Recovery.org removes phantom Congressional Districts

The federal website set up to track how the government is spending $787 billion in stimulus money has corrected the errors in the database which showed 440 phantom Congressional Districts across the country, including three new ones in New Hampshire. Recovery.gov now shows that New Hampshire has received $285 million in the First Congressional District, $213 million in the Second, and $197 million that hasn't been assigned to either district.



Federal officials blamed the phantom districts on data entry mistakes from stimulus grant recipients. Earlier this week, the Obama Administration was forced to remove 60,000 jobs from its stimulus report card after finding 12 recipients who over-reported the number of jobs created or saved by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Washington Examiner has found over 75,000 jobs in the stimulus report that don't exist. Reporters David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway have created an interactive map of bogus jobs, such as a $1,000 grant for a single lawn mower that is credited with saving 50 jobs.

Your Guide to the Stimulus, District by (Phantom) District

Bill McMorris has compiled all 440 phantom Congressional Districts on the Recovery.org website. The vast amount of bad data in the stimulus oversight project shows that it can't honestly be dismissed as just a few typos.

A debacle of the first order

Uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds sums up the increasingly ridiculous stimulus tracking website, Recovery.gov.

That whole thing has been a debacle of the first order. From the people who were supposed to return competence and transparency to the federal government.

Stimulus Help Line Advised Recipients to Enter Bad Data

ABC's Jonathan Karl follows up his report on stimulus money going to non-existent Congressional Districts. He finds even more errors in the projects in actual Congressional Districts, and at least one stimulus recipient who was advised to inflate his job estimates by the Administration's Help Line.

ABC News does not allow us to embed their videos, but you can watch the report here.

NH Representatives Respond to Phantom Congressional Districts

Adam Krauss at Foster's Daily Democrat has gotten reaction to this week's news of massive errors in the Recovery.org database from New Hampshire's two Representatives in Congress.

Matt Robison, chief of staff for Rep. Paul Hodes, D-Concord, said "there's no question that this was a serious mistake and an example of sloppy record-keeping by the administration and Paul Hodes believes we need real answers and an accurate picture of the situation that working families are facing."

Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, D-Rochester, said the typos were discovered because of the "unprecedented level of transparency and disclosure" at Recovery.gov. "While it is unacceptable for Recovery.gov to have any typos, I am pleased that the administration is working to immediately correct them," she said.

No reaction yet from the Congressman from the mythical 4th, 6th, 27th, and 00th Districts.

Top Dem slams Recovery.gov errors

Fox News interviews Rep. David Obey, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, about the rash of errors plaguing the stimulus oversight project at Recovery.gov.

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Obey called the inaccuracies on Recovery.gov "infuriating" and said the success of the government's stimulus package has been "obscured by the silly mistakes."

"In my judgment, someone who doesn't know which congressional district they're in doesn't have enough of a clue to receive taxpayer money in the first place," Obey said.

"When you put out information that turns out to be inaccurate, you shouldn't be surprised if the public says, 'Hey, do they know what they're doing?'" he added.

NH Stimulus Director responds to Phantom Congressional Districts

Orville "Bud" Fitch, Deputy Attorney General and Director of New Hampshire Office of Economic Stimulus, has responded to news this week that the federal government's Recovery.gov database has created phantom Congressional Districts across the country.

Responding to an inquiry from the Josiah Bartlett Center, Fitch says he learned about the problems with the Recovery.gov database upon returning to the state yesterday.

Preliminary information is that this may stem from reports filed by folks who received funds directly from the federal government and report directly, not through the State's process. We worked hard to ensure congressional district data was accurate on the reports filed by State ARRA fund recipients. We are attempting to identify whether the non-existent congressional district data stems from input errors from these reports filed by others or if they involve entities doing work in NH who have headquarters in other states where they have the congressional districts listed. The federal reports that recipients of ARRA funds are required to submit have fields for the Congressional District where the primary work site is and also for the Congressional District where the recipient's headquarters is located. If one is not careful during input and when reading, the two could be confused.

Fitch added that he has asked his staff to look into the errors, and determine if the faulty data came from the state reports he submits or from individual recipients. Reporter Bill McMorris has found 440 phantom districts nationwide which are listed as receiving $6.4 million from the Americand Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Administration tries to explain away stimulus errors

Responding to rash of errors in its tracking of the $787 billion stimulus package, the Obama Administration has mounted a defense of its $84 million web boondoggle.

Obama special adviser G. Edward DeSeve writes on the White House website that the errors are minor compared to the overall to the massive bill.

First, the mistakes are RELATIVELY few, and don’t change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the data. Even if as many as 5-10% of the reports or 5-10% of the totals are wrong (and we don’t think it is that high), that still means the Recovery Act saved or created between 600,000 and 700,000 direct jobs in its first seven months – more than most experts predicted when it passed. And most leading experts agree that – whatever the recipient reported total should be – the actual number of jobs saved or created is about double that, because the recipient reports don’t include direct payments to individuals, the jobs created by Recovery Act tax cuts, and the jobs created when workers on Recovery Act projects spend their paychecks.

The Recovery.gov team even weighed in on Twitter, passing the blame for the slew of faulty job numbers and phantom Congressional Districts on recipients making mistakes on the reports they submitted.

Did you know? Unless an egregious error is noted, Recovery.gov posts data exactly as it is reported by recipients.

But the Board overseeing the $84 million Recovery.gov project admits it never checked to see that the data going into the database was accurate. Ed Pound is Director of Communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” Pound said…

Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.

“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

In New Hampshire, the stimulus website shows that 92.5% of all jobs "created or saved" by the stimulus are in Concord, likely the result of how state officials reported how they were spending the money to Washington. Of the 3,000 jobs reported by New Hampshire stimulus coordinator Bud Fitch, over 2,000 were public school teachers, and nearly all were working for state or federal governments.

As the Administration tries to explain away its ability to track how the government is spending $787 billion in taxpayer money, it lacks any explanation for how the stimulus has failed to meet the Administration's rosy projections, or why the same bureaucrats should be trusted with America's health care industry.

$6.4 Billion Stimulus Goes to Phantom Districts

Bill McMorris, who I quoted in this morning's story on the 440 phantom Congressional Districts that received funding under the stimulus.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts. Pennsylvania’s 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi’s 5th District and Oklahoma’s 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

$84 million for a great website, with tons of functionality. Too bad they didn't bother to check to see if the data going in was garbage.

Mark Steyn tours the 00th Congressional District

Over at National Review Online, Mark Steyn explores the political implications of making up Congress Districts, like the Obama Administration has done with the stimulus package.

Reading those jobs numbers, I can't be the only resident of New Hampshire's Second Congressional District who dreams of relocating to the "00 Congressional District", land of 2,873.9 newly created jobs. What a great name! Because in the Obama budget you can always use a couple extra zeroes.

I like to think of it as somewhere up around the Fourth Connecticut Lake or the Indian Stream by the old bootlegging routes in from Quebec. I drive around in the forlorn hope that one day on a rutted Class VI road deep in the woods, just over the washed out culvert, I'll round the bend and see the sign saying "Now Entering The 00 Congressional District. This $47,000 sign brought to you by the America Recovery & Reinvestment Act", and the Emerald City of Oo will rise before me, its streets paved with Stimulus green and lined with dancing fountains of sparkling H1N1 vaccine and Obamatronic statues that bow as you pass by as if you're the Japanese Emperor and they sing "Be Our Guest" in a faintly metallic voice. And I'll be greeted by 2,873.9 gnarled old stump-toothed loggers with an average of 2.7 fingers between them, now federally retrained as green jobs czars, NEA performance artists, end-of-life counseling coordinators and Joe Biden speechwriters...

92.5% of all NH Stimulus Jobs in Concord

According to the federal government's Recovery.gov database, which tracks how state governments are spending the $787 billion stimulus package approved last year, 92.5% of all New Hampshire jobs "created or saved" by the legislation are concentrated in the State Capital of Concord.
According to the New Hampshire summary page, the government credits the American Relief and Recovery Act with creating or saving 3,528.8 full-time jobs across New Hampshire. 3,264.4 of those jobs are listed under Concord zip codes. Outside of Concord, only a few communities have more than a handful of jobs credited to the stimulus; 37 in Manchester, 25 in Salem, 47 in Portsmouth, and 14 in Durham.

Orville "Bud" Fitch oversees Governor John Lynch's Office of Economic Stimulus. Last month, he reported that the stimulus had created or saved 3,007 full-time equivalent jobs statewide through September 30, 2009. The federal website relies on reports from individual grant recipients, as well as the state's report every three months.

