Stimulus is working, on schedule, under budget, & free of fraud
People of good faith can disagree over whether PresidentObama's $787 billion stimulus package is creating enough jobs, piling on toomuch debt or helping the country in the long run. But it's about time to retireone 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 AmericanRecovery and Reinvestment Act is clearly not a political success, it is just asclearly a managerial success - on schedule, under budget and, according toindependent investigators, remarkably free of fraud.
On Sept. 30, the Administration met its self-imposeddeadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act funds, $551 billion, by the end ofthe fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committedto specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speedrail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less thanexpected, so the savings have financed more than 3,000 additional projects, fromairport improvements in Atlanta to new child-care centers at military bases inLouisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma, from a new five-lane roadin Jacksonville, Fla., to a $14.5 million transformation of a World War IIammunition factory into an eco-friendly government building in St. Louis.
Earl Devaney, the hard-nosed watchdog leading theindependent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, recently testifiedto Congress that investigators "simply haven't seen the kind of fraud thatwe would have imagined as professional law enforcement." Before thestimulus passed, experts predicted the government would lose 5% to 7% of it tofraud; today, out of more than 190,000 contracts, grants and loans, fewer than0.2% are under investigation. The board is using newfangled computer algorithmsthat can track suspicious spending patterns before there's a complaint; theinspectors 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 stealfrom the Recovery Act; it's far too transparent, with every dollar traceable atwww.recovery.gov, and there are far too many eyes on it.