EDITORIAL: USDA’s lesson in failed stimulus

President Obama’s stimulus plan will be remembered for decades — not for what it did for the economy, but what it did to the economy. By the reckoning of the Heritage Foundation, taxpayers will be paying down the $3.3 trillion in principal, interest and debt service costs of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act until 2019.

The Agriculture Department’s inspector general took a trip down memory lane with “Lessons Learned from the Recovery Act,” a look at the benefits of spending $28 billion to stimulate agriculture. The audit concluded $5 billion of this amount went to “questionable or unsupported costs,” which is auditor-speak for “money flushed down the drain.”

The audit compiled results from 80 investigations that came up with 401 recommendations on what the department should do to get its act together. The prime lesson was that programs that are supposed to “quickly pump money into the economy by immediately executing infrastructure and labor-intensive projects” failed because the “programs were not ‘shovel ready.’” The department was incapable of managing the boondoggles, mostly because they had no “meaningful or realistic” measures of success.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service, for example, opened up the subsidy cafeteria and began serving 27 “shovel-ready” projects. Six of the projects failed before starting. Two more went unfinished at a cost of $943,000.

Officials of the Rural Development agency inappropriately handed out an estimated 1,772 home loans worth $208 million to borrowers with “no history of stable and dependable income,” who “had a credit history that did not indicate the ability and willingness to repay a loan,” or who “did not meet repayment ability guidelines.” The Forest Service burned through stimulus dollars so haphazardly that $92 million went up in “questionable” flames.

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