WASHINGTON — In February 2009, the United States had fallen into what many economists called the deepest economic slowdown since the Great Depression. The housing bubble had burst, unemployment was nearing its highest level in almost three decades and the once-freewheeling banking sector had turned tightfisted.

At the urging of President Barack Obama, Congress passed a $787 billion economic stimulus bill on Feb. 10, 2009, to get federal dollars flowing into the U.S. economy.

Eighteen months later, the administration estimates that about 85 percent of the jobs it expected to create or save in the first two years have indeed been created or saved. The economy is rebounding slowly, and the worst effects of the recession have softened. Unemployment, while still high, is better than it otherwise would have been.

For the most part, mainstream economists such as those at the Congressional Budget Office agree with those conclusions, but an examination by McClatchy and the Medill News Service has found that some parts of the country have benefited far more from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act than others have, that some sectors of the economy are benefiting far more than others are and that it’s difficult to detail exactly where all the money has gone.

Among the findings:

• The jobless rates in the states had little to do with where major portions of the stimulus package were distributed. Some states with the lowest unemployment rates received some of the highest per-capita spending for stimulus projects. (Graphic: The disconnect between stimulus funds and unemployment by state.)
• Job creation on the local level has been uneven. By the White House’s numbers, for example, Nebraska created 74 percent of the expected jobs, while North Dakota and Massachusetts created 100 percent.
• The Obama administration won’t be able to fulfill its vow to track every stimulus dollar. The mechanism that’s used to account for the expenditures is complicated, flawed and at times inaccurate. “I know it’s political rhetoric to say we have to know where every penny is spent,” said Raymond Yee, a lecturer at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Information. “But it’s difficult to even understand where every billion dollars is spent.”
• Much of the stimulus money has yet to go out the door. As of July, $127 billion in contracts, grants and loans had been awarded, but that’s less than half the $275 billion allocated for those projects.

That’s partly by design and partly because it was difficult to get systems in place to spend money quickly for the array of new programs that the stimulus bill funded.

As it sought to sell the nation on the necessity of a major stimulus package, the White House released 50 information sheets in February 2009 that described how the stimulus would be a boon to every state.

The first selling point in each sheet? Jobs. Whether it was the projected 396,000 jobs created or saved in California or the 8,000 in Vermont, job creation and retention got top billing.

The White House projected creating or saving about 3.5 million jobs in the first two years after the stimulus bill passed. In a July report, the administration estimated that it’s created or saved approximately 3 million of them, about 85 percent of the expected total.
(Using different economic models, the administration calculates the added-jobs tally at either 2.5 million or 3.6 million and averages them out to 3.1 million.)

While they agree that the stimulus package has created jobs, other economists are less optimistic than the White House is. The CBO says the job boost could be as low as 1.4 million or as high as 3.4 million. Three other economic organizations _ all of which the White House cited in its July report _ put the jobs tally at 1.8 million, 2.1 million or 2.2 million.

UNEQUAL BENEFITS

It’s clear from the McClatchy-Medill analysis of stimulus spending and unemployment, however, that some states have fared much better than others have.

North Dakota has had one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates for the last year. In June, it hit 3.6 percent. Yet the analysis found that it’s scheduled to receive more stimulus spending, per capita, than is Nevada, where the unemployment rate climbed to 14.2 percent in June.

Part of the disparity is because much of the stimulus spending was doled out based on formulas that were already in place.

Transportation dollars, for example, were distributed to the states based on existing formulas that take into account population, existing roads and other factors. Officials then were directed to consider which parts of their states were “economically distressed,” but that criterion didn’t come into play until after the money had gone to the state capitals.

That means transportation dollars were distributed to states regardless of their economic fortunes. North Dakota and South Dakota, whose unemployment rates are among the lowest in the nation, have more than $250 per capita to spend on recovery act transportation projects. Michigan and Nevada, which have the nation’s highest unemployment rates, will get about $100 per capita for such projects.

Economists who’ve studied the stimulus package say there’s little connection between which states have the worst unemployment and where the stimulus dollars have been spent. Edward Glaeser, a Harvard University economist, wrote in March that, “Stimulus aid was not particularly well matched with need.”

Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in March that she and other researchers were unable to find any relationship between unemployment in a given area and the amount of stimulus dollars spent there.

“No matter how we measure unemployment, we find no correlation,” she said.

Though other economists recognize de Rugy’s findings, some disagree with Glaeser and her that funding stimulus programs without regard for local unemployment or economic conditions is a problem.

“If you say, ‘Let’s target states that are doing worse, places that saw the property crash in the worst way,’ ” said Timothy Taylor, the managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “is that really the right goal here? This wasn’t just inflicted on them like a lightning bolt. Rewarding failure is never the best plan.”

According to Taylor, the stimulus was intended to be “timely, targeted and temporary,” and state-level funding was meant to prevent state budget shortfalls from contributing to the already slumping economy. Though the system of disbursing money may have been less than ideal, he argues, it was better than creating a complicated distribution system that would have slowed the recovery.

“I think giving (money) to the state governments was probably about as targeted as one could reasonably do,” he said. “It was no more unfair than other possibilities could have been. To have the federal government try to fix things county by county seems insane, especially if you take timely as an important task.”

Administration officials also disagree that targeting communities with high jobless rates would have been a better approach.

“Economic need isn’t bound by county or state lines and, fortunately, neither are the economic benefit of recovery act programs and projects,” said Elizabeth Oxhorn, the recovery act spokeswoman for Vice President Joe Biden. “And when it comes to supporting the hardest-hit among us, assistance like unemployment benefits, tax relief and health care are directly targeted to those who need it most, regardless of where they live.”

“Bottom line: It’s working,” Oxhorn said. “Before the recovery act, our economy was losing an average of 750,000 jobs each month. In the first five months of this year, the economy has created nearly half a million new private-sector jobs.”

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

Obama also pushed the stimulus bill with a promise that the American people would be able to account for “every penny” that was spent.

A year and a half later, however, and despite spending $18 million to launch an unprecedented system for tracking stimulus bill spending, much of the reported funding information doesn’t match the dollars the federal government says it’s paid.

Although the administration reports how much each government agency has spent, that’s only half the story.

When stimulus dollars are spent, they’re funneled through states, agencies and contractors to the “sub-recipients” that build roads, do research or retrain unemployed workers. After they receive the money, states and recipients are supposed to record how they spend it and report those totals to the federal government.

That’s where things get confusing.

The $280 billion set aside for the states came fast and without clear accounting procedures. Moreover, the federal government didn’t include any money for states to hire the people necessary to track the deluge of money.

“I joke that the (stimulus) money came in the nick of time and the worst time,” said Kinney Poynter, the executive director of the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers and Treasurers. “Many states were already short staffed. And really there were no policies and procedures that happened this quick and of this magnitude before.”

States had seven months from the day the stimulus bill was signed to the first time they were expected to report on how they’d spent the money. Small state-level staffs were flooded with new terminology, coding numbers, data keys and reporting websites. Many were confused.

The McClatchy-Medill review of state audits found that money sometimes went to poorly organized programs; other times, reporting demands conflicted with other federal guidelines.

Ultimately, beyond the costs of transparency mandates in time and money, states and contractors were confused and oversight was scattered, according to the state audits.

One agency that generated concern among auditors was the Department of Education, which so far has paid out more than $50 billion in stimulus money.

According to Charles Willson of the Government Accountability Office, it was difficult to account for education spending even before the stimulus. Giving educators more money didn’t improve accounting; it just meant there was more to account for.

“Maybe no one knows where this money has gone,” said Yee, the University of California Berkeley lecturer. “Whenever you have thousands of people fill out a form to submit to the government, it’s going to be messy, but there is no clear accounting here. The stimulus wasn’t meant to be a national jigsaw puzzle.”

Barry Bosworth of The Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington policy-research organization, pointed to another problem with the stimulus program: the lagging speed of spending. The stimulus “was originally meant to stop the collapse,” Bosworth said. “The problem with it: It was too slow.”

With the national unemployment rate still well above 9 percent, many Americans are wondering whether the stimulus measure has been a success.

