Obama's recovery chief thinks Recovery.gov is a 'great success,' says data errors aren't important

G. Edward DeSeve, the man running President Obama's economic recovery effort has a post up today on Recovery.gov that deserves a special place in the Out-of-Touch Government Officials Hall of Fame.

DeSeve is Special Advisor to the President, Assistant to the Vice President and Special Advisor to the OMB Director for Implementation of the Recovery Act.

Titled "Looking at the big picture on the Recovery Act," DeSeve claims all those "mistakes," like the thousands of jobs created in congressional districts that don't exist or counting raises as jobs created by stimulus funding, "are relatively few and don't change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the data."

DeSeve might as well have said "nothing to look at here, folks, now move along." Or perhaps "hey, it's close enough for government work, so what's the problem?"

As anybody who knows elementary statistics can attest, entering one piece of bad data can render an entire database useless, or worse, produce analytical results that bear absolutely no relation to reality.

DeSeve also claims some of the mistakes are "frustrating typos and coding errors that don't undermine information at the heart of the data." But when hundreds of "frustrating typos and coding errors" are found in a database, competent database analysts and statisticians know you go back to the original source, correct the errors, and then start doing analysis and drawing conclusions.

DeSeve and his bosses in the White House want us to just ignore such data-entry problems and accept the Obama administration's fairy tale conclusions about what the data allegedly tell us regarding the amazing success of the stimulus program.

Third, DeSeve claims that having so many errors is okay because "transparency is going to be messy but it is better than the alternative." That's like telling a lung cancer patient that his surgeon today didn't finish med school but, hey, letting him cut you open is better than the alternative, which is dying.

The reality DeSeve is avoiding is that, for whatever reason and regardless of who is at fault, Recovery.gov's data is worthless as an indicator of the value of the Obama administration's economic stimulus program. It is incredible that he would argue to the contrary after multiple mainstream media organizations dug into the numbers and found endless examples of mis-counting, mis-representation, and outright fraudulent claims.

Such as here, here, here, and here.

And that's just a sample of what's been found so far by mainstream media journalists, bloggers, and investigative journalism outfits. If President Obama is genuinely interested in restoring honesty in government and public trust in its statements, he will fire DeSeve, shut down recovery.gov., and apologize to the American people for allowing this farce to go on as long as it has.

By the way, if you want accurate data about the stimulus program, check out recovery.org, which is maintained by Onvia, a private company that specializes in tracking government data, funding, contracts, etc.