Recovery Transparency Meets Mixed Results

Three weeks after President Barack Obama signed into law the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act), states have begun to see federal economic stimulus funds move within their borders. Behind the hundreds of billions of dollars soon to follow are some 25 federal departments, agencies, and administrations that are in charge of allocating the funds. In addition to this unprecedented level of emergency spending is a pledge [1] by Obama to "watch the taxpayers' money with more rigor and transparency than ever." The speed at which the administration and some federal agencies have moved is impressive, even as there has been uneven implementation of transparency efforts.

Spending data on Recovery.gov [2], the new website established to monitor how the Recovery Act is being implemented, is organized haphazardly. To find information on Medicaid disbursements, for example, one must comb through a list of press releases to find a link to that spending. The Recovery.gov website links to the Recovery Act legislative text and contains a breakdown of the act's spending provisions by spending area [3] (e.g. health, transportation, tax cuts, etc.), but the website does not – perhaps cannot yet, given the short time frame of its implementation – contain a listing of all federal Recovery Act programs with their attendant funding levels and state allocations. This fact, however, is mitigated by information provided by federal agency Recovery Act websites – a list of which is available [4] on Recovery.gov.

When the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidelines [5] to the federal agencies on Recovery Act spending, it mandated that they establish on their own websites a specific and easy-to-find area to detail Recovery Act spending. These Recovery Act sections of agency websites are all located by adding "/recovery" after the agency's web address. For example, the Department of Transportation's Recovery site is located at "www.dot.gov/recovery [6]." The Recovery Act and subsequent instructions to create agency websites are only weeks old, but some agencies have moved adroitly and are providing organized, detailed information. Other agencies have not done so.

An example of an agency that is managing its Recovery Act site well is the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). On the HUD Recovery Act site [7], one finds a list of Recovery Act programs and is able to click on each program to view a description of the program; the dollar amounts of total funding for that program; total funds allocated; total funds obligated; and total funds expended. Additionally, HUD provides downloadable spreadsheets that present the level of funding each state will receive from each HUD grant program.

The Health and Human Services (HHS) Recovery Act website [8], while aesthetically pleasing with useful maps, lacks organization; it requires the user to hunt for funding allocations and program descriptions. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) Recovery Act site [9], however, provides programmatic spending allocation detail, while linking to USDA sub-agency sites that provide almost no Recovery Act information whatsoever. As federal funds begin to be transferred to the states through grants or federal programs, the need for well-organized and informative agency websites is becoming apparent.

The OMB guidance also instructs agencies to produce and make available on Recovery.gov, from March 3 to May 12, weekly reports detailing "total appropriations, total obligations, and total expenditures as recorded in agency financial systems on a cumulative basis" and "[a] short bulleted list of the major actions taken to date and major planned actions." These reports are not yet available at Recovery.gov*, but they are available at the agency websites. And, like the establishment of agency Recovery Act websites, this requirement has met with uneven results.

Most agencies provide a downloadable spreadsheet with the information exactly as described in the OMB Guidance. Unfortunately, the guidance specifies that spending be reported by Treasury Account. The Treasury Account number, however, does not indicate to which program it belongs, leaving everyone but program budget specialists bewildered as to how agency Recovery Act funds are allocated. However, a few agencies, like HHS, provide a program description to match the Treasury Account in their spreadsheets. But some agencies, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and USDA, do not, as of the time of this writing, provide the required weekly report.

The level of transparency envisioned by the administration is ambitious, and with a law that is barely three weeks old, missteps and less than one hundred percent compliance is to be expected. Tracking Recovery Act spending at the program level, however, is only one challenge the Obama administration faces when it comes to spending accountability. As Recovery Act funds are disbursed to the states through contractors and subcontractors (and grantees and subgrantees), a sophisticated system of data reporting gathering will be required. In an effort to assist the administration in developing such a system, the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery [10] (CAR), co-chaired by OMB Watch and Good Jobs First, has put forth its recommendations for a Recovery Act data collection and reporting system in a memorandum, "Interim Recovery.gov Data Reporting Architecture [11]." It is certain that a series of iterations will be necessary to refine such a model to achieve the transparency articulated by the Obama administration, and as such, the CAR coalition will continue to solicit feedback from stakeholders and the administration to that end.

*Update (03/13/2009): Agency weekly reports are available on the Recovery.gov website here [12].