Meet the woman keeping track of all of Michigan’s stimulus billions.

(For more of Recessionary Road's visit to Lansing, visit the blog for dispatches on youth employment spending, a sewer infrastructure project, and a homeless shelter's $20,000 of stimulus money.)

LANSING, Mich.—The stimulus doesn't come with an instruction manual. When both receiving and applying for money from the federal government, all 50 states are left wondering: How should we keep track of where all the money is going? What are the criteria to apply for more money? How should we calculate the number of jobs we've created or saved? How should we decide whether this thing is working?

These are the central questions of the stimulus, yet the feds send only advice, not answers. And if the feds don't know the answers to these questions, then who does? By default, it's the stimulus czars—a not-so-fraternal order of state officials who are tasked with making up the answers to these questions as they go along. They're a diverse bunch: comptrollers, lieutenant governors, folks brought in from outside the government, etc. And their individual decisions will in large part form the collective, authoritative answers that the stimulus is judged upon. The Obama administration's economic legacy rests with obscure state officials that most have never heard of.

In Michigan, that official is Leslee Fritz. Before ascending to the czar position, she had been doing double duty as an adviser to Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and as a spokeswoman for the budget department. On Feb. 12, a day before the stimulus plan was passed by Congress, she got an unsolicited job offer from Granholm to direct the nascent Michigan Recovery Office. She accepted it on the spot.

Now she heads a 10-person office carved out of other departments' personnel and office space. Her office is sparse, the most striking object being an "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" binder on her desk that has to be at least four inches thick.

She is simultaneously a cheerleader and a realist. One moment she says that she knows the stimulus is working because she can see an improvement in the community. The next she calls the bill "amazingly convoluted." It's an intriguing split—she knows the $5 billion in stimulus money that Michigan has received (with at least $2.5 billion more to come) is needed, but her voice carries a hint of exasperation that this whole thing is so unnecessarily difficult. So much of Fritz's job is essentially reading the government's body language, trying to figure out what its memos and requests for grant applications actually mean. She is perpetually on a first date, wondering if the feds' words and actions have a double meaning and what that may mean for their future together.