See no evil: what scandal lurks as Congress looks the other way? - lax oversight committees

What scandal lurks as Congress looks the other way?

It looks as if veteran congressional investigator Thomas Trimboli got fired for doing his job a little too well.

Trimboli, who played a key role in uncovering the Wedtech influence-peddling scandal, was everything a congressional sleuth should be: aggressive, zealously dedicated, wise to the Byzantine ways of the federal bureaucracy, legendary for his documentation and attention to detail, and eager to burn the midnight oil.

"He's as good as they get," Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) wrote in December 1989, a year after Conyers had become chair of the House Government Operations Committee and hired Trimboli to head the panel's investigative team.

But six months later, just as Trimboli was deep in an investigation involving a major defense contractor, Conyers suddenly sent him packing. The incident occurred soon after the defense contractor's top executive called Conyers to complain about Trimboli's probe.

Trimboli's firing hints at why many critics say the Government Operations Committee -- designed to be the House of Representatives' most tenacious government watchdog -- has floundered since Conyers replaced the tough Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Texas), who had chaired the panel for 13 years.

"I don't know what the reasons are, but this committee hasn't lived up to its full potential," committee member Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) said last summer. "We have 360-degree authority to pursue waste, fraud and abuse, and we should strike fear in the hearts of bureaucrats and contractors. But nobody's afraid."

Shays now attributes the problem to the fact that Conyers was running for mayor of Detroit at the time. He stresses that things have improved and praises the committee's probe of the A-12 and B-1 bomber programs and others. But, he told Common Cause Magazine, "This committee could be one of the strongest and most effective in Congress. I don't think we're there yet."

Sources on and off Conyers's committee say the chairman isn't aggressive or focused enough to head a major oversight committee, that the 14-term lawmaker, in one insider's words, tends to "accommodate the people being investigated rather than the investigators." Conyers brought seasoned investigators to the panel but some have quit in frustration, complaining about the interference and inexperience of the chairman's political aides.

But the problems with "Gov-Ops," while troubling in their own right, are only exhibit A in a much more sweeping indictment handed down by many observers: Congress on the whole is failing to carry out its government oversight responsibility, allowing waste, fraud and abuse to go unchecked throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Congressional oversight in general is "more geared to garnering media attention" than making government work better, the National Academy of Public Administration concluded in a 1987 report. The academy cited staff turnover and failure to follow up as reasons why most oversight actions are more bark than bite.

If anything, the problem has gotten worse since the academy's report. According to current and former congressional investigators interviewed for this article, the oversight process today is in a shambles; many investigations are superficial and scattershot at best. Too many lawmakers are ambivalent about oversight and subject to pressure from the targets of their investigations, critics say.

"There are very few purists left on the Hill in terms of members with investigative staff, fortitude and ambition to get into these areas," says a former Government Operations investigator who asked not to be identified. "Members are careening from issue to issue trying to get the best political bounce off of them."

SLEEPING DOGS

Along with writing laws, raising revenue and spending public money, oversight is one of Congress's chief responsibilities. The job entails ensuring that laws are enforced, keeping a check on the executive branch and exposing government and contractor malfeasance -- or, more simply, making sure that people aren't cheating the government and the government isn't cheating the people.

"Oversight is a great tool," says Franklin Silbey, a former congressional investigator who left Capitol Hill in 1983 after 16 years but still works with the oversight panels as a private consultant. "It's the ability to see what is happening after you pass the legislation and where the money has been spent."

But today's typical lawmaker, critics say, is far more interested in doing the work needed to get reelected -- raising money, wresting favors for folks back home from federal agencies, latching onto popular legislation and elbowing on to the evening news -- than knuckling down to the often thankless task of ensuring that the government works well for everyone.

"Time was, you viewed the Congress as an institution in an adversarial role with the administration in terms of ferreting out information and making sure the job was done," says Jack Blum, who left Capitol Hill in 1989 after stints as a congressional investigator dating back to 1966. Today Congress is "more interested in getting favors for constituents from the administration," he says.

"When I first came to work in Congress," Blum says, "there were large investigative staffs connected to a number of committees. And even though the professional staff has grown perhaps three times, virtually all of that has gone to public relations and constituent service. They gave up the check-and-balance function for the re-election function."

Experienced staff investigators have become "an endangered species," says Don Gray, a 30-year veteran investigator who recently left the Hill. Many of the ambitious sleuths who remain are demoralized. Seldom are heard the sweetest words a lawmaker can say to an investigator: "Take it where it goes. I'll back you up all the way."

