A Perfect Introduction to Congress

NPR reports on the new public entry to the U.S. Capitol:

The U.S. Capitol Visitor Center formally opens to tourists Tuesday, over budget and behind schedule.

At 580,000 square feet, it's the largest project in the Capitol's 215-year history. It was originally scheduled to open almost four years ago, and the $621 million price tag is double the initial estimate.

What a perfect introduction to Congress and its activities! I hope they have a display in the entryway about the construction of the Visitor Center. And maybe they could have interactive graphs and figures showing cost overruns in the Visitor Center, weapons systems, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs. A sign of the times in the Bush-Obama New New Deal era.

The Washington Post offers more details on the progress toward the Visitor Center:

The unveiling that will be marked with one Capitol Hill staple -- speechifying by politicians in an invitation-only morning ceremony -- already has achieved much else for which Congress is noted.

Take, for example, spending. What was proposed as a $71 million project in the early 1990s became a $265 million endeavor a decade later. By the time work got underway in 2002, the price tag was up to $368 million. Tomorrow, the ribbon will be cut on a $621 million project.

Then there was the congressional penchant for thinking big. The center's architects were ordered to include 150,000 square feet of "shell space" for some future day when Congress might need more office area. The finished center is about two-thirds the size of the entire Capitol.

Then there have been delays, a malady common to many federal endeavors. The project once was expected to be finished in time for the presidential inauguration -- in January 2005. As that date neared, the center was about half done, so the completion date was bumped ahead to spring 2006.

Six months after President Bushwas sworn in for a second term, the Government Accountability Office reported that the architects and contractors were making so many mistakes and facing so many unexpected problems that March 2007 was probably more realistic. When that target rolled around without a ribbon-cutting, project officials were summoned before a House subcommittee to explain why, and Rep. Jack Kingston(R-Ga.) scolded them for overseeing "a monument to government inefficiency, ineptitude and excessiveness."

Members of Congress did manage to achieve one thing with the timing:

Top lawmakers and Congressional officials have been fretting for months that the visitor center would finally open its impressive doors in the weeks before Election Day. They worried that it would inspire a raft of news stories and snide commentary about how Congress had erected another monument to itself, just in time to irritate voters already irked at Washington.