On Friday, in assessing the president’s performance in the first year, I wrote that he “wildly overestimated the effectiveness and efficiency of government programs (stimulus spending).”
As part of the stimulus program, Congress gave the Energy Department’s Weatherization Assistance Program a big funding boost. The program, which fixes up homes for low-income people and usually has a budget of around $200 million a year, got a $5 billion injection.
Yet a year later, just $441 million has been spent, raising questions as to just how effective the program is at stimulating the economy . . .Her optimism echoed that of state officials, who were chided recently in the Dallas Morning News for having weatherized just seven homes in the whole state of Texas as recently as last month.
Now that number is up to 49, said Gordon Anderson, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Housing and Community Action.
If you cover government, or you work in government, you begin to get familiar with the ever-infurating ways in which it fails to work as intended. Endless meetings. Project delays. Office turf wars. Waiting for that office to sign off on a decision. More paperwork. Inter-departmental memos.
The people who have the most faith in government’s ability to work as intended often seem to have the least experience in dealing with it.