House oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller on Monday that he and his fellow committee members are planning to grill Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on Tuesday about exactly what the Obama administration considers to be waste, fraud and abuse.
“Tomorrow, he’ll be in front of our committee and as you know, we deal with waste, fraud and abuse,” Issa said in an interview on Capitol Hill. “Secretary Chu’s answer today was that they had very few dollars that led to criminal indictments and that’s their standard for not wasting money.”
“Tomorrow, we’re going to have a series of questions for Secretary Chu about ‘what is your definition of waste?’” Issa added. “If it’s only criminal prosecutions, then what you’re saying is bad decisions aren’t waste — only if in fact there’s a law broken.”
The top oversight committee Democrat, ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, has accused Issa of playing politics with his investigations into the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program. The most notable loan default was Solyndra, but other companies which received loan guarantees have also failed.
“Although I fully support aggressive oversight to ensure that government programs work effectively and efficiently, I believe the committee should refrain from making accusations without evidence to support them and should correct the record when claims turn out to be inaccurate,” Cummings said in a letter on Monday.
Chu, according to The Hill, is expected to cave on some demands for new congressional oversight.
“I have spent my career as a scientist,” Chu says in his prepared written testimony. “Rigorous peer review and double-checking someone else’s findings are fundamental to a sound scientific process — and I believe the same is true in government. So I welcome any and every sincere effort at oversight, and where we find mistakes, we have and we will move swiftly to correct them.”
Even so, he’ll stick to his support for the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program.
“We are supporting more than 15,000 projects across the country,” Chu will explain in his testimony. “And since the summer of 2010, we have consistently supported between 40,000 and 50,000 direct jobs each quarter, and likely thousands more throughout the supply chain.”
