Stimulus Waste? The $3.4 Million Turtle Crossing

One Utah sheriff's office wants to spend $25,000 in stimulus money for a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Six months after President Obama launched the stimulus plan, a majority of Americans think it's done little to end the recession, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

To keep track of all the spending, the government has created a Web site. But nothing in life is free.

The independent General Services Administration quietly put out a release Wednesday night saying the site would be redesigned -- for $9.5 million and, perhaps, as much as $18 million in the next five years.

Most of the projects paid for by the stimulus will also get signs announcing: "Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act." Those signs do not come cheap, of course. Small signs can start at $400 in Michigan all the way up to more than $8,000 for a large highway sign in New York.

"We need to be spending money now on things that have true value," Coburn said.

His dream spending list would include money for highways, roads and bridges, dam-repairs and a larger new homeowner tax credit. Coburn also suggested spending $100 billion to restock the military with supplies. That, he said, would immediately get idled factory lines running again.

"Those are jobs that would click in within 30 days," he said.

The other week Coburn released "100 Stimulus Projects: A Second Opinion," a report examining projects Coburn claimed to be wasteful and paid for by stimulus money.

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Ed DeSeve, senior advisor to the president for Recovery Act implementation, called the report "filled with inaccuracies" and included "projects that have already been stopped, projects that never were approved, and some projects that are working quite well."

Of the $787 billion approved by Congress, only $174.9 billion has been allocated for projects so far, with just $60.4 billion of that actually paid out, according to Recovery.gov.

About two-thirds of the total stimulus money so far has been used for short-term projects rather than long-term job creation, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

However, Obama administration officials report that the rate of stimulus spending will increase substantially in the months to come.

"It is clear from the data that there needs to be more fiscal stimulus in the second half of the year than there was in the first half of the year," White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers said this week. "Fortunately, the stimulus program designed by the president and passed by Congress provides exactly that."

"We said all along … we weren't putting an emphasis on helping small businesses create jobs and being able to weather the current economy," said Kurt Bardella, spokesman for House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa, R-Calif. "Unfortunately there were not enough mechanisms to ensure that the money goes to where it was promised and there's nothing to safeguard against how stimulus funding is used once it's disseminated in localities."