The White House announced in its usual fashion, very low key, that it would be changing the way it tracks the jobs created by the Stimulus plan. It won’t just be counting jobs that were actually created. It will be counting jobs that were never in danger in the first place:

Now, the White House says it will no longer keep a cumulative tally of jobs created and saved by the stimulus. Instead, it will post only a count of jobs for each quarter.

And instead of counting only created and saved jobs, it will count any person who works on a project funded with stimulus money—even if that person was never in danger of losing his or her job.

The new rules came out last month in a little-noticed memo [1] (PDF) sent to federal agencies by Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. OMB said it changed the guidelines to prevent the kinds of errors and confusion that occurred when the first job counts came out in October.

This should make it much easier. I mean, you are just adding jobs that were neither saved or created to a vast amount of data that had more errors and falsehoods than your average Robert Gibbs press briefing.

The changes are especially suspect when you consider the report filed by the Associated Press. Yes, that Associated Press:

A federal spending surge of more than $20 billion for roads and bridges in President Barack Obama’s first stimulus has had no effect on local unemployment rates, raising questions about his argument for billions more to address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth.”

An Associated Press analysis of stimulus spending found that it didn’t matter if a lot of money was spent on highways or none at all: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless. And the stimulus spending only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, the analysis showed.

The AP article was independently verified “by independent economists at five universities,” showing “the strategy of pumping transportation money into counties hasn’t affected local unemployment rates so far.”

In response to this, does the federal government reconsider its approach? Only to tabulating the success of the plan.

With tens of thousands of recipients now scrambling to meet the Jan. 15 deadline for the next report, the new guidance could significantly change what the public sees. Some examples:

• When Chrysler reported a $53 million contract to build 3,000 government vehicles last fall, it listed zero jobs [4] because it used existing employees to fill the orders. But under the new rules, those workers would have counted.
• The Associated Press found that some recipients were counting pay raises [5] as stimulus jobs. That will be OK under the new rules, but only if they are counted as fractions of a job.
• The California state auditor rapped the state corrections department [6] (PDF) for reporting 18,000 jobs instead of just 5,000 officers who had received layoff notices before stimulus money came in. But under the new guidance, the corrections department may have been right because stimulus money is helping it make payroll for all its employees.

Isn’t this what got Enron in trouble? How is this not cooking the books?

Related posts:

• Stimulus Package Neglecting Areas with High Unemployment
• “Calculator Abuse?” How About “Taxpayer Abuse?”
• Oh No He Didn’t: Biden Touts Millions on Unemployment as Proof Stimulus is a Success Updated w/ Scariest Jobs Chart EVER!
• How Do You Create Jobs in Districts That Don’t Exist?
• After Seven Months of Stimulus, How Many States Have Grown Jobs? One.