When it wants information, Congress has enviable powers to get it. It can summon officials for questioning, take depositions and issue subpoenas like any prosecutor. There are 12 House subcommittees and three in the Senate whose sole responsibility is oversight and investigation. Congress also has its own auditor, the General Accounting Office (GAO), churning out some 1,000 blue-jacketed reports each year. And when wrongdoing is discovered, oversight committees can inform the Justice Department or urge other committees that authorize or fund the agencies and programs to hold up the money.

However, "there are many members who simply don't have the stomach for it," says one investigator. "There are other members who don't want to do oversight because they're in bed with special interests or they're in bed with the party that happens to be in power at the White House."

"Congress has allowed the process to atrophy," says a former investigator. Sources within federal agencies have withered; many whistleblowers, no longer nurtured by Congress, remain silent. "When I first worked for the Congress and oversight was genuine, there were any number of people in the bureaucracy who would pass things to you," says Jack Blum. "I was utterly astonished when I got back to the Hill that that whole process had dried up."

But Congress has failed to act even when signs of brewing scandal were as plain as the Capitol dome. Allegations that Reagan administration officials were illegally funding the Nicaraguan contras emerged at least two years before the Iran-contra hearings finally got under way. Early evidence of wrongdoing involving Wedtech, the now-defunct Bronx, N.Y. defense contractor, fell by the wayside because Trimboli's boss at the time, House Small Business Committee Chairman Parren Mitchell (D-Md.), refused to pursue the investigation, according to published reports. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) wins praise for his subcommittee's effort to explore and exorcise the abuses at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), but the abuses had actually been exposed by HUD's own inspector general and Congress had virtually ignored them while they were going on.

No scandal of the 1980s better illustrates Congress's failure to conduct oversight than its complicity in the massive savings and loan debacle -- a lesson that could cost taxpayers half a trillion dollars.

Aside from helping to create today's S&L mess by relaxing federal controls and failing to provide enough bailout money early on, lawmakers harassed federal regulators who were probing evidence of wrongdoing and accepted campaign contributions from S&L operators. As the S&L crisis symbolizes, "too often [congressional committees] become advocacy- rather than oversight-oriented, failing to provide stop signals for the inevitable wreck," Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) said.

GIVE ME A BREAK

Effective oversight "takes, first and foremost, bravery and courage on the part of the sitting chairman to step on all those sensitive toes, anger all those private interests," says veteran investigator Franklin Silbey.

Not only do the White House and the Justice Department resist, but if an investigation involves corporate entities, "you got high-priced lawyers, PACs and corporate executives putting pressure" on lawmakers and their colleagues to back off, says an investigator who's still on the Hill.

It took only one unhappy telephone call to Rep. Conyers from Unisys Corp. Chair Michael Blumenthal before Tom Trimboli was fired, paralyzing Trimboli's investigation into a major Unisys government contract. And while the Unisys case gathers dust today in committee file boxes, an internal U.S. Air Force memo warns that nagging problems with Unisys computers -- the same ones Trimboli was dogging -- "could potentially have a catastrophic effect on ... government-owned software and programs."

The case involves a $1.7 billion contract Unisys won to supply the Air Force with 250,000 personal computers, a job known as Desktop III. The contract represented an important comeback for the firm, which had been barred from some new defense work following its implication in "Operation Ill Wind," in which the Justice Department -- not Congress -- found that defense industry consultants had bribed Pentagon officials to obtain contracts.

Conyers's Legislation and National Security Subcommittee began probing the Desktop III contract in early 1990 following complaints by Zenith, a losing competitor for the contract, and allegations in the press that the Air Force had mishandled the contract. The subcommittee also looked into evidence that Unisys had supplied untested computer products.

Not long after Conyers asked the Pentagon's inspector general to investigate, Blumenthal rang up the committee chairman, whom he knew from his days as the head of Detroit's Bendix Corp., asking if Conyers was aware of -- and supported -- the extent of Trimboli's probe, according to company spokesperson William Beckham. Blumenthal, a former Treasury secretary, was troubled because Trimboli's inquiries had prompted the Air Force to stop accepting Unisys shipments, costing the company money, Beckham says.

The gist of Blumenthal's call was, "Hey, as a Michigan company we could use your help," Beckham says. "It's safe to say Blumenthal's attitude was not a positive one."

Blumenthal's complaint caught Conyers off guard. "Conyers didn't know the extent of what was going on," Unisys's Beckham says. In turn Conyers's staff director, Julian Epstein, called Trimboli on the carpet and urged him to quit. Trimboli refused. Shortly thereafter, a former committee staffer recalls, Trimboli "came to work at 9 a.m. and at 9:15 had a letter handed to him, after 15 years of exemplary work on the Hill."

Conyers declined to speak with Common Cause Magazine. But he told the Detroit News last July that he had issued Trimboli's walking papers as a result of a phone call from the chairman of a "major corporation" whom he refused to identify. Conyers said he learned from the executive's call that Trimboli was working "on matters without my approval that I didn't know he was involved in."

Trimboli, now general counsel for a Springfield, Va., computer concern, is still puzzled about his dismissal. "I was never told that I was pushing any investigation too far or that I was taking an unauthorized action. Everything I did was fully documented and preceded by letters that bore the chairman's signature. To this day I still don't know why he didn't want me to keep working for the committee." Trimboli declined to be interviewed on other aspects of the Unisys case or other committee work.

The Government Operations Committee stopped pursuing its Desktop III probe after the Pentagon asserted that, while there were problems ("contractor performance failure, questionable compliance" with rules requiring that parts be manufactured in the United States and "constantly slipping delivery schedules"), the contract had been awarded legally. No hearings were held; no final committee report was issued. Committee aides deny that Blumenthal's phone call had any impact on the investigation. Other Unisys contracts will be examined in the future, they say.

Meanwhile problems with Desktop III live on. An internal Air Force memo of February 1991 from the Standards System Center at Fort Gunter, Ala., obtained by Common Cause Magazine, complains that Unisys delivered technically different products than it promised the Air Force "in clear violation . . . of the contract."

"During the life of the Desktop III contract," the Air Force memo goes on to say, "there have been numerous unauthorized Unisys changes to both hardware and software. Unisys continues to ignore the government and makes whatever changes they want. This must cease."

PROBING FOR DOLLARS

The frantic way many members of Congress raise money these days increases the odds that a lawmaker's campaign contributors will turn up in an investigation overseen by the lawmaker and create an uncomfortable conflict.

That's why Rep. Nick Mavroules (D-Mass.), chair of the Armed Services Committee's investigations subcommittee, decided to stop accepting PAC contributions from defense contractors in 1987. Mavroules "felt uneasy about working on Pentagon reforms and taking contributions from defense PACs," says a press aide.

Conyers, in contrast, has solicited and received contributions from a number of parties with a stake in his committee's investigations. As Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show, Conyers accepted contributions from computer firms with government contracts and computer trade associations while his committee, in its own words, "expended significant oversight resources" to ensure compliance with a law governing federal computer procurement.

And while Conyers's Legislation and National Security Subcommittee was conducting a major probe of a Navy contract awarded to International Business Machines (IBM), Conyers's fundraiser solicited campaign contributions from probe witnesses.

The IBM probe, which ran from February 1989 to November 1990, began when six IBM competitors charged that Navy computer contracts had been unfairly "wired" to favor IBM. While the probe continued, FEC records show, Murray Scureman of Amdahl Corp., one of the six complaining firms, contributed $500. Sidney Wilson of PacificCorp Capital, who testified before the committee, contributed $250. Lawyer David Cohen, who represented the six firms, contributed $3,000 with his spouse. And a PAC sponsored by EDS, a Dallas-based computer systems firm that cooperated in the IBM probe, contributed $500. Scureman, Wilson and Cohen did not contribute to Conyers prior to the IBM probe, according to FEC records going back to 1984.

Conyers's chief fundraiser, Jim Wise, says solicitation of probe participants was "inadvertent" and hard to avoid, given the 2,000-plus names in his contributor data base. A top Conyers aide says he is unaware that probe participants were solicited for contributions.

Sometime after testifying, PacifiCorp's Wilson was invited to attend a Conyers fundraiser and gave his $250. But he first checked with a lawyer, who advised that the contribution "was legal and there was nothing atypical about it and therefore acceptable," Wilson says.

"Do I think it's the way this should go on? Probably not," Wilson adds. "But they've got to solicit those funds. You know they're going to do it from people they come in contact with. Such is life."

Aside from its PAC contribution to Conyers's campaign, EDS also paid $7,000 to fund a Conyers-hosted reception at last year's NAACP convention in Detroit. "We have thousands of employees in the Detroit area," EDS spokesperson Randy Dove says. "We support events that are important to our employees." Dove doesn't see any problem with the fact that EDS made this contribution even as the company cooperated with the IBM probe. "It's not unusual at all," he says.

