Official Admits: Stimulus Projects Not Chosen for Job Creation
SYRACUSE NY--President Barack Obama claims that the federal stimulus program is designed to create or save jobs. But at least one government official now says that's not how projects are chosen.
According to the Syracuse (NY) Post-Standard, Sally Rockey, an acting deputy director at the National Institutes of Health, has admitted that the agency does not choose projects based on the jobs they would create:
The National Institutes of Health, the country's top research agency, is awarding recovery money to projects proposed long before the recession. With $8 billion extra dollars to spend on research, agency officials went back to the list of projects that had been turned down.
They looked for projects that could be done in two years, with no special emphasis on job creation and no requirement that the scientists buy equipment made in America.
Locally, the federally-funded projects, the paper reports, include the sort of projects typically labeled as "pork," including:
*$162,000 for a study that sends college students into the wild to collect ticks and plant them on lab mice.
*$783,000 for a study that invites 100 malt liquor and marijuana users in Buffalo to call in and punch numbers on the telephone to record their habits each day.
*$70,000-$130,000 for a Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs professor to study the health consequences of teenage childbirth.
*$109,000 to study schizophrenia on the Pacific Island of Palau.
*$3 million in equipment -- all manufactured in Germany and Japan--for Cornell University.
According to the article, the scientists receiving the grants were reluctant to discuss specifics and money regarding their projects, and at least one was "defensive about explaining how his grant ... would stimulate the economy."
It is not known how much of a role politics may have played in the selection process for the grants. However, studies show that employees of academia tend to vote (and donate) Democratic in overwhelming numbers. Therefore, it is quite possible that the selection of projects that have little, if anything, to do with job creation is simply an attempt by the Obama White House to repay supporters.
Not surprising that this is all about pork and special favors to Obama. More surprising is that someone in his administration would let slip and admit it.
