Watching the stimulus at work

It's not through Congress yet, but if and when the new stimulus package is ratified, it'll be one of the first items to get the new transparency treatment. The White House has reserved and posted a preliminary message on recovery.gov encouraging visitors to "check back after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to see how and where your tax dollars are spent."

The austere placeholder page says that an oversight board will be charged with regularly updating the site "as part of an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government." It's unclear what sort of information about the $825 billion stimulus package will be posted, but some online commenters have voiced the hope that the data is available in mashable form.

And at the Sunlight Foundation, which called recovery.gov "an important moment" and "a fundamental shift" in the government's use of the net for public-disclosure purposes, at least one excitable commenter asks why the bill itself (HR 1) couldn't have been posted in all its messy glory. (For those simply alight with eagerness to read that text, it can of course be read and tracked online on thomas.loc.gov -- but isn't it great that people want to see these things?)