Congressional Budget Office says reports on slowness spending infra-$s misleading

The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both had similar stories this week citing a Congressional Budget Office report saying that most of the money proposed in the Democrats stimulus package for  highways and other infrastructure would not get spent until after Oct 2010 (FY2010) when they forecast the recession would be over.

Here's the key part of a Post story: "A report by the Congressional Budget Office found that only about $136 billion of the $355 billion that House leaders want to allocate to infrastructure and other so-called discretionary programs would be spent by Oct. 1, 2010. The rest would come in future years, long after the CBO and other economists predict the recession will have ended."

The Journal story was similar: "The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected less than half of the $355 billion that House Democrats want to spend on highways, bridges and other job-creating investments is likely to be used before the end of fiscal 2010. The CBO said the balance would likely be spent over the next several years, after the recession is projected to end."

As the Post reported: "the CBO analysis appears to confirm the complaints of many Republicans and other critics, who have long argued that spending money on highway construction and other infrastructure projects is ineffective at quickly jolting a sluggish economy."

So where was this newsworthy report?

No sign of it in the list of recent publications on the website.  A couple of readers also asked us if we'd got the report.

We emailed the CBO press office. No response. Called a couple of times, finally got a press officer.

"There is no such report," she insists.

"Well what were the Post and the Journal reporting then," we asked.

The spokesman said there were "just some numbers, no analysis, no report." And she said the numbers are no longer relevant because they related to an earlier stimulus plan.

"Well could we have a copy of the numbers or whatever it was that being cited in those reports?" we asked.

"No these were just a computer print out without any analysis or explanations," the CBO lady said. "We never put out that kind of thing."

"So," we asked "were those stories of the CBO analysis (in the Post and the Journal) misleading?"

The CBO lady responded: "Exactly, very misleading. We produced no report of the kind they cited."

She did say that CBO is working on an analysis of the stimulus bill but it won't be ready until Friday afternoon at the earliest and probably early next week.

So what's all this about?

Our take on it is that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The Post and Journal reporters beat the story up in saying there was a "CBO report." They gave no description of the report let alone a title and they cited not a single phrase in direct quotes in either of their stories.

There was no "report" in the sense of formally laid out, written-up analysis.

But there was something more than "numbers."

These reporters aren't shills for Republican critics of this administration.

There was a spreadsheet or a printout of some kind showing how much of any announced stimulus spending might be expected to be spent in each of the following fiscal years, based we'd guess, on past timelines for this kind of spending.

And clearly the Democrat leadership came down hard on the CBO for the stories undermining the case for their big stimulus plan.

Jobs at the CBO depend on them killing any notion they think the minority party is correct on a major issue like this.

TOLLROADSnews 2009-01-22