Stimulus has funds for GAO to beef up staff

WASHINGTON -- For three years, the investigative arm of Congress has seen its staff dwindle in size. Now, the agency is getting a $25 million infusion of cash from the stimulus bill signed by President Obama last month to hire investigators, auditors and others to track hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending to jump-start the economy.

The stimulus bill contains $330.5 million for oversight and offers the president his first opportunity to put into practice his campaign pledge to demand greater accountability of federal spending. It provides $25 million for the Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan congressional agency; $84 million to create an accountability board within the administration and $221.5 million to the inspectors general who serve as department watchdogs.

The GAO will use the money to hire about 100 accountants, lawyers, economists and policy analysts to root out and prevent waste and fraud by the federal, state and local agencies spending the money, GAO spokesman Chuck Young says. "The GAO has been at a record low in terms of our personnel for several years, so we certainly have the room to add people," Young says.

The idea was not only to give investigators the resources needed to oversee such a large amount of money but also to "remove the ability of people to rationalize their failure," said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.

"They're not going to be able to hang their hat on the excuse of not having enough resources to look at this spending," said McCaskill, a former state auditor.

Will all of this prevent misuse of the money?

"While I'm sure that everybody will do their best, there's no question there will be waste," said David Walker, a former head of the GAO who is president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a non-partisan group that promotes federal fiscal responsibility. "The only question is, how much waste will there be?"

Walker said he's encouraged by the focus on oversight but concerned that there may not be clear goals for what the spending is supposed to produce or guidelines for how the money is to be distributed and spent. "If you don't have those rules in place, by merely having more people look at what's happened after the fact, all you're going to do is identify problems too late," Walker said.