Stimulus Package doubles size of Congress

The political appeal of the $787 billion stimulus package was that it allowed the Obama Administration to spread the money across all 435 Congressional Districts in an attempt to win votes from politicians eager to bring home the bacon in rough economic times. But reports by the Obama Administration's Recovery.gov database show that the money wasn't limited to those 435 districts. It also went to 440 Congressional Districts that don't exist.

Reporter Jim Scarantino of the Rio Grande Foundation broke the news yesterday that the stimulus tracking website listed millions in federal funds for projects in ten bogus New Mexico districts. Within hours, colleagues at other state think-tanks had published stories detailing the massive errors in their state's stimulus disclosure databases. By late-afternoon, ABC News and the L.A. Times had picked up the story, prompting an angry reaction from Democratic Congressman David Obey, who blasted the Administration's lax oversight of the nearly $1 trillion spending package.

Reporter Michael Noyes of the Montana Policy Institute investigated how his state could have received funding in 13 separate Congressional districts, when it has only one Representative.

Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, tells the Montana Policy Institute that his organization posts whatever information is reported by stimulus grant recipients, and doesn't check to make sure it's actually true.

"Our job is data integrity, not data quality," he said.

The Recovery.Gov website was set up in February with a budget of $84 million.

Overall, Bill McMorris of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity calculates that $6.4 billion of the stimulus package has been distributed to 440 phantom Congressional Districts, which the Administration claims created over 28,000 jobs at a cost of $224,500 each.

The news of the mythical Congressional Districts comes on the heels of an admission by the Obama Administration that 60,000 jobs had to be cut from its latest stimulus report after finding faulty data from a dozen stimulus recipients.

Reported problems with the stimulus jobs data are so widespread that the Washington Examiner's David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway have published an interactive map of bogus jobs created or saved by the stimulus.

Obama Administration gives New Hampshire three new Congressional Districts

Good news for all those Congressional candidates facing tough primaries next fall. The Obama Administration's stimulus package has created three or four more Congressional Districts in New Hampshire.

According to the summary of stimulus jobs "created or saved" in New Hampshire, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has created 3.2 jobs in the 6th District, zero jobs in the 4th District, and two jobs in the 27th District. New Hampshire, of course, only has two Congressional Districts.

The site also lists a whopping 2,873.9 jobs in the 00 Congressional District, which is presumably where former Celtic Hall of Famer Robert Parish lives.

Hattip: Jim Scarantino at New Mexico Watchdog, who discovered the problems with Recovery.org in his state. This appears to be a nationwide problem with the confusing reporting requirements imposed on recepients of grants under the stimulus package.

Stimulus Numbers Continue to be Exaggerated

Bill McMorris does not surprise our regular readers when he reports that the job creation numbers attributed to the stimulus package are exaggerated.

Authorities continue to overestimate the number of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus package, according to an independent review conducted by the the Boston Globe.

While Massachusetts recipients of federal stimulus money collectively report 12,374 jobs saved or created, a Globe review shows that number is wildly exaggerated. Organizations that received stimulus money miscounted jobs, filed erroneous figures, or claimed jobs for work that has not yet started.

The review saw some agencies that had reported creating dozens of jobs created recant their stories.

“There were no jobs created. It was just shuffling around of the funds,’’ said Susan Kelly, director of property management for Boston Land Co., which reported retaining 26 jobs with $2.7 million in rental subsidies for its affordable housing developments in Waltham. “It’s hard to figure out if you did the paperwork right. We never asked for this.’’

$700,000 in stimulus for offshore wind turbines

You know what's really going to give the New Hampshire economy an immediate boost? Offshore wind turbines! Because nothing gives small business owners an incentive to grow their workforce like a windmill, in the water. UNH is getting $700,000 from us, through the stimulus package, for an experimental program that anchors wind turbines in deep water to the ocean floor. Seacoast Online reprints the UNH press release.

Within the next year, CORE will install a wind turbine with a 25-foot diameter on a 60-foot tower floating in 170 feet of water just south of the Isles of Shoals, where a mooring grid is already in place – and permitted – from UNH's Atlantic Marine Aquaculture Center. The site is six miles offshore and one mile south of White Island. CORE researchers will equip the 10-kilowatt turbine with extensive instrumentation to measure wind, wave, and temperature effects on the turbine itself, the platform on which it floats, and the mooring lines that anchor it to the ocean floor.

