ProPublica: Eye on the Stimulus

How the Stimulus Revived the Electric Car

2012-01-31T09:00:48-05:00

This story was adapted from "Money Well Spent?: The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History," which will be published Tuesday by PublicAffairs.

A common criticism of President Obama's $800 billion stimulus package has been that it failed to produce anything – that while the New Deal built bridges and dams, all the stimulus did was fill some potholes and create temporary jobs.

Don't tell that to Annette Herrera. She was 50 when the auto supplier she worked for in Westland, Mich., closed its factory and moved the work to Mexico. Then, after being unemployed for 2½ years, she got a job in October 2010 with A123 Systems, which had received $250 million in stimulus money to help open a new lithium-ion battery plant in nearby Romulus, Mich.

"The first thing I did was call my husband and tell him, 'You're never going to guess! I got a job!'" Herrera recalled. "And then it was like celebration time."

One success the Obama administration can duly claim is the rebirth of the electric-car industry in the United States. Automakers have unveiled a number of mass-market electric cars, which have seen small but rising sales. Battery and parts manufacturers are building 30 factories, creating thousands of new jobs. A123 has hired 700 workers at Herrera's plant and a second one in nearby Livonia, and plans to hire a couple thousand more people over the next few years.

If it wasn't for the stimulus, the companies say, they would have built these plants overseas.

It was all part of an effort to promote "green" manufacturing and put a million electric cars on the road by 2015.

The question is: Will it last?

Elkhart, Ind., once believed it would. It saw electric vehicles as its salvation after watching its unemployment rate hit 20 percent. Eager to seed a new industry, the county witnessed electric-vehicle ventures sprout out of nowhere as the stimulus took off in 2009.

But by late summer 2011, what had sprouted were weeds. The parking lot of the Think electric-car plant was full of them, some more than a foot high growing from the cracks. Out front were two pickups and a motorcycle.

Hundreds of laid-off factory workers were supposed to have found jobs churning out the Norwegian company's bug-like, plastic-bodied cars, which ran solely on electricity.

Today the Elkhart factory employs two. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy in June. Its largest shareholder and battery maker, Ener1, which received $118 million in stimulus money, did the same last week.

A second life

Electric cars began appearing on California roads in the mid-1990s after state regulators mandated that a certain percentage of automakers' fleets include zero-emissions vehicles.

But within a few years, they were deemed a failure by car companies, which stopped making them and took back those they had leased.

Much had changed in the eight years leading up the stimulus package. The lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries that weighed as much as 1,200 pounds were replaced with lithium-ion batteries that weighed as little as 400 pounds.

In the early 2000s, gas hadn't even passed $2 a gallon. Less than a decade later, it was twice that. Toyota had proven the demand with its long waiting list for the Prius hybrid.

Government policy had changed, too, with a 2007 energy bill that increased fuel-efficiency standards and provided $25 billion in loans for automakers to upgrade their plants.

But until the economic stimulus package was passed in 2009, the manufacture of electric cars and their batteries in the United States was nearly nonexistent.

The United States had only two factories manufacturing less than 2 percent of the world's advanced batteries. Most were made in Korea and Japan. In America, only Tesla manufactured an electric car — which sold for a cool $100,000. Across the entire country, there were a mere 500 electric charging stations.

But as the stimulus kicked in, there was suddenly no better environment for the electric car to thrive.

With more than $2 billion in federal grants, matched by another $2 billion in private investment, the Obama administration was supporting electric cars from the mine to the garage.

Chemetall Foote Corp., which operates the only U.S. lithium mine, received $28 million to boost production at its plants in Nevada and North Carolina. Honeywell received $27 million to become the first domestic supplier of a conductive salt for lithium batteries. More than $1 billion was spent to open and expand battery factories, many of them in hard-luck towns across Michigan. Through a separate federal program, automakers received loans to retool their assembly lines.

Customers could receive a $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car. The stimulus provided funding for 20,000 electric charging stations by 2013. In many cities, drivers could get a home charger for free.

Although electric cars would not make up for the generation-long loss of manufacturing jobs, at least not yet, it was novel to see companies creating jobs in the Rust Belt instead of outsourcing them.

In July, Johnson Controls opened the first U.S. factory to produce complete lithium-ion battery cells for electric vehicles. Compact Power is building a $300 million factory in Holland, Mich., to produce batteries for the Chevy Volt and the electric Ford Focus. A123 now supplies the luxury electric carmaker Fisker Automotive and the manufacturers of electric delivery trucks used by FedEx and Frito-Lay. "Quite simply, if we didn't get that grant, we wouldn't have built [the factory] in the U.S.," A123 spokesman Dan Borgasano said.

The battery grants have created and saved more than 1,800 jobs for assembly workers, toolmakers and engineers, according to a ProPublica analysis of stimulus project reports filed by the companies. That number doesn't include the workers who constructed the plants or those hired by the matching private investment the companies had to make to get the grants.

Killed again?

The problem: Consumers have been slow to embrace the electric car.

The price of the battery is still too high, and the price of gas is still too low, the Government Accountability Office warned in June 2009 before the grants were awarded. The starting price for the all-electric Nissan Leaf is $33,000, while the hybrid Volt sells for about $40,000 before tax credits — far more than many middle-class families can afford.

About 40 percent of drivers didn't have access to an outlet where they park their vehicles, the GAO noted.

"Although a mile driven on electricity is cheaper than one driven on gasoline," the National Research Council reported, "it will likely take several decades before the upfront costs decline enough to be offset by lifetime fuel savings."

Perhaps the biggest obstacle, though, was what the automobile represents in the American psyche: the freedom of the open road. While most people drive less than 40 miles per day, consumers want cars that they can also take on summer vacations — and they don't want to have to constantly worry about looking for a charging station.

The Leaf's range is just 73 miles, according to the official government rating, well below the much-advertised 100 miles.

By the end of 2011, fewer than 18,000 Leafs and Volts had been sold in the United States.

A report by congressional researchers last year concluded that the cost of batteries, anxiety over mileage range and more efficient internal combustion engines could make it difficult to achieve Obama's goal of a million electric vehicles by 2015. Even many in the industry say the target is unreachable.

While the $2.4 billion in stimulus money has increased battery manufacturing, the congressional report noted that United States might not be able to keep up in the long run. South Korea and China have announced plans to invest more than five times that amount over the next decade. Even A123 had to lay off 125 workers in November — though Borgasano says the company plans to rehire them all by June — because Fisker reduced orders.

Dick Moore, the mayor of Elkhart, had hoped the area known for its recreational-vehicle factories would one day be not just the "RV Capital of the World" but the "EV Capital of the World" as well.

Navistar International had received $39 million in stimulus money to build 400 electric delivery trucks in the first year. But by early 2011, it had hired about 40 employees and assembled only 78 vehicles.

Think had rallied into 2011 with plans to start production in Elkhart earlier than expected. But in April, assembly work suddenly stopped as the plant awaited parts from Europe.

In June, Think's parent company filed for bankruptcy. The decision left the Elkhart plant slouching toward extinction until the American subsidiary was purchased by a Russian entrepreneur who promised to restart production in early 2012.

But on Thursday, its battery maker, Ener1, also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reporting that the demand for electric vehicles "did not develop as quickly as anticipated."

Elkhart's dream of becoming the EV capital?

Moore put it this way: "The fact that this hasn't moved very quickly, that doesn't bode well for that idea."

The future

The fate of the electric car depends greatly on whether sales take off soon.

There are other factors, such as the price of gas and whether Congress approves proposed standards requiring automakers to raise the average fuel economy of their vehicles to 55 miles per gallon by 2025.

The electric car has always struggled with a chicken-and-egg dilemma: Automakers have been reluctant to build electric cars without consumer demand. But consumers won't buy them until automakers develop cheaper, longer-range batteries.

One of the goals of the ongoing stimulus spending is to solve this problem. By 2015, the 30 battery and component factories will be able to produce 40 percent of the world's batteries, according to the administration.

The investments would help manufacturers increase the batteries' life from four years to 14 and cut their cost from $33,000 to $10,000, the administration said in a report on innovation. That would make the electric car more competitive.

Herrera noted that many people at the A123 factory believe they will never be able to afford the cars powered by the batteries they make. But, she says, "you never know."

"When the flat-screen TVs first came out, they were way expensive, and now they're reasonably priced," she said. "I think that's going to be the same thing with electric automobiles. This is a new product. It's going to take time."

Could Unspent Stimulus Money Be Used to Fend Off a New Recession?

2011-08-09T10:46:12-05:00

by Michael Grabell

The nation's top economists are already giving odds on a double-dip recession. The Federal Reserve has only a few bullets left in its gun. And Congress seems politically paralyzed to come up with any new infrastructure or tax-cut plan that would fire up the economy.

So, it seems all the more surprising that the federal government still has $100 billion to $150 billion in stimulus money left to spend. That's about as much as the Making Work Pay tax credit that gave $800 apiece to middle-class families in 2009 and 2010. And it's twice as much as Congress gave to states to stabilize budgets and save education jobs.

So, could the money be better used to counteract the fallout from the European debt crisis and Standard & Poor's downgrade of the U.S. credit rating?

