Obey Rips Administration For Outrageous’ Errors in Stimulus Reporting
House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) is fuming mad at the Obama administration over a slew of “outrageous— reporting errors on an official Web site tracking stimulus dollars.An ABC News report found that Recovery.gov, which was set up by the administration to keep tabs on the $787 billion stimulus, cites the creation of thousands of new jobs in nonexistent places. In one instance, the site reports 30 jobs being saved or created in Arizona’s 15th Congressional district with $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. But Arizona has only eight districts.“Credibility counts in government and stupid mistakes like this undermine it. We’ve got too many serious problems in this country to let that happen,— Obey said in a statement.Obey called the inaccuracies “outrageous— and said the Obama administration “owes itself, the Congress, and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes.—At least one Republican, House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Darrell Issa (Calif.), is already calling on administration officials to put a disclaimer on the Web site saying that its numbers are unreliable. But a Democratic aide familiar with the situation warned against reading too much into the reporting errors since the stimulus has already created more than 1 million jobs.Republicans are “all over it for the wrong reasons, saying that it didn’t create jobs. That’s ridiculous. … Every economist out there will you tell you it’s working— the aide said. “But apparently the recovery board people who are supposed to be making the data available are doing a bad job.—