I have not yet blogged about Recovery.org, the indispensable site set up by Onvia to keep track of how the Obama administration is spending your ’stimulus’ money. Recovery.org offers a number of ways to search - by state, county and program. They provide updates on how much stimulus funding is spent over time, and how may jobs the administration contends have been created (or saved). The site is doing quite well considering that it must rely on federal agencies for much of its information.

While Recover.org is a private site, the Obama administration has also set up its own site - Recovery.gov. It does not seem to be as up-to-date as the private site, but you can’t really expect a government agency to to move as efficiently or nimbly as the private sector. But while they may lag behind, they’re doing their best to ensure that Recovery.gov is running smoothly by… October:

During a recent field hearing in Brooklyn, N.Y., House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., said Recovery.gov is “not a useful database where citizens can go to see where their money is being spent.” Do you agree with that assessment? How long will it be before the site meets its goals?

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On April 22, the Associated Press published a short report about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has decided to stop paying for employee subscriptions to newspapers and magazines “to save money.”

Upon reading this, some may initially shake their heads in hearty agreement and congratulate Obama’s DHS for trying to save money. I, on the other hand, see this as a perfect example of a typical waste of the taxpayer’s money, though one finally rectified.

After all, what does this cancellation of subscriptions mean? It means government employees were getting FREE personal subscriptions to their favorite entertainment publications… well, free to themselves, anyway. We must realize that we the people have been saddled with the bill all along for who knows how many thousands of magazine and newspaper subscriptions for who knows how many years?

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Hat tip to Amanda Carpenter for the slogan. Let’s hear it for the Democratic Congress and President Obama, who have managed to spend nearly $1,200,000,000,000.00 before we even hit the Ides of March.

Robert Gibbs, Obama’s clean, articulate, incredibly skilled press secretary (/snark) said to day that this will help begin the process of getting America back onto a fiscally-responsible track. We haven’t yet heard from President Obama whether the 9,000+ earmarks in this bill qualify it as “a spending bill free of earmarks,” as he called the almost-entirely-pork “stimulus” bill on multiple occasions.

By the way, the bill passed the Senate by voice vote after 62-35 vote to defeat a GOP filibuster.

Repeat: “may.” Congress has an impressive talent at somehow managing to find new and exciting ways to spend your money.

Senate bogs down over $410 billion spending bill

WASHINGTON – The Senate, tied up in a fight over a huge omnibus appropriations bill, will have to pass a stopgap spending measure Friday in order to avoid a partial government shutdown.

[snip]

The huge, 1,132-page spending bill awards big increases to domestic programs and is stuffed with pet projects sought by lawmakers in both parties. The measure has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department except for Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

The measure was written mostly over the course of last year, before projected deficits quadrupled and Obama’s economic recovery bill left many of the same spending accounts swimming in cash.

And, to the embarrassment of Obama — who promised during last year’s campaign to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel ways — the bill contains 7,991 pet projects totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the GOP staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

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