A House Divided
Segal, David
A House Divided Why asking Congress to perform two often contradictory jobs-legislating and overseeing— is asking for trouble BY DAVID SEGAL There were newspaper accounts of cost overruns,...
...The simplest explanation is that the committee system isn't about enhancing government, it is about congressmen broadening what's known on the Hill as "that four letter word, t-u-r-f...
...Secondly, both Truman and Conyers were on committees dedicated exclusively to oversight...
...Just as the Decency Act is garnering signatures, those staffers come back to you with a couple of real scams, the kind that make you seethe, the kind that you came to Washington to end...
...FEMA's work in the summer's midwest floods got higher marks—they managed to get checks to more people sooner—but the agency still serves nearly two dozen different masters...
...David McCullough's 1992 Truman biography recounts that as the military signed billions in contracts, rumors of profiteering reached the then senator from Missouri, prompting Truman to do something unimaginable in today's Washington: He got in his car and drove...
...Dicks: Is there unity behind the C-17...
...A House Divided Why asking Congress to perform two often contradictory jobs-legislating and overseeing— is asking for trouble BY DAVID SEGAL There were newspaper accounts of cost overruns, murmurings of design defects, and rumors of opposition within the Pentagon...
...But members, especially the many committee chairmen, deserve the lion's share of the blame for hiring these people in the first place and then failing to push them to do oversight...
...One, I have been saying we have the safest food in the world of the major industrialized countries of the world...
...Then he tried to pin the Jack-in-the-Box incident on Canada: Now, recently, one of my colleagues who chairs a subcommittee on another committee made a statement that beef had come through Canada and that this may have caused what happened in Washington State...
...When the Pentagon refused to hand over something, Conyers subpoenaed it...
...They knew where to look, what questions to ask, and which documents to demand...
...But 98 pages of what...
...You notice that those incriminating letters and checks your staffers photocopied were headed to some very familiar addresses, namely the home states, maybe even the home districts, of the very folks you've been trying to sign on to your bill...
...The Hill is trying it again this year with something called the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, but an advance copy of the group's recommendations shows that improving oversight is virtually its last priority...
...The president of that company, J. Lester Perry, had little luck hair-splitting his way through a question and answer session with two members of the committee: Perry: I still insist that it [the steel] was not inferior for the end use to which it was put...
...General Cassidy: It's performance is much better...
...As all of these facts made it into the press in the months after this hearing, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced that the military would buy 40 C-17s instead of the originally planned 210...
...Rep Conyers: Some pretty serious...
...Perry: We will...
...But the Hill's prevailing ethos of "I'll ignore that if you sign on to this" has a price...
...an infomer-cial...
...He then fired one general and accepted the resignations of two others in charge of the program...
...In one three way brawl, Rep...
...As McCullough points out, fear of investigation caused innumerable contractors to clean up their act before their act got examined...
...And these folks aren't idle: In the past 16 years House committees alone have held a total of 54,034 hearings, or roughly 20 each day the chamber was in session...
...Tollefson: Of waivers, deviations or work that would be carried forward at Edwards and completed there...
...The results of this are obvious in, for instance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the people who are supposed to provide relief after earthquakes, floods, and nuclear accidents...
...With the country beginning to mobilize, the political mood was not conducive to asking tough questions about how the military was spending money...
...But look at what just one of those jobs entails...
...I mean it is very substantial...
...General Cassidy: It is very significant, a factor of five to one...
...Acts of Decency Members needn't be as rapacious as St...
...signed on with Washington-based law firms, trade associations, interest groups, and corporate lobbying offices...
...Their reputations were staked on whether money was saved and programs were working...
...An administrative assistant explained to Rushford, "I guess you're too much the investigative type...
...With uncanny circularity, the ideas for these hearings usually come right from the newspapers which cover them, and generally they are hurrumphing, headline-generating productions that have little to do with discovering why programs aren't working...
...Congress' myopia, love of publicity, as well as its media-dependence are showcased in scandals like Iran-contra...
