How stupid do these people think we are? That thought kept rolling around in my mind today as I read and re-read a response from a senior official at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to this simple question:
“What about the requested documents the committee claims have not been provided?”
I had posed that simple query earlier today after receiving a request from OMB's Moria Mack that I update this post from yesterday concerning the obstacles being encountered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in its effort to understand how Solyndra Inc. got a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy (DOE) under President Obama’s economic stimulus program.
The OMB spokesman asked that the update include quotes from a letter she provided from the agency to the committee concerning the investigation. I said I would happily do so, and then asked my simple question:
“What about the requested documents the committee claims have not been provided?”
More on that but first, here’s the background that puts the preceding in proper context:
Committee chairman Fred Upton's curiosity was peaked by media reports of financial and other difficulties at Solyndra. So the Michigan Republican asked Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida to look into the situation. Stearns is chairman of the panel's subcommittee on oversight and investigations.
After requesting documents and a briefing on the loan guarantee from DOE in February, the subcommittee in March asked OMB, which is responsible for auditing and approving federal loan guarantees under the stimulus program, for the following:
“All documents in possession of the Office of Management and Budget relating to the $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra and the loan guarantee’s Cost Subsidy Cost, including, but not limited to, notes, analyses, reports, memoranda, and all drafts of such documents.
“All documents containing communications between and among the Office of Management and Budget officials, staff, administrators, and employees relating to the $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, including, but not limited to, letters and email.”
Note that the subcommittee didn’t ask for “some” or “many” or a specific number of such documents; the request was for “all” such documents.
There ensued a classic example of executive branch political appointees and career bureaucrats going to great lengths to appear to be cooperating with the subcommittee, while in fact they were stalling, delaying, misleading, and even outright misrepresenting things to a legitimate congressional investigation.
Among much else, OMB and DOE officials produced thousands of documents, many containing redactions to obscure text, charts, and other vital information.
But hundreds more documents sought by the subcommittee were refused by the executive branchers. After much discussion, subcommittee investigators were finally allowed to view documents concerning communications between OMB and DOE in camera. That is, investigators were allowed to read but not to make copies of the documents.
Even then, the subcommittee was denied the opportunity to examiner hundreds of other requested documents, according to congressional officials. “Key information relating to the risk ratings assigned by DOE and OMB to the Solyndra deal were redacted from the documents; OMB has continued to refuse to produce this information throughout the investigation,” the subcommittee said.
But wait, there’s more: “In addition, OMB has not produced communications between OMB and DOE following the loan closing, from September 2009 through 2010, during the period of loan modification.”
Why? According to the subcommittee, “OMB has stated repeatedly during the past several months that, in OMB’s judgment, the committee does not need to see the emails between OMB and DOE.”
So, earlier this week, the subcommittee began discussing whether to issue subpoenas for the documents. Issuing of subpoenas usually produces whatever congressional investigators are seeking. If it doesn’t, there is always the prospect of contempt of Congress charges.
Now, back to my simple question posed to the OMB spokesman early Wednesday morning:
“What about the requested documents the committee claims have not been provided?”
Later in the day, Kenneth Baer, OMB’s senior advisor and communications director, responded to my simple question to Mack with the following statement in an email:
“OMB has been extremely responsive to the Committee’s requests and forthcoming with information, offering to testify, making available over 1800 pages of documents in addition to the 20,000 pages provided by the DOE, holding multiple hours long briefings with staff and several conference calls to answer all of the Committee’s questions.
“As recently as yesterday, OMB invited the committee to send any follow-up questions, committed to a review of additional documents at the committee’s request, and offered to provide an update on that document review by the end of this week. We are surprised by the Committee’s action, and look forward to continuing our cooperation with them.”
One need not have been in this town for 30 years to recognize in Baer’s mumbo-jumbo a variation of the old maxim that if you can’t dazzle them with the facts, you can always baffle them with bureaucratic BS.
So I again asked:
“What about the requested documents the committee claims have not been provided?”
Here’s Baer’s response: “Both the statement I sent you and the letter Moira forwarded you speak for themselves.”
In other words, kiss off (or something close to that, which you can probably guess).
Perhaps the subcommittee will soon give Baer and his uncooperative colleagues at OMB and DOE a reason to be more forthcoming.
For more from the subcommittee, go here. For more from OMB, go here. On the latter link, it appears OMB's communications shop has opted not to post the letter and statement Mack sent me earlier today. If and when those documents are posted, I will happily link to them in an update to this post.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner. Prior to his journalism career, he worked in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.
