Obama Blog's Sneak Attack on the Government Accountability Office
November 19, 2009
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As we may have discussed here in the past. Comrade BO uses his staff of whitehouse bloggers to fight back against any media reports that dare question the White House's official, sunny estimates of the usefulness of the billions in stimulus money rammed through congress.
The painful irony here is that Obama claimed this massive money injection would be subject to rigorous oversight. Trouble is, whenever that oversight says something inconvenient for his polling or reelection chances, he directs his flunkies to dispute the inconvenient information in official white house channels. A couple of recent examples before we get to Obama's preemptive strike on the GAO.
Obama's lackeys complained loudly when Edmunds.com studied cash for clunkers and determined it to be a horribly inefficient program that put taxpayer subsidies of tens of thousands of dollars per extra car sold.
Obama's propaganda office also took issue with the AP's criticism of its nonsensical "jobs created or saved" data, which are based not only on bad numbers, but invent an entirely new and undefined data point ("jobs saved") for the express purpose of obfuscating the numbers and taking his reelection campaign forward a few years.
Which brings us to today, when Obama's entourage went to war with the rest of the government on that same data. There's a pre-emptive strike on the white house blog about the bogus jobs data. It labels as "Fiction" the reports that these numbers are riddle with errors.
FICTION: The reports recipients of Recovery Act funds filed are riddled with errors.
Why would it do that? Why today? Maybe because the Government Accountability Office published a report today that pretty much says that these reports are riddled with errors.
GAO's fieldwork and initial review and analysis of recipient data from www.recovery.gov, indicate that there are a range of significant reporting and quality issues that need to be addressed For example, GAO's review of prime recipient reports identified the following: Erroneous or questionable data entries that merit further review: (1) 3,978 reports that showed no dollar amount received or expended but included more than 50,000 jobs created or retained; (2) 9,247 reports that showed no jobs but included expended amounts approaching $1 billion, and (3) Instances of other reporting anomalies such as discrepancies between award amounts and the amounts reported as received which, although relatively small in number, indicate problematic issues in the reporting. Coverage: While OMB estimates that more than 90 percent of recipients reported, questions remain about the other 10 percent. Quality review: While less than 1 percent were marked as having undergone review by the prime recipient, over three quarters of the prime reports were marked as having undergone review by a federal agency. Full-time equivalent (FTE) calculations: Full-time equivalent (FTE) calculations: Under OMB guidance, jobs created or retained were to be expressed as FTEs. GAO found that data were reported inconsistently even though significant guidance and training was provided by OMB and federal agencies.
In other words, the data being received are too lousy to allow anyone to be making any claims about how effective the stimulus money has been. But,of course, that hasn't stopped the Obama propaganda office from claiming otherwise, over and over again.
Unfortunately for the GAO and others, Obama's team of young social-media experts (the ones who poured water on Hillary and melted her, then won the election) are way ahead of the GAO's stodgy reporting process. The slick blog with little pictures saying things like "reality check" will probably be much more effective than the GAO's paragraphs of boring gray text. Never mind that the political hacks in the white house are in no position to judge what reality is, and the GAO, which is better equipped for the job, is actually, by the legislation's own text, responsible for providing oversight.
Inconvenient truths are easily disposed of these days. Especially when those burying the bodies know better how to harness The Internets to do it.
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