OPINION: Too Often, Congress Treats Oversight as an Afterthought

Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know: Congress has no idea what’s happened to the funds it told the government to spend. It’s supposed to be in charge of the federal budget — appropriating money for parks and air-traffic control and public health and support for farmers and myriad other things — but as an article in the New York Times made clear a few weeks ago, between the cuts enacted by the “Department of Government Efficiency” and those imposed by the Office of Management and Budget, what’s actually happened to the money is a mystery. This might seem like so much inside baseball, but as one budget analyst told the Times reporters, “The fact that Congress, who constitutionally has the power of the purse, can’t figure out what’s been going on is a deep, deep, deep constitutional issue.” It’s not just spending, either. I have lost track of the number of issues I wish Congress was looking into in a major and systematic way. There’s the impact on prices and the economy of the Trump administration’s tariffs; the effectiveness and impact of National Guard and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) deployments to U.S. cities; and the firings of key federal employees and the impacts of mass layoffs on the ability of U.S. departments and agencies to fulfill their responsibilities… And that’s just for starters. I’m not arguing that Congress needs to stop any of these. But it does need to scrutinize them, for a simple reason. Once an administration is in power, only Congress has the ability — and the responsibility to the American people — to hold its actions up to the light of day and, if necessary, hold it to account. Let me explain why this is so important. In many ways, our strength as a nation rests on a basic feature of the system the founders designed: a presidency and a Congress that are both strong, vibrant institutions, with neither able to run roughshod over the other. That, they believed, would keep the government responsive to the American people and produce wiser, more sustainable policies. In that mix, congressional oversight of administration actions and policies is crucial. It gives the American people information we need about our government, protects us from bureaucratic arrogance, puts up guardrails against rules and regulations that might do more harm than good, exposes misconduct, ensures that we understand not just what our government is doing but why, and potentially helps the country avoid disaster from misguided initiatives. I’d be the first to admit that in recent decades, scoring political points has too often masqueraded as “oversight” — a bid to make the party holding the presidency look bad or good, depending on which party controlled Congress. But that’s not what effective oversight is about. Instead, it brings fresh eyes and multiple viewpoints to the construction and implementation of policy. It holds unelected officials’ feet to the fire, asking them to explain their thinking, their actions, and their understanding of how those actions affect our nation’s people, communities, economy, and future prospects. And it’s vital to ensuring that the federal government is serving the national interest, not the whims and personal interests of a single elected official, the president. It’s impossible to write all this, though, without noticing just how far short of the mark Congress has fallen. When its leaders are of the same party as the president, they scurry to justify his actions — or, at best, plead ignorance and avert their eyes; when they’re of the other party, they tend to dwell on the politics, not on digging into the nuts and bolts. In both instances, Americans are left ignorant and misinformed, the administration is empowered, and Congress grows even weaker. This is not what the founders wanted, and it’s not what our country deserves.        

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Lee Hamilton, 94, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.