On February 13, 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. At $787 billion, the new law holds the title for largest domestic-spending effort in U.S. history.

In the following months, the Obama administration foresaw the salvation and creation of thousands upon thousands of jobs — specifically 3.5 million within the next two years — and a rapid rise in consumer confidence, credit-lending and the American economy as a whole. All this would be made possible by the quick dissemination of hundreds of billions of these dollars.

Well foresight, unlike hindsight, is not 20/20.

Since the recovery act was unleashed, unemployment has risen from 8.1 percent to 9.5 percent, and a lowly $55 billion is all that’s been paid out from the $787 billion total.

Now that is a pretty extreme amount of money to think about, except, that is, when one realizes that $55 billion is a measly seven percent of what Obama promised. So while the president’s optimism should be respected — at least to some extent — the reality is that he and his people, all Ivy-league brainiacs who so far seem much better at visualization than realization, need to do anything and everything to put more money into creating more jobs and filling more American pockets as quickly as possible.

But they aren’t.

Instead, they recently undertook what is and will be a public relations nightmare, contracting out a total of $18 million to Smartronix Inc. to redesign the Web site

http://www.recovery.org.

This Web site, ironically, was created to “increase transparency” of the recovery act’s now-embarrassing dollar dissemination.

Sure, $18 million is a whole lot of nothing in relation to $787 billion, or even to the $55 billion that has been distributed. It’s not nothing, however, when one considers the tens of thousands of unemployed Americans it could feed for a year, the 6.5 million gallons of gas it could put into tanks or the thousands of homes it could rescue from foreclosure.

Nor is it nothing, most importantly, when one considers the glaring message the Web site redesign sends: It’s more important to make sure that American taxpayers know about job-saving initiatives than to actually create them.

Well, that is one piss-poor message.

I’m all for transparency, but the Obama administration should be concerned a great deal more with the end results — in the form of jobs — than the means to achieve them. A Web site is definitely an appropriate modern-day way to get word out about the success of the act, but only if there is actual success to report.

Money for the recovery act should be awarded prudently and wisely to projects such as road repair and the weatherization of homes.

Money should not be awarded to the shockingly requested — but thankfully refused — funding for cemetery headstone-straightening, a fish sperm-cooling refrigerator and a $7 million plane to study bird migration.

As Vice President Biden reportedly told a collection of mayors, “It’s so important you make sure there are no water parks, golf courses or anything that doesn’t pass not only the test of the law, but the smell of the test. Because we’ve got to do this really well.”

And, of course, they do, as Fox News anchors, Wall Street Journal writers and the American public will all be watching.

Driving from Ames to Mount Rushmore over the July Fourth weekend, I also wonder why the recovery.org Web site is any concern at all.

Passing through a number of road work areas, three of them demonstrated their recovery-act funding loudly and clearly with multiple signs reading, “Putting America to Work — Project Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

That’s enough transparency for me, and the signs gave me a slight, but significant, sentiment of optimism.

If the administration funds more projects and more signs are erected — and less concern is paid to a stupid Web site — perhaps others will feel the same.

– Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Md.