Fact Check: Stimulus Cash to Phantom Districts?
Republicans, bloggers and conservative think tanks have been circulating reports suggesting that money intended to create jobs and shore up the economy was unaccounted for, misused or lost in some sort of bookkeeping black hole.
The problem is real. Its significance is overstated, and in some instances, fabricated.
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THE CHARGE: Using stimulus reports available on Recovery.gov, New Mexico attorney and political activist Jim Scarantino reported on his blog Monday that millions of dollars were being spent in New Mexico congressional districts that dont exist. Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly began circulating the report and reporters and bloggers began searching for other nonexistent districts.
Soon, the phantom congressional district story became shorthand for government waste.
The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a government watchdog group led by former Republican staffers, put out a report showing $6.4 billion in stimulus money had been spent in hundreds of nonexistent congressional districts.
Columnist D.K. Jamaal, writing on the Web site of the Washington Examiner, reported that “the dunderheads running Washington cant find it and dont know where it went.”
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THE FACTS: Scarantinos original report was correct, and his analysis was the latest discovery of problems in the massive database of stimulus spending.
Jobs have been overstated or counted multiple times. Jobs in multiple cities have been logged under the same city. Some businesses and local governments didnt follow the guidelines for counting jobs. And temporary, part-time jobs have been counted as full-time, full-year positions.
Those problems raise questions about how accurate the administration is when it claims more than 640,000 jobs saved or created so far.
Earl Daveny, chairman of the stimulus oversight board, told Congress this week he could not say for certain that the job total displayed by Recovery.gov and touted by the White House is accurate. And a government watchdog report to be released Thursday found 58,386 jobs that were created for projects that have yet to receive money.
The origin of all these problems is the same. When thousands of businesses, local governments, universities and nonprofit groups entered information into the massive government database, they didnt always do it right. And the government oversight group collecting the data didnt catch the errors.
But anyone with a computer can still easily find out the name of the business or agency that received the money, which city and state it is located, where the money came from, how much it received, and what its for.
ZIP code 35025 doesnt exist. Neither does Virginias 12th District.
But its easy to find out that the mistyped ZIP code was Birmingham, submitted by a subcontractor working on an Air Force repair contract. And that the Triangle Volunteer Fire Department in Nathalie, Va., spent $50,000 in grant money on a dozen masks and tanks for rescue crews.
Scarantino said Wednesday that his initial blog post was just trying to show problems in the data. The nonexistent congressional districts amount to a “huge red flag,” he said. If the oversight board that released the data cant catch that, what else is missing?