Senators highlight examples of frivolous stimulus spending

The federal government is wasting more than $7 billion on frivolous stimulus programs such as greening federal buildings, Sens. John McCain and Tom Coburn said Tuesday.

The Republican senators released a report of 100 agency programs, grants and loans they say are poor uses of money in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and are ripe for fraud and waste.

One such project is the General Services Administration's $133 million greening renovation of the Edith Green/Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in downtown Portland, Ore. The senators called the project wasteful, since a new San Francisco federal building constructed in 2007 was 100,000 square feet larger and cost only $11 million more than the planned Portland renovation.

The same project was highlighted by a GSA Recovery Act program manager at a federal building conference, FedCon, in Washington later that day.

Martin Weiland, a GSA engineer, said the renovation project, like many at GSA's Public Building Service, was "sitting on the shelf," for lack of funding until the Recovery Act was passed. The Portland project was chosen because it was "the best sustainable design we had sitting on the shelf," he said.

The 34-year-old building, which has never been renovated, will literally get a facelift with the installation of energy efficient windows and a "green façade" on the building's west side. The "green façade" will be composed of vines, which will shade the building from the sun in summer and insulate it in the winter, he said. In addition, the building will get energy-efficient ventilation and lighting systems.

That Congress provided $4.5 billion in Recovery Act funding for such renovations was "surprising for us because normally a lot more of our money goes into new buildings," Weiland said. "So getting $4.5 billion for actually modernizing our existing building stock, is pretty exciting. … We don't generally do that in the United States, to think of taking buildings that are from the 1960s or 1920s and make them into high-performance buildings."

The senators also highlighted another GSA project, a $117 billion greening and modernization of an IRS building in Andover, Mass. In 2008, the IRS announced plans to close the facility as a cost-cutting measure but decided to keep the facility open after pressure from members of Congress.

The senators also criticized the federal government spending $186 million on stimulus overhead in 2009, including hiring more than 25,000 people. Most of these employees are temporary and focus solely on implementing the stimulus, the report concludes.

These and other projects and grants don't create long-term economic growth, and the money would be better spent on improving highway infrastructure, such as bridges, the senators said.

"If you really want to create jobs, you've got to create something," said Coburn, R-Okla.

McCain, R-Ariz., said he had not found evidence that members of Congress had pushed to fund any of the 100 projects in the report. He said the haphazard, decentralized method of disbursing money means it will be more difficult for auditors to track.

The lawmakers said that waste and fraud stemming from Recovery Act projects may exceed the $55 billion projected by Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board.

"I think he's going to be underestimating that," Coburn said.