I agree with you completely. However, this should have been part of the normal budget, not a rider to the stimulus package.
Regarding stimulus money for volcanic monitoring.
My understanding is stimulus is to be spent for things that can be gotten moving rather quickly, and/or have long range benefits. I suspect that there is a bunch of monitoring equipment that could be ordered rather quickly that would immediately employ the companies that manufacture it as well as the people who will install it. Since we have 15 or 20 major volcanic areas or more in this country and since each area could use a number of pieces of equipment, this could add up. Actually, this is an interesting question that I may do more research on.