USAspending.gov Adds Recovery Act Spending Data Months before Recovery.gov

In late May, USAspending.gov started posting data that identified grants and contracts given out under the Recovery Act. This is in addition to the regular data on government spending on the site. Up until now, there has been a disappointing lack of specific data made available about Recovery Act spending, particularly on the Recovery.gov website – the main vehicle created for information on implementation of the act.

The Recovery.gov website has plenty of general information, such as the recently released agency program plans, which provide descriptions of the programs each federal agency will be implementing as part of their Recovery Act efforts. But it does not yet have any recipient data, such as details about which contractors or subcontractors receive funds. What’s more, officials at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board have said such information will not be available on the site until October, which is the first time recipients of Recovery Act funds are required to report on use of the funds. This type of information is equally as important as the program information itself, since it helps ensure taxpayer money is being well spent.

Strikingly, some of this data is already on USAspending.gov, a website on government spending created at the end of 2007 in response to a law sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK). The data on USASpending.gov is limited to only those grants and contracts given out directly by the federal government; it does not include sub-awards. Moreover, there is not very much of it yet (only a handful of departments have submitted data so far: Recovery contracts by departments [2]; Financial assistance (e.g., grants) by departments [3]).

While the standard data fields used on the USAspending.gov website are included in the Recovery Act data, almost none of it can be used to match those contracts and grants up with their corresponding program plans on Recovery.gov. Instead, we are left with simple identification details, such as the date the grant or contract was awarded, how much has been spent, to whom the funds were awarded, what congressional district recipients are in, and an esoteric description of the project. The contract description field is particularly useless as the quality of the information within that field is very poor.

OMB Watch did manage to link up one Department of Energy contract to its corresponding program plan, but that only happened because the contract and its plan were the only ones that mentioned work at the Hanford nuclear plant. If you do not have time to read all 270 program plans or browse through the literally tens of thousands of contracts and grants, matching up the contracts is simply impossible.

That said, the Recovery Act contract data on USAspending.gov is not entirely useless. As mentioned before, the site does identify contractors receiving Recovery Act funds. Using resources like the Project On Government Oversight’s (POGO) Contractor Misconduct Database [4] and the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets database [5], one can start to take a closer look at the contractors who are receiving Recovery Act funds, their past performance records, and their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

Indeed, a quick search of the contractors turns up some interesting data. Of the top five Recovery Act contractors on USAspending.gov, which collectively account for 98 percent of the contracts awarded thus far, three are listed in POGO’s Contractor Misconduct Database for recent violations. Two of them, CH2M Hill Companies, Ltd [6] and Ut-Battelle [7], have entries from the past year for the very same work at the very same place where they were just awarded new Recovery Act contracts. (The third company was URS Corporation [8].)

Ut-Battelle, in particular, was cited [9] by the Department of Energy’s Inspector General for incurring “unreasonable” costs at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2008, and yet it received a $73 million contract [10] under the Recovery Act for continued operations at Oak Ridge. The three companies, despite their track records, received $1.3 billion of the $1.8 billion in Recovery Act contracts, or about 75 percent of all the Recovery Act contracts which have been awarded to date.

Additionally, according to OpenSecrets.org, these same companies have given millions of dollars in campaign contributions to federal candidates and spent even more on lobbying activities. URS Corporation, which received a $203 million contract [11], spent well over $1 million during the 2008 election season [12], in addition to $2 million on lobbying expenses [13] (one of the firms URS hired to lobby for it was PMA Group, a lobbying firm which is currently embroiled in a pay-to-play investigation [14]).

Ut-Battelle, on the other hand, contributed to only one legislator during the 2008 cycle: Congressman Zack Wamp, a Republican who represents the Third District of Tennessee. Over the past ten years, Ut-Battelle has given Wamp over $100,000 in campaign contributions [15]. Coincidentally, the one contract Ut-Battelle received under the Recovery Act will be performed in Oak Ridge, TN, in the heart of the Third District.

Despite this, none of what these companies did is illegal. Companies can legally lobby and contribute to campaigns, and the companies’ misconduct was not flagrant enough to get any of them put on the federal debarment register. But it is disappointing that so much of the first round of Recovery Act money is going to what ProPublica aptly calls [16] “scofflaw companies,” or companies that have histories of violations of federal law and poor performance. This problem is most likely a result of the speed and urgency many placed on getting the Recovery Act funds out the door, and hopefully there will be improvements in the next round.

These limited examples reinforce why transparency and access to good spending information is so crucial. While it is wonderful that USAspending.gov has added a feature to allow subdividing Recovery Act spending, there is no reason this information should not also be available on Recovery.gov right now. There is also no reason federal spending and performance data should not inform future contract and grant decisions.

With its mission to help make implementation of the Recovery Act as transparent as possible, Recovery.gov should be providing the same information – both raw spending data and performance information – in a timely fashion. More directly, each agency and Recovery.gov should be providing machine-readable feeds on detailed spending so the public has access to the underlying data.