In a February Pew Research Center poll, 49 percent of Americans said they disapproved of the stimulus plan, an increase from June 2009, when 39 percent disapproved. A June 2010 poll that involved the same organization found that 60 percent of respondents said the stimulus hadn’t helped the nation’s job situation.

Mainstream economists, however, say the measure generally has been successful.

John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research said that America would have been worse off without the stimulus package; he estimates that unemployment could have been as high as 13 percent.

“The economics of it is not controversial,” Schmitt said. “It has been masked by politics.”

Added Diane Lim Rogers, the chief economist at the Concord Coalition, a nonprofit budget watchdog group: “In terms of boosting the level of economic activity beyond what would’ve occurred with the stimulus, I’m sure it worked,” she said. “The question of how great a piece of legislation it is, you have to be more measured in that response. Did it work enough to justify its cost?”

McClatchy’s Chris Adams and Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism’s Alice Truong, Lauren Drell, Mari Fagel, Jessica Binsch, Eleanor Goldberg and Christina Lee contributed to this article; the students graduated in June.

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WASHINGTON — When Education Secretary Arne Duncan inserted a half-page program description into the economic stimulus act last year, few except top Democratic leaders knew that it would create Race to the Top, a multibillion-dollar sweepstakes to overhaul U.S. schools that gave Duncan’s department unprecedented power.

With only $4.3 billion — less than 1 percent of federal, state and local education dollars — Race to the Top is one of many small, relatively inexpensive projects that lawmakers plopped into the recovery act. What’s striking about the competition, which awards millions to the states that best adopt Duncan-backed policies, is that the secretary arguably got more states to buy his brand of change in 18 months than any other U.S. school chief had in the Cabinet-level Education Department’s 29-year history.

Forty-one states applied for the first round. Tennessee and Delaware were declared victors in March, and state education leaders spent the spring badgering their legislatures to pass Race to the Top-friendly laws for round two. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia submitted applications by the June 1 deadline. Duncan selected 18 finalists in late July and will announce the winners of the latest go-around in September.

Last month, the secretary referred to it as part of a “quiet revolution” in U.S. school systems.

“States were willing to change their policies based on a gamble,” said Brenda Welburn, the executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education. “I didn’t think they would invest the level of energy they really did.”

It wouldn’t always have worked out this way. The biggest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, and other critics oppose making federal school dollars — usually controlled by formula — a contest. Lawmakers are loath to give so much control to the White House.

The inclusion of Race to the Top in the stimulus package, however, gave Duncan a unique opportunity: a peaking movement for change, a stimulus package laced with $100 billion in education money and a country of cash-starved states.

“The talk at the time was about this was going to be Arne Duncan’s slush fund,” said Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, a former Education Department official who’s now with The Brookings Institution, a center-left policy research organization in Washington. “I don’t think the administration knew what it was going to be or that Congress knew what it was going to do.”

Duncan set aside most of his agency’s stimulus money for quick cash injections such as student aid or propping up school budgets. Race to the Top, on the other hand, wasn’t an economic stimulus measure but a chance to influence education policy while Congress was preoccupied with jobs bills, regulatory restructuring and a Supreme Court nominee.

When Duncan announced the first winners in March — $100 million to Delaware and $500 million to Tennessee — it became pretty clear what he wanted: The finalists generally had lifted limits on charter schools, found some way to tie teacher ratings to students’ test scores and signed on to the Common Core Standards, a national curriculum movement that sets benchmarks in English and math through the 12th grade.

The program springs from a single sentence inserted in the stimulus law. Though it suggests that Duncan account for things such as teacher quality, data use, new standardized tests and school turnaround, it also allows for “criteria as the secretary deems appropriate.”

Duncan had championed contests since he was the CEO of Chicago’s public schools, where he experimented with competitive pilot projects. The results, by most accounts, were mixed.

Race to the Top was a chance to take the concept national, said Jon Schnur, a former Duncan adviser who’s credited with creating the national competition. After repeated talks with Reps. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee, and David Obey, D-Wis., the head of the House Appropriations Committee, Duncan gained custody of just over $4 billion. Schnur conceded that Race to the Top probably would have had few supporters in Congress as a standalone project.

When Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, the No. 2 Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, was asked whether lawmakers grasped the program’s scope, he said: “No. I understood it, but that’s because I’ve been following the issues long enough.”

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon of California, who was then the top GOP member on the House education panel, still pleads ignorance, and called Race to the Top an “administration deal,” though he said he didn’t press for answers at a small White House education lunch in February 2009. As Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., put it, “You could figure it out if you wanted to.”

All three lawmakers said they now generally supported Race to the Top, but none was as effusive as Miller was.

“These are my best hopes,” he said in May. “You see people doing things that a year ago they said they would never, ever agree to.”

North Carolina Republican state lawmakers cited the White House when they tried to lift the state’s cap on the number of charter schools in May. A Democratic majority defeated the measure, however.

Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter signed a teaching overhaul bill weeks before the round two deadline, despite opposition from the state’s largest teachers union.

Lawmakers in Louisiana and Minnesota are considering similar measures, and performance statutes have passed in Connecticut, Maryland, Michigan, Tennessee and Washington state.

Opposition to at least some of Duncan’s goals remains, however. Most teachers’ groups charge that it makes scapegoats out of educators; old-school Democrats loathe its reliance on charters; and others think that using a contest is unfair.

“We don’t want vital school funding to come with Ed McMahon’s picture on it,” Lily Eskelsen, the vice president of the National Education Association, said in reference to the late American Family Publishers sweepstakes hawker. “You, too, can be a winner.”

Still, the Obama administration has requested $1.3 billion for round three next year, and most on Capitol Hill predict that the program will continue.

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DANVILLE, Pa. — In the middle of rural Pennsylvania’s rolling pastures and farmland sits the sprawling 2 million-square-foot headquarters of what’s supposed to be the future of health care.

The Geisinger Health System employs 13,000 people and provides health care to 2.6 million in 42 counties across central and northeastern Pennsylvania. Helicopters fly in and out every day, carrying patients from around the state. Just one of its buildings spans more than five football fields.

The government has chosen this health care metropolis as one of 15 model health care information-technology systems around the country, giving it $16 million in taxpayers’ stimulus money to expand its efforts in the hope of dragging much of the country’s paper-based health records system and organization into the 21st century.

By modernizing care and generating savings, America’s health care costs could drop by as much as $77.8 billion a year, according to a recent report from the Center for Information Technology Leadership, an academic research organization.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, $25.8 billion in recovery act money will go toward health information-technology efforts.

Of that, HHS will dole out $2 billion for systems such as Geisinger’s, which are aimed at reducing the number of hospitalizations caused by common illnesses such as pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure. In addition to improving health care, the money will create jobs, officials say.

The Obama administration often avoids defining the stimulus as being mainly about jobs.

Vice President Joe Biden, in announcing stimulus grants to Geisinger and the 14 other health care operations around the country, stressed that the money would help improve care by digitizing records. Yet the program’s announcement claimed that it would create 1,100 jobs “upfront” and eventually “tens of thousands.”

Geisinger will be hiring about 40 people, 10 of whom will focus on IT, according to Dr. James Walker, Geisinger’s chief health information officer. Yet the program is more about process and care than jobs or technology.

Most of the money will go to hire about 20 case managers, who’ll use the data to track 125 to 150 patients each. By using health care IT systems to track patient care, case managers essentially can pay for themselves by cutting the number of hospitalizations per patient, according to Walker.

Rafael Garcia, a health care IT analyst with Morningstar, an independent firm, said the improvement in health care IT also could save money by reducing adverse drug events. Overdoses or misuse of prescription drugs kills or injures hundreds of thousands of people a year and costs nearly $6 million per hospital, according to HHS’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Garcia said health care lagged behind other industries in IT, in part because of the nature of the work.

“It’s pretty much the only industry in the U.S. that’s still paper-based,” he said. “Physicians tend to be busy professionals and don’t have time to learn another system.”

NO LONGER A CHOICE

While electronic systems aren’t perfect and can be problematic, going digital isn’t really a choice anymore.