...that there is a person in government called the "Federal Inspector of the Alaskan Natural Gas Pipeline" earning $115,300 even though no such pipeline exists...
...One National Academy of Public Administration study concluded that "High staff turnover and lack of staff experience on Capitol Hill in many of the complex and technical areas exacerbate the difficulties of oversight...
...Logging some 10,000 miles by himself, Truman visited a variety of army installations and defense plants, revealing his identity only when asked...
...The experts love it...
...Other times, overlapping jurisdictions lead to fights that ruin legislation...
...Ferguson: Then why don't you live up to the government specifications...
...Rep Conyers: We have the documents...
...According to Con-gressDaily, 40 percent of the members turned out by the 1992 elections "have started or joined consulting firms...
...There's also a kennel of accountants and investigators in the General Accounting Office which can be sicked on any subject, not to mention Inspectors General in the agencies themselves whose findings can be used to pursue inquiries...
...What gives...
...Barnes wanted to send an aide, McFarlane stood firm, and again the issue was dropped...
...But at that point the military had already pumped billions into the program...
...FEMA is a tiny agency, with an annual budget of $983 million, so at first this looks like 100 congressmen in a rugby scrum over an Oreo...
...Rep...
...Rushford knew that in 1976 a committee headed by Hubert Humphrey found that half of the $50 million in rice, wheat and soybean oil sent by Food for Peace to Bangladesh had been lost to insects, rodents, and mold due to inadequate storage facilities...
...Sure, the event was billed as a "Congressional hearing," but that phrase evokes a semi-circle of unamused lawmakers bearing down on glum, fifth-taking witnesses with lawyers at their side...
...He's from Washington state, home of Boeing, also a major defense contractor, leading unsympathetic observers to allege that Dicks' ardor for the plane was simply back-scratching for his two Golden State committee partners, gentlemen whom he might need to call on someday to return the favor...
...Keeping an eye on HHS would take six packs of Jolt Cola and late nights for even the most committed workaholic...
...Being able to extract more resources also means you're better positioned to bargain and push for your own agenda...
...Found to Skirt Ban on Aid to Contras" which described a meeting between Oliver North and a contra official...
...Today, only a few legislators—most notably John Dingell of the House Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of Energy and Commerce—have earned reputations as strong and thorough overseers...
...Dicks: One of the major points that I think needs to be pointed out is the number of fields in Reaseach assistance for this article was provided by Alan Greenblatt, Halle Shilling, and Adam Marcus...
...Ferguson: In other words, you are the man who is stating what you think the government should buy...
...Those tend to be the authorizing committees (which draft legislation and make wish lists of what funding agencies and their programs should receive), and appropriations committees (which study the budgets and write the checks...
...There's tremendous pressure for us to not criticize each other," says Rep...
...In January of 1989, the military's new cargo transport plane, McDonnell Douglas' C-17, had all the symptoms of a "troubled" program, and the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations committee was going to do something about it...
...All the elements were there: a genial host (Congressman Norm Dicks) helping an animated huckster (General Duane H. Cassidy) sell us a product (the C-17) that we don't really need...
...In a first person account for the Monthly, Rushford described his travails when he and his boss searched for a subject to investigate...
...Returning to the Capitol, he hired some savvy investigators, organized a set of hearings, and examined crooked and deficient contractors one at a time...
...McClellan had recently granted Eagleton membership on this powerful committee, and so Rushford had early on been instructed not to come up with anything that might anger John McClellan...
...Bearing up under this onslaught and being willing to dig out counter-evidence requires not just time and energy but a group of staffers who know where to look...
...In large part that's because congressional jobs are now widely viewed as a launching pad for careers rather than a venue for public service...
...Some pretty serious...
...As chairman of the Labor and Human Resources committee, Kennedy is the Senate's point man for the Department of Health and Human Services, an agency with 127,000 employees, an annual budget of $641 billion, and 250 different national health and welfare programs...
...In some cases this simply leads to stasis...
