…so says Peter Orszag, Obama’s Budget Director.

According to CNN’s interview, Orszag claims that “the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending bill which it inherited from the previous administration.”

That sounds an awful lot like an easy cop out to hard promises made on the campaign trail: “ …we can no longer accept an earmarks process in which many of the projects being funded fail to address the real needs of our country.”

The Governor’s Office has put up a web page:Montana Recovery.

[The purpose of] …this site is to allow all Montanans to follow how we are reinvesting and rebuilding Montana with funding from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. An estimated 11,000 jobs will be created or saved and the majority of Montanans will see tax relief.
…
Total investment in Montana – AT LEAST $626,000,000

The site is informative, full of tables and graphs explaining how the proposed money will be spent. My hope is that this site transitions to one that tracks this money; it could provide accountability and evaluation for this enormous amount of taxpayer money.