I’m sympathetic to Issa’s central complaint; I’ve spent a fair amount of time browsing the stimulus data in recent weeks, and it’s clearly full of errors. There are multi-million dollar projects that have allegedly created zero jobs, and there are individual employers who report more than half their workforce was “saved” by stimulus spending. Both claims are hard to believe.

Devaney sent a response to Issa today, and his letter has attracted a bit of media attention. Reporters are focusing on the idea that Devaney is backing away from the quality of the Recovery.gov data. But he never made any promises about the quality of that data; in fact, as he told me when I interviewed him earlier this year, it isn’t his job to certify the data. Recovery.gov is a repository for data from other entities. The data in question — the jobs data — comes from the recipients of stimulus cash: State and local governments, private companies, individuals. If there are problems with the data, therefore, the problems are with the recipients, not with the board.

In other words: This is a non-story. There are problems with the stimulus data, and that is a story, but the locus of those problems isn’t the RAT board. It’s the people reporting the data.

Here is how government performed, according to the INPUT report card:

Speed of Spending: B+ (Previous Grade: B+)
Reviewer’s Comments: “The federal government has continued to show unusual adeptness in dispensing a tremendous amount of money very quickly…At its current spending pace, the federal government will achieve 87 percent of the goal set by the president of having $350 billion spent by Sept. 30, 2010”

Contracting Effectiveness: B (Previous Grade: C-)
Reviewer’s Comments: “Federal agencies significantly improved in the use of fixed-price contracts and the percentage of contract awards made to small businesses…The federal government has awarded 48 percent of reported contract obligations using fixed-price contracts, a 30 percent increase over INPUT’s initial report card.”

Transparency and Reporting: C- (Previous Grade: D)
Reviewer’s Comments: “Each new report has been late…and the data quality of each new report has been poor upon release. However, overtime the quality and completeness of reports have improved. INPUT expects this will continue to be the case with the new recipient reports…A major area of disappointment continues to be the lack of transparency surrounding grant applications for many of the grant programs funded by the Recovery Act.”

Jobs Created: Incomplete (Previous Grade: Incomplete)
Reviewer’s Comments: “While the efforts to count jobs created or saved is a laudable goal, INPUT believes that accurate reporting of job creation is ultimately unknowable because of the number of recipients reporting, the complexity of the reports and the vagueness in the definition of a saved job.”

That $533,000 figure comes from dividing the total amount of money spent so far on contracts, $16 billion, by the number of jobs they created, 30,000. $533,000 is more than 10 times the median national income — so if it takes that much money to create a job, the stimulus bill must be wildly inefficient, right?

Wrong. The $533,000-per-job figure is wildly misleading, for two reasons.

The Recovery.gov data is full of errors. This is another problem, of course; the stimulus bill’s vaunted transparency isn’t very useful if the government is releasing bad data.

But this was the first batch of recipient reporting data, and everyone — including the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the stimulus — expected problems.

I’m looking around the DC area, for example, and I see dozens of contracts (some for $1 million or more) that don’t include any job creation numbers. It’s not that they say “zero jobs created” — which some contracts do. The contractors evidently didn’t provide any figures at all.

As data quality improves, which the RAT board promises it will, I suspect you’ll see the jobs numbers increase markedly.

Direct vs. indirect jobs. The data also only captures direct job creation; recipients don’t report indirect effects.

What’s the difference? If HUD gives you a million-dollar contract and you hire 20 construction workers, you’ve directly created 20 jobs. Those 20 contractors then turn around and spend some of their salary, stimulating the economy. Maybe they take their kids out to dinner; maybe they buy a new car. In any event, their spending creates indirect jobs.

The Recovery.gov data doesn’t capture those indirect jobs. The Obama administration’s economic team estimates, though, that each direct job creates one indirect job — and even if they’re overstating the case, the stimulus bill will create far more jobs than reported on Recovery.gov.

A little background for those of you who don’t follow the stimulus bill quite as obsessively as we do:

Recovery.gov already had agency reporting data, which comes directly from the agencies that awarded the money. But the recipients of that money are also required to report, on a quarterly basis, on each contract, grant or loan they receive. The first round of reporting ended on Oct. 10, and the RAT board has staretd posting that data online.

This data — in theory — is more detailed than the agency-reported data; it also enumerates the number of jobs created or saved by each project.

One big caveat: This first round of data only covers contracts awarded using stimulus money, not grants or loans. Contracts represent roughly $16 billion in spending, or less than 10 percent of the total stimulus money awarded to date. The grant/loan data should be available by Oct. 30.

So be careful about jumping to any conclusions based on this data — it’s a small fraction of the total stimulus spending.

Overall it’s a big improvement over the previous Recovery.gov site. The new site includes a mapping feature that allows you to view spending data by state, county, and congressional district; it also contains exponentially more spending data than the previous site.

There are still some glaring omissions: You can’t enter the name of a contractor and view all contracts awarded to that company, for example. Smartronix says that feature (and others) will be added in future releases.

The biggest omission, of course, is “recipient data” — spending data reported by the recipients of federal grants and contracts. Recipients aren’t required to start reporting until Oct. 1; Smartronix says the data will go live in mid-to-late October.

But it looks like those agencies aren’t the only ones working to ensure small businesses benefit from stimulus spending. The Transportation Department announced today that it has dedicated $20 million in Recovery Act funds to create a “Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Bonding Assistance Program.”

The program, which is run by the department’s Office of Small Disadvantaged Business Utilization, allows small and disadvantaged businesses to apply for reimbursements for the bonding premiums and fees they pay when competing for transportation infrastructure projects, according to a department news release.

The program will help small and disadvantaged businesses better compete for Recovery Act-funded transportation projects by helping them get access to the money they need to participate in government contracting.

“These Recovery dollars will help level the playing field so these companies have the tools and resources they need to compete,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in the news release.

The announcements come just as SBA reported that agencies missed their 23 percent small business spending goal for the third year running. Last year, agencies spent approximately $94 billion, or 21.5 percent, of their contracting dollars through small businesses. The Obama administration said it hoped to reach those goals through improved education and outreach to small businesses and federal agencies.

For those readers who want to know when and where SBA and Commerce are holding or participating in events, I’m told SBA is compiling the list and will post it on the SBA Web site soon.

Anyway, some reporters and politicians have questioned whether spending $20 million on pork helps the economy. So just to repeat a point we made in February: All spending is stimulative. The government could buy $787 billion worth of ham, or pay laborers $787 billion to dig holes and fill them back up again, and it would stimulate the economy — because that $787 billion is still being spent.

It wouldn’t be the best use of the money, of course, but it would be stimulative spending nonetheless.

The first part of the contract is worth about $9.5 million through January; other options, which extend through January 2014, are worth another $8.5 million or so.

Redesigning the recovery site is a big undertaking; it needs to be online by mid-October, when state and local governments start reporting their stimulus spending data. You’ll find more details about that in my interview with Earl Devaney from last week; we’ll also have a story about the redesign in Monday’s paper.

Already $112 billion in funds have been spent and over 150,000 jobs created, according to the White House.

The White House is currently working on a roadmap for the next 100 days and in October plans to post detailed spending information on Recovery.gov, according to the White House blog.

Options being considered include thin solar films that are imbedded into roofs, additional insulation to repel heat, and vegetative roofs such as a 5,000-square-foot garden patch atop the seven-story Interior Department headquarters building in Washington.

Other agencies have outfitted their roofs with vegetation, recognizing both the environmental and economic benefits. Our videographer, Colin Kelly, recently toured two examples outside the nation’s capital in Suitland, Md. Follow the links for video of green roofs at the Census Bureau headquarters and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility.