To support the COVID-19 response and recovery, an unprecedented level of federal aid has been flowing to New York City. The City expects to receive more than $22 billion in COVID-federal aid between fiscal year 2020 and fiscal year 2025. While a portion of this aid funded COVID-19 response and provided fiscal relief during the recession, the rest is being used to expand existing and create new programs, some of which will be ongoing. Considering the scale and allocation of federal support, the City should create a robust public tracker both to support diligent management to ensure the funds have maximum impact and to allow the public to know how the money is being spent, what effect it is having, and to hold government accountable.

To be robust and well structured, the tracker should include the appropriate funding streams, identify the programs being funded, and include performance goals and metrics for program inputs, outputs, outcomes, quality, and efficiency. The City currently has a COVID-19 funding tracker and is required to submit reports to the State and federal government, however these fall far short of a robust management and public accountability tool because they are incomplete and fail to present the information in an easily digestible format. For example, they do not readily identify:

• What specifically the Department of Education purchased and these purchases’ impact, including $163 million for supplies and materials, and $83 million for pedagogical salaries;¹
• How the City plans to spend $700 million in expected American Rescue Plan (ARP) State and Local Recovery funds (SLRF) that are not currently reflected in the November 2021 financial plan because lower than expected fiscal year 2021 revenue was not fully reallocated in fiscal years 2022 through 2025;² and
• The desired outcomes of initiatives including the Journey Home program for unhoused New Yorkers ($77 million), the Public Health Corps ($50 million), and academic recovery for public schools ($350 million).³

Once created, the Administration should leverage the tracker to manage programs to maximize the resources’ positive impact on New Yorkers. It should implement a citywide performance management system, in which leaders and managers participate in a structured process to regularly review the tracker’s data, identify what is working well, identify problems, implement rectification plans as needed, and appropriately hold managers accountable.⁴

Providing transparency and clarity of the financial flows, and program operational and performance metrics is challenging and ambitious. Both access to data and choosing the right metrics are critical. The COVID-19 tracker should be built and maintained by government, based on consultation with nonprofit and private organizations and fiscal oversight entities. Governmental agencies and offices have the access and technical expertise to assemble the data, and external partners can be extremely important to selecting the right metrics and goals and validating the tracker’s content.

Total federal aid in the New York City budget for fiscal year 2022 is $16.5 billion, well over twice what is received in a typical year.⁵ Such a substantial fund infusion and desired rapid government implementation increases the risk that without adequate managerial focus, oversight, and accountability, the funds could support ineffective, unnecessary, or duplicative programs.

To support performance management and public accountability, the tracker should identify:

1. The Funds Being Tracked
Unfortunately, funds already received and spent on initial and completed response efforts were not adequately tracked. It is now especially important to track current and future spending for management, accountability, and potential reallocation as appropriate. 

Priority should be placed on the $5.9 billion ARP SLRF, and $7.0 billion of Education Stabilization Funds from both the ARP and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRSSA). Funds for higher education and homeless services, among others also should be included. Tracking grants, such as the Epidemiology and Lab Capacity grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that support test, trace, and vaccination efforts, would be helpful but is lower priority because there is less local discretion and long-established rules on eligible uses and federal grant reporting requirements. Reimbursements, mainly from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), are also lower priority as they are for response and recovery expenditures that have already been made and deemed eligible by the federal government.

2. The Programs Being Supported and At What Level
Programs—discrete initiatives or services—should be listed clearly and with funding levels. These programs also should be grouped into categories so that similar efforts can be viewed holistically, such as mental health programs or homeless services. For each program, there should be a description and lead agency or office. While revenue replacement or budget relief is not a program in the traditional sense, the tracker should also identify funds used for these purposes and list expenditures that were funded.

Reporting on funding allocations should be at the individual program level to clearly identify where resources are allocated. In some cases, the limited reporting currently available identifies funding for groups of programs that should be divided. In education, the City is directing $251 million to special education including afterschool and Saturday programs, additional pre-K seats, expansion of Committees on Preschool Special Education, ongoing service for eligible students over age 21, and expanded workshops and information sessions for families.⁶ Similarly, the City reported to the U.S. Treasury on $172 million for Small Business Financial Assistance, which is funding seven separate initiatives: NYC Business Quick Start, Commercial Lease Assistance Program, Small Business Grants Programs, Small Business Loan Fund, Shop Your City, Open Streets, and Mobile Food Vending.⁷

3. Program Goals and Implementation Benchmarks
Clearly describing each program’s goals is crucial to developing the appropriate metrics on program activities and results. For example, if a program’s goal is to reverse the learning loss from the pandemic over two years, that loss will first need to be measured and achievement metrics identified and measured against the goal. New initiatives should include implementation benchmarks to ensure timely performance, such as when new afterschool services will be available, or target dates for releasing small business assistance funds.  

