OMB Moves to Fix ARRA Snafus

December 22, 2009 by Tommy Cafcas

Responding to criticisms such as those issued by the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery (CAR) and States for a Transparent and Accountable Recovery (STAR), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has revised its guidance that governs how Recovery Act grant and contract recipients report on jobs.

The revisions, consistent with recommendations from CAR and STAR as well as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), are intended to make job-counting less subjective and therefore less prone to errors. In the new guidance, OMB also signals that recipients that continually fail to report will be subject to penalties.

Because many recipients failed to accurately account for created or retained jobs in their October reports, OMB simplified its instructions. The new guidance says: count all work hours funded by Recovery Act dollars, divide those hours by a full-time work schedule for the quarter, and report that number. And don’t try to figure out cumulative jobs.

Although the guidance is likely to correct the most egregious reporting problems on the number of Recovery Act jobs, it fails to address CAR and STAR concerns about job quality and equity issues. Specifically, the coalitions remain on record seeking revisions in the guidance to include:

  • The wages of the jobs and whether they include access to benefits like healthcare.
  • The race, gender and nine-digit residential ZIP code of all workers performing those hours of Recovery Act-funded jobs. This will help determine if those most in need of economic stimulus are receiving their fair share.

The revised guidance also states that Federal agencies can terminate awards and/or revoke a recipient’s ability to receive future funds if a recipient or sub-recipient:

The guidance also warns that failing to submit a report or persistently filing late or negligently shall be treated as a non-compliant recipient subject to Federal action. There were more than 4,000 such cases in the first round alone. Moreover, it states, if a recipient or sub-recipient intentionally reports false information, Federal prosecutors may bring civil and/or criminal proceedings as enabled by ARRA or existing Federal procurement rules.

With clarified reporting rules, the blame for any new egregious errors will clearly rest with recipients, including state governments, not the feds. Effective February 2, corrections can be made continuously, not quarterly, at FederalReporting.gov.

While OMB should be congratulated for clarifying job reporting guidelines, the failure to include metrics on job quality and equity issues remains troubling.

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The Dog Ate My ARRA Reporting

December 16, 2009 by Phil Mattera

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has just published a list of more than 4,000 prime recipients of ARRA contracts and grants that failed to comply with the first round of reporting requirements, including data on job creation and retention.

If nothing else, the document shows the difficulty of trying to get thousands of companies, non-profit organizations and state/local government agencies to follow instructions and meet a single deadline. Since the list also includes the apparent reason for each case of non-compliance, it also provides an impressive collection of excuses for screwing up.

Here’s a selection of the self-justifications offered by these recipients of federal largesse:


The rules were to blame

A company called EnGenius said its failure to report was “due to late breaking guidance” (even though the final rules were published well before the filing deadline).

Cherry Central Cooperative and other Agriculture Department recipients complained “there was confusion about the reporting requirements vs. the exemptions that are provided for reporting salary information for top executives.” (The salary requirement applied only to very large federal contractors.)


The reporting system was flawed

All American Brothers Co. LLC: “Claimed they did not receive all the correct coding information to allow for input into stimulus template & drop down menu does not contain necessary information needed for report.” (Somehow thousands of others managed to make it work.)


The Internet was broken

CBS Surveying and Mapping and others said they did submit the data but it somehow did not get recorded by FederalReporting.gov.  (Didn’t they notice their data was missing from Recovery.gov?)

D.E.L. Disaster Recovery Enterprise LLC: “The FederalReporting.gov website was down and the recipient could not report and could not get help.” (Sounds like they need their own disaster recovery help.)

Advanced Integration Group Inc.: “Website down at time of reporting.” (And they never bothered to try again?)


I forgot to finish

Speaking of the Ruffed Grouse Society, USDA said: “Draft report submitted. Recipient was not aware they had not finalized the report.“ (The organization, whose website says it is “dedicated to hunting and conservation of young forest species,” was apparently too eager to get back to the woods.)

Interactive Elements Inc.: “Contractor inadvertently did not hit ‘submit’ to finalize its draft report in the federal reporting system.” (Yes, that interactive stuff is complicated.)


