Recovery.gov Missing Pieces

Recovery.gov on Friday will sport a few improvements and a lot more offerings, but perhaps one piece of valuable information will be missing: the demographics of the people receiving money.

The Web site, a clearinghouse of results from the $787 billion stimulus effort, will release all reports collected through Oct. 20 from aid recipients, adding to data about federal contract recipients that came out Oct. 15. However, none of the information on job creation, project status or funding amounts will tell users whether the recovery is benefiting segments of the population suffering the most -- reportedly Blacks, Hispanics and men. Federal reporting requirements do not cover such criteria.

That said, Friday's reports will include a massive amount of new data on grants and loans representing the bulk of the $275 billion that the federal government obligated between Feb. 17 and Sept. 30. The site also will showcase some enhancements, including the ability to save and repurpose data sets in more agile formats, including XML and XLS. The recipient statistics released earlier in October only were available for download in CSV.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board said on Thursday that some of the results from Oct. 15 will change on Friday, because recipients have been correcting errors. After midnight on Thursday, recipients are not allowed to make changes until next year, when the next reporting period starts Jan. 1.