In Nov. 2010, in fact, Obama grilled Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the subject, challenging him to document how many jobs his agency’s stimulus spending had created — only five weeks after writing the last of ten letters to Chu asking for funding for solar and other energy projects in Michigan, arguing that those projects would create some 5,000 jobs in the state.

But Upton is hardly alone in this regard. Those letters were signed by all of the members of the Michigan congressional delegation, including several others who have argued that the stimulus bill has not created any jobs. Rep. Mike Rogers, for example, has claimed that stimulus spending only created one job in his district and very few in the state of Michigan.

Then-Rep. Pete Hoekstra, now running for the Republican nomination to challenge for Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s seat, went on CNN and said that the stimulus spending “has not helped my community or helped the state.” But he signed all of those letters arguing that spending on Michigan stimulus projects would create thousands of jobs.

Rep. Candice Miller likewise has said that the stimulus bill “has failed to provide the promised jobs.” Rep. Dave Camp has made the same claim:

“Michigan, which consistently has the nation’s highest unemployment rate, has been particularly hard-hit by the failings of the stimulus plan,” said Camp. “It is clear from today’s jobs report that stimulus has failed to do what it promised and failed to create jobs for American workers. Eight months after the President signed the stimulus bill, we are all still asking: where are the jobs?”

Rep. Thad McCotter gave a speech on the House floor asking, “Where are the jobs?”

It seems that every one of these legislators firmly believe that stimulus spending will create jobs in Michigan, which would be good for them politically, but somehow creates a negative number of jobs everywhere else. And Republican legislators in every other state seem to think the same thing of their state.

Vice President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Steven Chu released the report, “The Recovery Act: Transforming the American Economy through Innovation,” which lays out the potential energy advancements.

They include, according to the Energy Department:

“Cutting the cost of solar power in half by 2015, putting it on par with the cost of retail electricity from the grid.

“Cutting the cost of batteries for electric vehicles by 70 percent between 2009 and 2015, putting the lifetime cost of an electric vehicle on-par with that of its non-electric counterpart.

“Doubling U.S. renewable energy generation capacity and U.S. renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012, a breakthrough that would not be possible without the Recovery Act.”

If the Obama administration can accomplish these advancements, they would address a number of key energy challenges, namely the high costs of solar energy and electric vehicle batteries. In reaching these goals, the administration would be able to quiet critics who say that it doesn’t make economic sense to move away from fossil fuels.

The initial version of the state aid bill — championed by Republican and Democratic governors, as well as congressional Democrats — cut approximately $6.7 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). It did so by taking back some of an expanded benefit created in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Feb. 2009 stimulus bill. The state aid bill made a number of cuts to provide $10 billion for teachers’ jobs and $16.1 billion for Medicaid funds.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) thought the bill was deficit-neutral, but the Congressional Budget Office said it came up approximately $5 billion short. (The Democrats had not cut enough because they had not factored in the timing of the bill’s passage. The changes cannot go into effect until mid-September, at the earliest, as the bill needs a House vote.) Democrats tinkered with the bill, cutting unspent funds from a number of programs.

And they expanded the cuts to SNAP. A CBO score released last night shows the revised version more than pays for itself, reducing the deficit by $1.37 billion over the next ten years. SNAP benefits face a $11.9 billion rollback starting in April, 2014. A family of three can expect their benefits to drop about $50 a month.

Never before have congressional policies actually created a month-to-month cut in food stamps. Even in the 1996 rollback of numerous welfare programs, SNAP benefits just grew more slowly than food inflation. Congress has always attempted to avoid a “cliff.” And, as I reported yesterday, policy experts describe that “cliff” in benefits as “devastating”:

The ARRA increase to SNAP benefits boosted benefits from meager to less-meager, advocates say. “We have been very supportive of the ARRA boost,” says Ellen Vollinger of the Food Research and Action Center. “But it underscored that these benefits are not generous. Anecdotally, we heard that the ARRA boost let some SNAP recipients keep going to the supermarket in the third or fourth week of the month, rather than going to a soup kitchen starting after the second week. They were stretching out their benefits, and purchasing some more nutritious food, like fresh fruit and vegetables.” Vollinger notes that even with the ARRA funding the average SNAP benefit is not really enough to eat.

