The New New Deal (45 page)

But in Beck’s antigovernment universe, wisps of smoke were always evidence of a raging fire. To Beck’s delight, Zoi left government to run a clean-energy fund for the left-wing financier George Soros. And speaking of dynamic women hounded out of public service, Claire Broido Johnson is now an executive at Serious Materials, where she’s launched a new program to finance energy efficiency retrofits at Fortune 500 companies.

Buried under Beck’s rants, there was a legitimate debate about the
federal role in promoting efficiency. “Do you think maybe the government has gotten too big when we have someone we pay in tax dollars in charge of weather stripping?” he asked. It was a fair question, despite the unfair description of Zoi’s job. The Obama administration argued that weatherization, in addition to saving money for families less fortunate than Beck, promoted our national, environmental, and economic security by reducing our energy consumption and carbon footprint while providing stimulus and creating jobs. But Beck—and the Republican leadership—rarely addressed this kind of argument on the merits. Instead, they created a caricature of the stimulus as a political con, a payoff to ACORN, a sleazy collection of sweetheart deals. Yeah, right, “weatherization.” Obviously, some lefties must be sleeping together.

T
he Republican case against the Recovery Act—beyond the overriding fact that the recovery didn’t feel like a recovery—still consisted mostly of cats and dogs. The lead inquisitors were Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain, whose reports crammed with allegedly wasteful stimulus projects gave the right its anti-stimulus talking points.
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Many of the projects they singled out were badly distorted, like a $54 million grant for a Napa Valley wine train, which was actually a flood control project for the entire valley, or a $10 million grant to renovate “an abandoned train station that hasn’t been used in 30 years,” when in fact its ridership had almost doubled in five years. Other projects sounded truly wasteful, like a $25,000 arts grant for an anti-imperialist puppet show. Quite a few of the projects had already been canceled by the administration, like a guardrail for a dried-out Oklahoma lakebed. But the facts didn’t matter much. The point was that government can’t do anything right, and Obama is tossing around your hard-earned money like a degenerate gambler.

To Coburn and McCain, the green-energy revolution was nothing more than a costly joke on taxpayers. In one report, their number-one boondoggle was a $5 million grant to retrofit an “almost empty” Tennessee mall to run on geothermal power; it was almost empty because it was being redeveloped. The top ten also included a $787,250
smart grid pilot program on Martha’s Vineyard, because Coburn and McCain apparently thought “smart appliances” that utilities could adjust remotely—“Big Brother–style”—sounded creepy. In fact, most utilities already use “demand response” for commercial customers like Walmart, paying them for the right to tweak thermostats a few degrees or dim lights a bit during peak demand. It’s voluntary, it’s unobtrusive, and it’s the future of the grid, saving customers money, helping utilities meet peak loads without building new power plants, and fueling a multibillion-dollar industry devoted entirely to demand response. Meanwhile, GE is taking advantage of the same tax credits that helped Serious Materials in order to manufacture smart washers and dryers in Senator McConnell’s hometown of Louisville, creating over eight hundred green jobs.

But that’s a complex story about change. The Republicans made the Recovery Act into a simple story about the fleecing of America, about small-business loans for martini bars and taxpayer-funded studies of malt liquor consumption, the Icelandic environment in the Viking Age, and the division of labor in ant colonies.

Medical research may be the best example of the gap between the substance and perception of the Recovery Act. Senator Specter’s insistence on the $10 billion windfall for NIH is already financing breakthroughs, especially in the futuristic field of genomics and personalized medicine. Stimulus-funded studies have already pinpointed genetic variations linked to Alzheimer’s disease, a rare birth defect called Kabuki syndrome, and a range of childhood brain disorders. The Recovery Act has also produced new advances in hip replacements, new proof that brains of different ethnicities are made of the same genetic building blocks, and new treatments of epilepsy, ovarian cancer, and lung cancer. It has accelerated the Cancer Genome Atlas, so that scientists will have a comprehensive catalogue of mutations associated with the twenty most common cancers by 2014. And NIH director Francis Collins, the former leader of the Human Genome Project, says the stimulus is producing technological advances that are swiftly driving down the costs of genomic research, so that standard patient records could soon include a full genetic portrait.

