"Never before in history has a federal government program been this transparent and accountable. Never. Not even close." -- Jay Carney, spokesman for Vice President Joseph Biden, November 2009.

I'm assuming Jay Carney has a lot on his plate, what with having to keep all of the statements made about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by his boss at their manufacturers' recommended inflation pressure. Otherwise, maybe he could take the time to explain why I can't get this historic, transparent and accountable federal government program to tell me where it spent American taxpayer dollars weatherizing 169 homes somewhere in Houston.



It isn't as if these 169 homes are some big secret. On the contrary --  Michael Gerber, executive director of the state Department of Housing and Community Affairs, thought them so important that he called me at home on a Saturday to tell me about them.

Gerber interrupted a weekend play day with his family to call after he had become personally involved in providing information for a story I was writing about the problems his department was having making low-income homes more energy efficient using so-called stimulus funds through the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Through December of last year, according to the reporting required by the U.S. Department of Energy's Weatherization Assistance Program, Gerber's department had spent $3.7 million and had weatherized a feeble 47 homes in Texas.

That amount comes to a taxpayer cost of $78,000 per home.

Knowing the story was soon going to be posted, Gerber told me he had canvassed the nearly three dozen local entities around the state that were directing the actual weatherizing work on a Friday late in January. Lo, and behold, Gerber found that during that month contractors had done more than 400 homes. We blogged about the additional weatherizing, and included Gerber's optimism that after months of delays the Weatherization Assistance Program was finally rolling in Texas.

Gerber's people even provided a spreadsheet with a breakdown of the number of units, what cities they were in and which city government or nonprofit agencies oversaw the weatherizing work. The largest single group, 169 units, had been done through Sheltering Arms Senior Services in Houston, the home city for Texas Watchdog.

Wouldn't it be great, we thought, to contact several of the homeowners whose monthly utility bills presumably would be slashed and talk to them about their good fortune? Maybe we could see for ourselves the kind of work was being done with your taxes.

When I called the Department of Housing and Community Affairs, their spokesman, Gordon Anderson, told me they did not have the addresses for those units in Houston. Nor could they tell me how much money they were putting into each of the units. "At this point, (weatherization money) sub-recipients" such as Sheltering Arms "are actually not required to submit the street addresses of units weatherized to TDHCA," Anderson replied to my inquiry in an e-mail. "They are required to submit a warehouse of data, but this information is not part of the program requirements."

Although bureaucrats at every point in the stimulus pipeline were blaming the exacting and unprecedented paperwork demanded by this transparent and accountable federal government program for at least some of their problems, Anderson said the program did not demand that local entities report such basic information as addresses and amounts spent to the state.

I would have to get that information from the people at Sheltering Arms, Anderson said. After failing to return a couple of my calls, Lynne Cook, vice president for housing and energy management for Sheltering Arms, and the group's media person, Carlos Ramirez, tag-teamed me with a conference call that included a thorough inquiry into my press credentials.

Satisfied, they said they would be happy to ask one or two of their weatherization recipients if they would be willing to talk to a reporter and get back to me. They were, however, barred from releasing any of the addresses where the work had been done. Their reason: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

This explanation brought me up short. This act, fondly referred to in the news business as HIPAA, includes provisions preventing institutions from releasing to the public personally identifiable information about a person's health. I asked Cook and Ramirez if they might not be mistaken. I wasn't asking anyone about their health. I wasn't interested, necessarily, in who lived at these addresses. As I understood it, I told them both, the public had every right to know how, where and how much of its money was being spent.

Cook, who told me she spent more than two decades with the Houston Chronicle, albeit in the advertising department, and Ramirez, who claimed a media background, stood firm.

Jim Hemphill, who says he's heard many tortured excuses for hiding behind HIPAA, says Sheltering Arms may have created a new form of torture. Hemphill, a First Amendment lawyer in Austin who serves on the board of directors for the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas along with Texas Watchdog's Jennifer Peebles, suggested that a formal request for the information through the Texas Public Information Act would be upheld by the attorney general of Texas.

We intend to make such a request.

When I told Anderson what Sheltering Arms was claiming he seemed surprised. Still, Housing and Community Affairs wasn't in any position to help out. "The emphasis the feds place on our (stimulus) reporting is more along the lines of jobs created and money expended," Anderson said. "For what it's worth, subrecipients aren't required to submit addresses of units weatherized with their regular annual allocation of (weatherization) funds, either."

What the sub-recipients are required to submit to the feds is not at all clear. You will search in vain for even the most basic information about weatherizing homes in Texas on the official federal stimulus site, Recovery.gov. As criticism of the reporting of stimulus spending has grown, the chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, created to address precisely these problems, said many of the groups that have received millions of tax dollars through the stimulus plan don't report to the federal government at all.

 "As the Chair of the RAT Board testified late last year, there are a considerable number of recipients who do not report to the Recovery Act because it prescribes no penalties for failure to report." U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said on his Website, demanding answers. "Perhaps even more important is the fact that the Administration currently does not require that agencies take any punitive action(s) against ARRA recipients who fail to file; rather it provides the agencies with discretion as to whether or not action should be taken if an ARRA recipient fails to file."

It isn't enough to say that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is failing to live up to Biden's tire-pump promise. The public is being deprived of basic information about this spending at the same time more than 1,770 complaints of fraud and waste in the stimulus program have been lodged, according to the most recent quarterly report by the Transparency Board.

"This lack of accountability, intentionally or unintentionally, is one reason why the public has little faith in the program," says Keith Elkins, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. "By all means, taxpayers should reasonably expect to know how their money is being spent."