Blog Posts of Sam Rosen-Amy

Earmarks: Inherently Bad or Just Broken?

 

You can always tell when the appropriations season is approaching because, somehow, earmarks, the shadowiest part of the appropriations process, always find a way of sneaking back into the political discourse. True to form, as we wait for Congress' budget resolution, today saw both the Democrats and Republicans announcing their own earmark reform plans. The House Democrats, through Congressman David Obey, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, announced that they would be forbidding earmarks to for-profit organizations. At the same time, House Republican Leader John Boehner announced that his caucus was considering an outright ban on earmarks from House Republicans.

Both actions seem like an overreaction. While there was indeed earmark abuse, all for-profit entities were not abusing them, and the House Democrats' actions seem to be punishing those who were following the rules. Also, as a recent New York Times article on the Congressional Black Caucus Foundations suggested, not all non-profits are perfect angels. And banning all earmarks completely won't get rid of corruption or influence-peddling; the most famous recent such scandal, involving Jack Abramoff, wasn't about earmarks.

We at OMB Watch don't take a strong stance either way on earmarks, so we're not going to endorse either party's proposal. What we care about is transparency. As long as everything is transparent and above-board, we're okay with it. But right now, the earmark process could be a lot more transparent.

The problem is that it can be difficult to tell who requests which earmark. In 2009, Congress mandated that Members disclose their earmark requests online. This should have solved the transparency problem, but instead of providing the data in one place, the new rule left it up to each Member to post their earmarks on their individual websites. This meant that there were now 535 different websites listing earmark requests.

To help fix this new problem, Obey's announcement banning earmarks for for-profits also included a promise to provide a "one-stop" link to all Members' earmark requests. While it's not clear what how this promise will be executed (one page with every Member's earmark requests, or one page with links to each Member's website which lists their requests?), we're hopeful it's similar to the principal behind a petition OMB Watch just signed onto. The petition calls on Congress and the Obama administration to make public all earmark information, in one place, in a data-readable format. This information, the "who, what, when, where" of every earmark, could be used by everyone from journalists to advocates to ordinary citizens to actually make the earmark process transparent. It's a great idea, and getting support for the petition is important. Even if Obey releases all earmark information in one place, we still need the Senate data, since Obay's power is only over the House appropriations bills. So go sign the petition, and help bring transparency to the earmark process.

Image by Flickr user johnmuk used under a Creative Commons license.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 03/10/10; 0 comments)

Fun with Recovery Act Tax Expenditure Graphs!

 

The Recovery Board, via the Office of Tax Analysis, has a new set of snazzy charts and graphs breaking down Recovery Act tax obligations, from March to December 2009. There isn't anything particularly newsworthy in these charts, since we've known the relative sizes of the expenditures for a while now, but they are very useful in seeing the expenditures over time, which is a new trick. I added part of one of the more interesting charts below; just be aware that more current estimates place the tax expenditure amount obligated closer to $120 billion.

The main take-away from the chart is that thus far, the Making Work Pay credit is far larger than any other single credit, with only all business tax credits combined coming close to it. This should continue for the rest of the Act's life.

Speaking of charts, I have to admit that the Board has been pretty good about putting up visual guides to the Recovery Act. Each new release of recipient data is accompanied by a set of charts showing the composition of the current release, and comparing it to earlier quarters. But the Board has an almost bewildering amount of data at its disposal, and I'd love to see them do more with it. For instance, it would be great to see a set comparing the federal agencies by project status. The site has an excellent set of charts on the late reporters, showing them by funding type (grant, loan, or contract) and by recipient type (prime or sub), but what if they expanded it out to include by agency or by state? I know ideas like these are why the Board made the recipient reports available for public download, so that groups like OMB Watch can take the data and do interesting things with it, but while we're working, why can't the Board take a crack at it itself?