Taking back money from slow-moving infrastructure projects like high-speed rail and spending it on sooner-starting projects or on short-term stimuli like food stamps is easier said than done and might create more problems than it fixes, according to economists and current and former White House budget officials.

"It's meaningful, but it's not a game-changer," said Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's Analytics who has followed the stimulus. "From an economic and political perspective, I'm not sure that would make a lot of sense to do. A lot of this spending has generated a lot of planning, a lot of environmental designs. They're counting on the money. If you're going to divert it, you're going to create all kinds of problems for them."

More than half of the remaining money is tied up in tax credits for things like renewable energy production and business equipment purchases, as well as increases in safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, which are distributed to states every three months.

Minus that, federal agencies had about $56 billion left in project funding at of the end of July. All but a few billion dollars of that is already committed to specific projects.

Although the vast majority of stimulus money is gone, dozens of solar, wind, high-speed rail and broadband Internet projects have yet to break ground. It wasn't until this year, for instance, that doctors could begin claiming billions of dollars in incentives to adopt electronic health records.

In addition, many highway projects

—such as the rehabilitation of Interstate 295 in southern New Jersey—are reimbursed as they go. Work has begun, and construction workers are receiving paychecks, but the money technically isn't "paid out" until a certain phase is complete.

"Rescinding the remaining funds which have already been obligated would mean halting projects before they are complete, putting workers out of jobs and leaving contractors without payments owed to them," said Moira Mack, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Centuries of federal law dating back to the Constitution tie the president's hands when it comes to spending money even in an economic emergency. Congress has full authority to set the government's budget, and federal agencies are required to use the money for a specific purpose. Many programs are further restricted with labyrinthine rules and formulas that dictate how much each state will get.

While federal and state officials do have some discretion to pick grand public works or minor repairs—a new bridge versus a paved road, for example—once they have signed a contract or a grant agreement, it would require an act of Congress to undo and could subject the federal government to liability.

"By and large, an obligation is a commitment that, absent violation of the terms and conditions, can't be pulled back and redone unless both parties agree," said Jonathan D. Breul, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

Such an act has precedent, though, under the Recovery Act. The White House shifted funds when recipients didn't file progress reports and after newly elected Republican governors, concerned about additional costs, turned down high-speed rail projects.

Congress cut funding for food stamps, renewable energy loans and broadband to pay for the Cash for Clunkers car rebate program in 2009 and a program to save teachers' jobs in 2010.

Linda Morrison Combs, who was OMB controller during the George W. Bush administration, said a similar situation occurred when she was chief financial officer at the Environmental Protection Agency. Some toxic-waste cleanups were facing long delays, so the agency worked with contractors and Congress to free up funds for other waste sites that had work ready to go.

Essentially, the administration could go to states and other recipients and say, "Are you going to spend your money or not?" But that option is complicated by some of the long deadlines set by Congress in the Recovery Act.

Although many programs had deadlines to spend or commit funds within the first two years, others such as energy-efficiency programs have until 2012 to spend their money. A California lawmaker recently tore into the state energy commission after an audit revealed it still had $183 million left to spend. Broadband expansion projects don't have to be completed until 2013, and California's high-speed rail funding doesn't have to be spent until 2017.

Still, if a project has multiple phases, the promise of future funding gives the federal government significant leverage to influence projects already under contract, Breul said.

So, while the Obama administration might not have a bullwhip, it does have bully pulpit, which Vice President Joe Biden was known to use during his weekly calls with mayors and governors before stepping down as "sheriff" of the Recovery Act.

For example, the administration has urged school districts that have held onto education money to spend it faster. Similarly, the Commerce Department earlier this year moved to streamline environmental reviews for broadband projects.

ProPublica intern Braden Goyette contributed to this report.

Our Recovery Tracker Database Hits $430 Billion Mark

2011-01-20T12:18:27-05:00

by Sydney Lupkin

Nearly two years since the first stimulus dollars entered the economy, ProPublica continues to follow where they’re all going with the latest update of our Recovery Tracker.

This version includes information on $430 billion in stimulus funds awarded through the end of September for more than 320,000 contracts, grants and loans.

Once again, we’ve traced dollars to the county level and provided details for every project. Interested in broader totals? Not a problem. The Tracker allows you to check out trends for federal agencies, sub-agencies or states so you can compare.

If you want to know how we do it, check out our methodology page. You can also request a copy of your state’s stimulus data here.

Can’t wait for the next batch? Sign up for our data and reporting tools e-mail list. You’ll be the first to know when the next round of Recovery Tracker data comes out.

(Hint: Recovery.gov plans to release data through Dec. 31 at the end of this month, and we hope to make it available online in February.)