While the health care bill that was signed into law in March provides incentives to modernize and stipulates the use of stimulus money to provide grants such as the one to Geisinger, by 2015 it will start penalizing organizations that haven’t equipped their data management systems with the latest in technology and know-how.

Walker emphasized health care methodology mixed with technology, however, instead of just expensive equipment.

“The way too much IT operates is they do a big, flashy, expensive thing, and in two years it doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

That’s why most of Geisinger’s stimulus grant will go toward personnel.

Caseworkers and additional staff then will put Geisinger’s state-of-the-art information exchange system to work. The digital network has 10,000 authorized users so far, but fewer than 300 of them per month access the system. Geisinger’s IT program director, Jim Younkin, said that many more would start using it as more information was included and more people were trained.

Geisinger plans on sustaining the stimulus-created jobs without grants after the third year by selling its information network services to more offices and hospitals in the region that aren’t already in its system.

INSIDE HEALTH CARE’S DIGITAL CONVERSION

On the Web

• The Center for Information Technology Leadership report on savings through modernizing health care

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WASHINGTON — A routine federal requirement that’s intended to preserve historic sites threatens to delay some economic stimulus projects around the country.

Federally funded projects that could affect sites with historic value are required to undergo reviews that consider ways to minimize disturbance of the sites. Projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are no different.

In some cases, that’s meant delays in getting crucial stimulus projects out the door, and therefore in pumping stimulus dollars into the economy.

So far, there’ve been only scattered delays, but the state and tribal offices that conduct the reviews say they’re concerned they won’t have enough resources to keep pace with all the reviews that will be needed in the next round of projects.

In Pennsylvania, for example, Amtrak had planned a $30 million stimulus-funded project to replace 24 miles of electric transmission lines along an abandoned rail route. Although the trains are long gone, the transmission lines are still in use.

The project was projected to create 250 full-time equivalent positions, and the stimulus dollars must be spent by February 2011. Nationwide, Amtrak was awarded $1.3 billion for a total of 205 capital improvement projects.

Before ground can be broken, however, the project must undergo a historical review, which involves consultation with counties, townships and Indian tribes along the old railroad route, as well as the state historic preservation office. That began last September, and the project still hasn’t received final approval.

Susan Zacher, a supervisor with Pennsylvania’s historic preservation office, said in June that she expected an agreement to be signed soon that would lay out the measures Amtrak would take to preserve the railway’s history. Mostly, that means building kiosks with historical information along the route.

In the meantime, construction hasn’t begun, and the stimulus funding for the project has been downsized to $1.5 million, Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm said.

Historic review frequently has been time-consuming. What’s different now is that state and tribal reviewers say the influx of stimulus-funded projects is increasing their work load while the budgets to carry out that work are flat or declining.

In March 2009, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers told Congress that at least 13 state historic preservation offices had undergone staffing cuts and 30 were in the midst of hiring freezes. As for tribal historic preservation offices, the average federal dollars allocated to each tribe have decreased in the past year as new tribal preservation offices have been instituted, according to the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers.

While the White House and Congress were hammering out the stimulus bill last year, advocacy groups pushed for $50 million to assist historic preservation offices. It didn’t make it into the final legislation, however.

In a Government Accountability Office report in February, officials at the Departments of Commerce and Transportation said the historic review process had affected the selection and timing of projects.

Out of the 16 states surveyed, one — California — told the GAO that historic reviews already had caused delays in getting projects out the door, and six other states said the reviews might cause delays.

In California, furloughs in the state historic preservation office led to months-long backlogs in hundreds of stimulus projects, from the construction of clinics to highway projects. After the state inspector general for stimulus projects highlighted the issue, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office put more people in the state historic preservation office and the backlogs disappeared, said Roy Stearns, a spokesman for the California State Parks, which runs the preservation office.

Iowa, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York state and Texas told the GAO that historic review requirements could slow their stimulus projects. In more recent interviews, however, these states said they’d found ways to avoid delays, either by streamlining the historic review or _ in the case of New York _ by choosing not to use recovery act money for certain types of projects.

Projects on tribal lands also could face delays.

Robert Cast supervises a three-person office that reviews every project that might affect burial sites or artifacts from the Caddo Nation, a Native American tribe of about 5,000 headquartered in Oklahoma but with historic lands that span four states.

