White House Data Show 650,000 Jobs From Stimulus

The jobs data reflect stimulus spending on projects such as highway repairs and funding for education.

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Friday that the government’s fiscal stimulus program has helped create or save almost 650,000 jobs, a figure that is heating up the debate between the White House and Republicans over the success of the $787 billion package.

“We’re moving in the right direction. We’re starting to make real progress on the road to recovery,” Vice President Joe Biden said. “Quite simply, the Recovery Act is performing as advertised.”

The new jobs figure — 640,329 specifically — represents direct stimulus spending through Sept. 30 on projects or activities such as highway repairs and education. More than 400,000 of the jobs were in the education and construction sectors, according to the White House. (See details of the report.)

The report, set for release later Friday by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, gives the White House ammunition in its claim that the giant package of spending and tax cuts has offset some of the destruction of the recession. But with the jobless rate expected to exceed 10% and millions of jobs lost this year, Republicans expressed skepticism.

“The trillion dollar ’stimulus’ isn’t working, and no amount of phony statistics can change that,” House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio said in a statement.

The new data come from information tens of thousands of state and local governments, private companies, colleges and community groups submitted earlier this month to show how they are making use of stimulus funds. The White House said states with the highest unemployment rates reported 25% more jobs created or saved per capita than the nation as a whole.

As mandated by Congress, the reports cover only $160 billion of the $339 billion in stimulus spending that has occurred through Sept. 30. The reports don’t represent tax cuts, direct payments to individuals such as Pell Grants or grants of amounts under $25,000 per recipient, administration officials said.

Given that the documents represent less than half of the stimulus spending through the end of September, the White House sees the data as evidence that the $787 billion American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 has already created or saved at least 1 million jobs when tax cuts and other indirect effects are included.

The administration says that puts it on track to meet its goal of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010, when the two-year stimulus has run its course.

The new stimulus data are emerging as both political parties debate the direction of the economy and the potential need for new measures to create jobs. Figures released earlier this week suggested the U.S. recession has finally ended. But the unemployment rate remains at a more than quarter-century high, and fresh questions have emerged about the reliability of the administration’s stimulus data.

An Associated Press report Thursday found that an early progress report on the economic recovery plan significantly overstated the number of jobs created or saved by the stimulus program. The White House, which pledged that errors found in that report would be corrected in Friday’s figures, said some mistakes would be inevitable in such a large accountability effort.

Republicans ramped up their criticism of the White House’s stimulus data, saying the administration is masking the spending program’s failure with misleading statistics.

“One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called “jobs saved.” It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” Allan Meltzer, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in a memo released by House Republicans. “The Administration can make up any number it pleases. The number has no meaning.”

The White House shot back at its critics, pointing to the economy’s 3.5% third-quarter growth rate as evidence of the stimulus’s impact. The Council of Economic Advisers believes the Recovery Act contributed between three and four percentage points to growth in the third quarter. Without the stimulus, the economy would have expanded “little, if at all,” the White House said.

“For those that have said the stimulus or the recovery plan aren’t working, you’re hard pressed to back that statement up with the figures that have come out in the last couple of days,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Write to Maya Jackson Randall at Maya.Jackson-Randall@dowjones.com and Henry J. Pulizzi at henry.pulizzi@dowjones.com