ProPublica and PolitiFact Test Obama Claims on Stimulus

2010-11-10T09:30:10-05:00

by Rob Farley, Politifact, and Michael Grabell, ProPublica

This story was co-published with PolitiFact.

"One of the interesting things about the Recovery Act was most of the projects came in under budget, faster than expected, because there's just not a lot of work there."

-- Barack Obama on Sunday, Nov. 7, 2010 in a "60 Minutes" interview

Obama claims most stimulus projects have come in under budget, faster than expected

President Barack Obama says the time is ripe for immediate investment in infrastructure projects such as highways and bridges. With the nation recovering from a recession, interest rates are low, competition among contractors for work is intense and the cost of building materials are low.

As evidence, Obama pointed to the government's experience with the economic stimulus package, saying that taxpayers have gotten pretty good bang for their buck.

"One of the interesting things about the Recovery Act was most of the projects came in under budget, faster than expected, because there's just not a lot of work there," Obama said in an interview on "60 Minutes" on Nov. 7, 2010. "I mean, there are construction crews all across the country that are dying for work. And companies that are willing to take a very small profit in order to get work done. And so for us to say now's the time for us to rebuild this country and equip ourselves for the 21st Century. That's something that could make a real difference."

In the fall campaign, Republicans assailed the stimulus as wasteful spending, but now Obama is citing it as a example of efficiency. And so Politifact decided to collaborate with ProPublica to see if Obama was right that "most" of the projects funded by the stimulus came in "under budget" and "faster than expected."

We'll break this into two parts: whether most stimulus projects came in under budget, and whether they were faster than expected.

Under Budget?

There is no comprehensive federal database that tracks whether stimulus projects have come in under budget. But the White House pointed us toward Vice President Joe Biden's latest stimulus report, issued in early October, which found that "Contract bids, in some cases, have come in anywhere from 6 to 20 percent below expected costs, allowing agencies to do more work within their original appropriations."

But that was based on a limited sample -- an administration survey of eight agencies with a large number of infrastructure projects. The survey found that project bids came in about $8.5 billion less than anticipated, allowing the stimulus to fund more than 3,000 additional projects.

The bulk of the "bid savings" in the survey came from the Department of Transportation, where low bids for projects came in $7.5 billion less than expected, allowing the department to fund an additional 2,500 projects. But DOT wasn't alone. All of the agencies surveyed reported projects coming in under budget. In the Veterans Administration, for example, project bids came in 8 to 12 percent below estimates, allowing the VA to stretch its number of funded projects from 942 to 1521.

Those figures come as little surprise to industry experts who said that projects in the last couple of years have often been below estimates. The recession decimated the construction industry, which led to intense competition for public projects like those funded by the stimulus.

Whereas most projects would typically get five or six bidders, they now get 20 to 25 -- heightening pressure for lower bids, said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of America. In a survey of its membership near the beginning of 2010, 90 percent said they had lowered their bids that year; and 10 percent said they were even bidding below the cost of the project, "buying work," just to keep employees busy until things pick up, Turmail said.

Another factor: Construction estimates were unusually high in 2006 and 2007, when many estimates were first made. They were inflated by strong demand for construction and high materials costs.

As a result, officials began revising their estimating formulas to account for higher costs, at the very time when costs for construction goods and services actually were coming down. As a result, many projects in 2008 and 2009 -- prime time for the stimulus -- came in well under budget.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office confirmed the trend in a March report.

"Many highway contracts were awarded for less than the original cost estimates," the report states. "These 'bid savings' allowed states to fund more projects with the Recovery Act funding than were initially anticipated."

For example, an Interstate 59 pavement project in Gadsden, Ala., came in 31 percent below the original estimate of $53.9 million. The 8-mile Old Glenn Highway resurfacing project in Anchorage, Alaska, was nearly 50 percent below the original estimate of $25 million.

So there is some truth to Obama's point. But without definitive data telling us what percentage of all stimulus projects have come in under budget, we think it's a stretch for Obama to claim that most stimulus projects have come in under budget. After all, that's based on a survey of just eight agencies that found "contract bids, in some cases" were coming in well below budget.

Faster Than Expected?

This is a statistic that depends somewhat on who is doing the expecting.

Asked for backup, the White House again pointed to its October report, which noted the administration met its target of "outlaying," or spending, 70 percent of the stimulus funds by the end of September 2010. The administration also provided data on various deadlines met, or exceeded, to "obligate" money to various agencies. But "obligated" simply means the money has been committed to a project. It could take months before it's spent.

So back to the money "outlaid." Shortly after the law passed, the administration set a goal of having 70 percent of the funds outlaid and delivered in tax relief by Sept. 30, 2010. In the report, the administration boasted that as of that deadline, the government had outlaid $308 billion and paid out $243 billion in tax relief -- a total of $551 billion, or almost exactly 70 percent of the Act's $787 billion cost estimate at the time of enactment.

