After a week peppered with five House and Senate
subcommittee hearings into the well publicized excesses of the GSA’s 2010 Las Vegas
regional conference, you would think Congress would be jumping all over
legislative measures to curb such wasting of taxpayer funds in the future. You
would be mistaken.
While the House promptly brought to its floor and
passed HR 2146, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, slashing
agency conference budgets 20% across the board, capping single conference costs
at half a million dollars, limiting attendance at international meetings to 50
or fewer employees and requiring agency conference spending to be made public
on every government website, that legislation went to the Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Government Affairs, where it ran head on into Nevada
Senator Dean Heller’s SB 2469, which would prohibit government agencies from
adopting policies against using resort destinations as locations
for their meetings.
Rather than watching the conflagration which could
have resulted from this legislative impasse, the Senate unanimously consented
to add the DATA Act as an amendment to the Postal Service reform measure it has
under consideration, and which will languish in a conference committee when
Representatives and Senators can’t figure out how to make the Postal Service
cut expenses dramatically without closing any post offices or mail handling
centers that mean jobs to someone’s constituents. When will we know that
federal agency conference spending is actually under control? Only when a bill
gets through both houses of Congress and is signed by President Obama. Earl
Devaney, former Chairman of the stimulus spending RAT board, put it succinctly:
“Nothing makes a bureaucrat move faster than a piece of legislation.
Legislation is the only way to get all these agencies to do the same thing at
the same time.”
So, years from now when the press in trumpeting
investigations of yet another resort based, lavish government agency
conference, you will remember what happened when the bill to control and report
these excesses was mired in Congressional gridlock.
