$850 Billion, 1588 pages, and counting... somebody needs to read it!

Final Version

PDF | TXT
Passed in House on 2/13 246-183
roll-call vote

	Yes	No
Democrats	246	7
Republicans	0	176

Passed in Senate on 2/13 60-38
roll-call vote

	Yes	No
Democrats	57	0
Republicans	3	38

House Version (H.R. 1)

PDF | TXT
Passed on 1/28 244-188

	Yes	No
Democrats	244	11
Republicans	0	177

Senate "Compromise" (2/7)

Home • About • News •

Latest News

Text of the Friday Night Compromise

Posted at 9:00 pm on Friday, February 6, 2009

Now that there is news of a compromise reached between the Senate Democrats plus GOP Senators Susan Collins and Arlen Specter, the obvious question is: can we read the compromise bill text?

Short answer: no! As of now, no text has been released, and it is highly likely that as of Friday evening, it doesn't even exist. Our sources on the Hill indicate that "it is probably just a bunch of numbers scratched on a napkin right now."

We are of course eagerly awaiting the post-napkin version of the compromise, and will get it posted here as soon as it becomes available.

Senate Version Parsed

Posted at 10:10pm on Tuesday, February 3, 2009

We now have the Senate version parsed and available online, here. And we're still looking for help parsing the bill into our latest Google spreadsheet.

Help Needed!

Posted at 2:00pm on Sunday, February 1, 2009

The House has passsed their version of the stimulus bill, and over the next week the battle will move to the Senate. And so, we need your help!

First, we are working to parse the Senate bill into a spreadsheet in the same way we did the original House text. So if you have some time to spare and want to help us with data entry, please email us to volunteer and get access to edit the spreadsheet (() and we'll get you going. Everyone can view the current spreadsheet here.

Second, a new site has been launched at CongressWhip.com which is asking for people to help by calling their Senators and asking them where they stand on the stimulus bill. They need volunteers to call their Senators and report back so they can track who is on record favoring and opposing the bill --- and who is on the fence. So go lend them a hand!

House Voting Now

Posted at 5:30pm on Wednesday, January 28th 2009

The House just voted on the GOP substitute amendment, which is the last major item before the vote on the real bill. The GOP substitute will fail, of course, but the results will give a hint of what we'll see with the real bill (which will pass). The key numbers to watch are the Democrats who support the GOP substitute and the Republicans who oppose it.

For the GOP substitute, there were 2 Democrats supporting it, and 9 Republicans in opposition (compared to 255 Democrats opposed and 168 Republicans in favor). Will be interesting to see how different the results are for defectors on the final bill...

Update: The final vote is in, and the House bill has passed 244-188. Eleven Democrats opposed the bill --- and exactly zero Republicans supported it.

House GOP Alternative

Posted at 11:00am on Wednesday, January 28th 2009

We haven't quite gotten it into our searchable database format yet, but the House GOP has released their alternative bill text, and you can read all 31 pages of it in PDF format here.

Update: Here is the Rules Committee rule for which amendments will be allowed to be discussed today for the House bill. This is the roadmap for what will take place on the House floor today, so is definitely worth reviewing (scroll down to see the specific amendments that will be permitted and links to their PDF's).

CBO Analysis Charts

Posted at 6:00pm on Tuesday, January 27th 2009

The Congressional Budget Office has released their analysis of the House version of the stimulus bill (H.R. 1). You can read the full analysis in PDF form here, but we thought it would be useful to take some of the budget numbers in the analysis and present them in chart format.

Shown below are several different views of the how the dollars for H.R. 1 would be spent over time. Most striking is that in total, the CBO estimates that less than 21% of the funds would be spent in 2009. Apparently, it is a huge crisis which requires swift action (and no time to read bill text) to pass a massive spending bill --- but there seems to be no hurry at all to actually get the money into the American economy anytime soon.

The summary chart is shown below, click here to see even more charts and breakdowns of the CBO analysis.

MORE CHARTS

The Corrupt Senate Stimulus Bill

Posted at 11:00am on Tuesday, January 27th 2009

...and by corrupt, we do not mean packed with inappropriate and wasteful expenditures (although it is that), but rather, the PDF file is actually, technically, corrupted.