...Then there's the baffling way that the committees divide their work...
...For those not on a high powered committee, next best is getting on as many low-powered committees as possible...
...The Truman and Conyers successes share two critical similarities...
...I know lots of situations where committee staffers have snooped around and found stuff and their boss showed no interest in it," says Franklin Silbey, formerly an investigator with the Senate's Labor and Human Resources committee...
...You call it the Decency Act of 1993, and you set about lobbying for it...
...Rep...
...General Cassidy: We have to be able to move and react to the fighting situation...
...For as long as a single committee is supposed to both write checks and perform oversight, oversight will get slighted...
...It's loaded with great features...
...After Hurricane Andrew swept through Florida, FEMA was suddenly working with $11 billion and a spate of Congressional committees were preposi-tioned to direct where that money went...
...So the episodic melees for the best slots invariably center on the big dollar outfits...
...Dicks: There seems to be some confusion on the actual cost of the C-17...
...He stated his thesis: I just have a couple short questions...
...The clear solution was to make one committee responsible for the whole agency...
...A congressional hearing would seem an opportune place to listen, but as the House Appropriations' C-17 hearing suggests, lawmakers are often more interested in rah-rahing programs and agencies than in thoroughly investigating them...
...Perry: No, sir...
...Perry: We should...
...Europe that you can take the C-17 to versus the [Air Force's cargo transport] C-5...
...But the Hill has been so ineffectual with these tools that few people even realize that regularly appraising programs is actually one of Congress' duties...
...In June of 1985, the Miami Herald ran a story entitled "U.S...
...Dan Glickman of Kansas...
...Nita Lowey of New York even enlisted the help of a rabbi...
...If you're a legislator and those dollars are headed to your home district, why ask tough questions...
...It's telling —and alarming—that Rep...
...Meanwhile, you're determined to weed out all the waste, fraud, and abuse you can find as the newest member of the House's Rural Enterprise, Exports and the Environment subcommittee...
...Most commonly, this means vying for committees important in the state or the home district...
...And the sales pitch covered all the bases: This thing really does the job...
...Real reform would require that Congressmen focus on one or two subjects...
...It's up to chairmen to decide how much time, effort, and resources are going to go into investigations and whether or not to take people on," says Rep...
...The Department of Agriculture is supposed to inspect the meat industry, but it's also meant to promote the meat industry...
...Ideally that sort of quiet congressional intervention would win lawmakers the lasting adoration of America, but Cannon was known only in Washington and his home state of Nevada, and in those places only as a conservative Democrat with a nerdy streak...
...Enough to keep him ricocheting around the chamber, right...
...Formed in the wake of the House Post Office scandal, its focus is improving Congress' ethical image...
...Sen...
...The one thing a system like this is unlikely to produce is rigorous oversight...
...Most legislators are simply wary of asking the tough questions that could make government work...
...Those, for instance, with local high-tech businesses push for the Space, Science, and Technology committee...
...The dust is still settling on this affair, but the press reports that sparked Cheney to reduce the total C-17 buy and get rid of three generals were the direct result of Thorsen and Serincioni's work...
...The more committees you sit on, the larger number of jurisdictions you have control over," says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, a former staffer on the House Rules committee...
...Truman: I'll say you will...
...It give us the flexibility inherent to being able to go more places...
...These steps will mitigate the problem, not eliminate it...
...Here the committees win clippings by addressing a topic timely enough to create its own news peg...
...The House Energy and Commerce committee, for instance, has a hand in something close to 65 percent of all legislation—its purview spans billions in programs ranging from telecommunications to insurance to national energy strategy...
...The agency became, as a National Academy of Public Administration report put it, "vitally concerned" with the project, and significantly "accelerated implementation" of the system...
...The House Intelligence committee, headed by Lee Hamilton, then lumbered into action by calling in North and simply asking him if the charges were true...
...Enough to make you sick...
...But twice in the past two decades Congress has formed—what else?—a committee to rationalize the system, and aside from very slightly reducing the number of members' assignments, neither made lasting changes...
