The Window On Your Federal Government Is Still Fogged Up

The federal government's RAT Board unveiled its new website yesterday, featuring an interactive national map showing the location of stimulus funded contracts, grants and loans by geographical location. It's a nice toy if you want to see who the original grantees are in your state or zip code, but it is utterly useless to citizens interested in finding out who is really profiting from expenditure of all the billions the folks in Washington are bragging about "obligating" to date. Why? Without clicking on each of the 36,000 dots on the map, it's impossible to find out which contractors are getting the most money from all sources across the country.

Nationwide construction contractors like AECOM, Bovis Lend Lease, Chicago Bridge & Iron, Morse Diesel, Turner Construction and others could be reaping immense profits from all this stimulus spending at innumerable different locations around America, but without endless hours of clicking, reading, and adding up, it is impossible to tell how much revenue any such nationwide contracting firm is going to get. Of course, correlating those figures with campaign contributions to Senators and Congressmen from the localities where the projects have been awarded would add even more time and effort to the endeavor. So, for all the taxpayer money invested into development of this website, the touted "transparency" of the Obama administration has succeeded in making the truth about government operations just as opaque as under any earlier administration.

Stimulus Infrastructure Spending On Track [We Think]

In testimony before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said nearly $9 billion in stimulus spending by the Transportation Department has been obligated among the 50 states and the territories, putting the Department ahead of schedule for distributing the whole $48 billion within 18 months of the bill's passage. EPA reported at the same hearing that $1.5 billion of its $7.2 billion to be spent on construction by that agency has already been distributed to the states, mostly for clean water and drinking water infrastructure. Meanwhile GAO reports that in many of the 16 states it has checked up on so far, state auditors say local governments and state transportation agencies may not be able to adequately track and report expenditure of these funds.

OMB To Require Detailed Stimulus Reporting

In testimony today before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, OMB Deputy Director Rob Nabors said guidelines to be issued tomorrow will require federal agencies charged with distributing $630 billion in contracts and grants appropriated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to report who is getting the money, including contractors and subcontractors. Nabors said Recovery.gov will post information, for example, about contractors receiving $40 billion in highway and transit construction projects. In his remarks, Nabors said "The administration believes this level of reporting strikes the appropriate balance between transparency for Recovery Act spending and the burden that reporting imposes on recipients."

Since it seems Nabors has not read my March 16, 2009 E-mail to the White House reminding the administration that construction contractors are already required to submit lien waivers identifying all subcontractors and material suppliers along with their monthly billings on every project in every state. So, I sent him another copy. If only someone from the construction industry were in Washington working on this.

Nabors did predict that $252 billion of the money will be spent before the end of July, 2010.

Stimulus Transparency To Cost Money And Time

OMB's RAT Board Chairman Earl Devaney announced last Thursday that the transparency respecting expenditure of stimulus legislation funds on the Recovery.gov website will require most of his $84 million oversight budget, and over a year to develop. Federal and state agencies can't agree on how much detail should be included in reports on construction projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

I have an idea that won't require creation of a single additional piece of paper. How about assigning a unique identifying number to each individual project funded in whole or in part by these appropriations. Create a database attaching the identifier with the brief project description already included in the front end of every government construction contract. Then, link the identifier to .pdf copies of the contractor's sworn statement and lien waivers already submitted with each monthly pay request on every government construction job.

This way, citizens interested in the progress and efficiency of any particular project could quickly drill down to a complete list of every business that was paid any money for labor or materials on the project. Furthermore, neither the bureaucrats nor the contractors on the project would have to write up a single document they are not already required to prepare. As far as I can tell all this information is already required to be public under the freedom of information laws in every state anyway, so no one's toes get stepped on, and no one has to do any extra work. Just run the sworn statements and lien waivers through a scanner every month and e-mail them to Devaney's folks in Washington, D.C. for electronic insertion into the database. Nobody even has to spend money on stamps. Mission accomplished.