Found a well-structured dataset on Recovery Act contracts at fedspending.org. Created a network map for the Awards funded by Department of Defense (except military departments) category. Also serves as a crude user interface to the data. Clicking on contractor nodes links to full record with information about the contract.
Would love to build something like this for the whole dataset, or for the TARP funds.
Fedspending.org already does some flash-based geographic maps to show which states the money is (initially) ending up in.
(click for interactive version)
UPDATE Feb 11, 2010
When working with the this data, I was very surprised to see a name I recognized jump off the screen. Nehalem River Dredging is small 2-6 person operation with a single boat based in my home town. Could they really be receiving a $47,150,000 contract with the Army Corps? Almost 50 million dollars!? That probably greater than the entire yearly economic output of the town. Since this data is known to have some highly-politicized problems (like the flap about the non-existent congressional districts) it seems like there may be some kind of error. My father called up the Port wheer the dredging is being done to investigate. Sure enough, they said there is a two decimal place error in the reported contract amount. It was actually $470,150. So I guess the message is take this data (which is self reported by recipients as I understand it) with a grain of salt, there is plenty of room for two-orders-magnitude errors to sneak in.