...You've seen it advertised elsewhere for a fortune but we're offering a low, low price...
...Rep...
...The price of this kind of coziness is sometimes measured in dollars rather than deaths...
...Sen...
...Am I right or am I wrong...
...He replied that Barnes could see the material but would have to read it himself...
...Dicks: The C-17 gives you that intratheatre capability...
...Last year's crowd of freshmen fought for these choice spots—Public Works and Transportation, Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Appropriations, to name a few—with the kind of elbow-throwing that gets hockey players suspended and fined...
...Pentagon procurement officials like to lard testimony with so much inscrutable arcana that legislators either keel from boredom or are flummoxed into silence...
...The competition doesn't compare...
...Michael Barnes, then chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of House Foreign Affairs, made his own half-hearted investigative stab by writing Robert McFarlane, head of the National Security Council, and demanding to review documents on North's contra contacts...
...One quick way to lose friends is to perform the sort of tough oversight that ends infusions of dollars to home states and districts...
...Then he restated his thesis: My time is up, but I keep saying that we have the safest, we have the best food inspection system in the world...
...A different tone from the Dicks/Cassidy love-in...
...When the House Armed Services committee squawked, Conyers ignored it...
...The Iran-contra hearings we eventually got were vintage Congress: a media-driven orgy of spleen-venting and speechifying which happened well after anything could be done to prevent the crime...
...In one fort he found, as he put it, "hundreds of men just standing around collecting their pay, doing nothing...
...Then it would strip oversight functions from appropriating and authorizing committees (most of their time is taken up with writing budgets anyway) and establish more committees dedicated solely to oversight...
...Truman's hearings, in fact, landed him on the cover of Time, made him a national political figure, and helped him become Roosevelt's vice president...
...Dingell and other serious overseers hire veteran investigators with strong backgrounds in special subjects and the instincts of investigative reporters...
...In 1979, for instance, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation noticed that the Federal Aviation Administration was foot-dragging on its promise to install a new mid-air collision traffic alert system...
...And the senior lawmaker from Massachusetts isn't unusual...
...New legislation wins wider glory, and it's also more fun...
...You listen to the details with fists clenched and teeth gnashing...
...One of the Hill's favorite committee reform proposals—requiring each committee to publish an oversight agenda—might work like a charm if the media made a point of holding chairmen to it, noting those who failed, and praising those who succeeded...
...You pep talk a couple staffers and send them looking for scandals to unearth and millions of tax dollars to save...
...Getting to the truth about a given program or agency takes energy, determination, and a willingness to wade through documents and detail...
...Sen...
...The plane's design was defective, the military had to reduce its performance specifications three times, and its cost soared (each C-17 is now slated to cost $300 million...
...This wouldn't require more committees if you followed Senator Nancy Kasse-baum's excellent suggestion of merging appropriations and authorizing committees and using the left over resources to set up more oversight...
...Ferguson: Why didn't you...
...You get the picture...
...Most agencies and subjects are scrutinized by a number of committees...
...By the way, you might not win the investigation fight, and it'll surely make you a pariah in any number of future deals...
...This is how the fracturing of agency oversight happens...
...So you face a tough choice...
...As one former Office of the Secretary of Defense analyst put it, "There were always voices in the Pentagon arguing that the C-17 was too expensive and that there were cheaper alternatives, but nobody wanted to hear it...
...The most consistent attention-winning method is drafting new legislation, something most congressman far prefer to checking up on laws that already exist...
...Then he left...
...No fewer than 16 committees and 23 subcommittees have a hand in the agency: Food and shelter falls to several committees, fire prevention to several others, disaster response to several others, and so on...
...Not surprisingly, these folks haven't done much about the six to eight million cases of foodborne illness reported in the United States each year, some 9,000 of which result in death, and 80 percent of which can be traced to bad meat or chicken...
...With so much at stake it's worrisome to learn that the committee has only 25 staffers, not one of whom is nosing around programs already up and running...
