Why there's so little spending data on Recovery.gov
By Bill Allison May 29 2009 2:14 a.m. 1 commentBecause apparently, there's not all that much spending yet:
Only a small part of the spending authorized by ARRA has occurred so far. It appears that about 5 percent, or about $19 billion, of the approximately $380 billion in budget authority for 2009 granted under the law was spent through the end of April. (Reported expenditures of $29 billion include $11 billion in federal transfers into the unemployment insurance fund, most of which has not yet been distributed to recipients.)
That's a Congressional Budget Office estimate, via a report by David Lightman of McClatchy.
I'm going to be digging a little more deeply into Recovery data (or the lack thereof) Friday and more next week, but it makes me wonder: Are we looking at the wrong thing here? It's been a while since I read deconstructionists (and I'm not pretending I ever understood them), but I think we're a little too fixated on the signifier, and not the object to which the signifier refers.
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You should take a look at Recovery.org which tracks every recovery project from over 89,000 government entities at the federal, state and local level.They have consistently provided better tracking of the Recovery act spending than any other source.