Googling the stimulus funds

Byron York has a disturbing, yet funny story of how Republican leaders in the House can't get the administration to tell them how the stimulus money is being spent. So they've resorted to using Google and Lexis-Nexis to try to get an idea of where the money is going.

If they wanted, majority Democrats could demand real-time details from the Obama administration. But minority Republicans have no power to compel the administration to do anything. So Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House, and GOP Sen. John Thune have set up a working group to track spending as best they can.

You might think that two high-ranking elected officials would have ways to learn such things, but the fact is, they don't. At the moment, the best tools Cantor and Thune have are Google and the Lexis-Nexis newspaper database.

"Right now we have very little access to information as to what the agencies are up to, prior to the money actually being spent," Cantor says. "Agencies will give you information in very broad terms, without many specifics."

That's where local news reports, dug up on the Internet, come in. When a city or county official learns that he will receive a pile of federal money, he usually tells the nearby newspaper or TV station. "Local news has been by far the best source of information so far," one GOP aide told me. "If you want to know how a local government is going to spend the money, Google around, Lexis-Nexis a bit."

Such searches led the Cantor-Thune group to the Binghamton, New York Press & News-Bulletin for a glimpse into how HUD is spending that $1.5 billion in the Homeless Prevention Fund. In early March, the paper reported that the small town of Union, New York would receive $578,661 from the Fund, even though "Union did not request the money and does not currently have homeless programs in place in the town to administer such funds."

An article in the Altoona Mirror reported that the small central Pennsylvania town was going to receive $819,000 from the Fund even though Altoona officials "may not have enough of a homelessness problem to use it." And a Google search turned up a report from WHP-TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania saying the city would receive $855,478 from the Fund, but does not know what to do with it.

The Cantor-Thune team is also keeping a close eye on a website, Federal Business Opportunities (FedBizOpps.gov) on which the government lists jobs that will be funded by the stimulus. This week they found an opportunity for art conservation for the Army. Like many others, it might be a perfectly legitimate task, but it has little or nothing to do with economic stimulus.

Not exactly the stories of all the jobs created by the stimulus that the administration wanted. But when congressmen have to use Google to track what the supposedly "most transparent" administration in history is doing with the billions allocated for so-called stimulus money is going, that's what happens.