Apropos of my post yesterday on the phantom “saved or created” jobs here in Maryland (and Eddiebear’s national scoop!), I notice that other folks have found that the administration has stowed a few extra congressional districts in their states, too. Dafydd Ab Hugh discovered that California is actually 44 Congressional Districts larger than he thought and Michael Noyes learned that Montana picked up 13 extra districts, too.
Of course, that’s nothing compared to my mighty, mighty state of Maryland, which added 63 previously-hidden districts.
Expect the problem to get worse. Why? Because the people who were given $33.6 million a year to run the website don’t actually check the data coming in to make sure it’s anywhere close to accurate. From Noyes report:
Ed Pound, director of communications for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board which oversees the site, said his organization is accurately reporting the information that recipients provide. He said in some cases it appears recipients are entering the wrong congressional districts in their reports.
“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” Pound said.
…
Pound said he plans to make the chairman of the recovery board aware of the calls he has received. However, he said there are no plans to change the information on the website at this time. Pound said the reports will be updated and have a chance to be corrected during the next reporting phase in January. Reports from recipients are due in early January and will be posted at the end of the month.Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.
“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.
In other words, “Hey, it’s not my job to make sure there are basic error-checking routines in the software that my site uses. My only job is to make sure the data is there, whatever the data is. Now where’s my check?”.
You may also remember, about four months ago, we gave another company $18 million to re-design the site. Presumably that would include some sort of quality control of the data (unless they’re from the Ed Pound School of Bureaucratic Malaise).
This is not a difficult problem to solve. You software engineers, heck even you amateur programmers out there could whip up something that would check the State and Congressional District someone entered into the system against the actual State and Congressional district, just to make sure the number fits into a given range. It wouldn’t necessary ensure that the user was using the correct district number, but it would at least prevent the sort of ridiculous entry errors we’ve been seeing the past two days.
You’d think that for $51.6 million, we’d get a little bit more than “Hey, that’s not my job”. Makes you wonder how many of those we’ll get for the trillions the administration wants us to spend on health care.
UPDATE: David Obey, one of the guys who wrote the stimulus bill, is both shocked and enraged that his giant government boondoggle should become a giant government boondoggle.
UPDATE 2: The White House says we should ignore all those naysayers pointing out the bazillions of obvious mistakes because their website is completely awesome and the President said so. So there.
UPDATE 3: 440 fake districts? That’s what Amanda Carpenter found.
(Spokescritter quote via @seanhackbarth)
Tags: Economic Stimulus
thanks for the h/t. I do get a kick out of the mental gymnastics the left are doing to spike this act