CAGW was quoted in Reporter Michael Grabell’s latest story on misspent stimulus cash. Here are a couple of the story’s highlights:
Breakfast at Fuddruckers: $19.24.
Snow cone and cotton candy machine: $146.89.
Six extra preview performances of “Little House on the Prairie – the Musical”: $50,000.
Benefit to the economy? According to the recipients of this stimulus money: Priceless.
Last week, the federal government released the first comprehensive tally [1] of the nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package. And while the White House has heralded marquee projects [2] like road construction and solar panel factories, the stimulus package is also made up of hundreds of smaller purchases like office supplies, gasoline and lab rats.
Some of the more unusual purchases are bristling stimulus critics.
“This was not what people had in mind when they were talking about job creation,” said Leslie Paige, spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste [3]. “It was a gigantic pork barrel project from the first day out of the box, and it has proven itself to be every bit as swinish as we thought it would be.”
Waste, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.
Among the 150,000 stimulus expenditures released last week are dozens of iPods, toilets and trips to resort hotels. But, according to the reports, those seemingly questionable purchases are being used to enhance technology in the classroom, make bathrooms accessible to the disabled and train special education teachers.
“If you build a bridge to nowhere, that might be a bridge that you’re going to use that I’m not going to use,” said Ed Pound, spokesman for the government board charged with investigating waste and fraud in the stimulus package. “That’s not a call we’re going to make.”
The White House provided some insight on what types of projects don’t meet the administration’s standards when it announced [4] last month that it had stopped and altered 170 proposals so far. On the list were projects to straighten headstones, freeze fish sperm and steam-clean bird droppings from buildings.
But when the stimulus oversight board released its report last week, other stimulus recipients had funded the exact same types of projects to reset headstones, freeze fish sperm and power-wash bird droppings from bridges…
The award for most unusual stimulus project could perhaps go to Malcolm MacIver, a neurobiology and engineering professor at Northwestern University.
MacIver received a $1.25 million grant to use electric fish from the Amazon to study how animals take in sensory information to move quickly in any direction. (See video.) [5] The research could help in the development of underwater robots to find the source of toxic leaks. Further in the future, it could lead to new, far more agile prosthetics.
Read it all here:
Filed under: Pork
