Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Better Luck Next Year...


Well, I guess it was too good to be true. During and after his first legislative test, President Obama declared that we would know exactly how and where every dollar, actually, every DIME, would be spent. He made a big deal about Recovery.org, a website that would list, down to the contractor level, how and where the "stimulus" money would be spent.

I took a gander at Recovery.org to see how things are going and to my surprise, after looking for stimulus spending sent to NJ, all I could find was a general overview (NJ gets about $2 billion). There's nothing specific about who is getting it and how EXACTLY it's going to be spent. So much for transparency. But to top things off, the actual information that Obama bragged about providing won't be available sooner than October and possibly as late as next Spring!

The man who is leading the government's effort to get Recovery.org up and running, Earl Devaney, said that it would be a "challenge to have the site ready to present data in five months" and, after the hearing before the House Subcommittee on Science and Technology, that "the board [Recovery Transparency and Accountability Board] doesn't have enough storage capacity".

Ok. I'm not a huge techie who spends hours figuring out how to program this or that, but I do realize that computers have a limited capacity to store and process information. If there is a lot of information that needs to be used on a computer, you have to ensure the computer is capable of handling it right? If the government is planning on sharing $800 billion worth of spending information, don't you think you should have a friggin' Cray computer set up to handle the data? Asleep at the switch doesn't even begin to describe this.

I know, politicians make promises all the time, but this is supposed to be the era of enlightenment and super technology with one of the most "plugged-in" presidents in our nation's history! What happened?

Anyway, just to make us feel confident in the Board's ability to take charge of its mandate and get the job done, Devaney said that after they wait six to nine months for the White House Office of Management and Budget to come up with rules on how the stimulus spending information should be released, he would, "...push them for as much data as possible".

Man, I feel so much better.