"It's Monopoly money, and these are Monopoly jobs," Brinkley said.
According to the Maryland data that covers February through September, transportation funding led to the creation of nearly 800 jobs through the start of 84 construction projects at a cost of $184 million. Education funding has supported 1,810 teachers, and $34 million in work force grants were used in part to hire hundreds of students in part-time summer jobs.
While some of the information comes from contractors reporting how many jobs were supported by the federal funding, some is based on a formulaic accounting.
More progress
Enright defended the pace at which the state has been able to deploy the federal dollars and said future reports will show more dramatic progress.
"We have not yet begun to see the real wave of recovery act dollars. The big numbers are still coming," Enright said. "Next quarter is when we're going to see a lot more job creation and a lot more dollars out the door."
The administration also calculated that 1,450 jobs were indirectly created by the federal funding through subcontracting, for example, and another 8,170 jobs were "induced" or created by the ripple effect of more money in the economy. Medicaid rolls were expanded, for example, so that doctors and their support staff also benefited. Those jobs numbers were not reported to the federal government.
The 4,460 figure does not include 965 private-sector jobs that were created or saved through federal contracting that wasn't handled through the state. The over-reporting errors were found in that data, and the White House said in a statement Thursday that many of the problems have been fixed and that the errors do not significantly affect the total job count.
Administration officials said they can't pinpoint how many jobs were created versus saved, though Enright said the number includes 700 state employee layoffs that O'Malley had threatened before the recovery act was enacted. While the governor was able to avoid mass layoffs when crafting the budget at the beginning of the year, he recently laid off 200 state workers as tax revenues continued to decline.
Some analysts said the stimulus money is making a real impact. Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, credits the funding with fueling a 3.5 percent economic growth rate in the third quarter, the best showing in two years. Bivens said without the stimulus, gross domestic product expansion would have been only 0.8 percent.
Others questioned the usefulness of the data. J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said it is "virtually impossible in any scientific way to determine gross job creation from federal or state spending." He criticized states for putting out specific numbers when government officials readily acknowledge the jobs figures are a best guess.
'False precision'
"The data are spotty," Foster said. "That kind of false precision is misleading."
But even Foster credited state and federal efforts to make the information public. "There is much about the data that can be criticized, but you have to acknowledge that it is the most extensive reporting and presentation of data, probably in the history of man," he said.
Baltimore Sun reporters Jamie Smith Hopkins and Paul West contributed to this article.
