Brad Henry: Spend Porkulus Money Quickly - And Carefully(?)

So Gov. Brad Henry tells his new stimulus oversight panel that the $2.6 billion that Oklahoma receives must be spent quickly and carefully?

"A lot of deadlines are approaching pretty quickly," Henry told the group. "There are also stipulations tied to much of this money. If it's not spent by a certain time, we lose it."

The same story has state auditor Brad Burrage warning that it must be spent "free of waste, fraud and abuse."

Pardon me for saying so, but it's almost impossible to spend quickly and avoid waste. (Haste makes waste, someone once said.) Fraud and abuse are also enabled when you work fast. The chief watchdog for the stimulus package agrees with me:

"I'm afraid that there may be a naive impression that given the amount of transparency and accountability called for by this act, no or little fraud will occur. My 38 years of federal enforcement experience tells me that some level of waste and fraud is unfortunately inevitable," Mr. Devaney told state officials charged with coordinating the spending.

Meanwhile, state officials across the fruited plain are reporting that the spending restrictions and other rules are making it virtually impossible to large parts of the money. David Freddoso at NRO reports:

The strings attached to various parts of President Obama's stimulus package have baffled state government officials, and it's not just a Republican-versus-Democratic issue. The White House was to provide additional guidance today about permissible uses of the money, but I'm told that much of the information will not appear for a week or more. This is a problem in many states that are working on their budgets right now.

There are some inherent problems in areas where the rules have already been written. One example: a senior aide to one governor complained to me recently that his state, given its current program structure, cannot possibly handle a seventy-fold expansion of weatherization funding in just 15 months, which appears to be a condition of accepting some of the funds.

As for the remaining unknowns, some states are simply making assumptions about what they can do with the money, which could prove to be wrong.

He lists several illustrative examples of municipalities and school districts that are finding that even with the added money, they cannot address their real problems because Congress, or the White House, decided to get very specific with targets for spending.

The grousing of local officials over stimulus money may seem like mere ingratitude. But considering that it's not free money — the federal government is borrowing and spending a trillion dollars for this — it's instructive to see what they are saying and what incentives are being created by the funds and the strings attached.

In Geneseo, Ill., they're happy to get money for infrastructure, but they cannot use any of it on sewers. So in the rush to spend, they'll just pave over their aging sewers and pray that they're good for another 7 to 12 years.

Add to this confusion the fact that over half of the stimuli cash is being spent in just 16 states, and that much of the money will not be spent until 2010 or later, and you wonder just how much real improvement our economy is going to see.