Stimulus Snapshots Show Slowly Developing Picture

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-the stimulus legislation that President Obama signed in February-contained 61 separate programs with money for construction, by AGC's count, with a wide range of administering agencies, formulas and rules. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of variation in how quickly the agencies have awarded the money. Here are some glimpses I saw in a week of presentations in early October. At AGC's National and Chapter Leadership Conference, an official of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said his agency had awarded 48 percent of its stimulus funds for operations, maintenance and construction by September 30, the end of the federal fiscal year, exceeding its goal of awarding 45 percent. That was rapid progress compared to statements made by other Corps officials as recently as July, indicating that they were behind their internal goals. He said the Corps was hiring, reassigning and recalling personnel with contracting experience in order to get the funds flowing. On the same panel, a senior official from the General Services Administration said his agency had awarded only $1.1 billion of the $5.55 billion available for renovating federal courthouses and office buildings. But GSA expects to spend between $3 billion and $4 billion in the current fiscal year. Illustrating the complexity and relatively slow timetable of some of the funding applications, an official from the University of Arkansas Medical System said his institution had recently completed two applications for stimulus funds to be awarded by the National Institutes of Health. The applications totaled 160 and 360 pages, respectively, and he didn't expect a decision until next summer. From the contractors' side of the room, results also vary. A minority of attendees at the meeting and another national meeting I addressed that week said they had won stimulus projects. The percentage was higher than in other groups I've queried lately. But in meetings of Orlando-area members of the AGC of Greater Florida and AGC's Kansas City Chapter, as well as the D.C. office of a large national architecture firm, nobody had won any stimulus funds. The month before, a contractor in Kentucky told me he had won a U.S. Forest Service stimulus project but the contracting officer said he was so busy awarding other projects he couldn't hold a preconstruction conference to let the contractor get started for six or eight weeks. State departments of transportation have generally done well at turning their stimulus allocations for highways into contracts. In some cases, awards have come in far enough below estimates that states have held additional bid-lettings. But the underlying federal-aid highway program remains in limbo. Addressing the annual meeting of the National Association for Business Economics, Lawrence Summers, Chairman of the President's National Economic Council, said the administration favors more infrastructure spending. As he left, I asked him if that meant they would support an increase in the Highway Trust Fund sooner than the 18-month delay they have sought so far. He only replied, "What taxes do you want to raise?" At the same meeting, I chaired a panel featuring the presidents of two leading economic modeling and forecasting firms, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody's Economy.com. Both said the stimulus had worked as they had expected and that they project much bigger impacts on the economy in the next several quarters. In sum, stimulus funds are appearing like a very slowly developing Polaroid, with details showing up at different times in different parts of the picture-not an instant digital photo showing lots of workers wielding shovels immediately.