Years from now, historians may not agree on whether the federal stimulus plan was effective in reigniting the country’s flailing economy. What should be settled, however, is that the taxpayer-funded program – like others before it – is heavy on waste.
This isn’t a referendum on the broader effectiveness of the so-called “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” But with the border stations, and now the self-congratulatory signs (which I’ll get to in a minute), it’s becoming more difficult to make the argument that much-needed financial oversight for the stimulus dollars was ever there. Some of this was unavoidable, what with $787 billion being divvied up to hundreds of different agencies. But how did the federal government see fit to allocate $31 million in stimulus money to two rural Montana border stations?
The Scobey and Whitetail crossings are just 12 miles apart and rarely used. Whitetail sees just three travelers a day; Scobey sees 20. When Montana Democratic Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester announced that they had secured millions for “repairs” at each station, even the members of those communities were taken aback.
“It would be wiser spent on something more useful to the public generally,” farmer Marc Chabot told CNN.
In fact, no one has been able to make a convincing argument that the border stations need much fixing. Tester has defended asking Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to consider the northern border when dispensing funds, pointing out that the Whitetail crossing is contaminated with asbestos and adding that, “our borders are only as strong as their weakest link.”
It was an argument more defensive than convincing.
When the story of the border crossings began making national news, Napolitano immediately denied that politics played a role in distributing stimulus money, despite the fact that both Baucus and Tester had sent out press releases taking credit for the cash windfalls.
“Politicians take credit for things that go on in their state whether they deserve it or not,” Homeland Security spokesman Sean Smith said in late August.
But it was already clear that that federal stimulus money, taxpayer money, given to Homeland Security wasn’t being spent based on need – especially when a border town like Laredo, Texas, which sees 66,000 crossings a day, didn’t receive anything
It was ironic that the same day, Sept. 16, Napolitano spoke in Las Cruces, N.M., about how the U.S. and Mexico are making “advancements in the safety and security of the border area and the safety and security of Mexico” she halted any new border construction projects in the face of heavy criticism. Whitetail and Scobey will have to wait for repairs, and they appear just fine with that.
To a lesser extent, another recent example of waste is the road signs.
Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg, a Republican who hates all things stimulus, took to the floor of the U.S. House recently to denounce signs posted on highways that tell passersby that the construction projects next to them are being paid for by stimulus funds.
Rehberg, and many of his Republican colleagues, call these self-congratulatory.
“The dollars Congress allocates come from taxpayers,” Rehberg said. “In this case, it would be more accurate to say a project is funded by our children and grandchildren.”
Rehberg’s and his party’s motivations are political; the GOP is only recently advocating fiscal conservatism and the Montana Department of Transportation has listed funding sources (which also often credit taxpayer dollars) on road signs for years.
But when 106 Montana stimulus signs cost $185,144, the estimate from MDT, there is a real problem. When one sign costs nearly $2,000, it’s easy for Republicans and anyone else to decry wasteful spending.
It appears that, despite promises that a federal program would be both transparent and well managed, the term “government waste” is still painfully redundant.