WASHINGTON - The U.S. government has spent about $700 million on IT and telecommunications products and services under its economic stimulus program, part of a total of $3 billion that's in the spending pipeline, according to a private analysis of this data. But how many jobs have been created is not as clear.

Congress approved $787 billion in February to promote job growth and the White House recently claimed that some 600,000 jobs have been created by the stimulus spending so far. But the government data, made available through Recovery.gov , provides no details about the types of jobs and salaries and uses formulas to estimate the job impact.

Oniva Inc., which tracks government contract spending and has set up a separate site, Recovery.org , to look at stimulus spending specifically and has tallied the amount of technology spending. It calculates spending, and planned spending, based on actual contracts, or parts of contracts, that have allocated funding for IT and telecommunications communications and services.