Bad Grades for Stimulus Plan

June 15th, 2009 by Julia Lim

Input, a government market research firm, recently issued a 100 Day Report Card for the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – or the stimulus spending plan to you and me. They had some interesting and harsh things to say about just where and how the hundreds of billions of taypayer dollars are being spent.

First the kinda good news – a “B+” for the government on the Speed of Spending. The government is good at spending money quickly – who knew? President Obama’s goal of spending $350 billion by September 30, 2010 seems to be close to being on track, especially as the spending accelerates. For those of you who want to have your head spin at the numbers they’re talking about, that’s $4.16 billion per week that the federal government needs to be spending.

The bad news is that the end result of all the spending has not yet been realized. Input gave the government an “Incomplete” when it came to actual Job Creation. Granted, they provided a caveat when it came to the impossibility of actually determining the number of new jobs created by the stimulus spending. And then this nugget: The Council of Economic Advisors provided initial guidelines to fed government agencies to report job creation. Their metric – $92,000 of government spending to create one job-year. Wow.

But probably the most relevant part of the report card is how well the government is doing on the Transparency & Reporting requirements that go along with the stimulus package. Despite guidelines set by the OMB – or perhaps because of too many guidelines set by the OMB – Input gave federal agencies a big fat “D” on the report card.

So the government is spending billions a week, net new jobs are not being created and we have no view into how the agencies are actually getting things accomplished. The opportunity: get onto Force.com and create your own cloud computing app that tracks stimulus spending for agencies.

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