Rep. Towns hires staff, vows rigorous oversight

Despite losing one of the House’s most powerful chairmen to another committee, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is gearing up to play a major role next year in monitoring the financial crisis.

Questions still remain, though, about whether incoming Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) can meet the high bar set by his predecessor, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), and stave off a stage grab from Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

{mosads}When the financial crisis blindsided Washington this fall, Democrats conditioned their agreement to help the Bush administration on having strenuous congressional oversight of any federal response. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) touted Frank and Waxman’s announcement of a series of recess hearings intended to determine how the crisis unfolded.

Waxman held six such hearings between October and the beginning of December, including probes into the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the cause and effect of the bailout of AIG, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and the role that hedge funds, federal regulators and credit rating agencies play in the financial sector.

In announcing the hiring of the committee’s new staff director, Ronald Stroman, and deputy staff director, Michael McCarthy, on Monday night, Towns said that “the current financial crisis demonstrates that fundamental aspects of the federal government are broken and in need of sustained oversight and significant reform,” highlighting his desire to keep the committee fully invested in monitoring the government’s response to the market meltdown.

Stroman has been a managing director at the Government Accountability Office since 2001 and was general counsel to the full oversight committee from 1988 to 1994. McCarthy had been staff director and chief counsel to Towns as subcommittee chairman on government management, organization and procurement. He also served as minority counsel to Waxman for the panel’s probes on Hurricane Katrina and Iraq contracting.

Democratic insiders say some are still waiting to find out how much of the current professional committee staff Waxman takes with him when he moves over to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee in January — and how decimated that leaves the Oversight panel.

While Towns may be waiting for January to announce a committee schedule or a list of intended hearings, at least one member of the Oversight panel is lobbying for immediate oversight of AIG.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) last week wrote Towns and incoming ranking Republican Darrell Issa (Calif.) requesting a hearing to investigate AIG’s use of bailout funds for a corporate retreat and the issuing of retention payments, which Cummings believes are just disguised bonuses.

“U.S. taxpayers now own a nearly 80 percent stake in AIG ­— and yet there is essentially no information available either to the Congress or to the U.S. public regarding exactly how AIG has expended the taxpayer funding provided to it,” Cummings wrote in his Dec. 16 letter.

Some House Democrats thought Cummings would challenge Towns for the top spot on the Oversight panel, but he announced his support of Towns on Nov. 25.

In response to the Cummings request, Towns spokeswoman Shrita Sterlin said “Rep. Towns is looking forward to working with Rep. Cummings to investigate AIG’s compensation policy with respect to the retention bonuses. This is a priority in the 111th Congress.”

On Dec. 17 Cummings told Bloomberg News that Towns “agreed with me 100 percent. He’s told me we would be proceeding to a hearing.” 

Yet Towns has not formally announced his commitment to a hearing.

Senior Democratic staffers have said that the transition between chairmen is progressing at a normal rate, and have generally defended Towns’s handling of the transition.

Still, there is a lag caused by a changing of the guard. And while Towns is still staffing up, Waxman last week used his Oversight perch to write to President-elect Obama over the “deterioration of the Clean Water Act enforcement program,” and to release a long-awaited report on the Bush administration’s infamous “16 words” uranium claim.

Other senior Democratic aides have said that, in Waxman’s absence, the Oversight subcommittees will be delegated more responsibility, and that on matters related to the financial markets, Frank’s committee will assume a greater oversight role next year.