If you want to understand how comprehensively the Obama Administration has failed the nation, you need only begin with this point: as the president approaches the end of his first term, we’re still unearthing lurid details about his first major policy initiative, undertaken in his earliest days in office.<\/p>\n
That plan, of course, was the $787 billion stimulus package that was supposed to kickstart economic growth (it didn’t) and keep unemployment under 8 percent (it’s never been that low in the nearly three years since the package was enacted).<\/p>\n
Last week, I wrote about the case of a Maryland PR firm<\/a> that got paid nearly a million dollars in stimulus money by the National Institutes of Health to promote how well the National Institutes of Health was spending stimulus money.<\/p>\n This week’s second verse of the same song is orders of magnitude worse; the dollar amount is in the billions and the outcome wasn’t just wasteful — it was non-existent. According to the Daily Caller<\/a>:<\/p>\n As of the third quarter of 2011, no projects from the federal government\u2019s\u00a0Broadband Technology Opportunities<\/span> Program<\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/a>(BTOP) \u2014 a technology stimulus program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) \u2014 have been completed…<\/span><\/p>\n The funds awarded for BTOP totaled over $4 billion, and the average award was $6,217,509, according to Recovery.gov.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Three years. Over $4 Billion. Zero results. This project may not have stimulated any growth in the broadband sector, but it’s certainly going to keep some Republican opposition researchers employed.<\/p>\n