4. A Portfolio of Resource and Performance Metrics for Each Program
A reasonably limited number of metrics that sufficiently cover a portfolio of categories are best for program monitoring, management, and public accountability.⁸ These metrics fall into six main categories: input, process and output, effectiveness, quality, efficiency, and outcome. (See Table 1 for examples.) For metrics other than inputs, it is important to consider levels as well as how those levels compare to benchmarks or expectations.

• Inputs
  Inputs are the resources committed to each program, including granular information on the expenditures being made, such as descriptions of goods or services being bought, contracts being let, and staff being hired. For example, inputs could be new nurses hired to provide COVID-19 testing in schools.
   
• Processes and Outputs
  Processes are the actions and efforts that will be implemented to achieve the stated goals. Outputs are units of services delivered or products created by the program, such as the number of trainings provided, loans issued, or voucher applications processed.
   
• ​​​Effectiveness
  Effectiveness metrics measure how well the program is doing with regards to providing the services and meeting the programs intended goals and objectives.
   
• Quality
  Quality metrics seeks to assess how well the services are being delivered; for example, metrics about the timeliness of responses for assistance, or customer satisfaction could be included.
   
• Efficiency
  These measure the unit cost of a service, often the number of outputs per unit or cost of the input, for example cost per training or the number of COVID-19 tests administered per $100,000.
   
• Outcomes
  Outcome metrics quantify the benefits or impacts resulting from the programs’ processes and outputs. For example, how much learning loss was regained or how many families were diverted from shelter through voucher programs.  

While essential for public accountability and transparency, public reporting of the data will alone not maximize positive impact on New Yorkers. The tracker’s data should be used to manage programs. The Administration should implement a citywide performance management system, in which leaders and managers, cascading from City Hall to and throughout agencies, participate in a structured process to regularly review the data, identify what is working well, identify problems and implement rectification plans, and appropriately hold managers accountable.⁹

In the longer run, these data can be used to conduct concurrent and retrospective evaluation of each program. This would allow the City to increase the evidence base of what works and should inform future City initiatives and ongoing services.

The current publicly available data do not include many important elements identified above. The spending data are disaggregated transactions that are not connected to specific programs and lack spending planned for future years. The program performance data do not include specific goals and benchmarks, or a portfolio of program activity, output, outcome, efficiency, and quality indicators. The City’s COVID-19 Funding Tracker and the State and federally mandated reporting each has its own deficiencies. Still, the City has some experience on which to build. 

COVID-19 Funding Tracker

The COVID-19 Funding Tracker is the City’s primary platform for releasing data. It was created to comply with Local Law 76 of 2020, which required the creation of a public database.¹⁰ The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) indicated that reporting and transparency will be enhanced in the future.¹¹

Spending Data

The City provides data from the City’s Financial Management System that includes all COVID-19 related expenditures with the projected funding source. While the data are supposed to be updated quarterly, the current data file has not been updated since May 2021 and only includes expenditures through March 31, 2021.¹²

Beyond being out of date, the data are insufficient for tracking the federal spending because:

• Disaggregated transactions are not clearly linked to programs or initiatives;
• Funding streams are based on the City’s expectation and change over time;
• Planned spending for the rest of the fiscal year or future fiscal years is not included; and
• Analysis of the data requires uncommon technical skills and City budget knowledge.

As a result, the data do not include: how much has been spent on each program; how much will be spent on each program in the future; what specific goods or services were purchased; or how many staff were hired in which positions. For example, in fiscal year 2021, the COVID-19 spending data for the Department of Education includes general education salary expenditures totaling $78.5 million for pedagogical staff, $12.0 million for temporary staff, and $2.4 million for paraprofessionals. These personnel expenditures likely support array of programmatic interventions across City schools that are not identified. Likewise, a nearly $500,000 payment to a Department of Small Business Services (SBS) contractor is not accompanied by information specifying which SBS small business assistance programs it supported, or the types of goods or services purchased.