AID TO EDUCATION

In May 1990, Conyers accepted IBM's invitation to join executives at a press event announcing the company's $200,000 teacher-training grant to Detroit's Wayne State University, Conyers's alma mater. The grant came after Conyers had met privately with IBM officials and discussed not only the probe but also the company's "education initiatives."

While admitting that IBM's invitation could benefit him politically, Conyers denied that the grant had any influence on the committee's investigation. Conyers told the Detroit News that he "couldn't function" as a lawmaker "if he avoided all involvement with corporations under investigation by his subcommittee."

IBM also denies any link between the Wayne State grant and the committee investigation, noting the company's history of financing projects at colleges in Michigan and across the country. "We chose not to let our concerns about the probe get in the way" of inviting Conyers to the press event, IBM spokesperson Mark Holcomb says.

IBM nevertheless managed to have an impact on the committee's investigation, sources say. The conduit was Rep. Frank Horton, the committee's ranking Republican, whose upstate New York district is home to a number of IBM jobs.

Early in the probe Horton had praised Trimboli's foot-high briefing documents, which painted a critical portrait of IBM's efforts to land government contracts, as the "best presentation he'd ever seen," according to insiders. Members of Conyers's subcommittee even discussed at one point whether the panel should recommend that IBM be suspended from government contracts until the company cleared up the problems cited in the briefing books, according to a committee source involved in the probe.

But when the IBM probe was over, Horton, with Conyers's acquiescence, managed to soften criticism of IBM in the committee's final report, aides say. The report, issued in November 1990, says IBM sold equipment to the government that failed to conform to domestic-content rules and sold the government used equipment as new. It also held that IBM had offered improper gratuities to government officials and invited Navy contract officials in Washington on junkets to the firm's training center in San Jose, Calif. At one point, an IBM executive even escorted a Navy official on detours to Pebble Beach for a little golf and to Lake Tahoe for some gambling.

Though raising these allegations, the committee's report in effect exonerates the company. IBM "appears, for the most part, not to be responsible for the bizarre Navy [computer] acquisition system, but merely its willing beneficiary," the report summary says. As for the company's junkets, the summary blames the Navy for forgetting "the standard of dealing with potential contractors at arm's length."

"The exoneration is a matter of record," says IBM's Holcomb.

IBM enjoyed unusual access to Horton during the probe. IBM lobbyist Robert Bedell volunteered to help Horton and his aide Don Upson craft legislation relating to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where Bedell had spent 15 years. Upson says Bedell had no influence on Horton's action in the IBM investigation. Nonetheless Bedell confirms that he spoke to Horton about it.

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

Such congressional softpedaling seems to be a recent phenomenon. Modern memory serves up Sen. Estes Kefauver hounding organized crime in the 1950s, Sen. John McClellan exposing labor racketeering in the '50s and '60s, and Rep. John Moss's crusading in the '70s against unsafe prescription drugs, lead in Christmas-tree tinsel, flammable Easter grass and aspirin bottles any child could open. Television has brought some low -- Sen. Joe mcCarthy's ugly "witch hunts" -- and some high points -- Sen. Sam Ervin's dogged pursuit of Watergate crimes -- into living rooms across the country.

Former investigators wax nostalgic about the days when they tapped hardearned sources in the bureaucracy and were backed all the way by maverick lawmakers. Michael Barrett, an investigator since 1975 who recently retired, fondly recalls "chasing John Dean around a parking lot with a subpoena," finally serving the papers to the Nixon aide and key Watergate witness at his lawyer's office in a neighboring state.

To some, there will never be enough oversight; formal complaints about lawmakers being coopted by the government and interest groups date back to the 1930s. And it didn't help that when Congress overhauled the federal budget-writing process in 1974 it concentrated the budget power in new budget committees and eroded other committees' control over the purse strings of the federal agencies they oversee. Tighter federal outlays and a rise in last-minute, catchall spending bills also have weakened Congress's leverage.

Some critics say oversight still suffers from the six years from 1980 to 1986, when both the Senate and the White House were in Republican hands. Former President Reagan's popularity made the Democratic-controlled House less willing to challenge administration actions. Senate oversight went into a tailspin.

"There was a major turnover in staff and experience, and in some cases the committees rewrote their rules to preclude the issuance of subpoenas and launching of investigations," recalls Jack Blum. "They focused mostly on going along with the Reagan administration.

