Besides Missouri Senator Claire
McCaskill’s Accountability In Government Act introduced earlier in the week,
each chamber of Congress has introduced another bill in response to the spending
abuses revealed during the four Congressional subcommmittee hearings into the
2010 Las Vegas conference put on by GSA’s Region 9 under Jeffery Neely. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has introduced
the Conference Accountbility Amendment, to cap government agency conference
spending on any single meeting at $500,000.00, unless the agency is a primary
sponsor of the event. Interestingly, this measure would not have applied to the
offending Las Vegas GSA conference. The amendment would also require quarterly
reporting of conference expenses on each federal agency’s website, including an
explanation of how each conference advanced the mission of the agency, who paid
the costs of the conference, and a listing of government employees in
attendance, together with all meeting minutes, presentations and recordings.
In the House, Congressmen Darrell
Issa of California and Mark Warner of Virginia are co-sponsoring reintroduction
of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a measure languishing in
the cloak rooms of Congress for years but now expected to garner renewed
support in the aftermath of last week’s hearings. The so-called DATA Act would
require standardized reporting of every federal agency’s spending on a single
government website, accessible to the press and the public. The Issa/Warner
bill would create a new federal agency named the Federal Accountability and
Spending Transparency Board [FAST Board] to replace the Recovery Accountability
and Transparency Board [RAT Board], and be responsible for making sure all
government spending was reported and accessible to public scrutiny.
If one thing became clear during
last week’s subcommittee hearings, it was that the highest officers of GSA in Washington,
D.C., did not have ready access to spending information within their own
agency, and that the GSA Inspector General took well over a year to ferret out
what went on in Las Vegas in 2010 and who was responsible for authorizing the
excesses. Spreading detailed expense
information respecting millions of transactions at hundreds of federal agencies
across the internet is obviously not the answer. These three feel good “transparency”
bills will not be any sort of substitute for good management practices and
strong Congressional oversight regarding spending of taxpayer dollars by
federal bureaucrats.
