The Committee on Oversight and Reform is the main investigative

committee A committee or commission is a body of one or more persons subordinate to a deliberative assembly. A committee is not itself considered to be a form of assembly. Usually, the assembly sends matters into a committee as a way to explore them more ...

of the

United States House of Representatives The United States House of Representatives, often referred to as the House of Representatives, the U.S. House, or simply the House, is the Lower house, lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the United States Senate, Senate being ...

. The committee's broad

jurisdiction Jurisdiction (from Latin 'law' + 'declaration') is the legal term for the legal authority granted to a legal entity to enact justice. In federations like the United States, areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, and federal levels. Jur ...

and legislative authority make it one of the most influential and powerful panels in the House. Its chairman is one of only three in the House with the authority to issue

subpoenas A subpoena (; also subpœna, supenna or subpena) or witness summons is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of ...

without a committee vote or consultation with the

ranking member In United States politics, a ranking member is the most senior member of a congressional or state legislative committee from the minority party. On many committees the ranking minority member, along with the Chair, serve as ''ex officio'' members ...

. However, in recent history, it has become practice to refrain from unilateral subpoenas.

Carolyn Maloney Carolyn Jane Maloney (née Bosher, February 19, 1946) is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for since 2013, and for from 1993 to 2013. The district includes most of Manhattan's East Side, Astoria and Long Island City i ...

( D-New York) served as acting chair of the committee following the death of

Elijah Cummings Elijah Eugene Cummings (January 18, 1951October 17, 2019) was an American politician and civil rights advocate who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1996 until his death in 2019, when he was succeeded by his predecess ...

( D-Maryland) on October 17, 2019; she was elected chair a month later. Representative

Jim Jordan James Daniel Jordan (born February 17, 1964) is an American politician currently serving in his ninth term in the U.S. House of Representatives as the representative for since 2007. A member of the Republican Party, he is a two-tim ...

served as ranking member from January 3, 2019, until March 12, 2020. On March 31, 2020, Jordan started his second stint as ranking member. Representative

Mark Meadows Mark Randall Meadows (born July 28, 1959) is an American politician who served as the 29th White House chief of staff from 2020 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina's 11th c ...

served as ranking member from March 13, 2020, until March 30, 2020, when he resigned his congressional seat to become White House Chief of Staff. Representative James Comer (R-Kentucky) was selected to succeed Meadows on June 29, 2020.

History

The panel now known as the Committee on Oversight and Reform was originally the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, created in 1927 to consolidate 11 separate Committees on Expenditures that had previously overseen the spending of various departments of the federal government. The modern-day committee's immediate predecessor, the Committee on Government Operations, was established in 1952. The new name was intended to reflect the committee's broad mission: to oversee "the operations of Government activities at all levels with a view to determining their economy and efficiency". After Republicans gained control of the House in the 1994 elections, the committee was reorganized to include seven subcommittees instead of 14. This reorganization consolidated the jurisdiction previously covered by three full committees and resulted in a 50 percent cut in staff. In 2007, a reorganization under a new Democratic majority combined the duties of the seven subcommittees into five. In the 106th Congress, the panel was renamed the Committee on Government Reform. While retaining the agenda of the former Committee on Government Operations, the new committee also took on the responsibilities of the former House Committee on the

Post Office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...

and

Civil Service The civil service is a collective term for a sector of government composed mainly of career civil servants hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leaders ...

and the Committee on the

District of Columbia ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

. On January 4, 2007, the

110th Congress The 110th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, between January 3, 2007, and January 3, 2009, during the last two years of the Presidency of George W. Bush. It was composed of ...

renamed it the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The name was changed again by the 116th Congress to its current iteration: the Committee on Oversight and Reform. Since 2007, it has been called the "Oversight Committee" for short.

Subpoena usage

In 1997, the Republican majority on the committee changed its rules to allow the chairman,

Dan Burton Danny Lee Burton (born June 21, 1938) is an American politician. Burton is the former U.S. Representative for , and previously the , serving from 1983 until 2013. He is a member of the Republican Party and was part of the Tea Party Caucus. Ear ...

(R-Indiana), to issue subpoenas without the consent of the committee's ranking Democrat. From 1997 to 2002, Burton used this authority to issue 1,052 unilateral subpoenas, many of them related to alleged misconduct by President

Bill Clinton William Jefferson Clinton ( né Blythe III; born August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. He previously served as governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and agai ...

, at a cost of more than $35 million. By contrast, from 2003 to 2005, under the chairmanship of Tom Davis (R-Virginia), the committee issued only three subpoenas to the Bush administration. After Republicans retook the House in the 2010 elections, the new chairman,

Darrell Issa Darrell Edward Issa ( ; born November 1, 1953) is an American businessman and politician who has served as the U.S. representative for California's 50th congressional district since 2021. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served i ...

(R-California), escalated the use of subpoenas again, issuing more than 100 in four years during the

Obama administration Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. A Democrat from Illinois, Obama took office following a decisive victory over Republican ...

. That was more than the combined total issued by the previous three chairmen—Davis,

Henry Waxman Henry Arnold Waxman (born September 12, 1939) is an American politician who served as a U.S. representative from California from 1975 to 2015. He is a member of the Democratic Party. His district included much of the western part of the city of L ...

