Last week the Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) handed Gov. Scott Walker another report for his failure files. The nonpartisan, independent LAB found that Walker’s allegedly job-creating Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) is still a mess. This comes on top of years of previous reports documenting troubles at WEDC, including the agency’s inability to track loans made with taxpayer money, high staff turnover and sloppy accounting. Despite those problems, Walker actually wanted to expand WEDC and merge it with the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA). Thankfully, Walker called off that merger following the audit’s release.
The failure at WEDC is purely Walker’s creation. He abolished the former Department of Commerce to set up this public-private entity, and he’s the chairman of the board.
The latest LAB audit shows that WEDC’s way of handling failures is to sweep them aside and ignore laws governing it. WEDC had claimed that it had improved its loan-tracking and recouping efforts, but the LAB found that WEDC’s improvement was the result of writing off or forgiving millions in past-due loans or deferring loan repayments. The audit also shows that WEDC contracts were loosely written and job creation and wage targets often weren’t mandated. WEDC didn’t verify information submitted to it and staff didn’t follow up to see if companies lived up to their promises to create jobs. And WEDC still can’t provide reliable data about how many jobs its programs have created or retained.
This audit should be a devastating blow to a governor who was elected on his promise to create 250,000 private sector jobs in his first term, then radically “reformed” the public sector to help him do it. Unfortunately, we doubt that Republicans in the state or nationally will care that Walker’s job-creation efforts have been an utter failure. Why? As right-wing columnist Christian Schneider explained in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this month, “Walker’s challengers [in the Republican presidential primary] won’t attack him on the Wisconsin economy because to do so would be to attack the efficacy of conservative policies in general.” In other words, Republicans can’t admit that their starve-the-beast small government strategy doesn’t work so they’ll ignore Walker’s failures in office and continue living in denial.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, we live in the real world where Walker’s failures can’t be ignored.
Image by Gateway Technical College via Flickr and a CC license
