ACLP Releases Updated ARPA SLFRF Summary Workbook

funding
ARPA
A guide to the ACLP’s ARPA SLFRF Excel Workbook
Author

Alex Karras, Phoebe Kamber

Published

January 23, 2024

SLFRF & Public Reporting

In March 2021, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into effect. Among its $1.9 trillion in allocations was $350 billion to the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF). The SLFRF provided funding to states, counties, and municipalities for a variety of eligible uses, including broadband infrastructure.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has been providing quarterly public reporting data, summarizing how recipients have allocated their SLFRF funding. Unfortunately, different types of recipients, categorized by population and award amounts, have different reporting frequencies (in general, quarterly for larger recipients, yearly for smaller ones).

ACLP’s Aggregated Dataset

To simplify use of the public reporting data, the ACLP has created an Excel workbook aggregating the latest data available for SLFRF allocations. The workbook pulls from two data vintages to yield a comprehensive look at obligated and remaining SLFRF funding:

  1. The first dataset is for “Tier 1” and “Tier 2” recipients, reflecting data as of September 30, 2023. In those tiers are recipients with a population over 250,000 or exceeding certain funding award thresholds (depending on the type of recipient).

  2. The second is data for “Tier 5” recipients (those smaller/below the Tier 1 and 2 thresholds) as of March 31, 2023. This data is reported annually instead of quarterly (Tiers 3 and 4 encompass Tribal Governments and are not covered in either dataset).

Since the data are current as of either March or September, they do not include any ARPA allocations and expenditures that may have occurred since then.

Dataset Guide

The first sheet of the Excel workbook Funding Summary provides a summary of key metrics for all recipients. On this page, there are four columns of interest:

  • Allocation indicating how much SLFRF funds the recipient has received.
  • Cumulative Obligations indicating the amount of SLFRF funds the recipient has already committed (but not necessarily spent) on projects.
  • Broadband Obligations indicating what amount of SLFRF funds the recipient has already committed, but not necessarily spent, to broadband projects (this is a part of the total in “Cumulative Obligations,” and is not a separate amount).
  • Remaining Funds which is how much SLFRF funding remains unallocated (and could thus be allocated to a project, including but not limited to broadband).

To further narrow down the scope of interest, such as specific states or localities, the Excel sheet can easily be filtered using the drop-down menus at the top.

The four additional sheets (gray tabs) contain the data from which the figures in “Funding Summary” are computed. These are as follows:

  • Recipients (Hybrid) which contains full information for all recipients, as provided by Treasury.
  • Projects (Hybrid) which contains full information for all recipient projects, as provided by Treasury.
  • Two Definitions sheets, which contain Treasury’s explanation of the columns in the Recipients and Projects sheets.

The Recipients and Projects sheets include an additional column beyond those provided by Treasury: Source, which indicates from which vintage of Treasury’s data a given row is from. The Funding Summary tab also contains this column, though it is hidden, along with several others, to conserve screen space (these can be unhidden as desired).

Alex Karras is a Senior Fellow at the ACLP. Phoebe Kamber is a 4th year at University of St Andrews where she is studying Economics and Social Anthropology, and a Research Fellow at the ACLP.