|
Flummoxed by a staggering amount of money and by guidelines for how to spend it, Wisconsin counties and cities are spending tens of millions of dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funds to try to administer American Rescue Plan Act funds.
Just exactly how many millions of federal tax dollars are being spent on administrative costs is impossible to say. The state Department of Administration, overseer of federal pandemic spending, doesn’t keep track of individual spending categories at the local level and has not responded to Badger Institute inquiries.
But, according to information kept by the U.S. Treasury Department, spending in just a small percentage of Wisconsin municipalities amounted to nearly $10 million in allocations, budgeting and expenditures for administrative costs.
That amount is just a fraction of total spending on administration of ARPA funds in the state. A Treasury website has not been updated to include spending for the past year, nor were there fillings for most of the 72 counties and more than 1,000 communities in Wisconsin.
A conservative estimate of total spending on administration, based on interviews with financial directors in six Wisconsin counties and cities, is that administrative costs funded with ARPA money is already at least twice that $10 million figure and could very well triple.
It is also clear from those interviews that all this contracted administrative expertise has failed to speed up the actual spending of Rescue Plan dollars.
Read the full article
| 