I forgot to start

Green Building Construction & Electric, Inc.: “Contractor said he simply forgot to do the report, even though contracting called and reminded him. “


Reporting requirement? What reporting requirement?

Eureka Development, LLC: “Were not aware of the ARRA reporting requirements.” (This was their non-eureka moment.)


I heard that the assignment was cancelled

Chester Bross Construction Company: “Misinformed that no reporting was required – will report 1/10. “ (I swear that’s what I heard.)


I was confused

Dell Federal Systems: “Lack of understanding of the reporting requirement and associated guidance.”

State Military Department of Indiana: “Recipient lacked understanding of Recovery Act reporting requirements.”


I was on vacation

Siku Construction, LLC: “The responsible administrator was on vacation and did not receive the e-mails and phone messages left by the awarding office.”


I was really sick

City of Pauls Valley: “Reporter Contracted H1N1, no backup.”


I’m Canadian

Nanometrics Inc.: “Contractor tried to submit report, but system won’t recognize Canadian institutions. “


There was this big wave…

American Samoa Criminal Justice Planning Agency: “Grantee was given waiver due to tsunami.”


Reporting—I Don’t Need to Do Any Stinking Reporting!

Eyak Technology Limited Liability Company: “Recipient has chosen not to report.” (This from a firm that got an award from the Department of Homeland Security.)


You caught me

Johnson Controls Inc. and numerous other contractors for the Department of Veterans Affairs: “No valid reason discerned.” (Busted.)

Thanks to Tommy Cafcas for research help.

(reposted from the STAR Coalition website)

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NYC Approves Recovery Zone Bonds for Project that Won’t Aid Recovery

December 16, 2009 by Allison Lirish Dean

The New York City Capital Resource Corporation (CRC) is blurring job numbers on stimulus bond projects again. On December 15, 2009 the CRC’s board voted to issue $19.8 million in tax-free Recovery Zone bonds on behalf of Arthur Management Corp. to finance the construction of a parking facility in the Bronx. The facility will serve St. Barnabas Hospital, which created Arthur Management in order to be eligible for the financing.

CRC staff insisted the new facility will create six permanent jobs. What they didn’t mention was that 28 jobs will be displaced when the old facility is torn down because the new one will rely heavily on automation, allegedly saving the hospital $500,000 a year. Good Jobs New York staff and organizers from the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR) who testified against the deal questioned the logic of using stimulus bonds intended to “contribute economically to the neighborhoods in which projects are located,” as the city’s own criteria state, for a project that could result in a net loss of 22 jobs.

Even the argument that saving a hospital some money aids recovery doesn’t hold up in light of the millions in bonuses St. Barnabas, despite being in financial straits, recently gave to its top executives. The hospital has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars–and plans to spend more–attempting to overturn a 1999 National Labor Relations Board decision that cleared the way for resident physicians to legally unionize. In the meantime, the NLRB was obligated to impound secret ballots generated when staff voted earlier this year on whether to unionize, an indication that St. Barnabas’s relationships with unions and its employees is less than the standard New Yorkers should expect from companies seeking public subsidies.

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A Clawback Enforcement Trend?

December 15, 2009 by Tommy Cafcas

North Carolina officials, outraged at Dell over its closure of a heavily subsidized assembly plant, are doing everything they can to recoup subsidies given to the company. Governor Purdue, a fierce proponent of incentives to attract jobs, stated “that every red cent of incentives money had to come back to the people of North Carolina.” State and local officials have enforced clawback provisions from various grant programs recapturing $28 million, but Dell says it’s not obligated to pay back up to $6 million in tax credits given between 2005 and 2007. The state openly disagrees with Dell’s interpretation.

Secretary of Revenue Kenneth Lay stated in an interview that Dell no longer meets agreement benchmarks and is therefore ineligible for past and future tax credit subsidies. Dell’s position is that by creating the number of jobs required by past benchmarks, it is entitled to keep past tax credits awarded, even if by closing the factory it becomes ineligible for that same subsidy going forward. The law, hastily written and passed in 2004 under pressure from Dell, is unclear about who is correct.

Ambiguous legislative and contractual clawback language is also an issue in Missouri. Two years ago, Pfizer broke ground on a heavily subsidized St. Louis facility. Now, Pfizer has announced it is closing the lab, and officials appear unwilling to let Pfizer walk away from the deal with taxpayer subsidies in hand. Pfizer was offered a $7 million, 10-year tax abatement as well as sales tax exemptions on construction materials and training cash grants for creating 1,000 jobs. State and local officials are reviewing the economic development contract signed with Pfizer, Inc. to determine if a clawback of subsidies is possible.

Although no national statistics are available, clawback enforcement appears to be an increasing trend. Between 2004 and 2009, the Texas Enterprise Fund has clawed back at least $1.3 million from 12 projects. In 2008, the State of Illinois found 11 projects to be in violation of agreement terms and began recapture efforts on all of them.

Even site location consultants are recognizing that clawbacks are here to stay. Most now advise clients to seek easily obtainable benchmarks in negotiations instead of refusing clawbacks outright. “Even when a company is presented with seemingly inflexible documents, it may have some room to negotiate related points,” said site location consultant Tracey Hyatt Bosman. Many deals now contain clawbacks but lack strong standards. Clawback agreements are much less useful if they lack clear, robust benchmarks.

As clawbacks become the norm in development agreements, officials should take care to ensure that incentive standards are not watered-down or negotiated out altogether.

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Misbehaving Contractors are Recovery Act Winners

November 13, 2009 by Phil Mattera

ARRA logoThe federal government has awarded about $17 billion in direct contracts under the various provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Given the Administration’s commitment to accountability, one hopes that the contractors were chosen with the utmost care and that any companies with serious blemishes on their record were excluded.

If the timing had been a bit different, such a review could have been accomplished much more easily. The General Services Administration is in the process of implementing legislation passed by Congress last year that mandates the creation of a database on the integrity and performance record of federal contractors and grantees. In September GSA published a notice in the Federal Register about its plans for what is being called the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System, or FAPIIS. The comment period on the plan ended earlier this month. Perhaps the system will be operational before ARRA reaches the end of its two-year life.

Unfortunately, the public will never know the details of how FAPIIS is used to vet contractors for ARRA or any other program. The reason is that Congress caved in to pressure from the contractor community and prohibited public disclosure of the database, which will be available only to federal agencies for internal use.

Fortunately, the public still has access to the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which was created and is maintained by the non-profit Project On Government Oversight (POGO). It served as the inspiration for FAPIIS, though POGO and other watchdog groups pushed for a public version of the federal database. The FCMD, which covers the 100 largest federal contractors, documents more than 700 cases of misconduct since 1995 that resulted in more than $26 billion in fines and penalties. It covers a wider range of misconduct than will FAPIIS.

Apparently, most federal agencies did not pay close attention to the FCMD in awarding their ARRA contracts. An examination of the national Recovery Act contractor spreadsheet shows that many of those companies appear in POGO’s database as having been involved in cases of misconduct. They account for more than $6 billion in Recovery Act contract awards.

There are 12 contractors with more than one instance of misconduct and ARRA contracts of at least $150 million.* Here they are (listed by volume of ARRA contracts):

  • CH2M ($1.8 billion in ARRA contracts; 6 instances of misconduct with penalties of $2.8 million)
  • URS ($737 million in contracts; 4 instances and $2.4 million in penalties)
  • Northrop Grumman ($596 million in contracts; 29 instances and $821 million in penalties)
  • Battelle Memorial Institute ($522 million in contracts; 7 instances and $1.3 million in penalties)
  • Honeywell International ($472 million in contracts; 31 instances and $641 million in penalties)
  • Fluor ($469 million in contracts; 23 instances and $198 million in penalties)
  • SAIC ($312 million in contracts; 10 instances and $14 million in penalties)
  • Bechtel ($270 million in contracts; 15 instances and $359 million in penalties)
  • University of California ($270 million in contracts; 25 instances and $67 million in penalties)
  • Lockheed Martin ($180 million in contracts; 50 instances and $577 million in penalties)
  • University of Chicago ($163 million in contracts; 4 instances and $22 million in penalties)
  • Jacobs Engineering ($161 million in contracts; 2 instances and $37 million in penalties)

When the nation’s largest contractors have track records such as these, it is not surprising that Congress chose to keep its misconduct database a secret.

