Rescue Plan Strained by Lack of Staff

If you’re looking for a job, there’s one government agency that’s desperately short of people:

President-elect Barack Obama has made his most important Treasury Department personnel choice, but Timothy Geithner has big personnel challenges of his own.
The current Treasury has so far struggled to keep up with the task of hiring enough people to handle the $700 billion financial rescue package passed by Congress in October. The man now in charge of running the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Assistant Secretary Neel Kashkari, said the department’s Office of Financial Stability, with about 40 full-time employees, is operating at half-staff.
Federal banking regulators, who must approve the applications from banks before they go to Treasury, said there is a backlog of unprocessed applications for relief. Outside observers said the difficulty of quickly building a qualified staff may be one reason the Treasury abandoned its original plans to use the TARP to purchase assets from financial institutions, deciding instead to inject capital into the banking system.

So we have $700 billion that’s to be spent by 40 people. I think I know how this story will end.

Posted by on November 28th, 2008 at 10:17 pm


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