You want congressional oversight hearings? Henry Waxman is going to deliver oversight hearings.
With a Democrat now in the driver’s seat, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is set to hold Congress’s first in-depth hearings into charges of waste and fraud involving money spent on reconstruction in Iraq.
Three days of hearings — the first of what Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) says will be a series unfolding in coming months — are set to begin Feb. 6. They will mark the opening of what promises to be one of the most significant inquiries by the new Congress into actions by the Bush administration while Republicans controlled the House and Senate.
Any new disclosures about lax oversight or misspent funds could prove embarrassing to the Bush White House just as it is pressing for an additional $1.2 billion to spend on reconstruction and economic stimulus in Iraq. The new funds are a central part of the president’s plan to stabilize the country.
The hearings about bound to be entertaining. Scheduled witnesses include Paul Bremmer (former head of the CPA), Stuart Bowen (the special inspector general for Iraq spending), and Timothy Carney (who oversees U.S. reconstruction and development projects in Iraq).
Bowen, as I’ve mentioned many times, has quite a story to tell, including reports on billions of U.S. tax dollars doled out carelessly in Iraq, without any real controls or oversight at all, which ended up paying employees who didn’t exist, for jobs that never happened.
But before Waxman’s hearings gear up in earnest, let’s not lose sight of the big-picture question: it’s taken four years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and countless instances of fraud and abuse for the House to start holding hearings on reconstruction spending in Iraq?