A new government report says the stimulus was virtually free of waste, fraud, and abuse. This is supposed to be good news. I’m not so sure.

The report, which Vice President Joe Biden officially delivered to the president on Friday, is the official 2010 audit of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It’s a full accounting of how the government has spent Recovery Act money, but it’s the section on waste that’s gotten the most attention.

And rightly so. Of the nearly 200,000 prime and sub contracts that the Recovery Act awarded, just 293 led to “consequential investigations” of fraud. That’s 0.2 percent—i.e., two-tenths of a percent. Given the amount of money we’re talking here, that’s astonishingly clean, even by private sector standards.

Lest you think this is just the Obama Administration whitewashing its own record—and me whitewashing their whitewashing—the General Accounting Office has reached the same conclusion, calling the amount of waste and fraud minimal. Earl Devaney, the Interior Department Inspector General who is on leave to run the the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, told the New York Times recently that “I do think history will show that there was a lot less fraud in this effort than had been anticipated or that normally would occur with such a large amount of money.” Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, says "the fraud and waste element has been smaller than I think anything anybody anticipated."

Mike Grunwald, who’s been covering the issue for Time, explains how the feds are doing it: