The Obama Administration has spent a lot of your money, with very little to show for it:
House Republicans are expanding their probe into the Obama administration's energy programs, investigating $500 million in green job training grants that placed just 10% of trainees in jobs, according to a government report.
The program's goal was to train 124,893 people and put 79,854 in jobs. But 17 months later, 52,762 were trained and 8,035, or roughly 1 in 10, had jobs. Those numbers come from an audit by the Department of Labor's inspector general, which recommended that the administration end the program and return unspent money.
President Obama has made green jobs a cornerstone of his economic agenda. In his first 2012 campaign ad this month, he said clean energy industries created 2.7 million jobs and were "expanding rapidly." But Republicans have pounced on failures, such as the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel maker backed with a Department of Energy loan guarantee.
Citing what he calls "abysmal results" in the job training program, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., is demanding answers about how the Department of Labor awarded the grants, which were funded out of the 2009 stimulus bill.
But Assistant Secretary of Labor Jane Oates defends the initiative, saying the inspector general's audit used old numbers and that it was never designed to provide immediate results.
"It's like coming to me three days after I join Weight Watchers and yelling at me because I didn't lose 62 pounds yet," she said. More recent numbers are still being compiled, Oates said.
Good point, Ms. Oates. The only flaw in your logic is that these Companies have had our money for 17 months, not three days.
One group Issa singled out is the Pathstone Corp., a Rochester, N.Y. non-profit that spent $2.3 million of its $8 million grant and had trained only 25 people — far short of its 660 goal, auditors found.
Those numbers are "extremely outdated," said Pathstone's Jeffrey Lewis. But he conceded that job placements have been much slower than anyone would have liked. "This grant came just as the recession heightened," he said.
So Pathstone has spent over 25% of the money, yet has only hired 3.7% of the employees it promised. And wasn't the money provided to help Companies like Pathstone weather the storm of the recession in the first place? Where did the money go, Mr. Lewis, if it didn't go towards training new employees?
