A month after President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill into law, there is no central online portal where Americans can go to find out what the federal government and the 50 states plan to do.
The Obama administration did set up Recovery.gov, touting the program’s accountability and transparency. But information on the site is incomplete — it links to the individual stimulus Web sites of only about two dozen federal agencies, and its map linking to omnibus state sites includes only slightly more than half of the sites compiled in a review by msnbc.com.
Msnbc.com has put together two tools. The first is a state-by-state map with links to official state stimulus sites and tracking by the nonprofit group Stimulus Watch. The second is a list of 80 federal agencies and departments that maintain stimulus sites.
A dedicated link to each collection can be found below it.
Msnbc.com queried all 50 states for home pages or database portals devoted specifically to the stimulus plan. The results are presented in the following state-by-state map, which links to each state’s official stimulus site, if it has one, or to the site maintained by the highest-ranking government office. The map also also includes a link tracking each state’s stimulus projects as compiled by Stimulus Watch, a nonprofit group organized by scholars at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
To compile the box of federal links, msnbc.com repeated the process for major programs and agencies in all 15 Cabinet departments. “Promo” pages are not included — only those agencies offering significant information or user interactivity are presented.