(Sam Rosen-Amy 03/09/10; 0 comments)

How Not to Make an Example

 

I wanted to highlight one other thing from ProPublica's article on the "two-time loser" list, a nugget which I think was buried in the article. According to earlier OMB guidance, the main recourse agency officials have to punish repeat offenders is the revocation of federal funding, and we haven't heard whether agencies have used this stick yet. But ProPublica quotes OMB spokesman Tom Gavin as saying that, thus far, one, and only one, organization has suffered this fate. Want to guess which greedy, no-good corporation is flaunting the will of Congress, and which is being singled out as a rule-breaker? Maybe Xe? Wal-Mart? ENRON!?!

Nope, it's those money-grubbing child hunger advocates, Share Our Strength. While I applaud the federal government for cold-heartedly applying regulations, I'm not sure if a non-profit aimed at helping those who literally can't help themselves is really the best group to make an example of. Especially when it sounds like they're just as confused about how to report as thousands of other recipients. Regardless, Share Our Strength now has about $90,000 fewer dollars to help poor kids eat nutritional meals.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 03/08/10; 0 comments)

ProPublica Fact-Checks Recovery Board's Two-Time Loser List

 

ProPublica has a great story up today, examining the list of "two-time losers" the Recovery Board posted on their website. The Board chairman, Earl Devaney, said he posted this list of recipients who failed to report, as they are legally required to do, in both reporting periods, in an effort to shame the recipients into reporting. Since agencies have very few sticks to get recipients to report, the list sounded like a great idea. One problem: ProPublica found that at least 60 of the 360 recipients listed did actually report on time.

Hopefully the Board is working on straightening this out, and figuring out where things went off the tracks. That said, it sounds like Devaney's stunt did accomplish its goal. ProPublica quotes one non-reporter as saying that Devaney's list, and accompanying comments, were "uncalled for and not reflective of the intent of those accused." Guess who's probably reporting next cycle!

(Sam Rosen-Amy 03/08/10; 0 comments)

CBO Scores Obama's Budget

 

I know everyone's been distracted lately with health care, the Olympics, and the last season of Lost, but the budget process has been churning away silently these past few months. While we await Congress' budget resolution on April 15, the Congressional Budget Office decided to remind us all that the process is still moving ahead by releasing an analysis of the President's budget, one which is significantly less rosy than the President's estimate.

Granted, this is a somewhat ridiculous exercise, since Congress will likely ignore the President's budget, but it at least gives us a starting place. In any case, according to the CBO, Obama's budget proposal will add approximately $9.8 trillion to the nation's debt over the next ten years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration's own estimates. Almost all of this 14 percent difference comes in the out years, 2016-2020; in fact, the CBO's analysis is pretty close to the administration's over the next several years. For FY 2011, the upcoming budget year, the CBO estimates Obama's proposals would create a $1.341 trillion deficit, which is only a few percentage points higher than Obama's estimates.

Hit up the CBO report for all the fun, and, to save you the Googling, here's the President's budget from last month.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 03/05/10; 0 comments)

Recovery Act Data Shows Recipients Are Learning

 

Earlier today, the Recovery Board released the list of Recovery Act recipients who did not file during the second reporting period. According to the Board, recipients of 1,036 awards failed to file during this quarter, which was from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31. That number represents a whopping 76 percent decline from the first reporting cycle, which saw 4,359 missing award reports, and is less than one percent of all the award reports. Equally good news is that of the 1,036 missing reports, only 389 were from "repeat offenders," or recipients who failed to file in both quarters.

The trend from the non-filer list echoes other data the Recovery Board also posts, such as the late filers and report corrections. According to the Board, the second reporting cycle saw half as many late reports, which are award reports filed after the filing deadline. This past cycle, 7.3 percent of recipients filed late, down from 14.9 percent of reporters in the first round of reporting, and of these late reports, a vast majority of them were not repeat offenders. Similarly, only 12.75 percent of award reports were changed after the fact (recipients can change their reports for several months after the filing deadline), as opposed to over 21 percent in the first round.

These data sets show what we've been assuming would happen: Recovery Act recipients are learning. As time passes, and recipients learn how the reporting system works and how they're supposed to file, the number of reporting errors are slowly decreasing. More recipients are reporting on time, fewer are forgetting to report (or are understanding that they have to report), and there are fewer mistakes to correct after the fact. And this progress is despite the fact that there are more award reports in the second round than the first.

