440 Phantom Congressional Districts Get $6.4Billion

According to Recovery.gov

• Posted November 17th, 2009 at 1.06pm in Enterprise and Free Markets heritage.org

The government’s Web site that is supposed to tell taxpayers how their stimulus dollars are



being spent, and which spends $84 million per year to do so, shows that $6.4 billion of the stimulus has been spent in 440 congressional districts that don’t exist, according to a report by the Franklin Center, as reported by Watchdog.org.

The site, Recovery.gov, reports, for instance, that North Dakota’s 99th Congressional District has received $2 million in stimulus funding. But North Dakota has only one congressional district. The nation’s capital now contains 35 congressional districts, according to Recovery.gov.




For those keeping score at home, there are really only 435 congressional districts, so adding 440 new ones effectively doubles the size of the House of Representatives. By the way, Recovery.gov also reports that the $6.4 billion spent in those districts has created 30,000 jobs, which works out to almost $225,000 per job created. Various news reports, however, show that many of the estimates of “jobs created or saved” are bogus, so that number, too is in doubt. (See the Washington Examiner’s map and chart tracking jobs created claims.)