...Dicks does not hail from southern California, where the C-17 is made...
...Rep...
...And anyway, your bill is a wonderful idea and come to think of it, it'd look pretty damn good in that next mailing and, well, you and the missus are beginning to like Washington and...
...Here's Conyers with Colonel Kenneth Tollefson, the Air Force's defense plant representative at McDonnell Douglas, as Tollefson tries to put a happy spin on a 98 page document the company had given the Air Force in 1990...
...Tollefson: Serious, I guess—I am not prepared...
...Rushford, for the record, had been recommended for the job by the editor-in-chief of this magazine, an admirer of Eagle-ton's...
...It's far easier, and more comfortable, to make a name as a participant in deals rather than as a spoiler of them...
...Not surprisingly, there's been no improvement in the USDA's meat inspection system since then...
...Most senators have the same amount on their plates...
...The chairman of the House subcommittee on Department Operations and Nutrition is Charles Stenholm of Texas, who, according to a Public Citizen book, They Love to Fly . . . And it Shows, was given no fewer than 37 plane tickets and $38,000 in honoraria in 1990 by agriculture business interests...
...Lawmakers vie for federal dollars, which can help them keep their own jobs, at the same time that they are supposed to find out when those dollars are being wasted...
...Well, sometimes it does...
...And the more jurisdictions you control, the more resources you can extract on behalf of constituents and interest groups...
...One of those states was Arkansas, home to Senator John McClellan, the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee...
...There are oversight subcommittees in other committees but their work has been extremely uneven...
...Smaller committees want as much federal acreage as they can get, so they look for reasons that they should be lords of one part of a given agency...
...It will go a long way toward producing more Trumans and fewer infomercials...
...This vapid cheerfulness got downright bizarre in the wake of the Jack-in-the-Box hamburger deaths in early 1993...
...Further nosing around Food for Peace only turned up other ways for Eagleton to annoy his colleagues...
...Because a couple of congressmen from rice-producing states had lobbied the White House in 1976 to increase rice exports...
...Sure, you've got some solid proof of kickbacks and book-cooking, but going public with it would mean ending programs important to some would-be co-signers...
...Congress' reigning beef czar, E. (Kika) de la Garza of Texas ($22,000 in honoraria in 1990), breezed into a hearing on the subject primarily to perform a rear guard action on behalf of the industry...
...Of course, had this been a real infomercial, the FTC would have prosecuted Dicks and Cassidy for false advertising...
...On January 24th in a Washington Post article headed "Hard Times Ahead Over Hardware" called the C-17 a plane that costs an average of $483 million each when spare parts and hangar costs are included...
...Congressional oversight is one of those messy, tight corners of democracy because it necessarily gives lawmakers two radically different, virtually contradictory roles...
...By 1943, estimates were that the committee had saved the country $15 billion, a rough guess since Truman's real effect was deterring fraud before it could do damage...
...There's pressure not to kick somebody in the shin that you might have to work with tomorrow...
...And few want to because oversight is complex and it isn't sexy...
...What creates press interest are the sensational, scam du jour hearings...
...There's the risk of stepping on someone else's t-u-r-f...
...TV Winners The press, for its part, doesn't inspire the Ea-gletons of Congress by covering, and thereby encouraging, rigorous oversight...
...What often results is a group of like-minded lawmakers keeping tabs on agencies who, in turn, are keeping tabs on powerful —and generous —industries with PAC dollars that might be crucial to members at election time...
...In other words, there's no reason to dig hard even when the dollars are heading for your colleagues' constituents—colleagues who later might take a dim view of your favorite program, as well-intentioned and essential for the commonweal as it might be...
...John Conyers, began to study it...
...In part...
...But Truman knew such questioning couldn't be more timely and he sent his tiny staff directly to factories to learn first hand what was happening...
...If the C-17 gets built, after all, that's jobs and federal dollars for someone's district...
...Kennedy may be equal to the task, but it's hard to believe he could be without slighting the roughly 220 hearings held last year by the nine other committees on which he sits...
