Last spring, when the ink was barely dry on the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), there was already concern about an emerging frenzy of lobbying on behalf of corporations seeking a slice of the stimulus pie.

The Obama Administration enacted rules designed to make ARRA lobbying more transparent. That didn’t work out very well, but the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board recently completed the release of the first round of quarterly disclosure reports by ARRA recipients. In part, these reports serve as a score card showing which companies won the great stimulus lobbying competition.

Beginning with a list of the largest direct federal contracts, I ran the names of the prime contractors through the invaluable lobbying database maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. Many of the largest contracts went to joint ventures set up by major engineering companies to do clean-up work at nuclear facilities owned by the Department of Energy. In those cases I searched the names of the individual parent companies (and some universities) involved.

There are a total of 52 companies and institutions involved with the 50 largest ARRA contracts. Of these, 34 show up as clients in the Center’s lobbying database. These include large corporations such as Bechtel, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Motors and Ford—as well as smaller players. Also on the list are educational institutions such as the University of California, Stanford University and the University of Chicago.

So far in 2009, the 34 have spent a total of $65 million on lobbying the federal government. Of course, not all that lobbying can be attributed to the quest for stimulus contracts, but it shows in general terms that the ARRA winners include some of the biggest influence-peddlers in Washington.

Moreover, there is every reason to think that a significant portion of their lobbying efforts were focused on stimulus contracts. I searched the database of lobbyist disclosure reports provided by the Senate Office of Public Records. Of those 34 contractors, 24 show up as clients in 2009 lobbying reports in which the word “recovery” or “stimulus” is mentioned in the description of the specific issues on which the lobbyists reported working.

It’s not possible to determine how much of their spending went specifically to ARRA issues. But whatever portion of the $65 million was involved, it was money well spent for the contractors. The 24 that definitely had lobbyists working on ARRA matters ended up with stimulus contracts worth some $7.4 billion. That’s an impressive return on political investment.

Now we can only hope that these and other stimulus contractors crank up their hiring so taxpayers also get something significant out of this bonanza. According to the recent ARRA recipient reports, some of the projects being carried out by those two dozen firms have already created (or retained) a substantial number of jobs. Yet others, in a pattern seen in the overall ARRA contractor data, report few or no jobs despite having already received substantial sums for the projects.

Reposted from the Dirt Diggers Digest.

Here’s a mystery for Recovery Act sleuths: how do you spend more than $1 billion and have no jobs to show for it? That’s one of odd results from an examination of the ARRA recipient data recently released on Recovery.gov.

On October 30 the Recovery Board posted spreadsheets summarizing reports from recipients of federal grants and loans, along with a revised version of the spreadsheet summarizing reports from federal contractors that had originally been released on October 15.

Some critics of the stimulus plan claim that the numbers relating to job creation and retention are exaggerated, yet the October 30 data include numerous instances in which the employment impact of ARRA spending seems to be understated.

The national spreadsheets cover about 130,000 reports from recipients of federal contracts and grants. This number includes grants to state and local governments covered by recipient reporting requirements (Medicaid, for example, is not) but not the reports relating to vendors or loan recipients.

Good Jobs First has found that some 28,000 grant recipients and 3,000 contract recipients placed a zero in the column for number of jobs created or retained. This is not entirely surprising, given that many projects have not yet started. So we then examined the field for project status.

We found that, among the 31,000 zero-job reports, 1,194 describe the project as “More than 50% Completed” and another 1,270 are described as “Completed.” In other words, 2,464 grant and contract projects for which a substantial amount of the work has been done accomplished the amazing feat of not creating or retaining a single job. These projects reported receiving a total of $1.1 billion in payments so far.

There may be good reasons why some of the projects come up with a goose egg in the jobs column, but it is also likely that many of these are cases in which the recipients misunderstood the reporting requirements and incorrectly made it seem as if their project had no employment impact.

Findings such as these should be a wake-up call for the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for setting the rules for ARRA reporting. Either the guidelines need to be improved or measures need to be implemented to make sure recipients are not making egregious mistakes in their data submission.

The key goal of ARRA is to create and retain jobs. If the reporting system fails to provide accurate results, we’ll have no idea how effective the entire undertaking may be.

Reposted from the STAR Coalition website.

In a victory for transparency, the ARRA data on Recovery.gov now has names–the names, that is, of the highest paid officers at companies that received Recovery Act contracts directly from the federal government.

As I wrote about a couple of week ago, the federal rules governing ARRA contracts require certain companies to divulge pay information for their five highest-paid people. These are firms that receive $25 million or more in federal governments as long as federal contracts account for 80 percent or more of their total revenue.

When the first versions of the contractor recipient reports were released on October 15, the compensation figures were there but the names were absent. The Recovery Board, which oversees Recovery.gov, was concerned that disclosing the names might be a violation of privacy. Good Jobs First raised this issue in a meeting that we and OMB Watch and the Economic Policy Institute had with Recovery Board Chair Earl Devaney and his top staff. We were told the matter was under consideration.

