The American Reinvestment and Recovery Plan – By the Numbers

President Obama's American Reinvestment and Recovery Plan , launched after much backroom bargaining and a huge public fanfare, has the appearance of a well-structured performance plan. Its 6 socially focused themes:

• Spurring a Clean Energy Economy


• Lowering Health Care Costs and Ensuring Broader Health Care Coverage


• Preparing Our Children for the 21st Century Economy


• Rebuilding America’s Roads and Bridges and Investing in 21st Century Infrastructure


• Supporting America’s Working Families


• Changing the Way Washington Does Business

have 5 main goals:

• Double renewable energy generating capacity over three years – enough to power 6 million American homes.


• Undertake the largest weatherization program in history, modernizing 75% of federal buildings and two million homes.


• Computerize every American’s health record in five years, reducing medical errors and saving billions of dollars in health care costs.


• Launch the most ambitious school modernization program on record, sufficient to upgrade 10,000 schools and improve learning environments for approximately 5 million children.


• Enact the largest investment increase in our nation’s roads, bridges and mass transit systems since the creation of the national highway system in the 1950s.

At the next level he has some apparently hard performance measures (or benchmarks as he calls them). They are the specific outcomes he is hoping for:

Spurring a Clean Energy Economy

• Double renewable energy generating capacity over three years – enough to power 6 million American homes
• More than 3,000 miles of new or modernized transmission lines and 40 million “Smart Meters” in American homes
• Weatherizing at least two million homes to save low-income families on average $350 per year
• Modernizing more than 75% of federal building space, saving taxpayers $2 billion per year in lower federal energy bills
• Clean Energy Finance Initiative to leverage $100 billion in private sector clean energy investments over three years.

Lowering Health Care Costs and Ensuring Broader Health Care Coverage

• Accelerating adoption of health IT systems to modernize the health care system, save billions of dollars, reduce medical errors and improve quality
• Protecting health care coverage for 20 million Americans during this recession
• Providing health care coverage for nearly 8.5 million Americans
• Oensures that no American will lack immunizations due to costs - more than 156 million
  Americans.

Preparing our Children for the 21st Century Economy

• Renovate and modernize10,000 schools - will improve learning environments for about 5 million students
• Increasing college affordability for 7 million students
• One-fifth of high school seniors who receive no tax credit under the current system will receive a tax cut to make college affordable for the first time
• Tripling the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships in science, to help spur the next generation of home grown scientific innovation
• Provide an additional 350,000 children access to quality pre-k services, but will create at least 15,000 new teaching and teaching assistant jobs, as well as new supervisory and support positions
• Preventing teacher layoffs and education cuts in every state.

Rebuilding America’s Roads and Bridges and Investing in 21st Century Infrastructure

• Repair and modernize thousands of miles of roadways in the U.S. and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans
• Enhancing the security of 90 major ports
• Funding to support 1,300 new wastewater projects, 380 new drinking water projects and construction of 1000 rural water and sewer systems, ensuring that 1.5 million people have new or improved service
• Making much-needed repairs to military housing units and accelerating modernization of VA medical facilities

Supporting America’s Working Families

• Providing a $1,000 Making Work Pay tax cut for 95% of workers and their families
• Cutting taxes for more than 16 million children
• Increasing food stamp benefits for over 30 million Americans who currently receive food stamp benefits
• Providing 7.5 million blind, disabled and aged Americans an immediate $450
• Extending and expanding unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.

Changing the Way Washington Does Business

• No earmarks for any proposal in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan
• When the plan is enacted, all citizens will have the ability to see how recovery funds are spent on a new website, http://www.recovery.gov/
• Strict oversight with independent review
• New public-private partnerships to support innovation
• Fundamentally reform the nation’s unemployment insurance system to more efficiently address the challenges and realities of the 21st century workforce.

The hard question is:

Will President Obama actually know if he achieves his goals?

Some of the outcomes are quite specific, particularly when he is talking about physical activities. However the social change outcome targets are vague and ill-defined. These offer the opportunity for bureaucratic capture of the funding, minimising the desired impacts, and constraining the flow of money which is the real purpose of this plan.

Will it work?

More importantly, will the USA be in a better position as a result? The rest of the world depends on it.

Smart investment requires more data for Evaluation and decision-making

"Lean times = Lean research. But no one can do less research. We have to do more, with less, and the key tools to help us deal with this will be around data and analytics. More data will be needed for evaluation and decision-making at every level of the academic institution."

Jay Katzen of Elsevier hit the nail on the head yesterday:

LiveSerials: Data Analysis Will Drive Decision-Making in Research – Jay Katzen, Elsevier

Pointing out that while world leaders such as Gordon Brown (innovation is the way out of the economic crisis) are making grand statements about continuing to invest in R&D he notes the leaner times are here: hiring freezes at most universities in the USA (e.g. Harvard); there is a drop in funding levels (Stanford is basing their budget on a 5% decrease); and private institutions such as the Wellcome Trust plan to decrease their endowments.

And the lean future has already hit UK Universitites. The UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 analysis reveals there are fourteen universities in the UK getting less investment than the previous year, and forty institutions receiving funding that is below inflation. So there are more than fifty UK universities that have had to begin making cutbacks somewhere. These include University College London, Kings College, Imperial College, and University of Cambridge.

The solution is complex yet simple. "...More data will be needed for evaluation and decision-making"