Liz Oxhorn, a White House spokeswoman for the stimulus program, defended Obama's "faster than expected" claim based on outlays, saying, "Because most projects pay out on the back end, money out the door is one of the best indicators that projects are being completed ahead of schedule."

But if outlays are the measuring stick, the projects have not come in "faster than expected," they have come in exactly as expected.

And a couple caveats are in order here. The stimulus bill contained $288 billion in tax cuts and $499 billion in spending. As of Sept. 30, 85 percent of the tax cuts had been issued, along with 62 percent of the spending. In other words, the 70 percent threshold is inflated a bit by tax breaks.

An analysis by ProPublica also found that a number of agencies were lagging behind spending estimates.

The Department of Energy, for example, has been the slowest agency to spend its stimulus funds, as many of the agency's programs have been tied up by an onslaught of applications and regulations regarding prevailing wages, American-made materials, increasing electricity rates and environmental clearances. As of Sept. 17, it has spent only $7.6 billion of its $32.7 billion allocation. The slowest energy programs include the $3 billion "clean coal" carbon capture program, the $4.5 billion smart grid program and the $2.5 billion loan guarantee program to support clean energy projects.

The Department of Homeland Security spent less than $500 million of its $2.8 billion allocation. When the stimulus bill was passed, the CBO estimated that Homeland Security would spend more than $1 billion by now. The slow spending comes from nearly every part of the agency. For example, Customs and Border Protection has paid out less than $50 million, even though it was authorized to spend $680 million to modernize ports of entry and deploy other border technology. That program was halted briefly last fall as news media and members of Congress questioned the plan to modernize little-used border stations in Montana and North Dakota instead of busy crossings along the southwest border.

While outlays may be a good measure of the progress of stimulus spending, we also think most people would interpret Obama's comment to mean that projects were actually being done faster than expected. Again, there is no comprehensive federal database tracking that statistic.

But ProPublica analyzed a piece of the stimulus, the money awarded to the Federal Highway Administration. Of the 12,932 projects listed in a database provided by the agency, 5,752 are marked as completed, about 45 percent. Of the completed projects, 51 percent were completed earlier than the estimated date. About 30 percent came in late and 12 percent on the same day. Several hundred projects had no estimated date.

In the case of the Federal Highway Administration, Obama could rightly claim that "most" projects have come in faster than expected (though barely, at 51 percent). But this is just one agency.

As with the claim about projects coming in under budget, Obama would have been on firm ground had he said "many" projects have come in faster than expected. Many have. But many have not. And if the claim is based on meeting a deadline to outlay funds, the overall target of 70 percent was reached -- barely -- by the end of September. That's only faster than expected if you expected the government to fail.

Obama makes a valid point about this being a good time to get deals on infrastructure projects. The recession has created desperate workers willing to work cheaper, and the cost of materials is still relatively low. Obama's point that this was borne out by the stimulus projects is on target. But he stretched the facts -- at least what is actually known -- when he claimed most projects have come in under budget and faster than expected. And so we rate his claim Half True.

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Did the White House Meet its Stimulus Goal?

2010-10-01T12:06:22-05:00

by Karen Weise and Michael Grabell

Updated: This post has been updated with the White House's full report.

Oct. 3: This article has been corrected.

The White House plans to release a report today announcing that it met its goal of spending 70 percent of the $787 billion stimulus package by the end of September. If so, there must have been a last-minute push to get more money out the door.

According to early news reports, the administration said it hit its goal by spending $309 billion and issuing $242 billion in tax cuts — exactly reaching the target of $551 billion.

But for that to happen, stimulus spending (excluding tax cuts) during the latter part of the month would have had to run 30 percent higher than average this year, according to our analysis of weekly stimulus spending reports from agencies.

Those reports still aren't in for the last week of September, nor are Treasury Department estimates of tax cuts for the month. We've put in a call to the White House media office asking how they back up their numbers but haven't heard back.

ProPublica has been tracking spending on our Stimulus Progress Bar since the spring of 2009.

Since the beginning of the year, direct stimulus spending has held steady, with about $16 billion a month going to contracts, grants, loans and entitlements. To reach the report's figures, direct spending and entitlements would have jumped $9 billion since Sept. 17.

Tax breaks -- which primarily include credits and incentives -- have also been consistent, averaging $20 billion a month the first half of the year and adding up to $223 billion by the end of June. In July and August, the total increase was only $10 billion -- a slowdown that Treasury attributed to revisions in earlier estimates and a normal drop-off that comes after tax returns are processed.

