So much waste, fraud, and inefficiency in federal spending have been exposed since President Donald Trump re-entered the Oval Office three months ago that it raises the question: why didn’t Congress shine the light on such outrages long before Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came along?

Americans for Limited Government (ALG) President Rick Manning, for example, put it well recently, asking congressional watchdogs what they “have been doing over the past 20 years? Where was their spending oversight? Why have they not forced these systems to be opened up for public review so they could dig deep into the spending on authorized programs to determine whether they are being administered properly, and that the taxpayer has been getting their [money’s] worth?”

Manning’s question makes sense, considering what DOGE has uncovered barely three months into its deep-dive, including trillions of dollars in checks issued by the Department of Treasury — with no coding showing the purpose of the spending, billions of dollars of improper payments to ineligible or fictious Social Security, Medicare, pandemic, and unemployment beneficiaries, and millions of grant dollars to pay for things like transgender surgeries for Latin American men.

To get some answers to the question posed by Manning and others, The Washington Stand dug into the years of demands from congressional investigators to executive branch departments and agencies for millions of documents, threatened and delivered subpoenas, transcribed interviews, whistle-blower reports, and public hearings.

What we found can best be summed up in a comparison of what those sleuths looked at as a measure of their priorities in two years, including 2022 when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and Democrat President Joe Biden was in the White House, and 2024 when Republicans controlled the House, but Biden remained in office.

More specifically, we focused on one House committee, known in 2022 as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (HOGR), and in 2024 after the panel was renamed the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA).

In 2022, Democrats running HOGR were extremely active, but exposing waste, fraud, and corruption in government was not a priority. In 2024, Republicans focused almost entirely on waste, fraud, and corruption in government, but they met a solid wall of refusals to cooperate from political appointees and career civil servants in the executive branch.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a 30-year Democratic veteran of the House, chaired HOGR in the 116th and 117th Congress with Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, as the Ranking Member in 2022. When Republicans regained the House majority in 2023 for the 118th Congress, Comer succeeded Maloney as chairman. Because it has such wide-ranging investigative authority, the oversight panel is a major newsmaker.

Maloney’s HOGR publicly issued at least 189 official letters to government and corporate individuals and entities, providing detailed background information to explain and justify the panel’s concerns, as well as posing multiple questions to recipients who were expected to answer as if they were under oath. In only a handful of those many letters did Maloney go beyond questions and ask for documents related to the subject and issues in the committee’s investigation.

Sorting the letters according to investigative issues produces the following breakdown:

• 26 of the 189 letters, or 14%, were focused on one of a wide assortment of left-wing ideological causes such as confirming the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, converting the United States Postal Service (USPS) vehicle fleet to Electric Vehicles (EVs), weaponization of election disinformation, and the availability and accessibility of menstrual products, among others.

• 17 of the letters, or 9%, focused on allegations that the 20 biggest fossil fuel corporations like Exxon and Shell were exaggerating their efforts to reduce carbon emissions and prevent climate change-caused disasters.

• 14 of the letters, or 7.4%, concerned Trump scandal allegations, including classified documents kept illegally at his Mar-a-Lago compound, allegations of excessive rates charged to representatives of foreign nations staying at the Trump Hotel in the nation’s capital, improper foreign gifts to Trump, and claims various Trump family members and appointees profited from their positions in government.

• 11 of the letters, or 6%, dealt with issues related to cryptocurrency.

• Nine of the letters, or 5%, were devoted to allegations of food and supply-chain inflation.

• Five of the letters, or 2.6%, questioned whether social media giants like Facebook were sufficiently aggressive in removing disinformation from the internet.

• Only 14, or 7.4% of the letters covered issues of oversight of government programs such as the propriety of contracts awarded by the departments of Agriculture and Defense to particular firms, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concerning its response to shortages of infant baby formula.

The balance of the letters, 93, covered a wide range of unrelated topics such as allegations former Washington Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder tolerated a work environment hostile to women, accusations New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) wasn’t doing enough to assure mental health care access for Riker’s Island prison inmates, Amazon labor policies and cheers for state-level programs such as New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D) “Cumulative Impacts” program.

Only one of the 189 letters was addressed to a federal agency — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector-General (IG) — concerning the failure to produce documents requested on three occasions about that office bungling its investigation of allegations of sexual improprieties by government workers.

Notably, the HOGR did not ask the Social Security Administration (SSA) about checks being paid to dead recipients or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about improper payments to unqualified recipients covered by the Medicaid and Medicare programs. The improper payments issue has been prominent in the work of DOGE.

Maloney, who lost her 2022 re-election bid after serving in the House since 1993, could not be reached by TWS for comment. A spokesman for the Democratic minority members of the committee did not respond to TWS’s request for comment.

The oversight panel was even more prolific in writing official letters during Comer’s chairmanship in 2024, with a total of 210. And where only one HOGR request to a federal agency in 2022 concerned failure to produce requested documents, such requests were at the center of virtually every major controversy involving the committee in 2024.

