After the Associated Press ran a story pointing out several errors in the administration’s stimulus job numbers, the White House sent out a lengthy press release calling the story “misleading.”
The AP’s story, called “Stimulus jobs overstated by thousands,” is a review of the stimulus’s first progress report and shows errors in the numbers of jobs the government claims to have created. According to the AP, at least 5,000 of the claimed 30,000 jobs weren’t real.
But the White House took immediate issue with the story, contacting the AP and shooting out a release to its entire press list just after midnight today. The administration also sent out Jared Bernstein, Vice President Biden’s chief economist, on MSNBC to talk about the story.
“This story draws misleading conclusions from a handful of examples,” said Ed DeSeve, the President’s stimulus adviser, in the statement.
The errors, according to both the AP and the White House, seem to have been mostly mistakes by employers who were reporting to the government.
One of the most egregious examples was a Colorado company which reported it had created 4,231 jobs with a stimulus-funded contract, when in reality less than 1,000 jobs had been created.
The other 3,000 or so had been temporary workers who had worked five weeks or less, according to the AP. The recovery act requires that any job counted be equal to a 40-hour, full-time position that lasts at least a year.
As the White House points out in its statement, those 3,000 jobs make up the bulk of the AP’s reported 5,000 misreported jobs.
The administration defended itself by claiming the AP only used preliminary numbers that reflected 2 percent of stimulus spending; that the early numbers, posted on Recovery.gov, had only three days of review; and that most of the mistakes had already been corrected.
New numbers, set to be released Friday, will be more extensive and will have had 20 days of review, according to the administration.
