorful charts, links and boxes telling me all about stuff like this:
“To help middle-class families get back on their feet and restore some fairness to the tax code, President Obama in February signed one of his signature issues into law – the Making Work Pay tax credit. As a result, families across the country are seeing more money in their paychecks.”
Well, that’s nice, but it’s still just more of the same old self-serving Washington agit-prop that seems to include a lot of information but actually doesn’t.
When I clicked on the “State Progress and Resources” link for Virginia, it took me to the official Virginia site, which also had lots of pretty charts and graphs, plus a bunch of bureaucratic blah-blah about all the wonderful things Gov. Tim Kaine is going to do for Virginians with all that stimulus money the state is going to get. But nothing about specific expenditures to date. Maybe that will be found under the “Coming Soon” link to that led to cyber purgatory.
The confusion (or should I say smokescreens?) about how to track stimulus spending isn’t limited to the Obama White House. At the other end of Capitol Hill, Republicans are complaining that they can’t find any information except by using Google. House Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia got a shot in at Obama in an interview with The Washington Examiner’s Byron York, but otherwise appears not to have a clue about Recovery.org:
“All that Googling leads to a question. Shouldn’t Congress, which has to make critical decisions on how to spend the taxpayers’ money, have a better way of knowing where that money is going? After all, the Obama administration promised that its new website, Recovery.gov, would detail everything taxpayers wanted to know about the stimulus expenditures.
“It hasn’t. ‘We have been pressing the administration from the get-go to put everything online so that we can achieve a level of transparency and come clean to the taxpayers,’ Cantor told me. ‘But that kind of transparency and accountability are just not in place.’ The Obama administration admits that Recovery.gov has not had a smooth start, but promises better performance in the future.”
You should read the rest of Byron’s column on this issue here.
Recovery.org doesn’t have all the information about where the government is spending our $787 billion, at least not yet, but it seems pretty clear that these guys in Seattle are way ahead of everybody here in the nation’s capitol.
And by the way, what ever happened to that “Google-like, searchable web site of federal spending” at USASpending.gov? Shouldn’t we be able to find the $787 billion on that government web site? Why did the Obama administration opt to put the $787 billion on a sparate web site? Because using USASpending.gov. the way the White House is using Recovery.gov. as a propaganda outlet would be unseemly perhaps?
In any case, it appears that, as usual, government has decided to fix a problem – lack of transparency in spending – and is moving in a direction – too many sites, too little easily accessible data – guaranteed to make the problem worse.
Some things in Washington never change. — Posted by Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor
