It has been over five and a half years since President Obama signed an economic 'stimulus' plan into law, and even though it was intended to immediately spur new economic growth, money from the original $787 billion package is still being spent by federal agencies in 2014, long after it was originally designed to create new jobs.
Just last week for example, Social Security awarded two different contracts with 2009 stimulus funds - one was a $1.76 million IT contract, the other was for $639,935 in computer network traffic equipment, as the agency keeps using its remaining Recovery Act funds to upgrade the Social Security IT backbone.
In an answer to a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this year, the Social Security Administration told me that it had "approximately $100 million left to spend from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009."
The Department of Health and Human Services also cleaerly has some money still to spend from the stimulus law; on September 11, HHS issued an award for $3,228.39 to Lockheed Martin for IT infrastructure.
Earlier this year, HHS spent a larger chunk of 2009 stimulus money, awarding a $500,993 contractdealing with electronic health records.
How much money still hasn't been spent?
If you go to the Recovery.gov website, which details how the stimulus law money was spent, it says of the now $840 billion price tag for the stimulus, "$816.3 billion has been paid out" - that would mean there is still $23.7 billion to be spent, about 3 percent of the stimulus package total.
Most of the money left over from the stimulus law has been "obligated" by federal agencies - that is, it has been determined where it will be spent, but it just has not been fully spent as yet.
For example, in Hawaii, the National Science Foundation is using stimulus law money to build a new solar telescope - but all of that money hasn't made it into the economy.
"As of June 3, 2014, the remaining amount of these funds to be spent is $39,084,906.24," read a letter sent to me after a Freedom of Information Act request. "The amount that remains unobligated is zero."
That means over $39 million in funds sent to the National Science Foundation still haven't stimulated any actual U.S. economic growth - over five years after the stimulus law was signed by President Obama.
One interesting use of money from the Recovery Act came about a year ago, when the feds spent $527,216 to redesign the website that helps people track where money was spent in the stimulus law.
According to recovery.gov, the 2009 stimulus law breakdown looks like this:
Tax Benefits - $290.7 billion
Contracts, Grants & Loans - $261.2 billion
Entitlements - $264.4 billion
And evidently there is still $23.7 billion left in the kitty.
In one way, you could call it, 'your tax dollars not yet at work.'
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