The Uncertain Wait for All of Those Stimulus Dollars

Having doled out $787 billion for a massive stimulus package, taxpayers want to know when the money will come to their neighborhoods. Unfortunately, that's not a simple question to answer.

Some forms of stimulus cash have already hit many communities. Agencies, states, and municipalities are announcing a steady stream of spending, from one-time payments of $250 to veterans to the disbursement of $338 million in grants to 1,128 healthcare centers.

For the most part, though, officials are still scrambling to determine the precise allocations. And even when projects have been picked, it's often difficult to know when, exactly, any shovels will actually hit dirt. "In general, folks don't really understand where the money's going, how it's being put into the pipeline," says Charlie Newsome, vice president of Riley Contracting, a North Carolina construction firm that is hoping to win stimulus-related contracts.

That doesn't mean the stimulus timeline is a complete mystery. Starting this month, employees should see paycheck bumps from the "Making Work Pay" tax cut. By summer's end, most ready-to-go infrastructure projects should be underway, with $27.5 billion set aside for highways and bridges and $8.4 billion for transit. Boons for students will really begin to hit after July, when college scholars will be able to claim $17.3 billion in Pell grants and work-study funds for the 2009-10 year. The $22.2 billion in Title I and IDEA grants will be heading to schools by October. Other projects will take longer. Plans are still being developed for an $8 billion high-speed rail system and the $11 billion "smart" energy grid. And $17 billion in incentive payments for hospitals to modernize their health records won't start going out until 2011, after the government has established technological standards.

Why is it so hard to get more details about how and when stimulus money will be spent? First, it's still early. While the Obama administration wants to get the money out as quickly as possible, officials want to spend wisely, which means taking time for assessments. By design, the stimulus package also includes longer-term provisions because focusing solely on shovel-ready projects could bring a temporary bump, followed by a quick plunge. But the schedule is complicated by other factors, including the wide variety of funding mechanisms used in the stimulus bill, the historic lack of coordination between federal agencies and states, and the bill's sheer scale.

Making that cacophony of information accessible to the public is a challenge. That's the purpose of the federal government's website Recovery.gov, but it's still a work in progress. The site doesn't aggregate specific projects. Its weekly reports have been criticized by Sen. Claire McCaskill as not "useful to most people"—something that Earl Devaney, the stimulus's top watchdog, didn't deny. "Every morning, Senator, I get up and I go to Recovery.gov first thing in the morning. And I share your concern. I share your concern," he told her at a congressional hearing last week.

The public clearly is eager to follow the stimulus dollars; Devaney said last month that the website is getting 4,000 hits per second. The question now is whether the government can catch up to the demand for information.

• Read " Obama's Stimulus Dilemma: Spending Quickly Without Waste."
• Read more news on the stimulus.