Recovery Act Spending Near You

Thanks to our friends at ProPublica, county-by-county spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka “the Stimulus”) is now mapped in our Patchwork Nation project.

Some of these data come from Recovery.gov, the site that was touted to track every dollar spent under President Obama’s $787-billion stimulus package. As ProPublica found:

In spite of the Obama administration’s promise that you can use Recovery.gov to follow every stimulus dollar to your local community, the site doesn’t quite get there. We’ve cleaned out the cobwebs and added thousands of records the feds didn’t include — for example, recipients of small awards that aren’t required to report to Recovery.gov.

We’re digging into the data, and we’ll have more on what it means for the communities that we cover soon. In the meantime, check out how your county is doing and tell us what you see.