Tracking Missouri's Share of the Economic Stimulus Funds
In January of 2009, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (or ARRA), commonly known as the economic stimulus package. You can find the full text of the act here, but it lists its primary goals as the following:
- To preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery.
- To assist those most impacted by the recession.
- To provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health.
- To invest in transportation, environmental protection, and other infrastructure that will provide long-term economic benefits.
- To stabilize State and local government budgets, in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases.
Want to know if and how those goals are being met?
You can follow uses of stimulus monies on a national level and see what other states are doing with their shares at recovery.gov, the White House's public portal for all things ARRA.
To see what Missouri is up to financially, visit the Missouri Accountability Portal (or MAP), which gives Missourians the ability to review uses of public monies and information about enforcement of government programs.
In order to track how Missouri is spending its stimulus funds, go to MAP's Federal Stimulus Reporting site, which gives daily updates of exactly how much money has been received by which departments and agencies and exactly how they have spent it, including the names of individual entities and contractors. For example, you can see how much money has gone to cover 2008 Missouri tax refunds or how much has been used to extend unemployment benefits.
You can also review a report recently put out by The Missouri Budget Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organization that analyzes and disseminates information about the state's fiscal policy options on behalf of its citizens. The report details which Missouri departments and agencies are slated to receive stimulus funds and in what amounts.
If you have ideas for other ways the state could use the funds, visit transform.mo.gov, an interactive site created by Governor Jay Nixon, where Missourians can submit their own proposals for uses of federal stimulus funds.
Most of these sites are updated regularly as projects are added and plans move forward, so check back often for the newest facts and figures.
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