Trump blocks coronavirus bailout oversight even before it can start
Michael Hiltzik
[ With no oversight, the Trumps will be stealing with both hands. Wheeling gold bars out of Ft Knox. ]
,
LA Times•March 30, 2020
Even faster than Congress came together to pass its $2-trillion coronavirus bailout bill, President Trump signaled his intention to interfere with one of its most important provisions — public oversight of how the money gets doled out to big business.
In signing the bill late Friday, Trump stated that he considered several oversight provisions of the bill to exceed congressional authority — in fact, to represent "impermissible...congressional aggrandizement."
They include provisions requiring that the chief bailout overseer, the special inspector general for pandemic recovery, or SIGPR, inform Congress "without delay" if executive branch departments "unreasonably" refuse the overseer's request for information.
With $2 trillion in federal spending, oversight is not an elective; it’s an imperative.
Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine
"My administration," Trump wrote in a signing statement issued after he ceremonially signed the bill, "will not treat ... this provision as permitting the SIGPR to issue reports to the Congress" without presidential approval.
Trump's statement thus signals that he'll feel free to order executive branch departments not to cooperate with the inspector general.
Looking ahead, that could set up a new round of conflicts between Congress and the White House over lawmakers' demands for information, similar to the conflicts that arose over their demands for information relevant to the impeachment inquiry.
This raises the question, even before the first dollar is spent on the $500-billion business bailout in the measure, of what Trump expects to need hiding.
Most important, it undermines a crucial element of the bailout. As we've reported, congressional and public oversight of the spending is necessary to make sure that the bailout serves its purposes. “If you’re going to distribute the money without conditions attached ... your policy goals are not going to be achieved,” Neil M. Barofsky, who oversaw the spending from the 2008 bank bailout, told me.
yahoo.com |