“This could be a tipping point for personalized medicine,” Collins says. “The stimulus really created space for the out-of-the-box research that doesn’t get support when budgets are tight. You’ll hear about some game-changers.”

So far, Americans have heard about research like a $144,541 Wake Forest University primate study of cocaine’s effect on a brain chemical called glutamate. Or as McCain and Coburn described the research: “Monkeys Get High for Science.” Collins says the study could provide vital insight into the science of addiction, and it’s not the kind of experiment that can be conducted on humans. He also points out that research can provide just as much stimulus as tax cuts; NIH’s Recovery dollars would create or save fifty thousand jobs. But coked-up monkeys sound funny—and so do studies of “hook-up behavior” by drunken co-eds, the effect of methamphetamines on the sex drives of rats, and a $221,355 investigation into why young men don’t like to wear condoms. Whenever White House officials heard those stories, they stifled curses about their new Democratic friend Arlen Specter.

“If you took all the negative clips about the Recovery Act, the biggest pile would be the NIH studies, the teen sex habits and cocaine monkeys,” Ron Klain says. “And Republicans say: See? It’s classic government waste. Well, Specter was the sixtieth flipping vote! Without cocaine monkeys, there’s no tax cuts and no roads.”

Of course, the monkeys would have languished in Republican press releases and right-wing blogs if the media hadn’t found them irresistible. When it came to the stimulus, the national press was almost all- gotcha-all-the-time, missing the forest for the $564,635 grant to help undergraduates study Costa Rica’s trees.

T
here is only one congressional district in North Dakota, but according to the first batch of Recovery Act data posted on recovery.gov in October 2009, the stimulus sent $2 million to its 99th district. South Carolina’s 7th district was credited with $27 million, even though it was eliminated in 1930. And most of Montana’s stimulus jobs were supposedly created in its “00” district.

“Exclusive: Jobs ‘Saved or Created’ in Congressional Districts That
Don’t Exist,” ABC News reported.
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Gotcha! The $6.4 billion the stimulus purportedly distributed to “phantom districts” became a huge national story.

In fact, no money was distributed to phantom districts. There were just some clerical glitches in the 131,000 reports that stimulus recipients had filed that fall, and the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board had posted them to the new website without vetting their accuracy. The mistakes were soon corrected, but the uproar continued. Welcome to the age of federal transparency.

“To read some coverage, one might conclude that a scandal worthy of Sherlock Holmes had befallen the Recovery program,” the stimulus watchdog Earl Devaney wrote.
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“Not really—just critics hyperventilating.”

The Recovery Act’s unprecedented transparency was yet another reflection of Obama’s vision of change, backing up his good-government rhetoric about sunlight being the best disinfectant. As a senator, Obama had teamed up with Senator Coburn himself on a “Google for Government” bill that created the first searchable website for federal spending. After his election as president, he insisted the stimulus should go even further to help Americans track every dime online.

This noble effort handed Coburn and other critics a convenient sledgehammer to bash the Recovery Act. As Glenn Beck put it: “Now you can go right online and see how they’re peeing your money away!” Congressman Wilson, just two months after his “You lie!” outburst, declared the phantom districts were evidence that “the government website charged with reporting waste, fraud, and abuse is its very own worst offender.”
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The comedian Stephen Colbert, in character as a right-wing blowhard, fulminated that the stimulus was creating jobs for “leprechaun polishers” and “Yeti podiatrists.” Even Democratic allies like David Obey blasted the Obama administration, which didn’t manage the website and didn’t control Devaney. “The administration owes itself, the Congress and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes,” Obey fulminated.

It was just one more example of no good stimulus deed going unpunished.
“Everybody says oh, transparency, that’s good government, that’s a good thing,” Biden says. “Hell, transparency is costly. Every wart, you see.”

