All that Bill Donahue wanted to know was: "Where do I get one of those stimulus jobs?"

Out of work for 15 months, the laid-off charter-boat crewman living in South Jersey figured that, somewhere, there must be lists of openings made available by the $787 billion stimulus program.

He started calling around. He called his assemblyman. He called his congressman. He called a U.S. senator.

He kept calling.

He called the governor's office, which referred him to the state Labor Department, which referred him to the state Transportation Department. A likable, chatty guy, Donahue even got an assistant U.S. secretary of labor in Washington to talk with him for 20 minutes on the phone.

What he learned was what many jobless people are starting to grasp: However much success the stimulus has had in slowing the decline of the U.S. economy, it has not yet created all that many jobs.

While the White House says the program is right on track, its most recent calculation was that 150,000 of a promised 3.5 million jobs had been saved or created.

It says the pace will accelerate. But the relatively slow effect on jobs appears to have opened an expectations gap.

Many Americans expected more, sooner.

Frustration

Christina Romer said she understood frustration like Donahue's.

She said she could well imagine many people saying, "OK, we passed the stimulus act [four] months ago; the economy should be better."

Romer is chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers and coauthor of the stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In an interview from the White House, she said the stimulus had had major impact.

"We were an economy in free fall, and that's no longer the case," she said. "If you think where we were in January, that was really frightening."

She cited "glimmers of hope." Housing starts are up. Layoffs have slowed. Retail sales are up a bit.

But unemployment is at 9.4 percent and may climb to 10, by White House estimate.

"Nobody's satisfied with the fact that the unemployment rate is very high," Romer said. "We know we are still losing jobs. . . . I do know that people are absolutely hurting. I think the term expectations gap is a good one."

So far, White House says, $45 billion of $499 billion in program funds - less than one-tenth - has been released. An additional $100 billion in specific spending has been OKd. Total spending will spread over two years.

The bulk of the money has gone to help state governments avoid layoffs, aid schools, and meet health costs such as Medicaid. More jobs-heavy projects, such as highway and bridge work, will increase in weeks ahead.

Romer predicted that economic decline would bottom out by September and that growth would begin in the final quarter of the year.