"You would have thought that when the Democrats took over the Senate again in 1987 that they would have jumped back in and really torn things apart," Blum adds. "[But] because of the budget process, because of not wanting to make enemies, because of using the administration as a base for getting constituent favors, there's just terrible reluctance to pick fights."

Judging from its own press releases, it may seem like Congress is ripping the lid off government waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement every day. But seasoned investigators caution that the public should not be awed by the sound and the fury. Much of it is quick-hit stuff, like commissioning a GAO report and calling a press conference to release it or a hearing to discuss it. Or lobbing uniformed, softball questions at bureaucrats while the TV cameras whir.

Without good investigatory spadework, lawmakers are often winging it when oversight hearings are held. "More often than not, instead of taking the time to get really up to speed on what's going on, and holding people accountable for very specific kinds of things and specific kinds of policies, it's 'Oh, tell us what's happening,'" Blum says.

"You have a lot more members generally attending hearings than you used to have . . . if they think there's a chance they're going to get the sound bite," says another former investigator. "But once the sound bite's done, they rapidly lose interest in staying around for the three or four hours of additional questioning that's necessary to fully explore the issue."

When April Glaspie, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on her conversations with Iraq's Saddam Hussein just prior to his invasion of Kuwait, the committee didn't have copies of the instructions Glaspie had received from the State Department or the post-meeting report she sent to State. "How can you hold a hearing in which April Glaspie comes up and says, 'Hi guys, here's what happened,' unless you can see [her] report?" a former committee investigator says. "Saddam Hussein said she in effect gave him the green light [to invade]. Did she? How could you hold those hearings without those documents?"

The committee sought the documents last year but still doesn't have them and hasn't issued a subpoena to get them. "It's a check-is-in-the-mail situation," says Peter Galbraith, a senior committee aide. "Ultimately, the Congress has the power to force the release of this information. But you have to operate in the world with some degree of comity."

THE DINGELL METHOD

Government Operations is not the only committee scoffed at by current and former investigators. The panel's Senate counterpart, Government Affairs, has had a low profile in recent years under Chair John Glenn (D-Ohio).

The House and Senate armed services and intelligence committees also are accused of having a "clientele relationship" with the agencies they oversee, making them more willing to defend than investigate the Department of Defense, CIA and other national security agencies. The sensitive nature of national security, on top of agency control of security clearances, tends to prevent good oversight, Hill aides complain.

Tough oversight committees are considered few and far between. "There are a handful -- literally just a handful -- who do aggressive oversight and do it the right way and have experienced staffs," a current investigator says.

The name that's always held up as the exception is Conyers's fellow Michigan Democrat, John Dingell, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its subcommittee on oversight and investigations. While sometimes described as a bully and insatiable publicity hound, the 19-term lawmaker is still considered the real thing: a member of Congress who takes the oversight job seriously.

Michael Barrett, who recently retired as Dingell's chief investigator after 15 years with the lawmaker, explains why. "He's willing to stay on the issue, he's willing to take short-term heat," Barrett says. "He thinks, 'I'm Congress, I'm entitled and I'm willing to fight for it and I think it's important to fight for it.'"

With a hungry, seasoned staff and seemingly little desire for permanent friends, Dingell has an annoying habit of striking gold on other committees' turf as they sleep. While abuses by defense contractors technically fall under the jurisdiction of the Armed Services Committee, Dingell has tackled several such cases in which weapons makers -- he's not kidding -- "failed to disclose their misconduct" to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which Energy and Commerce does oversee.

Running an oversight committee the right way is a monumental job calling for exceptional qualities: massive confidence, an overarching devotion to public interest, an ability to attract, guide and trust a talented and aggressive investigatory staff and resistance to pressure from special interests and congressional colleagues who speak for them.

It also takes a willingness to fight to the finish. Former investigator Jack Blum describes how, with his subcommittee chair's blessing, he fought the State Department for key documents in the Foreign Relations Committee's probe of illegal drug imports from the Bahamas:

"I asked to see the cable traffic," Blum says. "I got a pile of news clippings. I went down to the State Department and I threw a fit. I said, 'You people have got to be joking. You must think that this whole process is a laugh. I take it very seriously. We take it very seriously. Now let's get on with it. I want to see the cable traffic.'

"In the end, they caved in. And that's the difference between being able to do genuine oversight and being treated like a fool."

COPYRIGHT 1991 Common Cause Magazine
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