Spending Stimulus Money Takes Money

Vice President Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius highlight stimulus spending at a project in Overland Park, Kan. (By Charlie Riedel -- Associated Press)

"The president has charged the men and women of the government to implement the Recovery Act with haste but also with strong attention to detail," said Tom Gavin, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget.

Gavin also noted that some of the spending for agencies here helps businesses elsewhere -- a contract for Social Security leaflets went to a Dallas firm, for example, and the one for outfitting the health agency's offices went to a Michigan company.

At the Health Resources and Services Administration, spokesman Nicholas Papas said the 134 new employees are needed to oversee the $2 billion in stimulus grants for the country's 1,100 community health clinics and $500 million for doctors and nurses working in underserved areas. The new hires are on a contract or term basis because most of the stimulus spending is supposed to be done in two years, he said.

"You want to have oversight, and that takes people and resources to do efficiently," Papas said. "If we're understaffed and there's a lack of oversight, the American people would rightly be upset about that."

Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said the agency needs the $37 million in the stimulus package for the personnel costs of sending out checks because it is barely able to carry its current workload. About $5 million went toward checking the list of recipients against lists of veterans and railroad retirees also qualifying for checks, to avoid double payment.

The Transportation Department needed to hire two experts to study job-creation estimates because it lacked the manpower to do the work itself, spokeswoman Sasha Johnson said. "Remember, these people are dealing with the recovery money on top of what they do every day," she said. "We wanted an extra set of hands to look at this."

The emphasis on accountability also helps explain the relatively slow pace of the stimulus spending. The White House says $135 billion has been "obligated," or fully approved to be spent, but many programs are still in the early stages of planning and reviewing applications, so eager are officials to spend every dollar right. The Housing and Urban Development Department, for instance, is still holding conferences at hotels nationwide -- at a cost of $348,483 for nine events -- to brief local officials on the application rules for a new $1.5 billion homelessness-prevention program.

On Monday, Biden presented plans for a ramp-up of stimulus spending, but the administration had always envisioned an acceleration about now, and the plans included no specific way to goad faster spending. Obama praised the plans, then stressed again the accountability theme that is arguably slowing the process and leaving so much of the money in Washington.

"We're going to . . . operate in a transparent fashion so that taxpayers know this money is not being wasted on a bunch of boondoggles," Obama said. "I think that sometimes good news comes in what you don't hear about, and you haven't heard a bunch of scandals -- knock on wood -- so far."