Blessings and Curses

If you haven't read Katherine Peters' story about the trouble the Energy Department is having managing the money it's received in the stimulus package, you should. Katherine's reporting makes the critical point that the stimulus money is straining already limited oversight resources. It's not the first time that folks have suggested that Inspectors General are overloaded, or that financial management needs to be reformed. But Katherine's story makes the additional point that the stimulus is also a way the Obama administration is redirecting agencies and departments' priorities:

The guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget on administering the funds poses daunting challenges for even the most well-run federal program offices, Friedman wrote. For Energy and other agencies with histories of contract and financial management problems, the stimulus funds present potentially overwhelming difficulties.

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"This is complicated by the fact that, in many respects, the Recovery Act requirements represent a fundamental transformation of the department's mission. If these challenges are to be met successfully, all levels of the department's structure and its many constituents, including the existing contractor community; the national laboratory system; state and local governments; community action groups and literally thousands of other contract, grant, loan and cooperative agreement recipients throughout the nation will have to strengthen existing or design new controls to safeguard Recovery Act funds," he wrote.

I think most program managers would agree that additional funding is a good thing. But that doesn't mean that keeping track of it is easy. And it's especially not easy when you're trying to realign your programs at the same time, get staff buy-in for that realignment, and meet a raft of new reporting requirements that your staff may still be struggling to understand. I don't have as solution for this. But it does mean that stimulus spending done properly is going to take time.