...The right restructuring and a press that covers what counts would, however, increase our odds of resolving that conflict in a way that benefits everyone, not just narrow special interests and certain home districts...
...Both Joe Serincioni and Erik Thorsen were well versed in defense issues—the latter had spent four years in the Pentagon...
...Conyers: Wait a moment...
...Within a few months, Eagleton fired Rushford, explaining that he just wasn't comfortable with him...
...General Cassidy: The unit fly-away cost of the airplane as we consider it in then-year dollars is less than $125 million a copy...
...For all that Capitol Hill involvement, FEMA's post-Andrew performance simply—by now, famously—complemented a natural disaster with a manmade one...
...Rushford quickly learned the cause: Twice as much rice was landing on the docks as the Bangladeshis could safely store...
...Just about every subject seemed to encroach on some member Eagleton couldn't afford to anger...
...The pro-consumer side of this contradictory mission isn't much enhanced by the House and Senate Agriculture committees, whose members all hail from states like Texas (lots of cattle), or Arkansas (chickens), and Vermont (milk) where agricultural business interests are major players...
...The press isn't interested in the yeoman's work of ensuring that programs are functioning as promised, and so the yeomen that do it don't win the fame that their colleagues drafting new legislation or holding splashy hearings can often count on...
...Beef Jerks While most members use committees to enhance the prospects of their own bills and programs, others use their assignments to enhance their prospects for reelection...
...Consider Ted Kennedy, who is the chairman of four committees and a member of six others...
...Unnatural Disasters To begin with, there's the workload...
...Removing the standard, built-in conflict of interest that bedevils other committees might result in the same kind of successes...
...The document listed the C-17's problems: Rep...
...To understand how this wariness affects even courageous members, take a look at what pressures naturally spin out from the committee system and Hill culture...
...The C-17 gives you that in the capability for the theater movement and you can't predict where that is going to be...
...The House Ways and Means committee and the House Education and Labor committee, for instance, both have a hand in student loans, and in the recent tug of war on Clinton's proposed overhaul of the system, a crucial component of it—allowing the IRS to collect payments—got dropped...
...Plane Speaking Oversight of the preemptive sort is rare on the Hill, but its ingredients are hardly a mystery, and when it works right it can perform miracles...
...The article caused nary a ripple on the Hill until The New York Times and The Washington Post picked it up...
...A typical discovery was a rolling mill selling the Navy dangerously inferior grade steel, the kind that cracks when you use it to build ships...
...In 1977, Rushford became a staff investigator with the then second-term senator from Missouri, Tom Eagleton...
...Also popular is the seasonal hearing...
...Sending a staffer to Central America might have clarified matters, but Hamilton later said that his committee couldn't afford the trip...
...It helps explain why Congress fails to stave off not just high profile catastrophes like the S&L collapse, but quieter outrages as well: that one out of five dollars spent by the government goes for overhead...
...Germain, got so chummy with the S&Ls that his first job after losing his seat was lobbying for the thrifts on the Hill...
...The House and Senate have an elaborate network of 247 committees and subcommittees run by a total of 3,400 staffers to divvy up the work...
...The top 13 recipients of agribusiness plane tickets and honoraria—178 of the former, $167,000 in the latter—were on the House and Senate Agriculture committees...
...There are modern and smaller-scaled analogues to this triumph...
...House members slightly less...
...Ironically, one of them is the C-17...
...Two years ago, Republican Arthur Ravenel threatened to become a Democrat if party elders didn't give him his first choice...
...The S&L bailout, for instance, would have cost significantly less than $300 billion had friendly congressmen, especially those on financial regulatory committees, not exerted pressure on regulators to keep so many ailing thrifts alive...
...We need more Howard Cannons, but it's unlikely we'll get many until the press ballyhoos his methods...
...Yet no restructuring occurred...
...With lines of authority hopelessly splintered and members too overextended to focus on one subject, accountability dwindles to the bare minimum...
...Rep...
