Stuffing An Elephant Down A Snake's Throat

(White House)

Now that President Obama has rammed through his $787 billion stimulus package -- or American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) -- the money needs to doled out, and rather quickly to have the desired effect of resuscitating the U.S. economy.

However, spending the money may not be so easy. According to a New York Times story, the infrastructure to dispense funding is not in great condition:

"The once efficient Obama transition has ground to a near standstill after tax problems bedeviled several of his nominees, leaving the top echelon of his government largely unassembled. Three cabinet jobs remain unfilled, only 2 of the 15 cabinet departments have deputy secretaries confirmed, and the vast majority of lower-level political jobs remain vacant.

"The slowdown seems to stem both from the administration's sharpening its vetting process after losing several nominees and from Senate committees' taking more time to consider names that have been sent to Capitol Hill. As a result, the very departments charged with executing one of the largest spending projects in American history are operating largely with career stand-ins without the authority of political appointees."

The Obama team countered that each agency doling out stimulus money has an administrator to ensure the money moves through the system quickly, which in itself would be a minor miracle. In addition, they say the bureaucrats ("career stand-ins" in the NYT article) manning agencies left over from the Bush administration won't be an obstacle to progress."

Even if the Obama team has a viable plan to distribute the funding, it will be like stuffing an elephant down a snake's throat. The bureaucratic infrastructure is by no means frictionless, and it will take months if not years to deploy the internal controls and oversight mechanisms that would ensure that the money is spent according to plan and delivers the desired results in the desired time frames.

The government promises that the citizens funding the AARA will be able to see who is getting the billions and how it is being spent at the Recovery.gov site. Given the problems with governments accounting systems in the past, such as the spend in Iraq, many will wonder if what is transparent in the AARA will be accurate.

Daniel Farber is editor-in-chief of CBSNews.com.

[phoenix125-2009]

We need to stop criticizing the stimulus package because this is the only thing we have at this time to work with. As the media, you should form a panel and discuss what should be done with the stimulus money so that some of the honest politicians at the different levels in the governent (state, city, etc.) might pick up these good ideas and actually help American people for a change.

This is the time that all Americans have to come together.

[cbsispravda1]

"Stuffing An Elephant Down A Snake''s Throat" is quite an appropriate title, as the Republican Party does just that to the Socialist snake Obama.

He''s going to get more than a belly ache in the process.

[joepack61]

A CAT scan in the emergency room to rule out a condition that the attending surgeon doesn''t believe exits per his exam costs over $4,000. How will electronic medical records (EMR) eliminate this waste? To the contrary, EMR could add waste and suffering. In one case, a man in his 30s had his colon cancer overlooked by doctors for years. They said that his MEDICAL RECORDS did not indicate a history or profile for colon cancer. If anyone can tell me how EMR would have change this story to one of timely and accurate medical treatment, I will reconsider my jaded view of EMR.

BTW check out the pork of H.R.1. at http://thomas.loc.gov/

[joepack61]

A government bureaucracy to intrude on doctor/patient relationships
Stage set for medical services rationing
--- Posted by tmcattack at 02:40 PM : Feb 18, 2009

Did anyone with a brain believe Obama''s hoey that computerized medical records will save $2000 for every american? That drunken Kennedy politician was also spewing the same malarky while EDS, IBM, HOneywell were standing in line for 10s of billions of corporate pork. The only thing I can think of that would have saved people money is a common phenomenom I hear of where people make repeated visits to doctors to have warts frozen off when in fact Dermatologists now have a new procedure using yeast injections.