Loans and Contracts

The City releases data on businesses that received loans or were awarded contracts.¹³ The loan data identify SBS loans from the Coronavirus Recovery Fund (CRF) or the CARES Act. The contract data include the vendor, purpose (manually entered description that varies in specificity), procurement method, dates, total amounts, and amounts spent to date.¹⁴ These two data files allow for analysis of how loans and contracts were distributed and allocated.  

Federal and State Reporting Requirements

The federal and State governments require the City to report on the ARP SLRF and education funding, respectively. However, the required data fall short of the components of a robust tracker.

The U.S. Treasury requires recipients with population over 250,000 to submit an annual Recovery Plan Performance Report on ARP SLRF, including performance metrics and information on whether programs are evidence based. The City’s report for fiscal year 2021 largely followed Treasury’s Recovery Plan Performance Report template.¹⁵ Its 72-page PDF file listed dollars expended to date, and itemized programs and possible performance metrics.¹⁶ While the metrics focus on outputs and outcomes, as required by the U.S. Treasury, there are few, if any, quality, effectiveness, or efficiency metrics. Also, this first report merely listed metrics that may be used or noted that metrics would be developed; it included no actual performance data.¹⁷

Similarly, the State required local education agencies to prepare qualitative reports of planned spending for federal COVID-19 education aid allocated to them by the State.¹⁸ New York City’s report was a presentation listing programs within six broad areas, with funding only for the current year.¹⁹ The level of detail and description varied greatly among the broad areas, and the Department of Education did not identify the metrics it will use to monitor the impact and effectiveness of the spending.

The City’s Prior Experience

Experience with previous trackers should inform a COVID federal tracker. Unfortunately, the City no longer maintains its interactive NYC Stat Stimulus Tracker that provided data on spending following the 2008 Great Recession. The more recent Sandy Funding Tracker provides extensive information on projects, funding, and contracts for the various federal funds the City received after Superstorm Sandy hit in October 2012.²⁰

The Sandy Funding Tracker provides data on programs, funding, and contracts; however, it falls short of being sufficiently comprehensive. It includes input and output metrics, mainly about the resources spent and the number of households, homes, or businesses served, but it does not include many outcome, effectiveness, or efficiency measures. For contracts, the tracker provides only the number of contracts by agency and total spending, and not information on individual contracts or what goods and services were purchased. Still, it includes helpful interactive maps of capital projects, and housing and business programs with counts and expenditures by program and geographic zones, such as community or council districts.

With access to the necessary data and agency staff, a public agency should be responsible for building and maintaining the tracker. The lead could be either the First Deputy Mayor or the Deputy Mayor for Operations, with OMB, the Mayor’s Office of Operations, and the new Office of Technology and Innovation in support. The City Comptroller and the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO) have tracking and oversight expertise; the current Comptroller has been a strong advocate for tracking COVID funds and the IBO had a COVID-19 spending tracker in fiscal year 2021 that showed non-personnel spending by agency and by what was being purchased.²¹ Both offices should have a role in the development of the system, monitoring, and providing feedback on the use of the funds.

To identify the metrics and design the access tools and presentation format, the public entities should collaborate with experts from nonprofit and private organizations, and fiscal monitors, chosen for their knowledge of specific areas, such as education, workforce development, small business operations, and fiscal management and oversight. Collaborating with this broader group will help ensure the right metrics are chosen.

To facilitate this, the Mayor, perhaps in partnership with the City Comptroller, should establish a COVID Federal Aid Tracking Working Group, including representatives from OMB, the Comptroller’s Office, Operations, key City agencies, fiscal monitors, advocates, community groups, social service providers, and private firms. The whole group should develop the overall framework with smaller groups convened to develop metrics for each subject area such as Education, Mental Health, or Small Business Recovery. The subject area groups should review each program in their area to identify input, process and output, effectiveness, quality, efficiency and outcome metrics, honing in on a small, well-defined set critical for management, monitoring, and public accountability.

The Adams Administration should build a robust federal COVID-19 aid public tracker to ensure accountability and maximize the impact these critical resources have on recovery. This framework for tracking, public reporting and performance management also can inform the Administration’s management in general.