And FRAC argues that that the situation where the government might actually cut benefits… would be “devastating” for recipients. “In the 1990s, there were terrible cuts to the program,” Vollinger explains. “But nobody ever started receiving less money [because the benefits increased more slowly than the price of food increased]. That situation — what will happen if people aren’t well-informed about the cut? What if they don’t recognize that the benefit will be lower?” It has never happened in the history of the program, Vollinger notes.

The CEA estimates the number of jobs saved through a GDP model, but the report also provides direct statistics on how the Recovery Act helped families and workers. The report notes that 22 million people, 14 percent of the labor force, have directly benefited from unemployment benefits provided in the  Recovery Act, for instance; 50 million retirees and others received $250 one-off assistance payments; and millions more benefited from a temporary boost to the earned income tax credit.

Holding the size of the labor force steady, without those 2.2. million jobs, the current unemployment rate would stand at 11.8 percent. Of course, higher unemployment would discourage workers from looking for jobs, etc., and it is impossible to project what the unemployment rate would have been if the government had not passed the Recovery Act. Regardless, the size of its benefit remains considerable.

“This is not only irresponsible, since the purpose of these emergency funds was to prop up the credit system in the midst of a crisis,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the chamber floor Tuesday. “It also violates both current law and the pledge we made that every dollar we got back would be returned to the taxpayer to reduce the national debt.”

This proposal is completely wrongheaded, but it’s perfectly illustrative of the way Democrats in Congress have been dealing with taxpayer money all year — by throwing it at one problem after another without much regard for the consequences. Whether it’s the Stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, or the health care bill that’s currently on the floor, Americans are running out of patience with politicians who promise jobs, but who deliver nothing but more debt, higher taxes, and longer unemployment lines.

Ignored in this critique is the inconvenient Congressional Budget Office finding that the stimulus bill has saved or created 1.6 million jobs this year, with a great deal of the money still left to be spent. Of course, the Republicans this year have already made evident the degree to which they’re concerned for the unemployed, delaying the recently passed unemployment insurance extension for the entire month of October while 7,000 people a day exhausted their benefits.

The president “meant to put the kibosh on the GOP’s favorite method for spreading the wealth around,” Frank writes, noting the astronomical growth of federal spending under former President George W. Bush, paired with a decrease in the number of federal government employees who could make sure those contracts were actually doing what they were supposed to. The failure of Parsons Corp. to finish building more than 20 of the 150 medical clinics it was hired to construct in Iraq is one just one prime example Frank highlights.

But as I wrote in my story posted today, Obama will have his work cut out for him, as he confronts a Congress that’s still ready to cave to government contractors when they lobby hard enough. That’s evidently why the Senate dropped the requirement that the House version of the stimulus bill included, and which House members touted as signifying a new era in government transparency:  the online publication of all those new government contracts.

So what happened to that?  Well, government contractors didn’t like it. And they pushed Congress hard enough until they got it removed.

President Obama is absolutely right that “far too often, [government] spending is plagued by massive cost overruns, outright fraud, and the absence of oversight and accountability.”

Making the actual contracts (and sub-contracts) available for everyone to see — as Congress originally promised — would go a long way to put a stop to that.

The lead story in The New York Times Sunday serves as a sobering reminder of what can happen when government tries to spend a lot of money quickly, but doesn’t bother to keep track of where it’s going. In Iraq, no-bid contracts and nonexistent oversight led not only to brand-new trucks abandoned on roadsides and $45 cases of soda, but also to tens of thousands of dollars in cash delivered in pizza boxes and distributed as payoffs in paper sacks at drop-off spots around the Green Zone, according to a widening government investigation detailed by The Times.

The stimulus package goes a long way to keep that particular history from repeating itself.

For example, the bill creates a new board to oversee and coordinate federal spending and prevent “waste, fraud and abuse.” Any agency’s inspector general can review concerns about spending under the program, and the General Accountability Office (GAO) will conduct regular and reports on how the money is being spent. All this, plus a summary of the contracts themselves (the House bill had promised to put the entire contracts online—this was a concession to government contractors) are required to be posted online at www.recovery.gov.

The bill also requires the government to put most contracts up for competitive bidding  — a sharp departure from business-as-usual under the Bush administration — and if for some reason the contract is not competitive, the government must publish a  justification for the exception.

But it’s disappointing that Congress scaled back its pledge to post the final contracts. Government contractors’ lobbyists had pushed hard against publishing the contracts, claiming they were worried about proprietary information (which the draft bill would have allowed them to redact) and in the end, they won out. It’s not clear what a “summary” of the contracts means and how much detail they’ll include. For example, will we know if KBR is again charging $100 to wash a bag of laundry?

