Tracking the Stimulus — Without Relying on Useless Recovery.gov

From the "From the Heartland" blog:

The Recovery.gov Web site has become a national joke. The Web site taxpayers have paid an astounding $18 million to redesign has discovered 440 extra Congressional districts in America – where $6.4 million from February's stimulus package has been spent to create (or save) thousands of jobs. Mind you, the entire purpose of Recovery.gov is to track the $787 billion stimulus package — to offer transparency and make it easy for taxpayers to see the "good" their money is doing for the economy.

Yet, for all practical purposes, Recovery.gov is useless. It's information in incomplete — when it's not being made up — and the site is clunky and difficult to use. Again, taxpayers are forking out an extra $18 million to improve the site ... and this is the clunker we've been given. Happily, the private sector is stepping in where Recovery.gov fails. Stimulus Watch, a project of Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, takes the limited and chaotic information from the government's Web site and makes it genuinely easy to follow the money — even down to your own neighborhood. According to an email Brito sent me:

You can search for contracts and grants awards by state and city, by awarding agency, or by recipient. (Keyword searching is coming soon.) When you find an award that interests you, you can vote on whether you are satisfied with it or not, add to the wiki description of the project, and join in the conversation about the award in the comments section.

A great idea. When the government won't really tell us what's going on with the money, why not rely on the intelligence the "crowd" can provide? I recommend kicking around the site a bit, and sharing it with your friends. Frankly, I trust Stimulus Watch more than the government's site, which seems more interested in promoting propaganda than open government.