For supposed proponents of limited government, the current Republican crowd seems to hate independent scrutiny of federal contracts for cases of waste, fraud and abuse. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recent firing of 60 contracted investigators from the Surveys & Investigations Staff (S&IS) of the House Appropriations Committee. The S&IS has been an active component of the House Appropriations Committee for 63 years, made up of former employees of the FBI, CIA and other federal investigative bodies. The bulk of its work is done covertly, its findings largely classified and rarely published.
On October 16th, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) unilaterally fired the 60 contractors, leaving the unit gutted with only 16 permanent investigators remaining in the unit. (Lewis himself has spent over $50k on lawyers over the course of this past month, as federal investigators continue to look into his history with the Copeland, Lowery, Jacquez, Denton and White lobbying firm and more specifically former disgraced congressman-turned-lobbyist Bill Lowery.)
More of the back story in extended.
According to
CQ:
Lewis' decision "has in fact stalled all of the investigations on the staff," said one of the contractors, a former FBI agent, who asked not to be identified. "This eviscerates the investigatory function. There is little if any ability to do any oversight now."
House Appropriations Cmte. spokesman John Scofield, who formerly worked for Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ) and Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-OR), contends that the decision was part of a 'bipartisan review' of the unit and that "the work we've been getting as of late has not been that good." Scofield reassures us by saying that "nothing sinister is going on" and that the decision to fire the contractors had the full backing of Ranking Democrat Dave Obey (D-WI).
But according to Think Progress, "committee Democrats had not been consulted prior to the suspension of the investigators." The timing of the firing comes at a strange point...with Congress out of session. More, with Congress not in session these types of decisions would seemingly require a full committee vote instead of what appears to be a unilateral decision made by Chairman Lewis. (Perhaps only decisions regarding the permanent S&I staff, who remain, require a committee vote.)
More suspicious than the timing, however, is the history of obstructionism and outright derailment on the part of Republicans when it comes to the Surveys & Investigations Staff's inquiries. While the committee's spokesman claims that the S&IS hasn't been producing quality work, the unit seems to have been hampered in their investigations frequently by numerous Republicans in leadership positions. There are now four documented, reported claims in which Republicans hampered the S&IS from conducting its oversight responsibilities.
Number one:
The first comes courtesy of the Congressional Record. The Appropriations Committee spokesman has said that the unit has done little to nothing in regards to their investigation of Gulf Coast rebuilding contracts. But there is a good for reason this, and its not the fault of the S&IS:
The Committee is very disappointed that the Office of General Counsel failed to cooperate with the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations staff during their audit of how funds provided in response to the Gulf Coast hurricanes were spent. The Office of the General Counsel delayed the Committee's investigations by two and half months [sic], engaged in a costly effort to monitor and control the conduct of staff interviews which resulted in less than a frank exchange of information, and required legal presence at every interview regardless of their expertise on the issue. The Committee expects the Office of General Counsel to be more responsive in the future and provide the Committee with unfettered access to information and personnel in a timely basis. If the obfuscation continues, the Committee will be unably to fully support the budget request for this office.
That's a pretty strong threat--withholding funding for the Office of the General Counsel of DHS. By the way, the General Counsel of DHS is Phil Perry, who happens to be the son-in-law of VP Dick Cheney. So, according to the logic of the Committee spokesman, the blame is now squarely on the investigative unit and not the DHS General Counsel who, even by the Commitee's own account, has derailed the investigation.
Number two:
Congressional Quarterly has been out in front on this story from the get-go. Last night, they dropped another bombshell (also diaried by LieparDestin here):
Two former House committee investigators who were examining Capitol Hill security upgrades said a senior aide to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert hindered their efforts before they were abruptly ordered to stop their probe last year.
The former Appropriations Committee investigators said Ted Van Der Meid, Hastert's chief counsel, resisted from the start the inquiry, which began with concerns about mismanagement of a secret security office and later probed allegations of bid-rigging and kickbacks from contractors to a Defense Department employee.
Ronald Garant and a second Appropriations Committee investigator who asked not to be identified said Van Der Meid engaged in "screaming matches" with investigators and told at least on aide not to talk to them. Van Der Meid also prohibited investigators from visiting certain sites to check up on the effectiveness of the work, the investigators said.
The investigation was carried out by members of the Appropriations panel's Surveys and Investigations team, which looks into charges of waste and abuse.
Robert Pearre, the team's director, ordered the investigators to step their work on the security contracts in the fall of 2005. Before that, the investigators said they were looking into allegations that security contractors had showered a Defense Department employee with kickbacks in the form of Redskins tickets, golf outings, a set of golf clubs and meals. The allegations of kickbacks did not implicate congressional aides.
The office in charge of the upgrades was funded through the Defense Department and overseen by the Capitol Police Board, but the Speaker's office took a lead role because of Hastert's status as third in line to the presidency, the investigators said.
