While the White House and the president say that the program is right on track and creating jobs, "they have actually spent relatively little so far," the Times said.

Over at Treasury, decision-making has slowed to a crawl or delayed altogether. While Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and the White House have made dramatic proposals, "carrying out those policies has bogged down because critical decisions about how to do so aren't being made," the Washington Post's David Cho reported Monday. Nearly four months into Obama's presidency, the department is without a deputy secretary and other top people are missing from its senior ranks.

The result: After announcing a plan to relieve banks of toxic assets, it isn't clear who will carry out its details. After announcing a $15 billion plan in March to open up credit for small businesses, "it is still struggling to get off the ground" after officials said it would not work.

The trouble is as much Geithner's inability to manage a bureaucracy as large as Treasury as it is the White House's propensity to micromanage all of its decision-making -- right down to the design of the department's Web site.

Meantime, the economy seems to be making a comeback of its own, and some economists are suggesting that maybe much of Obama's stimulus-spending plan isn't needed.

When I asked American Enterprise Institute economist Kevin Hassett whether he thought that a lot of the stimulus spending may come too late and may not be needed at all, he replied, "You raise a good point, if the third quarter starts out strong after a good second quarter, then we might well have too much stimulus."

But the political reality is that if the economy begins to improve in the second half of this year, as many predict it will, the administration will claim that it is due to its stimulus spending -- even when very little of it has been spent.