Can Recovery.gov Succeed Absent a "Magic Wand"?
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 6 2009
"There is no parent-child relationship between the Federal, State, County, and Municipal governments." That Eric Gillespie of the private company behind Recovery.org, testifying before Bart Gordon's House Science Committee yesterday and speaking the words on Recovery.gov that still dare not be spoken in polite company. Conducting the kind of oversight set forth by the stimulus package is as messy as knowing when, where, and how to discipline other people's kids. But oversight of the over $700 billion in public funds pumped out into the country as part of the recovery package, though, is going to be but an hollow shell of accountability without some mechanism for tracking monies from the federal purse all the way down to the tiny non-profit in Montana or obscure state highway commission subcommittee in rural Alabama. Surface-level tracking might make us all feel great about the noble commitment to transparency we've made. It will certainly provide for a steady stream of lovely charts and graphs on Recovery.gov. But it won't, you know, provide a meaningful check on waste, fraud, and abuse on a tremendous outlay of taxpayer money.
Recovery.gov's Earl Devaney admitted as much to the committee, saying, according to reporting by Federal Computer Week's Alice Lipowicz, "If I could wave a magic wand, I would like to follow the dollars from cradle to grave." Reassuring. It's unclear what the going rate is on magic wands these days. But even with $84 million in operating funds, Devaney is being tasked with what may well be an impossible mission: tracking the ripple effect what happens when one trillion dollars is dumped into the American economy. That kind of contract-subcontract-subsubcontracting oversight is difficult enough in any situation. Couple that with the fact that the money is leaving the federal treasury more or less in one bulk dump, and that the office responsible for following the money has been in existence for just about long enough to grab a copy machine and figure out where the bathrooms are. Trying to round up appropriations for a magic wand might be the most reasonable approach.
Devaney's less enchanted solution? Ask for outside help architecting an IT system that makes the most of the data that the Recovery.gov team is able to collect. That's what last week's national dialogue was all about. Step two: set up a public hotline, so that we the people can report on when something is amiss.
UPDATE: Scientific American's Eugenie Samuel Reich has more on the challenges of stimulus oversight in the science sector in particular.