About Those Phantom Congressional Districts . . .

by Little Miss Attila on November 17, 2009

They have apparently vastly increased the size of Congress:

Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist.

According to data retrieved from recovery.gov, nearly $6.4 billion was used to “create or save” just under 30,000 jobs in these phantom congressional districts–almost $225,000 per job. The web site operates on an $84 million budget and is tasked with monitoring the distribution of the $787 billion stimulus package passed by Congress–which, for the record, counts 435 members–in early 2009.

The site’s monitors, however, are not too savvy about America’s political or geographic landscape. More than $2 million was given to the 99th District of North Dakota, a state which has only one congressional district. In order to qualify for 99 districts, North Dakota would have to have a population of about 60 million people, almost 24 million more people than California.

The stimulus revived 8 recently retired congressional districts. Pennsylvania’s 21st District has received just under $2 million in funds. Mississippi’s 5th District and Oklahoma’s 6th received $1 million from the legislation, respectively. All three were eliminated by the 2000 census.

Many other recipients carried the banner for congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

New Mexico Watchdog broke the story on Monday morning after finding that $26 million in stimulus money had been distributed to 13 congressional districts–ten more than the state actually has. Similar reports soon followed from New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

A reporter from the Montana Policy Institue confronted the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the site, about these non-existent congressional districts on Monday afternoon. Ed Pound, Director of Communications for the board, said that the faulty information came from recipients of stimulus funds.

But don’t worry; they’ll correct the data in . . . January. At that point, it will become clear that fewer jobs were created/”saved” than has been claimed, which probably means that the amount of money spent per “job” will go up even more.

Via Hot Air, where Morrissey remarks:

As a former database administrator myself, I am not unaware of the challenges of bad data. However, that just means that database administrators have to set proper filters to restrict entries to prevent the infiltration of bad data. One particular strategy for a database built on Congressional districts for reporting would be to load a list of legitimate districts by state as a filter . . . .

This again demonstrates the rank incompetence of the Obama administration, and the folly of trusting government to spend our money more than we trust ourselves. The ostensible reason for Porkulus was to boost the economy, which Obama proposed to do by taking capital out of the markets and spending it on a raft of Democratic pork projects and progressive wish lists. We knew that the list of spending priorities would do nothing to boost the economy, but even we didn’t foresee just how incompetent the White House would be in tracking the money. How hard is it to get a list of actual Congressional districts, for Pete’s sake?

Would that be for the canonical states, or for all 57 of ’em?

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

smitty November 17, 2009 at 6:39 pm

Actually, I disagree with Morrissey, as something of an IT geek myself.
The purpose of an information system is to protect users from data and data from users. Therefore, all of the logic desired to preclude crap data entry should be on the entry forms.
However, as the tables were probably loaded by a drunken jackass from an .xls, these theoretical notions and $3 will get you coffee at Starbucks.

Reply

John November 18, 2009 at 6:21 am

I think the definitive quote comes from the Chrysler dealer closure:

“Congratulations, 52%. You elected a gang of f***ing thieves.”

Reply

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: