The appropriations panel soon will start drafting spending bills for the fiscal year beginning in October. Image: Katherine Welles/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffThe chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee is seeking budget reductions for agencies that “fail to cooperate with congressional investigations,” saying that the Biden administration “has been reluctant to fully respond to legitimate oversight requests” from his side.
“Agency heads appointed by President Biden, and at times, the White House itself, have repeatedly defied congressional authority to conduct oversight over the operations of the executive branch and how the administration is carrying out its duties under the law,” Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said in a letter to the House Appropriations Committee.
The appropriations panel soon will start drafting spending bills for the fiscal year beginning in October. Those bills “must signal to the administration that its behavior will no longer be tolerated. And they can do that by clearly mandating that failure to comply with congressional oversight requests for documents and information will result in a loss or reduction of funding at a given agency to gain compliance,” Comer wrote.
Comer said his committee “has been met with reluctance, recalcitrance, and outright obstruction by the Biden Administration. Instead of accommodating legitimate requests from Congress pursuant to its oversight authority, the Biden Administration has met these requests with delay or refusal to comply.” He listed some 20 instances in which he said agencies including FDA, HHS, Commerce, State, Justice, Energy, EPA and others had been only minimally responsive at most.
Although the letter made no mention of it, the committee also has clashed with the administration over requests for information on federal telework practices and their impact on productivity—an issue that was raised in a hearing with a senior OMB official last week.
Democrats who led the committee during the second Congress of the Trump administration voiced similar complaints about lack of responsiveness to their requests.
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