News stories said the White House claimed tax relief jumped to $242 billion, an increase of $9 billion over the August figures. Treasury has not yet released its quarterly tax estimates, which would include September, and would not provide a timetable for the release.

The Congressional Budget Office had predicted that stimulus spending and tax cuts would have hit $584 billion through September.

If we hear more from the White House, we'll let you know. Meantime, we wanted to highlight the five departments that have yet to spend a quarter of their stimulus funds.

The Department of Energy has been the slowest agency to spend its stimulus funds, as many of the agency's programs have been tied up by an onslaught of applications and regulations regarding prevailing wages, American-made materials, increasing electricity rates and environmental clearances. As of Sept. 17, it has spent only $7.6 billion of its $32.7 billion allocation. The slowest energy programs include the $3 billion "clean coal" carbon capture program, the $4.5 billion smart grid program and the $2.5 billion loan guarantee program to support clean energy projects.
The Department of Homeland Security has spent less than $500 million of its $2.8 billion allocation. When the stimulus bill was passed, the CBO estimated that Homeland Security would spend more than $1 billion by now. The slow spending comes from nearly every part of the agency. For example, Customs and Border Protection has paid out less than $50 million, even though it was authorized to spend $680 million to modernize ports of entry and deploy other border technology. That program was halted briefly last fall as news media and members of Congress questioned the plan to modernize little-used border stations in Montana and North Dakota instead of busy crossings along the southwest border.
The General Services Administration has spent $1.2 billion of its $5.9 billion allocation in stimulus funds primarily to build and update federal buildings. That's basically on target to the CBO's estimate of how fast the GSA would pay out funds.
The National Science Foundation has spent almost $600 million of its $3 billion allocation to support science and engineering research and education. When the bill was passed, the CBO estimated that the NSF would have spent $1.6 billion by now.
The Commerce Department has spent $1.6 billion of its $7.9 billion. The slow progress is largely a result of the administration's effort to expand broadband access, a program that was significantly enlarged in the stimulus package. The CBO estimated Commerce would spend $840 million on broadband by now, but it's actually paid out about a tenth of that.

Update: The White House released the full report, which says, "As of September 30, 2010, agencies and Treasury project that this goal will be met... Information regarding actual year end outlays and tax relief provided will be posted on Recovery.gov on October 8, 2010."

Correction: Because of a typographical error, an earlier version of this post mistakenly said the administration claimed stimulus spending of $309 million. The correct figure is $309 billion.

Stimulus Spending Likely to Make Administration’s Goal

2010-08-03T14:03:41-05:00

by Karen Weise

The Obama administration is on track to reach a self-imposed stimulus milestone: spending 70 percent of Recovery Act money by the end of September.

The administration set the goal in February, on the first anniversary of the bill. According to our Stimulus Progress Bar that tracks spending, 62 percent of stimulus money has gone out the door, putting $490 billion into the economy. If the administration keeps spending at the same rate it has so far this year -- both in terms of direct spending and tax cuts -- it should easily meet the goal.

Last week, the White House released a blog post addressing criticism that more money hasn't gone out the door. Since two-thirds of stimulus money is tax cuts and unemployment checks -- which have already been allocated -- the post explained that the funds "aren't 'unspent' ... they just haven't been paid out yet." Got that?

Speed has been a priority for the stimulus as the administration tries to counter the highest unemployment rates since the early 1980s. The White House Council of Economic Advisers recently estimated that the stimulus has added 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs to the economy.

Check out stimulus spending by agency on our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar, and how fast agencies are moving money out the door on our Stimulus Speed Chart.

Grab a Helping of Stimulus Data from Our Latest Recovery Tracker

2010-07-01T11:08:15-05:00

by Jennifer LaFleur

Nothing says summer like a fresh crop of stimulus data.

So along with our revamped ProPublica website, we bring you the next generation of our Recovery Tracker. As with our last trackers, we started with data from the federal stimulus website, Recovery.gov, and added thousands of stimulus spending records from USAspending.gov.

We also have continued to better track money to the county level. That means that instead of seeing a chunk of money going to your state Department of Education, you’ll see how much money your local counties received from the state (as long as your state reported the information to the Recovery.gov folks).

But wait. That’s not all. The latest version of our Recovery Tracker also includes more information about stimulus vendors. We identified more than 1,300 vendors where no recipient name was reported on Recovery.gov.

Finding our new Recovery Tracker will be easy. It will live online in the new Tools and Data section of ProPublica.org.

And for all you data lovers out there, you still can request a copy of your state’s data.

If you want to know about how we do all this, check out our detailed methodology.

If you'd like to be notified when we publish new data -- Recovery and more -- sign up for ProPublica's data and reporting tools e-mail list.

