People of good faith can disagree over whether President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package is creating enough jobs, piling on too much debt, or helping the country in the long run. But it’s about time to retire one set of critiques of the stimulus: that it would be riddled with fraud, hamstrung by delays, and crippled by cost overruns. So far, while the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is clearly not a political success, it is just as clearly a managerial success — on schedule, under budget, and according to independent investigators, remarkably free of fraud.
Yesterday, the administration met its self-imposed deadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act, or $551 billion, by the end of the fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committed to specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speed rail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less than expected, so the savings have financed over 3,000 additional projects
Meanwhile, Earl Devaney, the hard-nosed watchdog leading the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, recently testified to Congress that investigators “simply haven’t seen the kind of fraud that we would have imagined as professional law enforcement.” Before the stimulus passed, experts predicted the government would lose 5% to 7% of it to fraud; today, out of over 190,000 contracts, grants and loans, less than 0.2% are under investigation. The board is using newfangled computer algorithms that can track suspicious spending patterns before there’s a complaint; the inspectors general of every major agency are bird-dogging the stimulus as well. Devaney likes to say that if you really want to steal, you’d be crazy to steal from the Recovery Act; it’s way too transparent, with every dollar traceable at www.recovery.gov , and there are way too many eyes on it.
That transparency has sometimes carried a political price; for example, innocuous reporting errors on the website quickly became national news about stimulus money supposedly funneled to phantom congressional districts. At the same time, GOP Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have targeted a slew of Recovery Act projects they consider wasteful; although some waste is in the eye of the beholder, it’s probably safe to assume that the $762,000 for interactive dance software and the $18,500 to paint a mural on a Montana band shell could be better spent elsewhere
It’s not that the implementation of the Recovery Act has been glitch-free; for example, a $5 billion program to weatherize low-income homes got off to a dreadfully slow start. But the problems weren’t allowed to fester, and now the program is back on track. DeSeve holds conference calls with all the agencies twice a week
With unemployment still so high, the administration’s successful oversight of the stimulus does have an otherwise-did-you-enjoy-the-play-Mrs.-Lincoln feel. The recovery remains tepid, so the Recovery Act remains unpopular. The White House says there would be 3 million more unemployed Americans without it, and many independent economists agree, but the “failed stimulus” has become a Republican symbol of everything wrong with Obama’s Washington. Even most Democrats — including the president himself — won’t utter the word “stimulus” in public anymore.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2022781,00.html
thoughts?
It reads like something from Atlas Shrugged.
Didn’t the White House promise that we would have 8% unemployment if the stimulus was not passed and unemployment is around what 10%. I think they have fuzzy accounting.
Also these folks are separating the Tarp stuff from the stuff purchased by the Federal Reserve. So big surpise that the Tarp was not that bad as the Federal Reserve has all of this stuff sitting on its balance sheet. I bet when the Fed sells it they will make money too.
Their response (to unemployment not going as low as they thought) was that it would have been 12% if we didn’t pass the stimulus. Silly
Wait, so can can they be sure they spent our money better then we would have if value is subjective?
Sorry, the article says the stimulus isn’t being spent on political favors. Really? What about all the dudes who didn’t go bankrupt? Someone who’s paying attention to the political circus clue me in…
Really? 'Cause from where I stand it looks like all $787 billion is lost to fraud.
As soon as I read this I started laughing; if there’s one thing the government is good at it’s spending other people’s money (or counterfeit money, as the case may be).