Comer’s investigators encountered opposition from the Biden administration-led executive branch to virtually every request for documents, not just to those involving the controversial and politically sensitive corruption allegations related to the chief executive’s family business.

“Biden withheld tens of thousands of documents pertaining to his involvement in his family’s corrupt influence-peddling racket that generated millions for the Bidens and their associates. … [The White House] refused to hand over documents pertaining to its war on domestic energy production, which drove up energy costs for Americans and jeopardized our national security. And the Biden administration failed to provide critical information about President Biden’s border crisis. Thankfully, the Biden nightmare is now over, and President Trump is taking action to reverse President Biden’s detrimental policies and is providing transparency to the American people,” Comer told TWS.

For example, an executive order (EO) signed by Biden in March 2021 directed an executive branch-wide campaign to ensure voter access by, among other techniques, funding supposedly non-partisan groups conducting voter registration campaigns. Republican critics contended that those registration campaigns always seemed to focus on strongly Democratic areas.

Comer’s panel made its first inquiry to the Biden White House about the EO on May 13, 2024, seeking all documents concerning the drafting, implementation, and third-party organizations involved, to be produced no later than May 28, 2024.

“The executive order requires the heads of federal agencies to allow ‘approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises.’ To date, the administration has not provided a comprehensive list of who these approved organizations are, the process for becoming approved, or any guardrails for agencies in implementing this order,” Comer said.

Three months later, in an August 26 letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young, Comer emphasized the delays.

“The committee received a short letter response from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) over one month past the deadline, in which none of the requested documents or communications were produced. Additionally, OMB has not provided a timeline for production of responsive documents despite several requests by committee staff to work with your agency on this matter to obtain the requested documents and communications,” Comer told Young in the letter.

Comer said a subpoena would be on the table if the requested documents were not produced by September 2. The documents were never produced, according to a committee spokesman.

Similarly, the oversight Republicans repeatedly pressed Secretary of State Antony Blinken to produce multiple documents and other unredacted records regarding the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate (SPEC), headed by former Secretary of State John Kerry.

In a lengthy August 7, 2024, letter to Blinken, Comer pointed to multiple ways in which State Department officials evaded providing requested materials: “In a recent production to the committee regarding the SPEC office’s staff names and payroll information, the department made significant unjustified redactions and has withheld fully responsive information, thus undermining the committee’s ability to effectively perform its oversight functions.”

Comer further pointed out that it was “only after the threat of compulsory process did the department release some documents and communications revealing a sophisticated and targeted coordination between leftist environmental groups and the SPEC office that undermines U.S. foreign policy, energy policy, and national security policy.”

The committee also dug into the federal government’s chronic problem of improper payments, one of the most widely publicized examples of wasteful federal spending highlighted by the DOGE effort in 2025. In a March 26, 2024, statement, the committee noted the latest in a long-running series of reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the vast extent of improper payments across major federal departments.

“The GAO’s new report found there were $236 billion in improper payments in Fiscal Year 2023. Nearly 80 percent of Fiscal Year 2023 improper payments are concentrated in five areas: the Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicare and Medicaid programs; the Department of Labor’s federal pandemic unemployment assistance; the Department of Treasury’s Earned Income Tax Credit; and the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program loan forgiveness. Since 2003, cumulative improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion,” the statement said.

The panel’s Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, chaired by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) was the point of the spear in addressing improper payments, convening three hearings during 2024 to examine the costs, causes, and needed reforms.

Against the backdrop of hyper-partisanship that dominated Congress and the rest of the national political scene throughout the year, Sessions and Ranking Member Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) demonstrated in those hearings that members of the opposing parties can still work together seeking workable solutions to national problems on Capitol Hill.

Asked by TWS about his relationship with the Baltimore Democrat, Sessions responded that “Mr. Mfume understands this main point: If you’ve got misdirected payments to the extent that we have, that means the people that money is intended for will not get it.”

In an October 29, 2024, joint letter to Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who heads GAO, Sessions and Mfume recognized the obstacles presented by the lack of congressional access to vital documents and poor record-keeping by agencies.

“The subcommittee seeks to continuously evaluate whether agencies are getting better or worse at ensuring the levels of fraud seen during the pandemic will ‘never happen again.’ Unfortunately, because of limited or unreliable information maintained by federal agencies, the subcommittee has been unable to adequately assess agencies’ progress,” they told Dodaro.

As a result, Sessions, Mfume, and GAO launched a wide-ranging probe of why agencies too often seem incapable of eliminating improper payments and what Congress must do to fix things.

“We’re in the process now, because this is the first time in four years that we’ve had access to excessive amounts of misdirected spending. This is the first time we’ve had that kind of visibility. We knew numbers existed, fed to us by official people about money that was misdirected with, for example, COVID payments,” Sessions told TWS.

“But when you start going $400 billion here and this and that there, you are not really putting it all together for the State Department, USAID, EPA, and so forth,” he added. The Texas Republican is confident that the joint effort he and Mfume launched with GAO will yield concrete, long-term reforms enacted by Congress and signed into law by the president that ultimately will produce victory in the war against wasteful and corrupt spending throughout the executive branch.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

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