Revised Tax-Cut Figure Pushes Stimulus Spending Higher

2010-04-20T09:38:45-05:00

by Sebastian Jones

Stimulus spending has reached roughly $378 billion, according to the latest numbers from Recovery.gov, released on April 9. That number includes $215 billion in spending and an estimated $163 billion in tax cuts. The tax-cut figure was recently adjusted upward by the Office of Tax Analysis. In total, over 47 percent of the roughly $800 billion stimulus package has entered the economy.

You can track stimulus spending by agency on our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar. You can also see how fast that money is moving out the door, by checking out our Stimulus Speed Chart.

Stimulus Spending Update: $329 Billion Out the Door

2010-04-13T09:17:19-05:00

by Sebastian Jones

The Obama administration has spent close to $329 billion in stimulus funds, according to numbers from Recovery.gov. The latest total includes about $210 billion in spending and $119 billion in tax cuts. Overall, just over 41 percent of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package has entered the economy.

You can track stimulus spending by agency on our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar. You can also see how fast that money is moving out the door, by checking out our Stimulus Speed Chart.

Get Help Making Sense of Stimulus Data

2010-04-06T12:27:25-05:00

by Mike Webb

Lately, we’ve made it part of our mission to help other reporters pull stories together. Whether it’s our Reporting Recipe, which gives tips on investigating state licensing agencies, or our Reporting Matchmaker, which pairs reporters with homeowners in loan mod limbo, we’re doing what we can to make it easier for you to produce investigations.

Later this week, ProPublica is going to team up with the Associated Press Managing Editors and the Sunlight Foundation for online Webinars to share some tools and tips for getting stimulus data for your community. Making sense of the thousands of stimulus reports from hundreds of federal agencies can be challenging, so these Webinars will help you navigate the terrain of the Recovery Act.

These one-hour sessions are Thursday, April 8, at 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., and Friday, April 9, at 9 a.m. and noon. All times are Eastern. Jennifer LaFleur of ProPublica and Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation will host the Webinars. For more information or to sign up for a session, click on any “Stimulus Workshop” on APME’s events page.

We also hope you’ll check out our Eye on the Stimulus section to get data from our Recovery Tracker, and to view all of our stimulus tools and reports.

Stimulus Spending Update: Nearly 41% of Funds Out the Door

2010-04-06T09:49:13-05:00

by Sebastian Jones

Stimulus spending has reached roughly $327 billion, according to the latest numbers from Recovery.gov, released on March 26. That number includes $208 billion in spending and an estimated $119 billion in tax cuts. Overall, just under 41 percent of the roughly $800 billion stimulus package has entered the economy.

You can track stimulus spending by agency on our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar. You can also see how fast that money is moving out the door, by checking out our Stimulus Speed Chart.

PR Firm Behind Propaganda Videos Wins Stimulus Contract

2010-03-30T12:26:50-05:00

by Sebastian Jones and Michael Grabell

President Obama’s push for electronic medical records has faced resistance from those who question whether health information technology systems can protect patient privacy.

So last week, the U.S Department of Health and Human Services hired a public relations firm to try to win consumer trust.

The irony? The firm chosen for the job — Ketchum Inc. — was hip-deep in controversy a few years ago for producing a series of fake TV news stories that violated a federal ban on propaganda. The company also drew fire for channeling taxpayer funds to a conservative pundit to promote the Bush administration’s education policies.

Ketchum, based in New York, is one of the world’s largest public relations firms, with a host of large corporate clients and a history of winning government contracts.

Company spokeswoman Alicia Stetzer declined to answer questions about the $25.8 million contract, funded by the federal stimulus package. Nancy Szemraj, a spokeswoman for the government’s health IT initiative, said the PR firm won the contract over four other companies because of its ability to attract public acceptance.

"Ketchum has a long rich history of doing outstanding communication outreach work for large social marketing endeavors," Szemraj said. "They are very capable of moving the needle, with has to happen here."

She noted that Ketchum’s work helped HHS enroll 35 million people in the Medicare prescription drug program. And she said all of the firm’s marketing ideas would be reviewed by senior managers at HHS.

Consumer advocates warned that the PR contract will only heighten skepticism about the security of online health records. A poll conducted last year by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that roughly six in 10 Americans lack confidence in the privacy of online health records.

"The public has always been very suspicious over whether electronic health information will be safe," said Dr. Deborah C. Peel, a physician and founder of the Coalition for Patient Privacy, which includes consumer, privacy and health groups. Peel called Ketchum a "very, very troubling choice because the last thing the public needs are more tricks being pulled on them."

