Are you part of that special breed of Americans who want to bring the text of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with them everywhere they go? Are you part of that special breed of Americans who own iPhones? If you answered yes to both questions, take a moment to download the “Transparent Gov” app. It gives you several helpful breakdowns of stimulus spending and then in each case steers you directly into the relevant text of the bill, which you can explore for hours on end until your scrolling thumb cramps up and your eyes dry out.
For instance, if you tap the $300 billion “discretionary spending” bubble on your screen and then the “Interior and the Environment” line, you’ll quickly have about 80,000 words of text on your tiny little screen. Did you know the stimulus provisions $15 million for “Wildland Fire Management” at the BLM and that those funds will be available until September of next year? And that there’s another $485 million for “Wildland Fire Management” somewhere else, about 75 paragraphs down, right near a passage about how the Fish and Wildlife Service gets $110,000,000 for construction projects? And so on.
One potential problem is that when scrolling through an endless list of giant sums of money allocated to various programs one is only vaguely familiar with, it’s hard to resist the temptation to start speaking the numbers aloud in John McCain’s voice: “$1.5 million for Mormon cricket control, $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina, …” Not because you necessarily agree with McCain’s mockery and naysaying — but just because you heard him read so much of this stuff.
The top line breakdowns are useful references, but reading ARRA on your iPhone is about as masochistic as human activity gets — and read you’ll have to if you’re looking for something specific, since the app lacks a text search function. Endless scrolling is pretty much the extent of the user experience.
Sound good? Download your own “Transparent Gov” app for free here.
