ARRA Contracts & State-level Political Donors

by Edwin Bender, National Institute on Money In State Politics

ARRA funds remain ripe fruit for politics as usual. Creating a new metrics for watching over those fruits is critical to the health of our government.

We wanted to create a baseline understanding of the relationship between stimulus contract recipients and the most active political donors in the states. Second, we wanted to identify the difficulties mashing up different types of data and how this type of work can identify intersections of influence that should alert public officials to take corrective action-the type of due diligence often used by tightly regulated businesses such as bond sellers. You can see our findings and browse the details here.

Our first mashup of federal stimulus contract recipients and state-level political donors found few surprises:

• 3.2 percent of contract recipients were donors to state legislators or governors
• the amount of contracts that they received was a fraction of the overall total
• donors gave almost equally to Republicans and Democrats

Recovery.gov is setting the trend and opening doors that had previously been closed. Illinois' Open Book project www.openbook.illinoiscomptroller.com is a great example of this type of due diligence, which benefits elected officials, government agencies and the public alike.