Although President Obama has vowed that citizens will be able to track "every dime" of the $787 billion stimulus bill, a government website dedicated to the spending won't have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program, administration officials said.
Recovery.gov now lists programs being funded by the stimulus money, but provides no details on who received the grants and contracts. Agencies won't report that data until Oct. 10, according to Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which manages the website.
Devaney told a House subcommittee Tuesday that it will be a challenge to have the site ready to present spending data in five months. He said after the hearing that the board doesn't have enough data storage capacity, for example.
Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, a Republican serving on the House Science and Technology subcommittee, criticized the administration's decision to require reporting of only the first two recipients of stimulus spending. Broun said that means if the money goes to a state and then a city, the identities of the city's contractors will be unavailable.
Devaney said that after the first data become available in October, the board will wait six to nine months for the White House Office of Management and Budget to issue new guidance on how far down the spending chain the money must be tracked. "I'm going to push them for as much data as possible," he said.
Devaney's spokeswoman, Nancy DiPaolo, said the website may not be completed until next spring.
The board solicited ideas for the site last week during an online "national dialogue" that drew 542 ideas and 1,330 comments. The suggestions included adding mapping tools and other software to allow users to search the data.
People accustomed to getting easily searchable information quickly could be frustrated, said Greg Elin of the Sunlight Foundation, which is part of a coalition pressing for better access to spending data. "If we have to wait until October to get the information or to the end of the year to get a powerful recovery.gov site, the Obama administration will have missed an important opportunity," Elin said.
The site currently lists total amounts available and already spent — as of last week, $72.2 billion available and $15.4 billion spent. There's also an interactive map showing allocations for each state.
As with all federal contracts, information about stimulus contracts is available on the Federal Procurement Data System's website, but that data is not available on recovery.gov.
In addition, 29 federal departments and agencies provide stimulus spending information. The quality of those websites varies, from a list of news releases and planning reports from the Justice Department to a chart detailing major programs and a clickable map with state-level funding figures on the Energy Department's site.
The 50 state stimulus websites also differ. Most of Mississippi's site, for example, is taken up by a message from Republican Gov. Haley Barbour noting he opposed the stimulus.
Texas, by contrast, has a site featuring links to information about applying for stimulus grants and contracts.
Elin said the Obama administration is moving relatively quickly to gather and present massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, executives at Onvia, which collects government contracting information for its clients, are skeptical that recovery.gov can meet the administration's goals. Onvia, which is posting stimulus-related data on its recovery.org website, took much longer to develop its systems, said Eric Gillespie, Onvia's chief information officer.
"It's really, really hard," Gillespie said, "and it's taken us 10 years to figure out."
