Writing on the States for an Accountable Recovery blog, Phil Mattera takes a well-measured swipe at Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-OK) report detailing Recovery Act project follies. While the report is intended to raise the ire of the public and Congress and grab "thousand-dollar toilet seat"-type headlines, it falls a bit short of being a catalog of waste-fraud-and-abuse porn it was intended to be. Mattera, however, makes the critical point that neither Coburn's nor Vice President Biden's cut-and-paste "100 Days, 100 Projects" report are based on actual data, just results from Google news searches.

The cherrypicking of self-serving anecdotes from secondary sources -- by either proponents or critics of the Recovery Act -- is no substitute for real data. We are still waiting for the Office of Management and Budget to release its final rules on how federal agencies should collect data on Recovery Act spending and job creation. Assuming that those rules provide for thorough reporting, we can look forward to the day when debates on the effectiveness of the Act are based on a more solid foundation.