Who Knows Where the Cash Goes?

Not them, GOP congresspersons are complaining. As Byron York reports in today's D.C. Examiner:

During the stimulus debate, the bill's supporters stressed that it included strong oversight safeguards. But audits and reports are months, if not years, away. Oversight will be after the fact; right now, with the money actually beginning to flow, members of Congress have little or no idea where it is going. What, for example, is the Department of Housing and Urban Development doing with the $1.5 billion Congress approved for a new program called the Homeless Prevention Fund?…. So Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House, and GOP Sen. John Thune have set up a working group to track spending as best they can…….

"Right now we have very little access to information as to what the agencies are up to, prior to the money actually being spent," Cantor says. "Agencies will give you information in very broad terms, without many specifics."

That's where local news reports, dug up on the Internet, come in. When a city or county official learns that he will receive a pile of federal money, he usually tells the nearby newspaper or TV station…..

Such searches led the Cantor-Thune group to the Binghamton, New York Press & News-Bulletin for a glimpse into how HUD is spending that $1.5 billion in the Homeless Prevention Fund. In early March, the paper reported that the small town of Union, New York would receive $578,661 from the Fund, even though "Union did not request the money and does not currently have homeless programs in place in the town to administer such funds."

An article in the Altoona Mirror reported that the small central Pennsylvania town was going to receive $819,000 from the Fund even though Altoona officials "may not have enough of a homelessness problem to use it." And a Google search turned up a report from WHP-TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania saying the city would receive $855,478 from the Fund, but does not know what to do with it.

Oh, Republicans–so predictably playing into the all-too-common linking of any sense that government should be frugal with taxpayers money to these Scrooge-like kicks in the shins to the homeless, but, well, that's what they like to do (and I'm sure they'd argue that this is a matter of bureaucrats lining their own pockets in fanciful ways and not about helping the homeless at all; still, the symbolism is rotten and there are a plethora of other places they could look for fiscal malfeasance).

That couple of million these eagle-eyes are complaining about here is extremely small change in Obama's era of Big Change. But the larger question of how any of our elected representatives can represent us when it comes to how this flood of cash bombards the land remains. And the answer is, they can't, and that's exactly how the sultans of stimulus want it.