The press had a field day with the jobs data in those 131,000 initial reports, even in districts that existed. It seemed like every investigative reporter in America was exposing saved jobs that hadn’t really been in danger, created jobs that weren’t really stimulus jobs, raises being counted as jobs, and jobs claims that made no sense. When the administration intervened to scrub a dozen blatantly unrealistic recipient reports from the website—one community college’s $27,000 stimulus grant supposedly saved 14,500 jobs—Republicans again cried foul. “Now we learn that OMB is playing an active role in trying to filter information,” howled Congressman Darrell Issa, the ranking member of the House oversight committee. How dare Obama remove all that erroneous data before he could be properly ridiculed for failing to remove it? When Devaney and other independent watchdogs testified that there was nothing nefarious about the problems, that recipients were just as likely to understate the jobs they were creating or saving, the media just spun that as more evidence of miscues. “Undercounting Concerns Stimulus Investigators,”
USA Today
reported.
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Recipients were obviously confused about how to report a saved or created job, and Devaney was confused, too. So the administration simplified the definition for the next round of reporting to include any job directly funded by the stimulus. After that, the data problems dissipated. In the first round, Devaney’s “Wall of Shame” exposed over four thousand recipients who failed to file timely reports. Over the next two years, those numbers declined over 90 percent.

But again, the PR damage was done. Macroeconomists believed the stimulus had already saved or created one million jobs, but the coverage revolved around phantom jobs in phantom districts. It was no coincidence that a poll during the controversy found 62 percent of the public thought the Recovery Act had hurt the economy or made no difference.
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The tone was set the day Obama signed the Recovery Act, when OMB went live with a rudimentary version of recovery.gov that it had
created in just four weeks. The Associated Press story announcing this experiment in government openness was headlined, “Promises, Promises: Web Site Likely to Fall Short.”
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Why? Because Obama had said Americans would be able to track money spent in their community—and on the first day, recovery.gov only offered state-by-state estimates for stimulus spending and job creation, without breaking it down locally.

That’s because no one had any clue how much money any particular community would get from the earmark-free bill. The AP conceded this: “The problem facing the administration is that it’s impossible to put decisions on the website that have not yet been made.” The 2.0 version of recovery.gov would break down contracts by Zip Code, with GIS mapping to show visually where money was being spent. Transparency advocates say the Recovery Act’s sunlight efforts, while imperfect, are by far the best ever. “It’s a sea change,” says OMB Watch director Gary Bass.
Governing
magazine concluded “the stimulus has done more to promote transparency at almost all levels of government than any piece of legislation in recent memory.”
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On Day One, though, the AP was already writing its obituary for Obama’s promise of greater openness. From the start, the narrative was: What a mess.

M
y favorite example of this narrative was a
USA Today
story from May 2009, as the stimulus was starting to accelerate. Despite the Biden Bridge stumble, Pennsylvania transportation officials told the paper they expected a “record building program” that summer. But when it came to the Recovery Act, every silver lining had a cloud. The headline was: “Traffic Set to Slow as Stimulus Gears Up.”
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This was not isolated nitpicking. Three weeks later, the same reporter, Brad Heath, had a new scoop: “Stimulus Projects Bypass Hard-Hit States.”
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Gotcha! But he only analyzed 0.5 percent of the Recovery Act, an absurdly tiny sample. His primary example of a victimized state was Michigan, even though he acknowledged that its officials were “generally satisfied with the pace of federal aid.” He didn’t mention that the
Energy Department had just announced its advanced battery grants, and five of the six largest factories would be built in Michigan.

In September, Heath was at it again: “Pace of New Stimulus Spending Slows.”
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Gotcha! But as he conceded, that was only because the feds had finished cutting multibillion-dollar fiscal relief checks to the states. In reality, the pace of new projects was, as he had already reported, gearing up. Later that fall, Heath tweaked the Recovery Act for sending too large a share of its highway dollars to rural America: “Stimulus Takes Detour Around Ailing Metropolitan Areas.”
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This was a more plausible critique, but it would have been more compelling if Heath hadn’t published another gotcha making the opposite case three months later: “Metro Areas Get Chunk of Rural Stimulus Aid.”
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