Recovery.gov to Track Recovery Spending, because “Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant”

Pres. Barack Obama announced, just one week after taking office, the creation of a new website, Recovery.gov, which will detail the manner in which all the money from his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, once passed by Congress and signed into law, is being spent. The website is another in a series of steps to create a far-reaching reform of the federal government’s reporting to the public about its activities, with the aim of achieving Obama’s promise of the “most transparent” government in US history.

Economic recovery requires a massive amount of new federal spending, and the administration has asked Congress to find ways to use that wave of spending to implement vital innovations in the overall structure of the American economy, so that some of the “stimulative” effects actually turn into sustainable new areas of compounded growth. That means not only infrastructure, but the fomenting of new industries, like clean-energy businesses that will build a new energy distribution system and new industrial output.

Stimulus also requires the rapid disbursal of funds to specific industries, which will immediately use those funds on projects that will lead to retention or increase of jobs in a given market. Among those industries is the entertainment industry that dominates the city of Los Angeles, and which needs the investment to keep employing the hundreds of thousands who depend on its intermittent projects for their income, as banks are not lending as freely as they once did.

All of this means Recovery.gov is a necessary tool, aimed at informing the public about how each recovery dollar is spent, where that stimulus has been directed, or where there are long-term infrastructure projects getting underway. This is a new wave of information which will also benefit those who are practically or geographically mobile and can shift skill-focus or change location in order to take advantage of new funding, something that can optimize the effects of the recovery and reinvestment plan.

Over the long-term, education spending has a better return-on-investment than any other type of government spending, in terms of generating economic activity, and so it will be instructive for the public to be able to view what sorts of new economic opportunities are being made available and what sorts of new horizons open up for the adults and young people who are able to take advantage of those opportunities.

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Consistently available continuing education is a needed asset for a dynamic 21st-century “knowledge economy”, in which the nature of specific skills and the knowledge needed to make best use of them are constantly evolving. Recovery.gov will enable observers of all stripes to examine how dollars directed at informational and education-enabling initiatives are being spent, to gauge whether real people are getting increased access to education or whether consultants and administrators are getting the bulk of the benefit.

Recovery.gov, because of the scope of the spending programs it will track, is a major revolution in government accountability, opening up the executive to intimate scrutiny of the details of spending that amounts —between Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan (ARRP)— to roughly half the annual federal budget. This brings the eyes and the insights of however many millions of American citizens choose to inspect and judge the process into the policy analysis.

This sort of action, which on its face may seem like the trivial creation of another government website, has the potential to generate one of the most effective avenues of public input into government activity and priorities. If the public is willing or able to take advantage of this information, a vast reservoir of detailed economic-potential data could be created, with immense potential for better gauging the health and resilience of the overall structure of the American economy, at any given moment.

Peripheral activity, such as the creation of vast analytic mash-ups and evolving composite real-time reports, a threadwork of data and interpretive theory, could make it possible for planners, activists and entrepreneurs in the private sector to hone their planning and craft the best solutions for shaping an agile, inventive marketplace of ideas, technology and financial activity. Allowing real people in the real world to have access to such information is itself potentially stimulative, in terms of confidence and better organization of future gambles, is a necessary improvement and the right thing for catching up to the information age.