Failure at Recovery.gov

Have you heard of Utah’s 7th Congressional District or Florida’s 86th District? Neither have I. Apparently, these non-existent Congressional districts have received millions of dollars in stimulus funding, marking yet another failure in transparency at the White House.

In early 2009, President Obama and Speaker Pelosi forced the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through Congress. This massive spending legislation was billed as a so-called “economic stimulus,” and was promised to create jobs, spend money on “shovel-ready” projects and turn around our economy. Unfortunately, the “stimulus” has done very little to boost job growth. In fact, the U.S. has lost over 2.8 million jobs since it was signed into law.

Now we find out that there have been serious inaccuracies when it comes to reporting the use of stimulus funds on Recovery.gov, the federal government’s tracking website. Recovery.gov was set up at a cost of $18 million to provide Americans “unprecedented oversight and transparency” as well as direct access to how their tax dollars are being spent in the stimulus package.

Recovery.gov relies on self-reporting by recipients of the stimulus money. Apparently no one checks to verify the accuracy of their reports. Last week, the Obama Administration removed more than 60,000 jobs from its most recent report on the stimulus because of “unrealistic data.” To make matters worse, this week ABC News reported that millions of dollars have been spent and many jobs created in Congressional Districts that don’t even exist.

This leads me to ask: How can we expect this Administration to manage billions of dollars stimulus funds when they can’t even accurately run a website?