There were several interesting New York Times articles about the (in)effectiveness of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) last week.

I, for one, am not the least bit surprised that the ARRA has been less effective than envisioned at stimulating the economy.  I could have told anyone who asked that this would be the case as I scrambled to collect a list of “shovel-ready” projects for West Virginia’s higher education system.  The Governor’s Office literally gave us hours, not days, to come up with our original list.  We then got another day to come up with a new list when the rules of the game changed dramatically.  The process from beginning to end was a joke.

Fortunately (and I use that word with some sadness), virtually all of the  higher education shovel-ready funding hit the cutting room floor during final ARRA negotiations.  But the process that we went through is similar to the process undertaken by other federal and state agencies.  So what did the ARRA’s authors produce with all this careful planning?

• Story No. 1.  France will spend 75% of that country’s stimulus monies this year.  Washington, on the other hand, hopes to reach that goal next fall.  Why?  France had a real plan to spend its funds quickly; the United States, with people like me scurrying to assemble shovel-ready lists, did not.
• Story No. 2.  The federal government provided about $3.5 billion for the Workforce Investment Act’s Adult and Dislocated Worker programs, which a major study late last year indicated are far from effective.
• Story No. 3.  While most Americans live in cities, transportation stimulus funds are going disproportionately to rural areas because they, not surprisingly, have a disproportionate share of roads and bridges.  This is good for West Virginia, but not good for the overall national economy.

I appreciate that our economy was in free-fall in February, but could Congress not have spent a little more time pondering the pros and cons of some of the proposed investments before rushing through the largest spending bill in United States history?  Good public policy is made over months and years, not hours and days.