It appears that transparency won out over privacy. The revised contractor data released last week (along with the new grants and loan data) now includes the names of the executives along with their pay. The spreadsheet also cleans up some glitches that had put the compensation data in incorrect fields.

There are now about two dozen firms reporting total compensation of $1 million or more. The largest is Lockheed Martin Services, which reports that Robert Stevens (CEO of Lockheed Martin) was paid $26.5 million. This is one of numerous examples in which an ARRA contractor affiliated with a publicly traded company reported the compensation of the top executives of its parent company–information that is already disclosed in SEC filings and may not technically be required in the ARRA report.

Yet there are also cases in which privately held companies appear to be disclosing the pay of their top people for the first time. The largest of these amounts comes from consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which reports that its CEO Ralph Shrader was paid $8.4 million.

Since it is not obvious how to find this data, here are some instructions:

• Go to the Download Center on Recovery.gov and under the Recipient Reporting tab, choose the XLS version of the file named All_ContractsFY09Q4.
• Unzip and open the file in Excel.
• Sort the spreadsheet by the field called recipient_officer_totalcomp1 (largest to smallest).
• Scroll across to Column S (recipient name)
• Freeze that column and then scroll across to Column AZ (recipient_officer_1)
• This shows the name of the highest paid officer. The total compensation amount for that person is in Column BE.
• The name of the second highest paid officer is in Column BA and the amount is in Column BF.
• Third highest: BB and BG. Fourth: BC and BH. And fifth: BD and BI.

Reposted from the STAR Coalition website.

At the end of the last week, the Recovery Board released the final results of the first round of ARRA recipient reporting. On October 15 we had already gotten a preview of the data on direct federal contracts. In addition to providing a revision of that data on Friday, Recovery.gov posted spreadsheets summarizing some 116,000 reports from recipients of direct federal grants and loans (the list is so big it’s divided into three files). The amount paid out so far to these grant recipients is about $35 billion.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the grant recipients are state and local government agencies-and, to a lesser extent, non-profit organizations. But buried in the lists are also some for-profit corporations. Since it is common to think of for-profits as the recipients of contract awards rather than grants, I thought it would be interesting to look at which companies managed to get themselves on the grants list.

Unfortunately, the Recovery.gov recipient spreadsheets don’t appear to have a field indicating whether a recipient is a for-profit. There is such a field, however, on USASpending.gov, the repository of data on all federal contracts and grants. On the advanced search page for grants, one can set the Recipient Category field to for-profits and the Business Fund Indicator field to ARRA.

And voilà: it shows that for-profits have received an astounding total of 26,738 ARRA grants from the federal government worth a total of $4.4 billion (this is the amount of the grants rather than the amount received). The largest amount is $241.2 million, which went to the for-profit University of Phoenix for Pell grants for students. Many of the other grants to for-profits fall into the same category. Since these are essentially pass-throughs, let’s focus on other types.

The second largest amount is $105.3 million to General Motors (which, thanks to its federal bailout, is almost a government entity). Its grant is part of the $2 billion program to subsidize the development of advanced batteries for electric cars.

Other energy grants on the list derive from the $3.4 billion included in ARRA for “fossil energy,” which is expected to be used mainly for industrial carbon capture projects. On the list of recipients is Hydrogen Energy California LLC (a joint venture of oil giant BP and mining giant Rio Tinto), which got a grant of $50 million for a hydrogen-powered electricity generating plant in California designed to capture most of its carbon emissions. The utility company Arizona Public Service got a $39 million grant for its project designed to test its algae-based carbon mitigation project with a coal-based gasification system.

Unfortunately, there are some significant discrepancies in names and amounts between Recovery.gov and USASpending. For example, on Recovery.gov, the DUNS number from the Hydrogen Energy California listing on USASpending shows up on a listing for which the recipient name is Carson Hydrogen Power LLC and the award amount is $308 million.

At the same time, Recovery.gov provides information on vendors that is not available on USASpending. For example, it shows that Progress Rail Services, a subsidiary of Caterpillar, got a grant of $68.6 million to rebuild a dozen locomotives.

The Recovery.gov data released on Friday also included a list of about 700 direct federal loans. The largest of these went to a for-profit: a $535 million loan from the Department of Energy to Solyndra Inc. to build a thin-film solar photovoltaic manufacturing facility. For some reason, it is missing from the USASpending database.

Some of the discrepancies between Recovery.gov and USASpending.gov are a matter of timing, but it would be a lot easier to reach definitive answers about the business share of ARRA grants and loans–and many other questions–if those discrepancies could be reduced. It would also be helpful if some of the features of USASpending, such as the ability to search by the recipient’s tax status, were made a part of the Recovery.gov data.

Reposted from the STAR Coalition website.