This trend will probably continue over the coming cycles, although it will be interesting to see if it hits a floor at some point, i.e. if there is some baseline level of user error we just can't escape.

The next important statistic to look at will be the change in data quality between quarters. While we know recipients are learning how to file, what we don't know is if they are entering better quality information this time around. Are there fewer award amount errors? Fewer job counting errors? Late reports are bad, but flawed data is even worse.

Image by Flickr user ekilby used under a Creative Commons license.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 02/25/10; 0 comments)

The Recovery Act's Real Legacy: Transparency

 

Yes, today is the Recovery Act's birthday, and to celebrate, everyone and their uncle are rushing to "evaluate" (translation: put their spin on) the Act. Did the Recovery Act create jobs? Did it avert the Great Depression II? Are we getting anything for the $862 billion? The answer to all these questions is "Yes" (see here, here, and here for some good evidence), but the debate ignores the more lasting legacy of the entire Act: its transparency provisions.

While the Act might have included too many tax cuts, too few tax cuts, or not enough infrastructure projects, or the Democrats might have undersold the stimulus, or oversold it, the one thing that cannot be denied is that the Act has substantially advanced the cause of fiscal transparency. We could complain that the transparency provisions of the Act are not perfect, but without the Act, we wouldn't even have anything to gripe about. We'd still be stuck arguing whether timely recipient reporting is a feasible goal or not.

In this sense, the Recovery Act provided a convenient pilot program for fiscal transparency. Now, one year later, the Act has not only proved that broad-based recipient reporting is feasible, it has shown that the reporting is useful. By showing how multiple levels of recipients (although not all levels of sub-recipients) have used their federal funding, the Recovery Act has provided the government and its citizens an unprecedented ability to see where its money has gone. And there's also the often-overlooked Agency Reports, which provide weekly updates of spending levels for every Recovery Act program, a response time that is almost unheard of in federal government.

The Act has also shown that there is a demand for this kind of transparency. At its height, Recovery.gov, the Act's homepage, was receiving millions of visitors a day, and still receives significant levels of traffic. Journalists and analysts, in addition to average citizens, routinely use the site as a resource. We may have our problems with the site, but it still is a marked improvement over the status quo, and serves as a starting point on the road to better fiscal accountability.

The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which created USAspending.gov, helped advance federal transparency. When USAspending.gov was first released, it only included data from a few federal agencies; now, it has spending data from every federal agency, and is an important part of federal fiscal transparency.

Hopefully, three years, five years down the line, we will be saying similar things about the Recovery Act and recipient reporting, long after we've stopped arguing about just how many jobs the Act created.

[Side note: If you want more "Recovery Act at One Year" analysis, sign up here for our webcast next week on that very topic.]

(Sam Rosen-Amy 02/17/10; 0 comments)

Board Releases New Features for Recovery.gov

 

While the entire rest of the fiscal policy world is obsessing about the budget, I thought I'd take a minute to talk about the other major event of the week, the release of the second round of Recovery Act recipient reporting. We're still working on sifting through the reports themselves, but the website, Recovery.gov, also received an overhaul this weekend. While many of the site's new features still have a long way to go, it's encouraging to see the Recovery Board, which is responsible for the site, actively working to improve the website, despite the fact that public attention has largely moved on.

The most significant change to the website is a new advanced search function. While it is hard to find, the new search is a drastic improvement over the regular search. The regular search, which is accessed through a search box at the top of all pages, simply returns "Google-style" search results. Type in "Boeing" for instance, and you get a link to every page on the site (or every recipient report) which mentions "Boeing" somewhere on the page. It could be a town, a company, or a project; users can't narrow their search in any way. It's also next to impossible to tell which of the results has the piece of information a user is looking for.

The advanced search is better in two respects. First, users can narrow their search parameters, meaning that if a user wanted to find contracts Boeing received in California, they can do so with one, simple search instead of having to hunt through dozens of search results. This narrowing of parameters is very useful in making searches more fruitful.

