Electronic Health Records

It's Official: The Stimulus Isn't a Waste of Money

October 1, 2010

Time.com - People of good faith can disagree over whether President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package is creating enough jobs, piling on too much debt, or helping the country in the long run. But it's about time to retire one set of critiques of the stimulus: that it would be riddled with fraud, hamstrung by delays, and crippled by cost overruns. So far, while the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is clearly not a political success, it is just as clearly a managerial success -- on schedule, under budget, and according to independent investigators, remarkably free of fraud.

Yesterday, the administration met its self-imposed deadline of spending 70% of the Recovery Act, or $551 billion, by the end of the fiscal year. Almost all of the unspent stimulus money is already committed to specific projects, except for a few longer-range initiatives like high-speed rail and electronic health records. And the completed work has cost less than expected, so the savings have financed over 3,000 additional projects, from airport improvements in Atlanta to new child-care centers at military bases in Louisiana, North Carolina, Mississippi and Oklahoma, from a new five-lane road in Jacksonville to a $14.5 million transformation of a World War 2 ammunition factory into an eco-friendly government building in St. Louis ...

With unemployment still so high, the administration's successful oversight of the stimulus does have an otherwise-did-you-enjoy-the-play-Mrs.-Lincoln feel. The recovery remains tepid, so the Recovery Act remains unpopular. The White House says there would be 3 million more unemployed Americans without it, and many independent economists agree, but the "failed stimulus" has become a Republican symbol of everything wrong with Obama's Washington. Even most Democrats -- including the president himself - won't utter the word "stimulus" in public anymore.

But so far: no indictments, no major scandals, no missed deadlines, no busted budgets. Hey, man: That's more than good enough for government work.