“It’s like the python that ate the rat,” Brad Whitehead, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, said of the struggle to shepherd so much federal money into state projects. “You need all those calories, but it’s hard to digest it all at once.”The Treasury Department gave states broad discretion over how the stimulus money can be deployed, but imposed limits on using funds to shore up public pension programs and restricted states from using relief funds to subsidize tax cuts. The tax cut prohibition angered several Republican governors, who argued it infringed o …