I'm sure the folks at UNH are doing good work. Maybe some day, we will be getting 20% of our electricity from windmills, as the Department of Energy hopes. But does this really reach the level of an emergency stimulus package, or is it just another way for Congress to borrow from the future in order to buy support back home?

Note to Washington: Stop Helping

Remember how the stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment under 8%?

Thanks to Innocent Bystanders, which updates this chart every month.

A Side Note on the Administration’s Defense of the Stimulus. The President and his economic team have claimed that the plan is working as intended, that they’re on track to save the original goal of 3.6 million jobs, but somehow, despite practically drowning in success, we’re going to have to live with high unemployment for years to come. Oh, and that everything is still Bush’s fault.

These claims have been debunked by a variety of sources, including the AP (and here), the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and blogs such as Political Math.

Federal Strings Trip New Hampshire Job Corps Center

Union Leader reporter Jim Fennell reports that the U.S Department of Labor has canceled the bid process for a Job Corps Center in Manchester, following a disputer over whether union work rules would have allowed any New Hampshire firms to build it.

Anagnost said he spent most ofAC yesterday trying to find out when or if the bid process would restart. He also said he called on the help of the state's four legislators in Washington, D.C.

The Labor Department's decision came a day short of one month after North Branch Construction of Concord filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office. North Branch decried the Labor Department's requirement for a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) that the contractor contends mandates following union rules and paying into union benefit funds as a condition for bidding on the project.

The rules virtually disqualified every construction company in New Hampshire from bidding on the project. The Labor Department canceled the bid a day before they were required to respond to the North Branch complaint.

Stimulus saves 473 jobs in district with only 290 teachers

The Obama Administration is counting stimulus jobs the way Chicago normally counts voters. The Chicago Tribune investigates the Administration's jobs numbers and finds them lacking.

More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers.

Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers.

"That other number, I don't know where that came from," said Lauri Hakanen, superintendent of North Chicago Community Unit Schools District 187.

The Obama administration last week released the first round of data designed to underpin the worthiness of its economic stimulus plan, which so far has directed $1.25 billion to Illinois schools. That money has helped save or create 14,330 school jobs in the state, the administration claimed.

But those statistics, compiled initially by the Illinois State Board of Education, appear riddled with anomalies that raise questions about their validity, according to a Tribune analysis of district-by-district stimulus spending and other state data. Many local school officials were perplexed by the stimulus data attributed to their districts.

Given that's it Illinois, we can only wonder how many of the jobs "created or saved" are held by residents of local cemeteries.

Stimulus saves 419.02 jobs in New Mexico

That's not a typo. According to reporter Jim Scarantino at New Mexico Watchdog, the $787 billion stimulus package has created or saved precisely 419.02 jobs in New Mexico. Does that mean somebody is working 48 minutes per week?

The recovery.gov site is also reporting that $259 per capita in stimulus funds has been received in New Mexico.

The cost of the 419.02 jobs so far created by the 2009 stimulus funds comes to $628,990 per job.

The Obama Administration would have been much better off simply claiming credit for any positive economic signs, while saying that any negative signs would have been worse without the stimulus. Presidents always get far more credit and blame for the economy than they deserve. But by trying to micromanage the stimulus by tracking every hour of work supposedly created by government spending, President Obama has inadvertently confirmed that the only jobs government creates are government jobs, and it does so at a horrifically ineffecient rate. Give me $628,990. I promise I'll hire at least two people for that, and double the effectiveness of the stimulus.

Performance art: Your stimulus money at work

The Union Leader argues that federal stimulus money would have been better used to fill in the state's budget hole than to subsidize arts programs.

So when the state recently received news that it would get $293,100 in federal stimulus money earmarked specifically to "save or create" jobs, where did it go? To arts programs, of course.

The New Hampshire Arts Council announced last week that the state will use the money to preserve 42 arts jobs (a highly questionable figure).

Among the jobs subsidized by this taxpayer money are: pianist educator, exhibition gallery assistant manager, bookkeeper, gallery manager, artistic director and office assistant. Also subsidized are eight visual artists and 16 performing artists.

The editorial points out that the money was earmarked for the arts by the NEA, and the state had no authority to transfer the cash to higher priorities.