Taxpayers Track the Stimulus Money (Obama and Congress Won’t – Not uhhh…ummm… Until October errr…?)
So just who’s tracking that $787 billion in taxpayer money that President Obama and the Democrat-led Congress are doling out? You are. Or you’re supposed to be, anyway.
“We are, in essence, deputizing the entire American citizenry to help with the oversight of this program,” said Rep. Brad Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on investigations and oversight.
So, too, said Earl Devaney, the ex-cop who’s now chairman of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board, charged with tracking the torrent of cash now pouring out of federal coffers.
“I’m going to have millions of citizens to help me,” he said, comparing run-of-the-mill Americans to inspectors general, the high-ranking officials charged with ferreting out waste and abuse in federal agencies.
“I’m going to have a million little IGs running around,” the chairman said Tuesday after his testimony before the subcommittee.
The most appalling spectacle was the size of the meeting! Apparently oversight of taxpayer money is not a priority of the government. (Not that it ever was, but still!)
And perhaps that’s just as well, given the turnout of the panel tasked with keeping track of thousands of millions of dollars. Just three of the 10 members bothered to show up for the subcommittee’s second meeting, dramatically titled “Follow the Money Part II.”
While Mr. Miller and the panel’s top Republican were there, only Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, Pennsylvania Democrats, came to the hearing. Absent were Democratic Reps. Steven R. Rothman of New Jersey, Lincoln Davis of Tennessee, Charles A. Wilson of Ohio, Alan Grayson of Florida and Bart Gordon of Tennessee. Republican Rep. Ralph M. Hall of Texas also skipped the session, while Rep. Brian P. Bilbray of California dropped by for the final hour of the nearly three-hour hearing.
Still, to a sparse crowd, Mr. Miller got right to the point. “President Obama promised a level of transparency, through the Internet, Recovery.gov. … How do you intend to provide that level of transparency, to see how – who actually got the contract to pour asphalt?”
Interestingly enough, redstate.com had an article that spoke to this very point. There is a website that has been created to replicate what the government should have been doing at this point already. It’s called www.recovery.org and it tracks where the stimulus funds are going.
Does Congress really expect the American Idol audience to have an attention span that lasts longer than an hour and proactively research where stimulus funds are going? We would have a completely different result of the past election if anyone dared watch C-Span on a regular basis!
This is the change and hope we can believe in during this new administration. All that transparency that Obama talked about was a big, fat lie.
Quite frankly, this entire process of getting the recovery.gov website up and running to track the money will be stalled. It will be delayed until just the right time when the important funds that were issued as Democrat payoffs will be paid and won’t be found.