Second, and more importantly, the advanced search results are now returned in a different format. Instead of the "Google-style" results, it now returns transaction-based results, with each record displayed by organization name, award number, awarding agency, award amount, etc. And each column is sortable, so even if a search returns hundreds of entries, it is very easy to find the one entry in question. To demonstrate the difference between old and new, I pasted below the old results (top), and the new results (bottom). The new version is clearly better at showing results in a meaningful way, presenting the information users are looking for in a cleaner, more accessible fashion. Sure, it's mostly a formatting change, but it's an important change.

 

This isn't to say that the new advanced search is perfect. It still has some flaws. The advanced search is almost impossible to find. For some reason, some transactions are shown twice in search results. Users can't download their search results. Clicking on an organization's name won't bring up information about them (for instance, a summary of all contracts that organization received). But despite these flaws, the Recovery Board would do well to consider making the advanced search the default recipient search. (For more ways in which the site's search abilities could be improved, check out our Recovery Act data site, Fedspending.org's Recovery Act tab.)

The other new features are not nearly as good. There's a job search feature, but it pales in comparison to plenty of widely known, free job search engines such as Monster.com, which has the added ability to search for jobs by location. Then there's the new "diversity" map, which aims to show how Recovery Act funds are distributed by race and is completely incomprehensible. I think the map shows communities with high minority-to-Recovery-Act-funding ratios, but I have no idea, since the map doesn't come with a legend. Both of these features, the job search and the new maps, have good intentions, and have the potential to be powerful tools, but probably need a little more time on the drawing board.

All in all, it's good to see the Board working to improve Recovery.gov. There is still much that can be done to make Recovery.gov a model for spending transparency, but the Board is at least demonstrating a will to move towards that goal.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 02/02/10; 0 comments)

Second Round of Recovery Act Recipient Reports Released Saturday

 

As a reminder, tomorrow the Recovery Board will release the next batch of recipient reports on Recovery.gov. The new reports will be released along with a limited overhaul of the site, which will feature a new search option, a "diversity map," and a job search function. We'll be reviewing these new features, and the new reports, on Monday.

Also, this release will be the first under the new job counting rules, which eliminate the awkward "created or saved" dichotomy from last cycle.

And, as always, remember that over two-thirds of Recovery Act spending will not be included in this release, a point helpfully highlighted by a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report. So while it's great that we're getting another batch of recipient reports, we still don't have comparable transparency for a vast majority of the Act's funding.

For more Recovery Act info, check out our past coverage here.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 01/29/10; 0 comments)

CBO Recovery Act Cost Estimate Rises to $862 Billion

 

I'm sure you all already read all of the Congressional Budget Office's 2010 Budget Outlook since I blogged about it the other day, but in case you missed it, the outlook also included a special section on the Recovery Act. The main take away from this section is that the CBO predicts that the overall cost of the Act will be higher than initially estimated, thanks to a couple of factors.

The first factor is higher unemployment. When the CBO initially estimated the Recovery Act's cost, it predicted an 8% unemployment rate, not today's 10% rate. This higher rate means that the unemployment insurance provision of the Act will cost more as more people qualify for unemployment; $21 billion more in fact, over the life of the Act.

The second factor is the food stamp program. There's a very complex reason why the program's cost is increasing, involving inflation and baskets, but explaining it would take up a couple pages, so just take CBO's word that it's going to cost an extra $34 billion.

Finally, another $26 billion in additional spending comes from the Build America Bond program which, according to the CBO, "pays state and local governments for 35 percent of their interest costs on taxable government bonds issued in 2009 and 2010 to finance capital spending." The program is more popular than the CBO initially estimated, generating more costs over the next ten years.

All told, the CBO is estimating that the Recovery Act will cost $862 billion over the Act's lifetime, up from $787 billion. The CBO helpfully provides the below chart to show how these costs are broken down over time by program.

Note that this year, FY 2010, will be by far the most expensive year of the Act. Although that shouldn't be too surprising since it's the first full year since Congress passed it.

Surprisingly, the news of a higher Recovery Act price tag has not created much of a stir. Earlier today (a full three days after this report came out!) I got a press release talking about Obama's "$787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act." These things take time, I guess.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 01/29/10; 0 comments)