Coburn "Report" No Help in Recovery Act Performance Conversation

Writing on the States for an Accountable Recovery blog, Phil Mattera takes a well-measured swipe at Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) report detailing Recovery Act project follies. While the report is intended to raise the ire of the public and Congress and grab "thousand-dollar toilet seat"-type headlines, it falls a bit short of being a catalog of waste-fraud-and-abuse porn it was intended to be. Mattera, however, makes the critical point that neither Coburn's nor Vice President Biden's cut-and-paste "100 Days, 100 Projects" report are based on actual data, just results from Google news searches.

The cherrypicking of self-serving anecdotes from secondary sources -- by either proponents or critics of the Recovery Act -- is no substitute for real data. We are still waiting for the Office of Management and Budget to release its final rules on how federal agencies should collect data on Recovery Act spending and job creation. Assuming that those rules provide for thorough reporting, we can look forward to the day when debates on the effectiveness of the Act are based on a more solid foundation.

(Craig Jennings 06/18/09)

Comments

by Anonymous (not verified) on 06/18/09

What is OMB Watch doing to

What is OMB Watch doing to make sure taxpayer money is protected. It looks like nothing.

by Adam Hughes on 07/01/09

OMBW is engaged in pretty

OMBW is engaged in pretty extensive work on the Recovery Act to bring more transparency and accountability to the funding. We worked to organize the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery, which involves over 30 national organizations working to promote accountability policies for both government agencies and companies that contract with or benefit from recovery spending.

To date, OMBW has developed a Data reporting architecture proposal, developed comments on OMB guidance on Recovery Act implementation, testified before Congress on the implementation of the Recovery Act, and met with multiple government officials at OMB, the RAT Board, and elsewhere throughout the government to discuss the proper way to implement recovery spending.

Our work has focused on creating the right reporting structures and data collection models to be able to hold all elected officials and others involved in the Recovery Act accountable. We need hard data about what programs and spending worked and which ones didn't, about who received the money and what they did with it. While Sen. Coburn's report does raise a few important questions, it doesn't really tell you anything. In many ways it was no more useful than the "advertisement" put out by the Vice President's office on recovery.