The good folks at the Senate Conservatives Fund managed to get a hold of the current draft of the Senate bill text. Unfortunately, the only copy available is a hand-scanned version that is over 30MB in size and seems to have technical problems, rendering some pages unreadable. As a result, we're struggling to get it processed into our database.

When we inquired as to whether a better version was available --- perhaps an original and not a scanned copy --- a knowledgeable source told us: "A non-scanned version doesn't exist. This document is being kept under lock and key in the appropriations committee and only even a few paper copies exist." Excellent. Our tax dollars at work!

For now, you can (try to) check out the Senate version and its accompanying committee report at Senate Conservatives Fund. If anyone with PDF expertise is able to repair the bill text file --- in particular, the problems start around page 153 --- and create a clean version, by all means please send it our way () and we'll get it published.

Major Updates: New documents, new features

Posted at 12:15am on Monday, January 26th 2009

The site has just undergone a major update: you'll now see that we've expanded the documents in the searchable database from the original, 258-page bill text released on 1/15 to over 1500 pages of bill text and committee reports which have been released over the past week. The good news is we've added these documents: the bad news is that only by reading and reviewing them all can we gain an accurate and complete picture of the stimulus package as a whole. So we still have a great deal of work to do!

Secondly, you'll notice that the front page of the site now features links to analysis of the stimulus package from our partner organizations, which we know will provide valuable perspective and insight on the hard work they are doing of wading through the package. Check them out!

First Pass at Appropriations Spreadsheet Complete

Posted at 1pm on Thursday, January 22th 2009

Thanks to the efforts of a great group of volunteers, we've now completed our first pass at entering all the actual dollar appropriations from the bill into a Google spreadsheet. You can view the results here.

We haven't quite finished the final 'validation' pass (double-checking our work), so please speak up if you notice anything that looks like an error in the current version.

Coming soon, we'll be using the data from the spreadsheet to present the stimulus bill appropriations in chart and graphical formats that will make it easy to understand just where the money is going. Stay tuned...

Comments & Trackbacks Enabled

Posted at 2pm on Saturday, January 17th 2009

We've just enabled comments on the bill text, so that now everyone can add their own thoughts, suggestions, and commentary on individual pages of the bill. Just scroll down to the bottom of any page of the bill and you'll see the comment form and the trackback URL.

In addition, you'll notice a widget on the left sidebar showing highlights of commenting activity such as the pages receiving the most comments, recent activity, and most active commenters

Now the real fun can start! Dive in...

Wanted: Volunteers to Parse the Bill

Posted at 8pm on Friday, January 16th 2009

One of the additional features we want to add to ReadTheStimulus.org is more detail on the actual dollar amounts being appropriated in the bill text. But to do that, we need to extract out all the individual appropriations and put them in a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, there's just no way to do that automagically, and so that means we have to brute force it: have real live humans manually read each page of the document and enter in the dollar appropriations into a collaborative spreadsheet.

To that end, we're creating an online spreadsheet that can be edited by many folks simultaneously that we'll use to "crowdsource" the effort. If you have time this weekend and want to help out, please email us at and we'll let you know how you can assist. Thanks!

Welcome to ReadTheStimulus.org !

Posted at 1pm on Friday, January 16th 2009

Welcome to ReadTheStimulus.org ! The site is a work in progress, so please bear with us as we add features and functionality to help citizens read and understand the 2009 fiscal stimulus bill. In particular, we will be providing the ability for visitors to add their own comments and feedback directly to the text of the bill shortly.

A key feature of the site that we hope will see wide use is the ability for bloggers or any other online publishers to link directly to an individual page of the bill text. The format is simple:

http://readthestimulus.org/index.php?doc=docversion&page=pagenumber

docversion is the particular document and version you want to link to. At the moment, the only document we have published is the 1/15/09 version created by the House Democrats, identified by "housedem0115".

pagenumber is the page number you want to link to.

So to link to Page 25 of the 1/15/09 House Democrat's stimulus bill text, you would use:

http://readthestimulus.org/index.php?doc=housedem0115&page=25

Feedback is welcome; please send email to .