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It may not be the kind of thing that gets people joyously running to the polls, but the administration deserves some credit for this:
The massive economic stimulus package President Obama pushed through Congress last year is coming in on time and under budget - and with strikingly few claims of fraud or abuse - according to a White House report to be released Friday...Even some former skeptics who predicted that the money would lead to rampant abuse now acknowledge that the program could serve as a model for improving efficiency in government...Meanwhile, lower-than-anticipated costs for some projects have permitted the administration to stretch stimulus money further than expected, financing an additional 3,000 projects, according to the report..."Certainly, the fraud and waste element has been smaller than I think anything anybody anticipated," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. "You can certainly challenge some projects as questionable economically. But there haven't been the examples of outright fraud where the money is essentially lining somebody's pocket."This kind of thing - the implementation of policies - is not the sexiest part of government. But after eight years of the Bush administration, one of the things many of us were looking forward to when Obama took office was a government populated by people who actually cared whether government did what it's supposed to do in a reasonably competent way. And given how much opportunity there is for mismanagement and outright graft when you're handing out $800 billion in a relatively short amount of time, the fact that there have been no major scandals associated with the stimulus is pretty remarkable. -- Paul Waldman
