‘Data’ on Recovery.gov is Completely Made Up

Conn Carroll / February 18, 2009

One of the stated missions of the Obama Administration’s new Recovery.gov website is to: “Provide data that will allow citizens to evaluate the Act’s progress and provide feedback.” Just how accurate is the ‘data’ on this taxpayer funded website?

We got a glimpse last week when Politico reported that the “Job Affect” numbers released by the White House simply did not add up. So the Obama Administration claimed that, as a state, California would get 396,000 new jobs under the economic stimulus bill. But when you added the totals up by Congressional District, the California was set to receive 421,900 new jobs.

The Obama Administration has since corrected these numbers so that the state and Congressional District totals match. You can go to Recovery.gov and move your cursor over a map of the United States to discover how many new jobs will supposedly be created in each state under the bill.

Politico‘s Ben Smith called the data correction “a different kind of reminder of the roughness of these estimates.” Another way to put it, is that the Obama Administration is just making stuff up.