TANNER'S ACCOUNTABILITY RESOLUTION
PASSES HOUSE UNANIMOUSLY

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution authored by Congressman John Tanner Wednesday that requires committee hearings to weed out waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in federal government.

Watch Rep. Tanner's Floor Remarks on Waste, Fraud, Abuse

“What we are attempting to do is to re-establish Congressional oversight,” Tanner said on the House floor during consideration of H. Res. 40. “Congress authorizes and appropriates money, but we don't actually spend it, so when we are asking the Administration – whoever it may be, Democrat, Republican or whoever – to come up and explain [reports of wasteful spending], I think all of us benefit.”

The resolution, which passed by a bipartisan vote of 423-0, requires that each House committee conduct:

• at least three hearings a year on the topic of waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the agencies under the committee’s jurisdiction.

• at least one additional hearing per year if an agency’s auditors issue disclaimers in that agency’s financial report. Disclaimers are issued when auditors cannot verify the financial information is presented fairly.

• at least one additional hearing if a program under its jurisdiction is designated as “high risk” by the Government Accountability Office.

“In 2007, the new Congressional leadership vowed to restore Congress’ Constitutional responsibility to perform oversight, a responsibility that had been abdicated for several years before that,” Tanner said after the vote. “Our resolution furthers that commitment and writes it directly into the House rules to assure the American people that their federal government will work for them.”

The resolution was supported publicly by the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition and the non-partisan Project on Government Oversight. H. Res. 40 does not require approval by the Senate or the President and will be immediately added into the House rules.

Tanner, a founding member of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, represents Tennessee’s 8^th Congressional district in West and Middle Tennessee. He serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Social Security. Tanner also serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and as President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

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Below is a transcript of Congressman Tanner's floor remarks:

What we are attempting to do is to re-establish Congressional oversight. Congress authorizes and appropriates money, but we don't actually spend it, so when we are asking the Administration – whoever it may be, Democrat, Republican or whoever – to come up and explain some of the things that we have seen in the paper by this instrument we are talking about here, I think all of us benefit.

What, basically, [H. Res. 40] does is it puts in place a systematic mechanism for regular oversight, not only just waste, fraud and abuse, but, as Mr. Cardoza said in his opening remarks, whenever there is an auditor’s disclaimer, that will trigger a hearing to hopefully ask them why they had to file the disclaimer, what is the information they didn't receive, why didn't they receive it [and] who is withholding it, so we can actually fix something around here for a change…. Those two [provisions] look backward to what already may have happened.

The third provision looks ahead. Every Congress, as you know, the [Government Accountability Office] identifies “high-risk programs.” That basically is government-talk for programs that don’t work as they were intended when they were passed by Congress, and so when that happens, there is a hearing to identify those high-risk programs into the future, so we can either fix them or abolish them.

You know, without getting into it, there were some 13,000 Inspector General recommendations that went unattended in recent years. That is not only our fault, but it is, in my view, a dereliction of the duty of the Congress as a separate and independent branch from this or any other Administration. What we are attempting to do… is to put in place a systematic, structural oversight mechanism, where the House will look at not only what we are going to do, but what we've already done.

Contact: Randy Ford, 202.225.4714