Cast said it had been hard to keep up with the increasing number of calls and e-mails that were coming into his office since the stimulus bill passed last year. He’s particularly concerned about a broadband project to lay fiber optic cable across swaths of rural Oklahoma that could affect multiple historic tribal sites.

Jessica Schafer, a spokeswoman for the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said the agency was working to ensure that reviews of its stimulus-funded broadband initiatives proceeded in a timely fashion.

However, Adrian Fine, the state and local policy director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said it was possible that things might get more complicated, not less.

Fine said that while many early stimulus projects already had gone through historic review, those in a second wave of stimulus money hadn’t yet.

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By Lauren E. Bohn and Chika Oduah | for McClatchy Newspapers

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C.— Downtown Rocky Mount in eastern North Carolina offers a horizon of shuttered businesses, along with a stretch of houses with boarded-up windows and vacant porches.

Forbes magazine now ranks Rocky Mount, once a vibrant manufacturing hub, as one of the 10 most impoverished cities in America, with an unemployment rate hovering at a dismal 13 percent and a county crime rate that’s almost double the national average.

The area’s woes have contributed to another number that’s rising: homelessness among children.

The Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools system had at least 564 homeless students for the 2009-10 school year, up 9 percent from last year. North Carolina ranks as the ninth worst state in the country for the risk of child homelessness, with a 48 percent increase in homeless youth from 2006.

About $70 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus bill, is to bolster a federal program aimed at helping homeless children. The money will assist cash-strapped school districts in complying with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a federal mandate to help remove some of the obstacles that prevent homeless students from attending school.

North Carolina received $1,627,010 in stimulus money under the McKinney-Vento act. Nash County, which includes Rocky Mount, got $44,248.

The Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools hired Joyce Hunt, a case manager, last November with most of its stimulus money. Her job is to connect the district’s homeless youth with social and academic services.

“The school will contact me with a specific concern and I can follow up directly,” Hunt said. “I just . . . say, ‘Hello, I’m just checking in. Do you need anything: pencils, help with homework?’ ”

Carol Eatman oversees the school district’s homeless education program. Before Hunt’s position was created, Eatman said, the district struggled to address the needs of homeless students.

“When you have social workers who have up to four schools and service all the children, you’re very limited in the amount of focus you can put just on this growing population,” Eatman said.

District officials are trying to find a way to sustain Hunt’s position once the stimulus money is gone. Eatman hopes that McKinney-Vento funds will fill the gap.

“It’s an uphill battle making sure we have the funds for next year,” said Barbara Duffield, the policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.

Diane Nilan, the founder and president of the homeless youth advocacy group HEAR US, charged that the federal government is “almost clueless” and has largely ignored America’s estimated 1.5 million homeless children in dealing with the recession.

“When you look at what you’re getting and what the need is, it’s pathetic,” Nilan said.

For now, though, in Rocky Mount, Hunt is the embodiment of stimulus spending on homeless youth. She uses her position to invest in the dreams of homeless youth.

Rosella Campbell, 14, is one of the students Hunt monitors. She and her father, Rodney, live at the Bassett Center, a community shelter in Rocky Mount.

“I wouldn’t want her to grow up with the lack of education I have,” her father said, clinging to his daughter’s certificates and awards. “I want her to be the smartest person in the world.”

Rosella, holding up a “Battle of the Books” trophy she won in a regional competition, said later that she’d try.

“I know I can have a chance,” she said, peering out the windows of her school bus to a diorama of foreclosed dreams.

“I’m going to try to really grab it with all my might and not let it go. I’m going to try to be the best me I can be.”

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The $787 billion stimulus law included about $50 million in funding for the arts. Like the Great Depression’s Federal One arts funding programs, the stimulus bill aims to create or save jobs in the arts. But the stimulus bill diverges from the Federal One program — it offers grants to arts programs through the National Endowment for the Arts while President Franklin Roosevelt’s arts funding gave money directly to artists.

FROM THE WPA ARTISTS TO NOW

WASHINGTON — In March 2009, the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority gave the Department of Energy its plan to use American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money for weatherization projects, expecting approval in a month, maybe two.