During the Bush administration, Ketchum and its former lobbying arm, the Washington Group, had several prominent Republicans on the payroll, including former New York Rep. Susan Molinari. In the last year, it has beefed up its Democratic credentials, hiring Jonathan Kopp, a member of the Obama campaign’s national media team, and Donald J. Foley, a longtime Democratic strategist.

Ketchum has continued to draw government work – particularly from HHS – despite a series of reports in 2004 and 2005, in which Government Accountability Office investigators found it had produced a series of video news releases that constituted "covert propaganda" because they did not disclose they were paid for by the federal government.

The segments aired during local television broadcasts on at least 40 stations across the country. Designed to look like news reports, each concluded with a paid actor posing as a journalist reporting from Washington.

One series was produced for HHS in an effort to promote the Medicare prescription drug program to seniors. The others were paid for by the Department of Education. Overall, video news releases have become increasingly common, used by large public relations firms and companies to repackage advertisements as news.

Ketchum was involved in a separate controversy in 2005, when reports surfaced that it had used taxpayer funds to pay syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind education bill during radio broadcasts as part of outreach to the African-American community.

In both instances, Ketchum defended its tactics. Stetzer referred reporters to a 2005 PR Week article, in which CEO Ray Kotcher said, "There is no indication that it was ever the intent of Ketchum or any of our people to mislead anyone."

This time around, HHS has hired Ketchum to provide a "comprehensive campaign for communications and education," to encourage doctors and hospitals to adopt health IT and to assure the public that their information will be safe.

The campaign is part of the administration’s $26 billion health IT program, also backed by the stimulus package, which aims to spearhead the transition to online medical records through grants, bonuses to doctors and hospitals, and the development of national standards.

Stimulus Spending Update: $324 Billion of Recovery Act Funds Spent

2010-03-30T09:39:35-05:00

by Sebastian Jones

The Obama administration has spent close to $324 billion in stimulus funds, according to numbers from Recovery.gov. The latest total includes $205 billion in spending and $119 billion in tax cuts. Overall, just over 40 percent of the about $800 billion stimulus package has entered the economy.

You can track stimulus spending by agency on our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar. You can also see how fast that money is moving out the door, by checking out our Stimulus Speed Chart.

The Stimulus ‘Loser’ List Loses Some Members

2010-03-25T08:27:40-05:00

by Jennifer LaFleur and Michael Grabell

Update (3/25/2010): The Recovery Board has corrected their list of stimulus recipients who have failed to file any quarterly reports. The list is here.

More than 60 stimulus recipients can take heart that they’re not "losers" after all.

The panel charged with watchdogging the federal stimulus program confirms that dozens of recipients wrongly appeared on a list of "two-time losers" for failing to file reports on their funds.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board’s list, posted on Recovery.gov earlier this month, included 389 awards to contractors and grantees ranging from rural health clinics to county governments. The list was based on information that was provided by the White House Office of Management and Budget and certified as accurate by federal agencies that awarded the funds.

And because we just can’t get enough stimulus data, ProPublica checked the two-time loser list by comparing project award numbers and dollar amounts against other data that had been reported on Recovery.gov. We found that some of the accused recipients actually may have filed reports.

After we wrote about our findings, the Recovery Board checked into them.

"After conducting a thorough review, I can now say that the list provided to us by ProPublica was accurate," said board Chairman Earl Devaney. "We will be posting an amended list of two-time non-reporters on Thursday (March 25)."

Spokesman Ed Pound said the Recovery Board staff verified every project on its original losers list to make sure it had not been reported.

In some cases, slight differences in the format of award IDs or changes in amounts could have inadvertently landed some recipients on the failed-to-file list.

Most of the unreported money involved U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects, Justice Department grants to police departments, and Health and Human Services grants to rural medical clinics.

At the time of our original review, Corps of Engineers officials said the agency was trying to figure out what went awry and was reaching out to ensure that all the contractors understood the reporting requirements.

A Health and Human Services spokesman said the mix-up happened because some health clinics had incorrectly filed as subrecipients of grants instead of primary recipients.

"In the future, we want better quality review by the federal agencies," Pound said. "We’ll do everything we can to make sure the information we put out is accurate."

$321 Billion in Stimulus Funding is Out the Door

2010-03-23T07:53:47-05:00

by Sebastian Jones

Stimulus spending by the Obama administration has reached roughly $321 billion, according to the latest numbers from Recovery.gov. That number includes $202 billion in spending and an estimated $119 billion in tax cuts. Overall, slightly more than 40 percent of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package has entered the economy.

You can track stimulus spending by agency on our interactive Stimulus Progress Bar. You can also see how fast that money is moving out the door by checking out our Stimulus Speed Chart.