Right.

USA Today reported last night that Obama’s website Recovery.gov, which is supposed to track every dime spent through the stimulus, won’t make data avaialble until . . . it’s too late.

Although President Obama has vowed that citizens will be able to track “every dime” of the $787 billion stimulus bill, a government website dedicated to the spending won’t have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program, administration officials said.
Recovery.gov now lists programs being funded by the stimulus money, but provides no details on who received the grants and contracts. Agencies won’t report that data until Oct. 10, according to Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which manages the website.
Devaney told a House subcommittee Tuesday that it will be a challenge to have the site ready to present spending data in five months. He said after the hearing that the board doesn’t have enough data storage capacity, for example.

This is the same Devaney who said at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing a month ago that some fraud and waste is inevitable (I wrote about it here). But I thought that the president did say that it would not happen this time.

Also, while the administration is already writing the story about how its policies are working and the economy will recover thanks to the stimulus money (even though most of the money is likely to be spent well after the economy recovers), stories are coming out with details of how states and countries are spending their stimulus funds.

Investor’s Business Daily explains how congressmen are actively securing funds for rural Airports that pretty much no one uses.

If pigs could fly, they would probably take off and land at John Murtha-Johnstown Cambria County Airport in Pennsylvania.
Two hours east of Pittsburgh, it averages just 20 passengers a day. But its namesake, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a powerful and controversial member of the House Appropriations Committee, has steered some $150 million to the airport over the years. That includes $30 million for never-used capability to handle huge military aircraft and store gear for rapid deployment.
The airport also received $800,000 in stimulus funds.
It’s far from the only one. An IBD analysis found that $154 million in stimulus funds is going to low-traffic rural airports that already get subsidies and tax breaks—and whose net economic benefit is a matter of considerable debate.

Read the whole thing here.

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that in Ohio, stimulus funds are used for monitoring criminals.

Leslie Ghiz and Greg Harris just announced they’ll unveil their plan Monday to spend $1.3 in federal Byrne law enforcement grants.
They want to spend $461,000 to lease 75 ankle-bracelet monitors equipped with GPS and $315,000 to hire two city lawyers to work on blight cases. They want the police department to re-prioritize how it’ll spend the rest.

More here.

How this will stimulate the economy, I fail to see. Here is the Wall Street Journal piece my colleague Eileen Norcross and I wrote about holding Obama to his promises of transparancy.