* In the case of joint ventures, the amount of the contract award is divided equally among the companies or institutions involved.

Reposted from the Dirt Diggers Digest.

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Green Jobs: Newest Bait for Tax Scams?

November 9, 2009 by Greg LeRoy

Thomas Friedman, author of Hot, Flat and Crowded, a book that touts green jobs, has argued that a “clean energy bubble” would be a good thing.

Wall Street’s casino has preempted that for now, but there is disturbing new evidence from Oregon this week that green jobs have become the hot new bait for corporate tax scams wrapped in the sheep’s clothing of “economic development incentives.”

“State lowballed cost of green tax breaks,” blared The Oregonian last weekend, reporting that the state’s Business Energy Tax Credit (BETC, known as “Betsy”) is costing the state 40 times what legislators were told when Gov. Kulongoski urged that BETC’s cap per project be drastically increased.

“State officials deliberately underestimated the cost,” the paper reported. An analyst with the state’s Department of Energy said he was told to “keep [the cost projection] conservative.” Instead of $4.1 million, costs are now projected at $167 for this two-year budget and $243 million for the next.

BETC is a lavish investment credit worth 50 percent of the cost of building a renewable energy facility, up to $10 million, and $20 million for a solar project.

The credits are salable, with the state setting the prices and finding “pass-through partners.” One company, Solar World, sold $11 million worth of credits to Wal-Mart for $7.37 million, giving Wal-Mart a 49 percent rate of return over five years.

State Senator Ginny Burdick tried to curtail the credits, but Gov. Kulongoski vetoed her bill. “This very, very worthy program has become one of the most blatant corporate welfare programs I’ve ever seen,” she said.

“What I find disturbing,” Chuck Sheketoff at the Oregon Center for Public Policy told The Oregonian, “is that very profitable companies and wealthy individuals with tax liabilities are getting a guaranteed return on investment while the typical Oregonian sees his savings depleted.” He recommends abolishing the tax credits and instead writing checks (to make the spending more transparent and accountable) or turning the credits into a state-chartered mutual fund available to all Oregon taxpayers.

Here’s another suggestion I’ve been making for the past two years. Instead of larding on new tax breaks and putting “a lot of eggs in a few corporate baskets” (even wind or solar baskets), let’s attach “green strings” to all of our major economic development subsidies.

For example: cities in Oregon and almost every other state routinely grant property tax abatements to owners of office buildings, warehouses and factories – in the name of economic development.

Yet very few cities say, as a quid pro quo, that new or existing buildings must conform to green building standards. News reports indicate that retrofitting to the U.S. Green Building Council’s so-called “LEED-EB” standard (that’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-Existing Building) pays for itself in just one to three years. Adobe’s headquarters retrofit paid for itself in 10 months, and Harvard University’s revolving loan fund for retrofits returned an eye-popping 35 percent!

Apply this principle to office buildings, factories, hospitals and warehouses and we can create oodles of skilled construction jobs and drive demand for all kinds of green mechanical and building materials.

While Oregon cleans up BETC’s mess, I say: let’s use the dormant power of existing tax breaks to create green jobs, get companies to act in their own self-interest, and reduce global warming air pollution.

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Stimulus Lobbying Pays Off for Major Contractors

November 6, 2009 by Phil Mattera

K streetLast 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.

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The Case of the Missing ARRA Jobs

November 3, 2009 by Phil Mattera

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.

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ARRA Executive Compensation Data No Longer Anonymous

November 3, 2009 by Phil Mattera

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.

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Recovery Act Grants to Business and Some Issues in ARRA Recipient Reporting

November 2, 2009 by Phil Mattera

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.

Posted in Disclosure, Economic Recovery | 1 Comment »

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