RSS Feed MenuLast month, President Barack Obama said that he was concerned that the United States was “suffering from a deficit of trust,” and that he was “committed to restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to [the] budget”. This is a bit odd, because metaphorical deficits seem to be the only sort of deficit he’s concerned about. However, we’re now learning that perhaps even this is not truly the case.
Earlier this week, TheHill.com reported that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) would be given the second smallest funding increase of any committee (the smallest funding increase was given to the Budget Committee, but it got the amount requested). Although the government’s investigative arm asked for an 11% increase, it only received a paltry 3% boost in spending. Overall, committees in the House received a 9% hike in their budgets.
According to their website, the OGR “conducts vigorous oversight to uncover waste, fraud, and abuse, to improve the operations of the federal government, and to examine wrongdoing in the private sector”. One might think that with the tripling of the national debt in President Obama’s budget, the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street and the $787 billion economic ‘stimulus’ plan, a larger, better-funded OGR committee might be helpful. Instead, the United States is faced with massive spending increases and a minute increase in the government’s ability to ensure the spending is done efficiently and effectively. How is it possible that despite an increase of 30% in overall government spending, Oversight is only given a 3% increase?
The Oversight and Government Reform committee has done some excellent work in the past. It has investigated cronyism in the Department of Defense, government waste in contracts after Hurricane Katrina, abuses at Abu Ghraib, and illegal campaign contributions by lobbyists. During the Clinton Administration, the Republican-led Oversight Committee issued over 1,000 subpoenas to investigate possible misconduct, receiving over two million pages of documents.
Since the committee’s jurisdiction runs through the entirety of the U.S. government, it is considered an extremely prominent and influential committee. But of course, this jurisdiction will mean less if funding for oversight doesn’t keep up with the massive increases in government spending. Indeed, the enormous increases in the size of government also increase the number of opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse.
President Obama has previously promised that “unprecedented transparency will be a hallmark of his presidency.” The President doesn’t seem to be living up to this promise. What is actually unprecedented, certainly among recent years, is the trivial increase in the OGR committee’s budget. In the last Congress, OGR received a 5.4% increase, while the Congress before that granted a 4.5% bump in the OGR committee’s spending. Other new precedents include what Tom Coburn has called “the most significant shift toward collectivism and away from capitalism in the history of our republic.” If President Obama is really serious about transparency and accountability, he would have made sure the committee charged with such matters was given more than a trifling increase in its budget.
krove // Apr 6, 2009 at 5:54 am
Why would increasing the budget by 3% mean less oversight? What increase would gain you more? 20%?. I thought you were for less government and less spending, obviously like G Bush no so much.