In 2009, Congress passed and the President signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment act, better known as the stimulus bill. The legislation pumped $860 billion of borrowed money into the economy.
Economists disagree on the benefits of the stimulus. Supporters say the money helped keep the economy from completely shutting down during the Great Recession. Opponents say a weak return on investment did not justify even more government debt.
Meanwhile, across the country, millions and millions of dollars were pushed rapidly into projects, some of questionable value. For the last several months, Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has been chronicling one example of the waste and inefficiency that frequently accompanies stimulus spending.
Eyre has focused in on the state’s use of $24 million in stimulus money to buy more than 1,000 high-end routers for high-speed Internet connections at schools, libraries, courthouses, health clinics, 911 centers and other public facilities.
That all sounds at least plausible until we learn that the routers, which cost $22,600 a piece, were much more powerful than necessary. In most cases, the same result could have been achieved for a fraction of the price and a trip to Best Buy.
Now, in his latest story, Eyre has learned that all but one of the 77 routers sent to West Virginia State Police detachments are sitting unused. Some are still in the boxes.
According to his story, “The new routers… lack voicemail modules, and State Police can’t operate the agency’s voicemail system without the hardware.”
State Police technology director Bill Gallagher indicated in emails obtained by the Gazette that the State Police notified the state Office of Technology a year ago about the problem and still haven’t heard back. It could cost several hundred thousand dollars to buy the modules and the necessary voice mail licenses for each phone.
Perhaps it would be beneficial for the state police to have these new routers, but if there was really a need they would have found a way to get them working by now. Forcing the routers into the field when there is no demand guarantees they’ll be wasted.
Now, if one reporter working alone has uncovered that much wasted stimulus spending in just one program in West Virginia, what do you think has happened across the country?
Devotees of Lord Keynes’ economic views are unbothered by such trifles. Their complaint about the $860 billion stimulus is that it was too small. Had the stimulus been twice as large, would there have been twice as many unused and underutilized Internet routers in West Virginia?
Our government does many things well, but one thing it does not excel at is efficiently distributing resources. Government, by nature, is inefficient because there is no incentive to watch the bottom line when you are spending other people’s money.
In the end, the Internet routers are just a fraction of a tiny drop in the bucket of government spending. But maybe that’s part of the problem. The federal government has gotten so large that wrong-headed spending that amounts to millions of dollars is just a rounding error.