(D-California), and

Edolphus Towns Edolphus "Ed" Towns Jr. (born July 21, 1934) is an American politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1983 to 2013. A Democrat from New York, Towns was Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ...

(D-New York)—from 2003 to 2010.

Prominent hearings and investigations

Between 2000 and 2006, many major events and scandals in the Bush administration generated few or no subpoenas from the Republican-led committee. These events included the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercia ...

; the leaking of classified information identifying

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

agent

Valerie Plame Valerie Elise Plame (born August 13, 1963) is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer ...

; CIA-backed abuses at

Abu Ghraib prison Abu Ghraib prison ( ar, سجن أبو غريب, ''Sijn Abū Ghurayb'') was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison with torture, weekly exe ...

; the Bush administration claim that Iraq possessed

weapons of mass destruction A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or any other weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to numerous individuals or cause great damage to artificial structures (e.g., buildings), natura ...

; illegal campaign contributions by lobbyists, including

Jack Abramoff Jack Allan Abramoff (; born February 28, 1959) is an American lobbyist, businessman, film producer, writer, and convicted felon. He was at the center of an extensive corruption investigation led by Earl Devaney that resulted in his conviction a ...

; deaths and damage due to the

Federal Emergency Management Agency The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), initially created under President Jimmy Carter by Presidential Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1978 and implemented by two Exec ...

's weak response to

Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina was a destructive Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused over 1,800 fatalities and $125 billion in damage in late August 2005, especially in the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas. It was at the time the cost ...

; and

Philip Cooney Philip A. Cooney (born July 16, 1959) is a former member of the administration of United States President George W. Bush. Before being appointed to chair the Council on Environmental Quality, he was a lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petrol ...

's suppression of data demonstrating the existence of

global warming In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

. After the release of the

Downing Street memo The Downing Street memo (or the Downing Street Minutes), sometimes described by critics of the Iraq War as the smoking gun memo, is the note of a 23 July 2002 secret meeting of senior British government, defence and intelligence figures discussin ...

, which contained incriminating information on the buildup to the

Iraq War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Iraq War {{Nobold, {{lang, ar, حرب العراق (Arabic) {{Nobold, {{lang, ku, شەڕی عێراق (Kurdish languages, Kurdish) , partof = the Iraq conflict (2003–present), I ...

, Democrats in the minority were refused a hearing chamber and were forced to meet in the basement of the

United States Capitol The United States Capitol, often called The Capitol or the Capitol Building, is the seat of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, which is formally known as the United States Congress. It is located on Capitol Hill ...

. However, under Davis's chairmanship from 2003 to 2007, the committee launched two controversial investigations. One of those investigations—triggered by the publication of

Jose Canseco José Canseco Capas Jr. (born July 2, 1964), nicknamed Parkway Jose, Mr. 40-40 and El Cañonero Cubano (The Cuban Cannon), is a Cuban-American former Major League Baseball (MLB) outfielder and designated hitter. During his time with the Oaklan ...

's memoir, ''

Juiced Juiced may refer to: * ''Juiced'' (video game), a racing video game ** Juiced (series), the subsequent series of games * ''Juiced'' (book), a book by Jose Canseco noted for revealing the extent of steroid use in baseball * '' Juiced.GS'', a maga ...

—''concerned the use of

anabolic steroid Anabolic steroids, also known more properly as anabolic–androgenic steroids (AAS), are steroidal androgens that include natural androgens like testosterone (medication), testosterone as well as synthetic androgens that are structurally related ...

s by

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

players. An inquiry was also made into the case of Terry Schiavo. In that investigation, which concerned the removal of a

feeding tube Eating (also known as consuming) is the ingestion of food, typically to provide a heterotrophic organism with energy and to allow for growth. Animals and other heterotrophs must eat in order to survive — carnivores eat other animals, her ...

from a woman in a

persistent vegetative state A persistent vegetative state (PVS) or post-coma unresponsiveness (PCU) is a disorder of consciousness in which patients with severe brain damage are in a state of partial arousal rather than true awareness. After four weeks in a vegetative stat ...

, the committee issued a subpoena requiring Schiavo to "appear" so that members could "examine nutrition and hydration which incapacitated patients receive as part of their care". The apparent objective of this, beyond providing information to committee members, was to delay the pending withdrawal of life support from Schiavo, whose wishes were in dispute, while Congress considered legislation specifically targeted at her case. Members of the Democratic minority opposed the action. Chairman Davis said it was "a legitimate legislative inquiry". The committee also investigated

World Wrestling Entertainment World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., d/b/a as WWE, is an American professional wrestling promotion. A global integrated media and entertainment company, WWE has also branched out into other fields, including film, American football, and vario ...

's wellness and drug policies, amid speculation about a possible link between steroid use and the death of WWE performer

Chris Benoit Christopher Michael Benoit (; May 21, 1967 – June 24, 2007) was a Canadian Professional wrestling, professional wrestler. He worked for various pro-wrestling promotions during his 22-year career including most notably the WWE, World Wrestlin ...

