Recovery.gov: Where’s the data?

March 20, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Using the Recovery.gov website to reveal how the $787 billion federal stimulus package gets spent may turn out to be tougher than expected, according to a recent article in Federal Computer Week.

The article points to a statement from Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, voicing his worries about the data available for the site: “I am concerned about data quality. The federal government’s data systems have never been fully successful at producing timely and reliable data.”

Edolphus Towns, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (where Devaney was speaking, and which currently operates the site), added that Recovery.gov “is not currently a usable database.”

A visit to Recovery.gov shows that Towns’ statement is pretty much indisputable. The site appears barely changed since it went up a month ago (on Feb. 17, the day the stimulus bill was signed into law). There are a few new charts, as well as a flood of press releases, but the promised searchable data on where exactly federal agencies are distributing the money is nowhere to be seen. It’s still early in the project, and presenting all this information in a way that’s both comprehensive and comprehensible to the average web user is certainly a challenge, but still, the early results don’t inspire much hope. Federal agencies supposedly started reporting on the use of funds on March 3.

Let’s hope we see some changes after the recovery board meets next week. There’s certainly public interest in this site; Recovery.gov receives 4,000 visits every second.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Alamgir Kahn
    I've been trying to find out for some time what the 21 large banks are that have gotten bail-out money, and it's been near impossible.
  • Miramon
    Good post. The very first day the recovery.gov site opened for real, when they were soliciting input, I commented that without any actual data to speak of, the site would be worthless. As of now, it's still worthless. A pie chart and the text of the bailout act is simply not useful. Links to 20 different agency websites, also not useful.

    How about a spreadsheet, just for the hell of it? They have the data, and they should publish it on the site. Maybe only 1 in 100 visitors will look at it, but without it, there is no transparency, and certainly no accountability. Or at least there's no accounting....
  • Even if the government is able to acquire timely and accurate data on recovery programs, publishing that data will be a big problem. The Yale Journal of Law & Technology called out this issue a few months ago:

    "Compared to technologists in the private sector, federal Web masters face a daunting array of additional challenges and requirements. An online compliance checklist for designers of federal Web sites identifies no fewer than twenty-four different regulatory regimes with which all public federal Web sites must comply. Ranging from privacy and usability to FOIA compliance to the demands of the Paperwork Reduction Act and, separately, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, each of these requirements alone is, considered on its own, a thoughtfully justified federal mandate."

    Therefore,

    "Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, [the government] should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data."
  • Testing another facebook comment.