It took five months.

The approval process was protracted, said Indiana’s weatherization manager, Paul Krievins, because the DOE questioned parts of the proposal, including the state’s plan to create a centralized purchasing program for contractors to buy weatherization materials.

“The delay certainly came as a surprise,” Krievins said. “We felt we had justified the process for making those decisions about our plan.”

Indiana’s difficulty in getting its stimulus-funded weatherization projects off the ground isn’t an isolated case.

This May, a Government Accountability Office report on the use of stimulus money said that only 13 percent of the 593,000 home-weatherization projects scheduled to be completed by March 31, 2012, under the stimulus package had been finished.

The DOE’s Weatherization Assistance Program got $5 billion in the stimulus package, which Congress passed in February 2009. In its first 12 months of existence, however, it had spent only 14 percent of that.

Mark Gaffigan, the director of energy issues at the GAO, said the DOE’s slow start wasn’t surprising given the surge in funding. “I think they’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of money going out of there,” he said.

Launched in 1976, the Weatherization Assistance Program helps low-income families reduce their energy bills by making their homes more energy efficient. The DOE distributes funding to state governments, which in turn fund the nonprofits, community action agencies and local governments that perform the work. Since its inception, the DOE reports, the program has provided weatherization services to more than 6 million low-income families, saving them an annual average of about $440 each on their energy bills.

Gaffigan said that directing the $5 billion from the stimulus act into funding slices for local agencies and contractors had been a fundamental problem. “It costs $6,500 to weatherize a home,” he said. “You have to spend the money in small chunks. It’s hard to spend $5 billion in that way.”

Doug Dixon, the weatherization director at the Joint Orange-Chatham Community agency in Pittsboro, N.C., is one of those who had to wait for his chunk.

In May 2009, the North Carolina Office of Economic Opportunity announced that Dixon’s agency would receive about $2 million in July 2009. The money didn’t get there until November, after management of the state’s Weatherization Assistance Program got shuffled from one North Carolina department to another one.

Jen Stutsman, a spokeswoman for the DOE, said some delays were inevitable with the massive increase in the agency’s Weatherization Assistance Program.

“The ramp-up was very significant,” she said. “We certainly had some challenges when we first implemented the recovery act funds that we believe have now been resolved.”

Adhering to stringent oversight from state agencies and the DOE has been another issue for contractors as they try to get their weatherization projects up to speed, said Liz Robinson, the executive director of Philadelphia’s Energy Coordinating Agency.

“I think there were too many hoops to jump through,” she said. “You burden things with too much red tape. We’re spending a tremendous amount of time doing paperwork.”

However, not everyone considers the slow buildup of the stimulus-backed weatherization projects a problem.

So far, the Housing Authority of Baltimore City’s contractors have weatherized about 300 homes out of a target of about 2,000 by 2012. However, Ken Strong, the director of energy-efficient homes, said the importance of comprehensive training for weatherization auditors and installers superseded short-term production goals.

“I don’t apologize for the long windup the weatherization program took,” he said.

Despite the delays in launching the projects, the DOE maintains that it can meet its goal of getting 593,000 homes weatherized by March 31, 2012.

“We’re now at a run rate of weatherizing about 25,000 homes per month,” Stutsman said. “We believe this rate will take us through to our goals in 2012.”

There’s some evidence that the goal can be met.

In Philadelphia, Robinson said that her agency not only was on track but also was projected to surpass its goal of weatherizing 625 homes by this September.

In Indiana, Krievins said that an accelerating pace by contractors put his department in position to meet its objective of having around 20,000 homes weatherized by 2012.

Despite the setbacks, Krievins thinks that the weatherization money from the DOE has been invaluable.

“There’s no question it’s made a difference,” he said. “There are no resources we could get from other places that are going to make up for what we’ve gotten and been able to do for Hoosiers with this money.”

RECOVERY THROUGH WEATHERIZATION

More from McClatchy

• Video: Recovery through weatherization
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• Weatherization program far behind goal
• Push to weatherize can’t break red tape
• Energy efficiency stimulus funds oversight is lacking, say critics