...You can either forge ahead with your investigation and fight like hell to save taxpayers some money, or you can look the other way and win acolytes for the Decency Act...
...A parade of witnesses were called to the carpet and third-degreed...
...Scott Klug, a second term member from Wisconsin...
...The paradigm is Harry Truman's investigation of military contracting fraud during World War II...
...Imagine you're the freshman representative from Michigan, and because you are smart, decent and driven to do good, you draft a bill that will both balance the budget and end hunger in all 50 states...
...Gregory Rushford learned this the hard way...
...Tort reform, for instance, is the domain of both the Judiciary committee and the Energy and Commerce committee—the former likes the idea, the latter has opposed it and virtually nothing has been done on the subject because of this split opinion...
...Ultimately, North's penchant for funnelling money to contras was simply a case of the executive branch breaking a law—in this case, the Boland Amendment—which Congress had failed to enforce...
...In fact, what's most insidious about the Hill is that it can change even those with genuine good government fire in their bellies...
...But once an earthquake or a flood happens, FEMA hits the emergency appropriations lottery...
...Shameless pork politics...
...The ex-marine firmly denied everything and the issue was dropped...
...In fact, they tend to wax operatic about a crack squad of bureaucrats delivering unsurpassed efficiency and progress...
...Germain to lose interest in oversight...
...Why dig hard if you might one day want to work for these people...
...When members feel compelled to bring home the bacon, letting them do the watchdogging is like asking Dead Heads to guard the medicine cabinet—it puts duty at cross purposes with instinct...
...Which, naturally, provides just another reason to beg off oversight...
...The problem is that when it comes time to push for legislation that is dear to them, legislators need all the friends they can muster...
...But too many others are young and new to the subjects they're supposed to keep an eye on...
...Swinging into investigative mode, it assembled a handful of its members, summoned some military brass, alerted the media and held...
...McFarlane knew legislators only too well...
...Those investigations just might turn up something that could make life unpleasant for past and future allies...
...That's why the least popular committees—Government Operations in the House and Government Affairs in the Senate—are the two which exclusively perform oversight...
...This event looked more like one of those scripted half-hour cable programs designed to sell rechargeable hand blenders...
...But more often Congress' negligence comes from a far less craven impulse—the urge to get along...
...So Congress' poor oversight track record isn't so much a scandal about greed and thievery as it is the inevitable result of asking legislators to both make laws and see them implemented...
...Dicks: Isn't the C-17 much more capable of of landing and taking off...
...that one third of the $200 million spent by Superfund went to paperwork...
...Finally, the two decided to look into Food for Peace, an Agency for International Development-administered program that sold food on easy terms to other countries...
...Chairman Howard Cannon lit a fire under the FAA by setting a precise timetable for implementing the system...
...Those living near port areas try to get on Merchant Marine and Fisheries...
...The standard explanation for this muddled network is that it grew up gradually and has failed to change with the times...
...Congress is given plenty of resources to ferret out these kinds of failures...
...Take, for example, a recent joint committee hearing on violence in TV video games—just in time for holiday shopping...
...Agency heads don't arrive on the Hill and confess their sins...
...The former committee chairman, Fernand St...
...Then you feel a sharp pain in your stomach...
...General Cassidy: This is the only program in DoD that has full service support and all the Commanders in Chief support it...
...Through it all, military officials concealed facts and constantly lied about meetings and money...
...Sometimes they simply lie, more often they just offer a novel take on the truth...
...But this kind of notoriety is altogether too rare, especially for members conscientious enough to do legislative oversight...
...When you do it right, there's the risk of stepping on someone else's bunions...
...Hearings on this subject generally have a Shirley Temple, look-on-the-bright side tone...
...As the rest of Congress pumped money into the program, two investigators at House Government Operations, a committee which is chaired by Rep...
...First, both men, thanks to the press, made a name for themselves through their oversight work...
...The ex-Representative from Rhode Island was following a common career path...
...His committee colleagues fared nearly as well...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 1