According to the investigators, Van Der Meid sought to stop their investigation shortly after it began.
"We got called into his office," said Garant, who served previously in the Defense Department's Comptroller's Office before becoming an investigator for the Appropriations Committee. Van Der Meid shouted at them, Garant said. "What the [expletive] are you looking at this for?...He wanted to shut the operation down right then and there."
According to the investigators, Van Der Meid was reluctantly persuaded to allow the inquiry into the security upgrades to go forward but continually hindered the investigators' work.
"They had resisted all along," the other investigator said about the Speaker's office. Nonetheless the investigator said that he was "stunned" when the inquiry was shelved about a year ago. Pearre, a former FBI agent, had strongly backed the inquiry until shortly before he ordered them to stop their work on it.
The order was "get out of there by sundown," Garant said, referring to the secure offices they had used for the probe because of its sensitive nature.
Garant said the investigators believed that the Speaker's office had successfully pressured appropriators to stop their inquiry. "From our perspective it was obvious....The only people who would give a [expletive] was the Speaker's office because this was an organization very close to them."
Numbers three:
The final two reported incidents come courtesy of Peter Cohn, writing for CongressDaily. I've only managed to find a version of the article posted by the National Waterway Conference, located here. Based on the content of the piece, it was printed sometime in early 2005. (The document itself was created on May 5, 2005.)
The article delves into the Surveys & Investigations Staff and the changes proposed under newly-selected Chair Jerry Lewis.
Robert Pearre, director of the S&IS, wrote in a memo that the unit should consider all government managers as "liars," and that the unit should "[n]ever buy into their line of BS; never drink the Kool Aid they're serving." If they did, they "will be excused without prejudice."
On to third case of obstruction:
Last year, controversy erupted when Appropriations ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., wanted to investigate reports that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was establishing his own internal Pentagon spy network, known as the "Office of Special Plans." He got [then Chairman] Young and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member John Murtha, D-Pa., to sign off.
But Lewis, who then was Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chairman, declined to endorse the investigation and it never got off the ground.
...
Sources said they suspected White House and GOP leadership pressure got to Lewis, who was seeking the full committee chairmanship. Cushing, who was not on Capitol Hill at the time, said "leadership and the administration generally don't known we're doing this kind of work" and that the investigations are an internal committee matter.
Number four:
From the same CongressDaily piece:
S&I has also been the subject of intra-party wrangling. Last year, then-Legislative Branch Appropriations Chairman Jack Kingston, R-Ga., initiated an investigation of alleged cost overruns at the Capitol Visitors Center. Sources said aides to House Speaker Hastert stalled that effort. A Hastert spokesman would say only that the Speaker's office "encouraged the appropriators to hold oversight hearings."
Kingston subsequently lost his job when Lewis dissolved the Legislative Branch panel, folding its duties into the full committee.
What we have here is a pattern of Republican leaders, from executive branch officials like Phil Perry to Congressional leaders Dennis Hastert, his counsel Ted Van Der Meid and Appropriations Cmte. Chairman Jerry Lewis, who have decided against transparency, oversight and accountability. Instead, they have fostered a culture of corruption and 'anything goes' when it comes to government contracting, which is directly responsible for the Duke Cunningham scandal and doubtlessly others which have gone uncovered.
For a party which supposedly cares about limiting the size of government in favor of the efficient use of tax-payer dollars, these acts are directly contrary to their stated conservative principles. That's why conservatives, libertarians and progressives alike should throw out the Republican leadership by helping elect a Democratic majority. Only a Democratic majority can bring about the strong oversight which our government sorely lacks.
Republicans no longer can claim to be the party of small, efficient government as they've gone hog-wild on spending, increasing spending by 33 percent during Bush's first term according to the Cato Institute. In 2006, the Republican-controlled Congress and George W. Bush managed to increase government spending to 20% of GDP. In context, government spending was at 20.7% in 1994, when Democrats were swept out of power in Congress. That figure plummeted to 18.5% of GDP when Clinton left office, only to rise after George W. Bush took office where it has continued to do so each year since.
From the Cato Institute's Stephen Silvinski:
Divided government is the norm, not the exception, in modern American politics. Over the past 42 years, for instance, there were only 13 in which united control of the legislative and executive branches of government existed at the federal level. The presidencies of Johnson and Carter account for nine of them. The past four years under George W. Bush account for the rest. What
we've seen in the past few years--a consolidated Republican majority--may simply be an anomaly. But based on the record, the question for conservatives in this election year is whether their cause might be better off if congressional Republicans finally spent some time in the political wilderness.
But I'll let US District Judge Paul Friedman close, who said this during yesterday's sentencing of David Safavian, former General Services Administration deputy chief of staff who received 18 months in prison for lying and obstruction in relation to his ties to fallen GOP golden boy Jack Abramoff:
"There was a time when people came to Washington because they thought government could be helpful to people....People came to Washington asking not what government could do for them and their friends but what they could do for the public."