States report saving 640,000 jobs through Recovery Act

State and local governments reported saving or creating more than 640,000 jobs through grants, loans and contracts issued by the Recovery Act, according to data released on Friday.

The long-awaited figures reflect the most detailed accounting to date of the effect of the $787 billion economic stimulus. Data released earlier this month covered a small slice of Recovery spending encompassing only federal contracts.

At a Friday afternoon news conference, Vice President Joe Biden said 640,329 jobs were directly created or saved through approximately $160 billion in stimulus spending, including 325,000 jobs in education and more than 80,000 in construction. In total, the administration will spend $275 billion in grants, contracts and loans that must be reported to a federal Web site, Recovery.gov.

The administration calculates that an additional 400,000 jobs were saved or created through induced or indirect stimulus spending not reported by recipients. The White House has pledged to save or create 3.5 million jobs by the time the effects of the stimulus are complete.

"This is another encouraging sign of progress following yesterday's news that the economy has begun to grow again for the first time in more than a year, but the president and I will not be satisfied until monthly reports show net job growth," Biden said. "We are working every day to create more jobs, and we will continue to report on our progress doing so with the Recovery Act in the same transparent way we did today."

Recovery.gov was updated on Friday afternoon with more than 130,000 new recipient and subrecipient filings. The overwhelming majority of this spending came from federal grants to prime and subrecipients, such as states, nonprofits and universities. Of that total, 116,675 reports covered grants; 13,080, federal contracts; and 607, loans.

California reported creating or saving more than 110,000 jobs -- the most in the nation -- through $12.5 billion in Recovery Act spending. The figure includes more than 62,000 teachers, administrators and professors, said Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"These are jobs that would have been gone if not for the Recovery Act," he said.

A report released on Friday by administration officials found that the states with the highest unemployment rates nationwide reported 25 percent more jobs created and saved per capita than the country as a whole. Those states generally received the highest percentage of Recovery funds.

The data showed that the majority of funded stimulus projects either has not started yet or is less than 50 percent complete.

The administration's data was immediately disputed by the Republican National Committee, which said the figures "cannot be trusted" and were manufactured "out of thin air."

Recipient reports originally were expected to be filed by Oct. 10. But the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board extended the deadline by 10 days to accommodate states that were issuing their reports in bulk. The data shows that roughly 9,000 reports were issued during that extended period.

During the past 10 days, board officials said, agencies and recipients have been working to improve the accuracy of the reports. Although agencies can highlight missing or erroneous information, only recipients can change the reports. No further changes will be allowed until the next reporting period begins on Jan. 1, 2010.

In a nod to transparency and good-government advocates who have been dissatisfied with the accessibility and usability of Recovery.gov, the site now allows users to search for the first time by recipient name, contractor or agency.

"Quite frankly, we are listening to our users, and are making changes and adding new features as fast as we can," Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney said in comments posted Friday on Recovery.gov.

Another new tool allows citizens to search their state to find the total number of contracts, grants and loan recipient awards. The public also will be able to download a list of recipients that failed to submit their spending reports on time as well as files containing the history of any changes recipients made in their reports after Oct. 10.

Friday's extensive data release was the second this month detailing stimulus spending. On Oct. 15 recipients of federal contracts reported saving or creating 30,000 jobs.

Those figures were called into question this week. An Associated Press investigation found that the job totals were overstated by at least 5,000 and some recipients had made serious errors in their reports. For example, a Colorado company that claimed to have created more than 4,200 positions now acknowledges that the figure is less than 1,000.

Ed DeSeve, a senior adviser to the president for Recovery Act implementation, said the mistakes were expected and have since been fixed. Recovery.gov now shows that 30,908 jobs were saved or created through federal contracts. The site shows that nearly 4,000 late reports on federal contract spending have been received since the Oct. 15 data release. Those new reports on job creation apparently offset the reductions that DeSeve said were made to the old data.

DeSeve said the new data has "been reviewed for weeks, errors have been spotted and corrected, and additional layers of review by state and local governments have further improved the data quality. As a result, whatever problems the early and partial data had, the full data to be posted on Friday will provide the American people with an accurate, detailed look at the early success of the Recovery Act."

Nonetheless, Friday's reports still provide an incomplete accounting of Recovery Act spending. The figures do not include spending through tax cuts and direct payments to individuals such as Pell Grants and unemployment compensation. Recipients also were not required to report on jobs that might have been created indirectly, such as suppliers to a construction company.

"The spending represented by the recipient reports only represents one part of the Recovery Act and will not include jobs that are created or saved by other Recovery Act provisions, nor will they include re-spending and upstream supplier jobs," said John Irons, research and policy director for the Economic Policy Institute.

The nonpartisan think tank said that while the reports are a substantial step forward, the quality and integrity of the data remains flawed because of the different job creation methodologies recipients are using.