Goodbye, Transparency: Politics Drives Fed Money to Outposts

By Amy Linn, 8-27-09

Watchdog groups like OMB Watch are having a field day with a fine story from the Associated Press, which reports that remote backwaters—like Whitetail, Montana—are getting millions of dollars in stimulus money ahead of bigger border crossings that urgently need upgrades.

The story by reporters Eileen Sullivan and Matt Apuzzo (view it in full here) shows how Whitetail managed to get $15 million under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, despite the fact that “a government priority list ranked the project as marginal.”

How can this be?

“Two powerful Democratic senators persuaded the administration to make it happen,” the story says. Those two senators, of course, are Max Baucus and Jon Tester.

OMB Watch, a nonprofit group dedicated to transparency in government and federal budget matters, puts it this way:

“Pop quiz time, folks. If you had $15 million in Recovery Act funding to spend on a border checkpoint, which of these two checkpoints would you choose to spend the money on:
--A) A checkpoint in Laredo, Texas, which serves more than 55,000 travelers and 4,200 trucks a day, and is one of the busiest border stations in the country; or

--B) A sleepy Montana checkpoint along the Canadian border that sees about three travelers a day.”

The government, of course, chose B, and decided to funnel money to low-urgency Whitetail, population 71. The project “involves building a border station the size and cost of a Hollywood mansion,” the AP reports. “Tester’s office boasted of that effort in an April news release, crediting Baucus and his seat at the head of the ‘powerful Senate Finance Committee.’”

What critics bristle about is that the office of Homeland Security keeps rankings of the most important repairs that need to be made at the nation’s border crossings, to prioritize where money is spent. But the Obama administration—despite vows to ban “earmarks” and maintain the utmost transparency—is allowing places at the bottom of the list to nudge out those near the top. And federal officials in some cases are refusing to release information about how they’re making their decisions. The result is distrust and questioning nationwide, as citizens wonder where stimulus cash is being spent—and whether it benefits them the way it should.

Consider a New York Times story by Patrick McGeehan, which shows how much guesswork has been involved when it comes to measuring the number of jobs created by stimulus money. The glowing projections, in New York City at least, have been imprecise and inflated.

How can people find out more? They can go to the federal government’s website, Recovery.gov, which vows to “provide accountability and transparency to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, so that every taxpayer dollar spent on our economic recovery must be subject to unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability.”

But the website doesn’t include information about things like border-post upgrades. And those who want to figure out how money is being spent in general—say, in Montana—can click on a link that redirects them to the state’s website, which offers a lot of generic info, but isn’t great on job-creation details. ("An estimated 11,000 jobs will be created or saved and the majority of Montanans will see tax relief,” the Montana site says, but there is no easy-to-find breakdown of where the jobs are and what “saved” means, among other things.)

As OMB Watch put it: “This [AP] article is just another reminder for why transparency is so vital. Despite best efforts to keep earmarks and political influence out of the Recovery Act, the example of the Montana border checkpoint shows that it’s still incredibly easy to subtly manipulate the spending process.”

In the meantime, we can only wish we lived in Whitetail.