I suppose we should be surprised:
According to multiple reports, the Treasury Department has allocated nearly $10 billion more in funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) than Congress has officially released, “effectively making more promises than it can afford to keep.â€
More, if you care to laugh/cry a bit. Whenever I see things like this, I think back to my work with a Federal grants program in the mid-90s, where service programs focusing on unimportant little things like classroom assistants, community policing, and homeless shelters ground to an immediate halt because Congress was busy playing budget politics. Sure, we knew that the money was coming one way or another, but not a single program received a commitment nor did a dollar flow until it was actually authorized by law. Of course, it was only millions of dollars at issue, and didn’t benefit the right kind of people.
tx2vadem
It depends on what they actually did. But they could be violating the Anti-Deficiency Act.
http://www.gao.gov/ada/antideficiency.htm
MB
Could be (man, if I had dime for every time I had to explain the ADA to someone . ..). But I somehow think we’ll never find out.