After trumpeting shovel-ready projects as the bedrock of his stimulus plan, President Obama admitted famously that “there’s no such thing.” But there were, and are, shovel-ready projects. The administration just needed to find them. Case in point: the nuclear cleanup at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., which received $1.6 billion in stimulus money. As soon as the money arrived in the summer of 2009, the retired cold war nuclear plant hired thousands of workers to decommission reactors, install pumps in the liquid waste tanks and ship barrels of solid waste to a salt formation in the Chihuahuan Desert. Workers from out of town filled up nearly all of the area’s apartments, hotels and restaurants. The county’s unemployment dropped to 8.5 percent from 10.2 percent in a matter of months.

Why did it work? Because the government could immediately send billions of dollars to contractors who were already in place for a project that had well-established plans.

The problem with most of the projects was that the Obama administration and Congress had defined “shovel ready” too broadly. The original plan called for putting “shovels in the ground” within 90 days. But when the rules were written, states ended up with 120 days to have their road projects “approved.” It often took six more months to a year before most of the projects were under construction.

Weatherization, for example, was billed as the low-hanging fruit of the clean-energy movement. But states are still sitting on roughly a billion dollars in unused grant money because of a tortured bureaucracy, in which the federal government paid the states, which paid local nonprofits, which then hired the contractors.

Neither states nor nonprofit groups were prepared to handle 20 to 30 times more money than usual. And federal officials brought ready projects to a standstill in the first year by applying new rules regarding prevailing wages.