For anyone looking to track how the $787 billion “stimulus” package is being spent, I completely recommend StimulusWatch.org. You can find out more about who’s behind this wonderful project here.

Stimulus Watch exposes both worthwhile and wasteful programs, but you’ll find most of the federal funds are going towards wasteful programs. Like this one:

Project Description: The primary objective of this project is, thus, to identify the micro-foundations of vote choice in sub-Saharan Africa through extensive analysis of individual-level exit poll data. Our project requires gathering sociodemographic, census, and political data to help us to design our poll well, writing and testing our exit poll in the field, training and supervising staff in the field, collecting and entering exit poll data into databases, analyzing and testing those data, and publishing the results of our analyses. We will disseminate our research results widely to academic and policy audiences as well as develop a comprehensive dataset that will be accessible to the public. These efforts will result in a robust understanding of how Africans vote, which will in turn allow for a better targeting our external aid funds aimed at promoting democracy on the continent.

Translation: We’re granting the University of California, San Diego, $233,825 of federal taxpayer funds to discover how Africans vote. Not African-Americans, mind you, but Africans.

Now, I’m sure figuring out why Africans vote the way they do is a worthwhile venture for the university. For whatever reason. And heck, I encourage this project to be funded.

But federal taxpayer funds appropriated to create lasting jobs? This quarter-million dollar grant, worth many times what the average American worker brings in annually, comes from the “stimulus” package. What is it doing there?

Total jobs reported: Zero.