A House divided.

• Author: Segal, David
• Position: Futility of investigations by congressional committees

Why asking Congress to perform two often contradictory jobs--legislating and overseeing--is asking for trouble

There were newspaper accounts of cost over-runs, murmurings of design defects, and rumors of opposition within the Pentagon. In January of 1989, the military's new cargo transport plane, McDonnell Douglas' C-17, had all the symptoms of a "troubled" program, and the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations committee was going to do something about it. Swinging into investigative mode, it assembled a handful of its members, summoned some military brass, alerted the media and held ... an infomercial.

Sure, the event was billed as a "Congressional hearing," but that phrase evokes a semi-circle of unamused lawmakers bearing down on glum, fifth-taking witnesses with lawyers at their side. This event looked more like one of those scripted half-hour cable programs designed to sell rechargeable hand blenders. All the elements were there: a genial host (Congressman Norm Dicks) helping an animated huckster (General Duane H. Cassidy) sell us a product (the C-17) that we don't really need. And the sales pitch covered all the bases:

This thing really does the job!

Rep. Dicks: Isn't the C-17 much more capable of

of landing and taking off.?

General Cassidy: It's performance is much better.

... It give us the flexibility inherent to being

able to go more places.

It's loaded with great features!

Rep. Dicks: The C-17 gives you that intratheatre

capability.

General Cassidy: We have to be able to move

and react to the fighting situation. The C-17

gives you that in the capability for the theater

movement and you can't predict where that is

going to be.

The competition doesn't compare!

Rep. Dicks: One of the major points that I think

needs to be pointed out is the number of fields in

Europe that you can take the C-17 to versus the

[Air Force's cargo transport] C-5. I mean it is

very substantial.

General Cassidy: It is very significant, a factor

of five to one.

The experts love it!

Rep. Dicks: Is there unity behind the C-17?

General Cassidy: This is the only program in

DoD that has full service support and all the

Commanders in Chief support it.

You've seen it advertised elsewhere for a fortune but we're offering a low, low price!

Rep. Dicks: There seems to be some confusion

on the actual cost of the C-17. On January 24th

in a Washington Post article headed "Hard

Times Ahead Over Hardware" called the C-17 a

plane that costs an average of $483 million each

when spare parts and hangar costs are included.

General Cassidy: The unit fly-away cost of the

airplane as we consider it in then-year dollars is

less than $125 million a copy.

Of course, had this been a real infomercial, the FTC would have prosecuted Dicks and Cassidy for false advertising. The plane's design was defective, the military had to reduce its performance specifications three times, and its cost soared (each C-17 is now slated to cost $300 million). As all of these facts made it into the press in the months after this hearing, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced that the military would buy 40 C-17s instead of the originally planned 210. He then fired one general and accepted the resignations of two others in charge of the program. But at that point the military had already pumped billions into the program. As one former Office of the Secretary of Defense analyst put it, "There were always voices in the Pentagon arguing that the C-17 was too expensive and that there were cheaper alternatives, but nobody wanted to hear it."

A congressional hearing would seem an opportune place to listen, but as the House Appropriations' C-17 hearing suggests, lawmakers are often more interested in rah-rahing programs and agencies than in thoroughly investigating them. Shameless pork politics? In part. If the C-17 gets built, after all, that's jobs and federal dollars for someone's district. If you're a legislator and those dollars are headed to your home district, why ask tough questions? When members feel compelled to bring home the bacon, letting them do the watchdogging is like asking Dead Heads to guard the medicine cabinet--it puts duty at cross purposes with instinct. Lawmakers vie for federal dollars, which can help them keep their own jobs, at the same time that they are supposed to find out when those dollars are being wasted.

But more often Congress' negligence comes from a far less craven impulse--the urge to get along. "There's tremendous pressure for us to not criticize each other," says Rep. Scott Klug, a second term member from Wisconsin. "There's pressure not to kick somebody in the shin that you might have to work with tomorrow." The problem is that when it comes time to push for legislation that is dear to them, legislators need all the friends they can muster. One quick way to lose friends is to perform the sort of tough oversight that ends infusions of dollars to home states and districts. In other words, there's no reason to dig hard even when the dollars are heading for your colleagues' constituents--colleagues who later might take a dim view of your favorite program, as well-intentioned and essential for the commonweal as it might be. It's telling--and alarming--that Rep. Dicks does not hail from southern California, where the C-17 is made. He's from Washington state, home of Boeing, also a major defense contractor, leading unsympathetic observers to allege that Dicks' ardor for the plane was simply back-scratching for his two Golden State committee partners, gentlemen whom he might need to call on someday to return the favor.

So Congress' poor oversight track record isn't so much a scandal about greed and thievery as it is the inevitable result of asking legislators to both make laws and see them implemented. But the Hill's prevailing ethos of "I'll ignore that if you sign on to this" has a price. It helps explain why Congress fails to stave off not just high profile catastrophes like the S&L collapse, but quieter outrages as well: that one out of five dollars spent by the government goes for overhead; that one third of the $200 million spent by Superfund went to paperwork; that there is a person in government called the "Federal Inspector of the Alaskan Natural Gas Pipeline" earning $115,300 even though no such pipeline exists.

Congress is given plenty of resources to ferret out these kinds of failures. The House and Senate have an elaborate network of 247 committees and subcommittees run by a total of 3,400 staffers to divvy up the work. And these folks aren't idle: In the past 16 years House committees alone have held a total of 54,034 hearings, or roughly 20 each day the chamber was in session. There's also a kennel of accountants and investigators in the General Accounting Office which can be sicked on any subject, not to mention Inspectors General in the agencies themselves whose findings can be used to pursue inquiries.

But the Hill has been so ineffectual with these tools that few people even realize that regularly appraising programs is actually one of Congress' duties. Most legislators are simply wary of asking the tough questions that could make government...