The right-leaning Heritage Foundation and other spending skeptics have posted a useful tool called Read the Stimulus. It allows you to search both the House and Senate stimulus plan bills for keywords. Searching on spatial, geospatial, GIS, sdi, nsdi, etc. yields no answers yet, but the Senate is likely to add things when they begin deliberations next week.
Among the targets of the Heritage Foundation, and others out to brand the bill as full of pork, are the many climate provisions in the bill, including earth observation satellites. As it stands now both bill call for spending on climate modeling and “$600 million for accelerating satellite development, acquiring climate sensors and climate modeling capacity, and establishing climate data records.”
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That’s good, maybe the senate will actually add something that stimulates the economy to the bill. The house certainly missed the point of the bill. On the downside this means that the senate version of the bill will be much more expensive than the house version because of the extra stimulus spending.
Did you try searching for National Map?
Here are some additional documents relating to the Stimulus bill:
The House Bill, HR 1
Summary of Spending
Summary of Tax Cuts
Congressional Budget Office report, 1/26/09
Summaries of the bill posted on the speaker’s Web site.
Proposed Amendments
Additional Supporting Documentation:
ASCE Report Card on US Infrastructure
State-by-state Transporation Infrastructure breakdown
New America Foundation Summary of Educational Needs
Schools Spending Plan
State-by-state breakdown of low-income programs by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
Within the Stimulus bill, there are a number of investments proposed, e.g. transportation funding, mass transit, broadband infrastructure and much more.
Question is, how do we intend to assess, triage and plan how and where geographically to make these investments to provide maximal benefit WITHOUT spatial data on a national national level? How can these investments be expended without an adequately informed decisionmaking process?
NSDI, the National Map and the related pieces that serve it should be an integral part of these processes.