White House Fires Back At Recovery Act Critics
By Robert Brodsky
The Obama administration is hitting back against charges that Recovery Act jobs figures are unreliable and overstated.
In a post this morning on the White House blog, Ed DeSeve, a special advisor to the president for the stimulus, argues that while some relatively minor errors have been discovered, they do not change the "fundamental conclusions" that between 600,000 and 700,000 direct jobs were saved or created in its first seven months.
"It would be great if every report filed was correct the first time, on time, and contained no errors," DeSeve wrote. "But that's not realistic when 130,000 reports are being filed in a 10 day period. It would be great if the reviewers at the federal agencies could have found all the mistakes in the 20 days they had to do the job, gotten the reports back to the recipients to be fixed, and reposted - but again, that isn't realistic."
DeSeve also made a little news, verifying for the first time that 10 percent of stimulus recipients have yet to file any reports.
Earlier this week, ABC News discovered recipient reports which state that jobs were created in congressional districts that do not exist. Other media accounts have found anecdotal overcounting of jobs.
Government Executive reported last week that job totals may have been systematically undercounted as well.
Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has seized on a document which shows that the Recovery Board and the Office of Management and Budget purged 12 questionable recipients reports which claimed that a total of 60,000 jobs had been saved or created because they appeared unbelievable.
Issa sent a letter to Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney on Monday calling for an asterisk or footnote on Recovery.gov alerting visitors that the data is unreliable. "I am concerned that the RATB web site may be spreading inaccurate and misleading information to the American people," the letter said.
The dispute will come to a head Thursday as the Oversight Committee conducts a hearing on the stimulus implementation.