White House Calls AP Story On Overstated Stimulus Jobs 'Misleading'

October 29, 2009 7:25 a.m. EST

Kris Alingod - AHN Contributor

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The White House is pushing back hard against an Associated Press story released late Tuesday saying jobs credited to the Obama administration's $787 billion recovery package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), were counted more than once in the first audit of the program.

In a statement, the Recovery Implementation Office said the AP reviewed only the earliest data posted online to the public, and that the data accounted only for 2 percent of all spending so far under the stimulus. But the administration also admitted to errors, saying its planned report on Friday "will not have similar problems" as the early data since it had had previously identified and corrected four of five errors cited by AP.

In its latest post dated Oct. 10, the administration had said there were 30,383 jobs created or saved from federal contracts under the stimulus. The AP said this was overstated by at least 5,000 jobs because some jobs were counted twice or four times, and some jobs were counted even when none were saved or created under the recovery package.

But Ed DeSeve, senior adviser to the President for Recovery Act Implementation, said in a statement that AP's story "draws misleading conclusions from a handful of examples."

"It looks at only a small portion of the data - an initial upload of data representing just two percent of Recovery Act spending - that was made publicly available before a full review of its accuracy could be done," DeSeve added. "Virtually all of the errors found by the AP had already been found by our review, and were already corrected in an update to be loaded onto Recovery.gov this week."

DeSeve, however, was interviewed by the AP for the story, and he is quoted as saying the administration has been working with companies that were awarded contracts, to fix the inaccuracies.

The White House plans to post reports of 100,000 recipients of federal contracts, and it says this latest data has already been reviewed during a three-week audit. It also sought to rebut the AP story with "real facts," such as, "All recipients were given through October 30th to clarify and confirm their data - including those linked to federal contracts. Any conclusions drawn about the quality of that small portion of data as it was posted two weeks ago are simply premature."

Unemployment has rose to a 26-year high of 9.8 percent last month. The losses added 7.6 million to the number of unemployed since the recession began in December 2007, putting the total to 15.1 million.

Republicans have been responding to the rising jobless rate by criticizing the administration's fiscal policy with the refrain: where are the jobs? Only three Republicans voted to support the stimulus, which they have labeled as "a trillion-dollar mistake," when it was passed in February.

The administration has repeatedly said that job losses will continue but that the economy is showing signs of improvement because of the recovery act. Vice President Joe Biden, who has been tasked to oversee the implementation of the stimulus, said in a report to the President early this month that 50 percent of the $499 billion estimated in spending under the stimulus had been obligated, ahead of the scheduled 60 percent before year's end.

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