Largely lost in the partisan bickering over the stimulus has been the law's enormous positive impact on improving government transparency. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is not just the most transparent federal spending bill in U.S. history-the changes it pioneered will endure even after the stimulus winds down.More...
The fifth round of Recovery Act recipient data (covering the third quarter of 2010) just posted on Recovery.gov is both disappointing and frustrating. Disappointing, because the aggregate employment numbers have turned sharply downward. Recipient employers reported a total of 671,607 full-time-equivalent jobs associated with ARRA funding, down 10 percent from the 750,000 reported for the previous quarter.More...
A new report published by Policy Matters Ohio finds that the highest per‐capita funding for ARRA energy and environemental projects occurred in the state's most economically distressed counties.More...
Critics of the $787 billion Recovery Act complain it is not doing enough to revive the economy, but they rarely ask why the companies that are receiving stimulus contracts and grants are not hiring more people. Now one of those recipients is facing a growing controversy over its employment practices in a case that helps explain why jobs remain in short supply.More...
A war of words is raging over the impact of the Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus program, which is now one-year old. Conservative members of Congress are mounting a relentless assault on what they see as an abject failure, even as many of them unabashedly promote and at least implicitly take credit for individual American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) projects in their home districts.More...