Key portions of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, especially the state fiscal stabilization fund, are designed to prevent job loss among teachers and other state and local government employees. But what about the rest?

The assumption seems to be that most of the job creation and retention will take place in the private sector. Yet one question that has received little attention since ARRA was signed by President Obama in February is whether the spending will contribute to the process of privatization and contracting-out of functions previously performed by public sector workers.

On October 15 the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board released the first batch of recipient reporting data covering some $15 billion in direct federal contracts. Although this is a small portion of overall ARRA spending (information relating to the much larger realm of federal grants to states and others will be released on October 30), it begins to shed some light on the privatization question.

My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have been examining the universe of around 9,000 recipient reports summarized in a national spreadsheet available on the Recovery.gov website. Many of the entries are unremarkable. They involve contracts for functions such as manufacturing and construction that have traditionally been concentrated in the private sector. It is not surprising that the federal government gave an ARRA contract to Chrysler to supply vehicles and one to Clark Construction to build a new headquarters for the Coast Guard.

Yet many of the other entries appear to be part of the contracting-out phenomenon. You can tell this, first, by looking at the names of the contractors: one firm called Federal Contracting Inc. leaves little doubt as to its orientation. There are others that have a reputation for being involved in high-profile outsourcing deals. An example is IAP Worldwide Services, a politically connected firm (former Vice President Dan Quayle is on its board of directors) that got a controversial contract to take over management of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

Or else you can look at the description of the projects. A company called 4W Solutions got a contract from NASA for “administrative activities, configuration management of documents, procurement-related analysis and support for report integration/administrative support for Cross-Agency Support construction contracts.”

To be a bit more systematic in our analysis, my colleagues and I decided to match the Recovery.gov list of contractors to the membership list of the Professional Services Council, the leading trade association for the federal outsourcing industry.

PSC’s members range from large and notorious contractors such as KBR (formerly the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root), Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) and CACI International (linked to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal) to small and obscure consulting firms. During its 27-year history, the association has sought to banish the use of the term “Beltway Bandit” to refer to federal contractors and has pushed for legislation that would maximize the amount of federal work that gets outsourced. It has also resisted the recent move toward insourcing.

We found that, of the 382 PSC members listed on the association’s website, about 50 are on the list of ARRA federal contract recipients (name variations make an exact count difficult). In all, these members and their affiliates have been awarded about 250 ARRA contracts with a total value of more than $800 million.

Some of these involve engineering and construction services, but others deal with functions that are more inherently governmental, such as a contract given to Deloitte Consulting to provide “program management oversight” for ARRA grants made by the Federal Aviation Administration.

In an economic crisis such as the current recession, all job creation is to be welcomed. But it would be a shame if some portion of Recovery Act money is being used in ways that do little more than shift work from the public sector to the private sector.

(Thanks to Tommy Cafcas, Caitlin Lacy and Leigh McIlvaine for their research help.)

Reposted from the Dirt Diggers Digest

Update: I should have mentioned that KBR and Xe Services are not among the recipients of ARRA contracts, but CACI has two.

Further update: We spent more time analyzing the spreadsheet and found many more ARRA contracts that can be attributed to PSC members through joint ventures, affiliates, etc.  Our tally is now about 470 contracts worth a total of about $3.5 billion. These include some huge contracts associated with clean-up projects at Department of Energy nuclear facilities.

Much has been said about the glitches in the Recovery Act recipient reporting that began last week with federal contractors. For there to be glitches there has to be reporting, but what about those recipients that did not fulfill their reporting requirements?

To check for possible scofflaws, I compared the list of top ARRA contractors on the federal government’s USA Spending website with the national spreadsheet of recipient reports on Recovery.gov. Limiting the comparison to those companies (totaling 56) with at least $25 million or more in ARRA contracts according to USA Spending, a few contractors appear to be completely missing from the Recovery.gov list.

These include:

• Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), which USA Spending says is receiving $1.3 billion in ARRA funds from the Energy Department. SRNS is owned by Fluor Daniel, Northrop Grumman and Honeywell, which do report on what appear to be separate smaller contracts.
• Ford Motor, which according to USA Spending got ARRA contracts totaling $91.6 million to supply motor vehicles. General Motors and Chrysler got similar contracts and submitted reports.
• Suulutaaq/Sloan Fencing JV, which according to USA Spending got a $53 million ARRA contract to supply fencing to the Army.

There are bound to be others in the rest of the long list of contractors.

To make things more confusing, there also appear to be ARRA contractors that are listed on Recovery.gov but missing from USA Spending. One example that surfaced is Innovative Technical Solutions Inc., which appears on the Recovery.gov spreadsheet with about a dozen contracts worth over $90 million, yet according to USA Spending it has received no ARRA contracts.

Apparently, we have a long way to go before we can even begin to accurately measure the impact of Recovery Act spending.

Reposted from the STAR Coalition blog.