Oct 2, 2009

Jennifer Aubel

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Stimulus Reporting Starts, Everyone Scratches Their Heads

After months of working under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), it is finally time for contractors to begin the onerous process of reporting their progress at FederalReporting.gov. Contractors who have already visited this website were likely a little shell-shocked – after all, the reporting model alone is 22 pages long! So the question becomes, if contractors are bearing the additional time and expense burdens of all this data gathering, exactly what will we learn once all the inputs are analyzed? The Wall Street Journal enlisted Carl Bialik, a Yale-pedigreed mathematician and physicist, to find out and his opinion might surprise you…The fact that the WSJ assigned an Ivy Leaguer to the story should be your first clue that any answers would be ridiculously complex – but then again, if you’ve visited FederalReporting.gov, I didn’t have to tell you that! Bialik focused on the issue of job creation, which many consider to be the lynch-pin that held the $787B stimulus package together and a key measure of whether or not the program has been successful. The White House promised that the ARRA would create 3.5M new jobs, but the method they used to estimate that figure is completely different than the one states will be using when they report on job creation. Furthermore, these estimates were made based on an array of assumptions and comparisons against an imaginary parallel universe in which no stimulus existed. With the unemployment rate up 1.2% nationally since the start of the ARRA, the job creation information coming out of FederalReporting.gov might contain some fuzzy logic indeed! Statistics and politics – a potentially explosive combination!