The nonpartisan watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense has been cautiously optimistic about the stimulus bill, while applauding the tracking Website, the oversight panel, and the nearly $200 million to be provided for inspectors general and $25 million for the Government Accountability Office — which provide critical independent oversight.

But there are also some concerns. In addition to the unpublished contracts, some of the important accountability measures proposed by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who has been a strong proponent for accountability in this bill, were not adopted. (McCaskill proposed and won important new whistleblower protections for employees of government contractors that had been left out of earlier versions of the bill.)

As Clint Hendler of Columbia Journalism Review reports, the oversight portion of the final bill (pdf) cut McCaskill’s proposed requirement for transparency in local and state contracts funded by stimulus money. McCaskill had been trying to get those contracts tracked on the recovery.gov website as well; instead, only federal funds will be tracked.

That’s too bad. But as Hendler also points out, the bill creates a floor, not a ceiling, for accountability of stimulus spending.

President Obama, meanwhile, has touted recovery.gov as a site that will “report on where the money is going in your community, how it’s being spent, how many jobs are being created so that all of you can be the eyes and ears. … The key is that we’re going to have strong oversight and strong transparency to make sure this money isn’t being wasted.”

It’s up to his administration now to make sure that happens.

As I reported earlier, that protection was left out of an earlier version of the bill, leaving employees of the contractors that are handling billions of dollars of stimulus money vulnerable to being fired for reporting misconduct within their company. An amendment by Senator Claire McCaskill fixed that problem.

The final language is here.

Still, federal employees, despite almost a decade of internal congressional wrangling about the problem, remain wholly unprotected. Although Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Todd Platts (R-Pa.) had proposed a bi-partisan provision on this that the House had adopted, the Senate conferees rejected it, apparently over concerns that providing protections for intelligence employees could somehow end up revealing classified information if they brought retaliation claims.

Tom Devine, legal director for the non-profit Government Accountability Project, is hoping to see federal employee protections in the near future. (There’s a bill on this already pending in the Senate, though as it stands now it still wouldn’t cover intelligence workers or provide jury trials.).

“It is not too late for accountability,” Devine said in a statement released today. “After nearly ten years of hearings and votes, there is no excuse to spend nearly a trillion dollars without safe passage for federal employees who risk their careers to keep it honest.”

Congress could still lock in federal whistleblowers protections before the money starts getting spent in 120 days, he said, adding: “The politicians owe it to the taxpayers.”

House Democratic leaders were forced to put off until Friday a vote on the $789 billion economic stimulus bill after many rank-and-file Democrats who were unhappy with some spending cuts demanded time to read the compromise measure.

That will be tough to do. The bill text has yet to be finalized.

McCaskill has introduced a whistleblower amendment — S.AMDT. 196 — to the stimulus bill. Although the amendment isn’t yet available on the Library of Congress’ online legislative database, THOMAS, a press release from the National Whistleblowers Center said the amendment “includes protections for all companies, state and local governments that receive any stimulus money. It provides for inspector general investigations, gives employees the right to jury trials, and requires all companies to inform employees of their whistleblower rights.”

“The McCaskill amendment is an absolutely invaluable component of the stimulus bill to ensure that taxpayer dollars are protected from fraud, waste, and abuse, ” said NWC President Stephen M. Kohn, preside in the release.

NWC Advocacy Director Lindsey Williams assures me that the bill covers internal whistleblowing by employees within their own companies — which was the subject of TWI’s story. But strangely, it does NOT include federal employees. They still remain unprotected in the Senate version of the bill, though whistleblower advocates are hoping that will be added during a joint House-Senate conference committee, since protection for federal employees was finally included in the House bill.

Protection for federal employee whistleblowers has become a point of contention among some Republicans, who claim that protecting whistleblowers within the federal intelligence agencies would endanger national security. However, I can’t see why classified intelligence information couldn’t be protected from public disclosure, and made available only to a congressional committee or inspector general that needed to review it, as is routine in courtroom cases and other situations where classified evidence is at issue.

Like the Bush administration’s broad use of the “state secrets” privilege to protect executive conduct from judicial scrutiny, this big concern with protecting executive authority on intelligence secrets once again seems to be placing executive secrecy — from other branches of government — over fiscal and legal accountability.