Stimulus Spending Data Is About to Disappear

In January of 2009, just days after Barack Obama
had assumed the presidency, he announced his intention to pass a
massive fiscal stimulus within just a few weeks. He recognized some
resistance on the part of the public to such an ambitious plan, and
he understood it, he
said, which is “why this recovery plan will include
unprecedented measures that will allow the American people to hold
my Administration accountable.”

Among those measures would be a website to track the spending,
open to all. “Every American will be able to see how and where we
spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called
recovery.gov,” Obama said. “restoring transparency is not only the
surest way to achieve results” but also the best way to earn back
the public’s lost trust in government.”

All of this would be part of a newly invigorated effort “to root
out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our
government.”

After the passage of the stimulus, that website went live, and
for the last several years, it has provided a valuable resource to
journalists, policy analysts, critics, and supporters of the law.
But now the data is about to disappear. Unless something changes,
all of the relevant tracking information will disappear at the end
of the month, because the government is dropping its contract with
the company that manages and keeps the information.
From The Washington Post:

The data will disappear because the government board that
oversees the Web site and ensures the stimulus money is spent
properly is not renewing its license with Dun & Bradstreet, a
major U.S. financial firm that assigns an identification number to
all entities doing business with the federal government. When the
license expires at the end of this month, those identification
numbers — and other associated data — will no longer be available
to the government.

No numbers, no way to track the money….Nancy DiPaolo, chief of
congressional and intergovernmental affairs for the Recovery
Accountability and Transparency Board, said that it was not
fiscally prudent to renew the license and that the board would be
forced to take down the recipient data. The cost to renew the
license would be between $900,000 and $1.4 million.

Under the terms of its sole-source contract with the government,
Dun & Bradstreet owns the actual data on the numbers used to
identify and track contractors through the stimulus, according to
the Post. “Once the contract ends, the information must be
deleted from government databases.”

On the surface, at least, this sounds like the federal
government—and taxpayers—got taken by a contract intended to create
long-term lock-in. As with so many of the stimulus dollars it
tracked, it was money that was probably not well spent.