If you're wondering where your stimulus money is going in Texas, this post might tell you. Maybe.

The federal government belched out a whole bunch of data today that's supposed to tell us all where the stimulus money is being spent. Problem is, it's 10 p.m. on the day the information was released, and already people are saying the data is messed up or unintelligible.

The information is being published on Recovery.gov, where you can download information for use in a spreadsheet program -- but apparently what's on Recovery.gov is pretty much a word-for-word recitation of the information sent in to Recovery.gov by the various federal agencies involved. That's pretty much a recipe for mass confusion.

With that caveat in mind, it looks to me like the company or firm getting the largest chunk of change in stimulus bucks in Texas is the Charles N. White Construction Co., which is making $102 million from the Public Buildings Service.

What is this company doing with that money? Good question. The spreadsheet doesn't seem to know. Where it's supposed to describe the project, the Charles N. White entry says, "A small portion of work has begun; project trailers have been mobilized and a small amount of site work has begun." Huh?

Ditto for Weston Solutions Inc., which is doing $61.8 million in stimulus stuff for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Here's what it says under "project description": "Not Started." Gee, thanks, Recovery.Gov guys. That's about as transparent as mud.

Again, with the caveat that what I'm giving you might be screwed up, I did crunch the numbers for the prime contract recipients file for Texas, and I've embedded it into a spreadsheet below this post.

Recovery.Gov is a good idea, but if the information on it is going to be useful to anyone, somebody's got to get all these agencies on the same page about what information they turn in. There's no point in the government sinking money into building a Web site that just makes its users' eyes cross and their heads hurt.

Anyhow, if you've got a hankering to see it all, click this link to download the a compressed .zip folder of all the Texas stimulus files from Recovery.gov (these are comma-delimited files, with a .csv extension).



[ad#ad1forposts]