UPDATE 4: Comment from Congressman Jerry Moran

UPDATE 3: Comment from Congressman Todd Tiahrt, information on how jobs are calculated.

UPDATE 2: More information on Kansas, total districts and jobs nationwide corrected.

Numerous reports have questioned the veracity of job creation claims by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus”). But now it seems the “Stimulus” has created 10 new congressional districts in Kansas and 440 new districts around the country.

According to Recovery.org, the “Stimulus” has created or saved 5,934.8 or 5,940.37 jobs in Kansas including 10 in the 9th Congressional district, nine jobs in the 8th District and three in the 6th district and two in the 14th. The 00, 99th, 5th, 76th, 68th and 36th districts saw no job creation. Of course Kansas only has four Congressional districts. Recovery.gov reports two different numbers for total job creation in Kansas.

Todd Tiahrt, Kansas’ 4th Congressional District representative, says the errors reflect on the “stimulus” premise. “I would call them dream jobs, they’re dreaming up jobs that don’t exist.”

“They’re obviously errors and a reflection of their whole calculation system,” Tiahrt said in a brief phone interview Tuesday with KansasWatchdog. ” I think the underlying premise that this administration is using is faulty and it’s reflected in their fictitious Congressional districts.”

Kansas had eight districts in 1933 but began losing districts after the 72nd congress. Kansas lost a 5th district after the 1990 Census.

Recovery.gov claims 28,429.7 “jobs” were “created or saved” in 440 non-existent congressional districts nationwide with $6.4 billion real dollars. That’s $234,000 per “job.” The 5,940 jobs created or saved in Kansas cost taxpayers $220,971 each.

Congressman Jerry Moran provided this comment to KansasWatchdog via email:

“The stimulus is another example of government spending money it does not have and now we see that the administration accounts for this spending in a haphazard and irresponsible manner.  Jobs are created by small business and entrepreneurs–not by increased spending and borrowing by the federal government.  We can not borrow our way to prosperity.  This failed accounting is further proof that more spending and bigger government is not the path to an improved economy.

“After spending $787 billion, the only place where the stimulus is creating jobs and the economy is improving is in Washington, D.C.”

According to Recovery.gov, many other states have congressional districts that have been defunct for decades. South Carolina’s 7th took the cake, garnering more than $27 million in stimulus funds, despite being eliminated in 1930. And Virginia’s 12th District may have been written off at the start of the Civil War, but it must carry some sentimental value in Old Dominion–it received more than $2 million, according to recovery.gov.

The stimulus helped to create 35 congressional districts in Washington D.C. and the four American territories, all of which have no congressional districts. These areas received $5 of the $6.4 billion distributed to the non-existent districts.

New Mexico Watchdog broke the story on Monday morning after finding that $26 million in stimulus money had been distributed to 13 congressional districts–ten more than the state actually has. Similar reports soon followed from New Hampshire, Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota and West Virginia.

A reporter from the Montana Policy Institue confronted the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees the site, about these non-existent congressional districts on Monday afternoon. Ed Pound, Director of Communications for the board, said that the faulty information came from recipients of stimulus funds.

“People make errors, and we’ve found people are making errors in these reports,” Pound said…

Recipients file their reports on a password-protected site. That information is then relayed to officials who oversee the recovery.gov website to post, Pound said. Unless an egregious error is noted, Pound said they post the information exactly as it is received.

“Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

The integrity of the data, however, has also come under scrutiny several times in the past month. Numerous media studies have revealed a reporting system riddled with errors and results that are “impossible” to calculate, such as the number of jobs “saved” by the bill.

Vice President Joe Biden admitted that the administration’s statistics were flawed after an Associated Press study revealed several instances of exaggerated and outright false job creation. The vice president acknowledged that “further updates and corrections are going to be needed.”

The administration may have begun to do just that. 60,000 jobs were cut from original stimulus estimates on Monday, citing faulty data.

Pound says that the board plans on correcting the site’s other reporting errors during the next data collection cycle, which is set for January.

The full data from the Franklin Center study can be found below or by clicking here. All information was pulled directly from recovery.gov.

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Bill McMorris at Watchdog.org contributed to this report and calculated the total jobs and congressional districts saved or created or imagined nationwide.

KansasWatchdog.org has more background on the “Stimulus” in Kansas here.

Nationwide data on jobs and districts created:

Recovery’s Phantom Districts –