How to spend 1.15 billion dollars in 2 weeks

The recent stimulus package passed a week ago or so is having an immediate impact on my job -- starting today. The USDA and separately the USFS were recipients of $$ to spend and they have little time to decide where and how to spend it. In particular, the Forest Service got $1.15B to spend and the Chief told her "people" that they had until this Friday to let her know how it was going to be distributed.

My office got pulled in because of our ability to display large amounts of data spatially for these suits to better make decisions. We made a Google Map interface that will tie directly into USA Spending to show stimulus project status (planned, in progress, or complete). We also made a ArcGIS web service that was low on pretty and high on usefulness. Our center manager got to demo these tools to the USDA Secretary Tom Vilsak and the demo actually made it to the White House a week ago.

Now that the demos are over, under-secretaries and deputies and department chiefs are using these tools to make decisions, so our office was basically running the tool and sharing it over a WebEx meeting. The suits would ask "Display all proposed facility projects in counties across the country that are rated in the bottom half of economic health." We'd oblige. Then they started asking things like, "How many jobs would we create and how much money would we spend if we approved X number of projects in Y types of counties?" The guy running the program couldn't keep up with the questions, so I was enlisted by our center manager to step in as a GIS technical specialist.

I basically sat on a laptop and ran various queries and summarized the data. They'd ask the question and I'd get to answer, "At that threshold, we'd create 3,128 jobs and spend $271,000,000." And then I'd repeat that for different thresholds they'd want to see. At 5pm Washington, DC, time, they not so subtely wrapped up the meeting and said, "We want three deliverables by tomorrow at 8am DC time:..." and then listed off three products -- both tabular and map. So, as they went home, we started working. I was at work until 6:45pm until I had to leave to attend to some church duties, but there were still 4 people working when I left. Two of those people were center managers in our building (there are 2 centers -- one remote sensing and one GIS) attempting to do GIS, an exercise they haven't done for many years.

I'm back to work tomorrow morning by 6am to sit on a WebEx session and conference call as I continue to provide GIS tech support. Although I have political differences with the stimulus package, it was a nice break in day-to-day duties to support the decision making of how to spend a cool 1.15 BILLION DOLLARS.