This post should be about all the great Recovery Act transparency and oversight issues the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee learned about yesterday when it held a hearing titled "Follow the Money: An Update on Stimulus Spending, Transparency, and Fraud Prevention." But it isn't.

In a hearing titled "Follow the Money" with the word "transparency" in the subtitle, you'd think there would be some talk about Recovery Act transparency. You'd be further encouraged by the presence at the witness table of Office of Management Budget Deputy Director Rob Nabors, who oversees Recovery Act implementation for OMB, Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney, who manages Recovery.gov, and Government Accountability Office Managing Director for Strategic Issues Chris Mihm, who helps track Recovery Act money for the GAO. Indeed, it has been a long time since representatives from the GAO, OMB, and Recovery Board were in the same committee room, giving us hope that the HSGA committee would actually get some answers to important transparency questions.

Except the hearing had almost nothing to do with transparency, stimulus spending, or even the Recovery Act. Instead, the hearing focused on the last part of the hearing's title: fraud prevention. In addition to the three witnesses above, the hearing also included testimony from Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, and the senators of the committee directed most of their questions to him, virtually ignoring the other witnesses. Most of the questions to the other panelists were either follow up questions to things asked of Leibowitz, or questions on what they were doing to prevent fraud. Even more distressingly, many of the questions focused on consumer fraud, or fraud cases in which people used the Recovery Act as a lure to swindle average citizens.

Why this sudden and abrupt focus on consumer fraud? It plays well back home. Instead of a "boring" hearing on stimulus oversight, by focusing on consumer fraud the committee members were able to spend three hours bashing fraudsters and appearing to protect their constituents from harm. This protection is far more tangible to voters than a vague increase in transparency, regardless of which is actually needed. And the senators' calculations paid off this morning, as news outlets everywhere carried stories about stimulus scams.

The only problem is there are already laws against consumer fraud, and they are already being enforced, a fact Leibowitz mentioned repeatedly throughout the hearing. It is utterly unnecessary to spend an entire hearing talking about it, especially a hearing that is supposed to be about stimulus spending.

More importantly, these frauds have nothing to do with the Recovery Act, since they would occur with or without the stimulus. Fraud, sadly, happens all the time. True, these crimes could be punished with stronger penalties, as Senator Claire McCaskill suggested when she called fraudsters "pond scum." But a hearing on the Recovery Act is not the appropriate forum for such a discussion.

In the end, because of the hearing's focus on fraud, we learned almost nothing about the Recovery Act, its spending, or transparency, wasting an entire morning. All I learned from the hearing is that there is a moderate level of fraud in the country, and Leibowitz is handling it ably. And unfortunately, it doesn't look like things are going to get any better, as Senator Joe Lieberman, the committee's chairman, closed the hearing by saying that the committee should focus on the issue of fraud prevention more in the future. Hopefully, before the next hearing, they'll realize that consumer fraud protection has nothing to do with the Recovery Act, and focus more on actual Recovery Act oversight during Recovery Act oversight hearings.

Image by Flickr user matthileo. Used under a Creative Commons license.