Green job program far short of its goal

GOP probing Obama’s $500 million initiative

WASHINGTON — House Republicans are expanding their probe into the Obama administration’s energy programs, investigating $500 million in green job training grants that reached just 10% of its job-placement goal, according to a government report.

The program’s goal was to train 124,893 people and put 79,854 in jobs. But 17 months later, 52,762 were trained and 8,035 had jobs. Those numbers come from an audit by the Department of Labor’s inspector general, which recommended that the administration end the program and return unspent money.

President Obama has made green jobs a cornerstone of his economic agenda. In his first 2012 campaign ad this month, he said clean energy industries created 2.7 million jobs and were “expanding rapidly.” But Republicans have pounced on failures, such as the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar panel maker backed with a Department of Energy loan guarantee.

Citing what he calls “abysmal results” in the job training program, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-calif., is demanding answers about how the Department of Labor awarded the grants, which were funded out of the 2009 economic stimulus law.

But Assistant Secretary of Labor Jane Oates defends the initiative, saying the inspector general’s audit used old numbers and that it was never designed to provide immediate results.

“It’s like coming to me three days after I join Weight Watchers and yelling at me because I didn’t lose 62 pounds yet,” she said. More recent numbers are still being compiled, Oates said.

One group Issa singled out is the Pathstone Corp., a Rochester, N.Y., non-profit that spent $2.3 million of its $8 million grant and had trained 25 people — far short of its 660 goal, auditors found.

Those numbers are “extremely outdated,” said Pathstone’s Jeffrey Lewis. But he conceded that job placements have been much slower than anyone would have liked.

“This grant came just as the recession heightened,” he said. Bureaucracy also slowed the process. As part of its grant application, Pathstone needed to line up employers to take its graduates. By the time it won the grant, one employer in Scranton, Pa., stopped hiring after a moratorium on natural gas drilling, and the funding constraints halted the city of Rochester’s abandoned-home-deconstruction program.

Oates acknowledged those problems and said the department was streamlining its decisionmaking. “We walk a fine line all the time between trying to be responsive to our beloved grantees — and we love all of them — and trying to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ money.”