Earl Devaney has a bookmark for reporters: Recovery.gov.
“My vision here is that every reporter in America will wake up and click on this site and be looking for problems. They’ve already started, by the way,” he told city and county officials yesterday during a meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board (RAT), is expected to give similar testimony today to a House committee seeking to learn how federal and state auditors will track stimulus funding.
The new Web site, currently run by the Office of Management and Budget, is averaging more than 3,000 hits per second, according to OMB director Peter Orszag, and should be transferred to Devaney’s control in 35 to 40 days he said, according to a pool report of his comments.
Following similar meetings with state officials last week, Devaney said he’s looking to how local, state and federal inspectors general handled Hurricane Katrina relief funding as a model for how to best coordinate accountability at all levels of government.
He also said he’s pushing for a Justice Department task force “that’s assigned to do nothing but work with these recovery funds.” He reminded officials — as he did last week — that some level of corruption and mismanagement of stimulus funds is likely.
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