. On July 8, 2009, committee Republicans released an investigative staff report discussing the

financial crisis of 2007–2008 Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fi ...

. The report alleged that the government had caused the collapse by meddling in the United States' housing and lending market in the name of "affordable housing". In February 2012, the committee held a hearing on the

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act The Affordable Care Act (ACA), formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and colloquially known as Obamacare, is a landmark U.S. federal statute enacted by the 111th United States Congress and signed into law by Presi ...

's mandate that would "require all employers to cover birth control free of cost to women". Specifically, Republicans on the committee alleged that the

Department of Health and Human Services The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is a cabinet-level executive branch department of the U.S. federal government created to protect the health of all Americans and providing essential human services. Its motto is " ...

's rules governing exemptions for religious institutions violated the

Free Exercise Clause The Free Exercise Clause accompanies the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The ''Establishment Clause'' and the ''Free Exercise Clause'' together read: Free exercise is the liberty of persons to re ...

of the Constitution. The chairman, Darrell Issa, said the hearing was "meant to be more broadly about religious freedom and not specifically about the contraception mandate in the Health Reform law". After

Aaron Swartz Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. A prolific programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS, the tech ...

committed suicide on January 11, 2013, the committee investigated the Justice Department's actions in prosecuting Swartz on hacking charges. On January 28, Issa and ranking member

published a letter to Attorney General

Eric Holder Eric Himpton Holder Jr. (born January 21, 1951) is an American lawyer who served as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States from 2009 to 2015. Holder, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama, was the first African America ...

, questioning whether prosecutors had intentionally added felony counts to increase the amount of prison time Swartz faced. On July 10, 2019, a hearing was held by the United States House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties entitled "Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border" on the "inhumane treatment of children and families" inside child detention centers on the southern US border.

Jamie Raskin Jamin Ben Raskin (born December 13, 1962) is an American attorney and politician serving as the U.S. representative for Maryland's 8th congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the Maryland State Senate fr ...

(D-MD) chaired the session which included testimony from Yazmin Juarez, the mother of Mariee who died at the age of nineteen months while detained in a

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from the c ...

(ICE) center in Dilley, Texas. In his opening statement Raskin said that "hundreds of thousands of people" have responded to the "harsh policies" by deciding to "migrate now before things get even worse".

Members, 118th Congress

Resolutions electing members: (Chair), (Ranking Member)

Subcommittees

TBD for the 118th Congress

Chair

Historical membership rosters

116th Congress

Sources: (Chair), (Ranking Member), (D), (R)

Membership changes

The Oversight and Government Reform Committee underwent numerous membership changes over the course of the

116th United States Congress The 116th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the Senate and the House of Representatives. It convened in Washington, D.C., on January 3, 2019, and ended on Januar ...

. * July 10, 2019: Fred Keller (R-PA) added to committee roster. * October 17, 2019: Chairman

(D-MD) passed away. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) assumed acting Chairship. * November 3, 2019: Vice Chair Katie Hill (D-CA) resigned. * November 20, 2019: Carolyn Maloney elected permanent chair. * December 19, 2019:

Katie Porter Katherine Moore Porter (born January 3, 1974) is an American politician, law professor, and lawyer who is the U.S. representative from California's 45th congressional district since 2019. She is the first Democrat to be elected to represent the ...

(D-CA) and

Deb Haaland Debra Anne Haaland (; born December 2, 1960) is an American politician serving as the 54th United States Secretary of the Interior, United States secretary of the interior. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, she s ...

(D-NM) added to committee roster. * February 27, 2020:

Ro Khanna Rohit Khanna (; born September 13, 1976) is an American politician, lawyer, and academic serving as the U.S. representative from California's 17th congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he defeated eight-term incumbe ...

(D-CA) added to committee roster, ranking after Harley Rouda. * March 21, 2020: Ranking Member

(R-OH) stepped down to assume the Ranking Membership of the Judiciary Committee;

(R-NC) assumes Ranking Membership. * March 30, 2020:

(R-NC) resigned to become White House Chief of Staff. Jim Jordan resumes Ranking Membership temporarily. * May 8, 2020:

Kweisi Mfume Kweisi Mfume ( ; born Frizzell Gerald Gray; October 24, 1948) is an American politician who is the U.S. representative for Maryland's 7th congressional district, first serving from 1987 to 1996 and again since 2020. A member of the Democratic ...

(D-MD) added to committee roster, ranking after Harley Rouda. * June 29, 2020: James Comer (R-KY) elected permanent Ranking Member. * July 1, 2020: Gary Palmer (R-AL) added to committee roster, ranking after Michael Cloud. ;Subcommittees

115th Congress

Sources: (Chair), (Ranking Member), (D) (R), , and (D)

References

External links

House Oversight and Government Reform CommitteeArchive

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
Legislation activity and reports, Congress.gov.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Hearings and Meetings Video
Congress.gov.
OMB Watch
a government ethics and reform nonprofit agency
Plum Book
''United States Government Policy Key Employees and Supporting Positions: About the Committee on Government Reform''

at the

National Archives and Records Administration The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It i ...

{{authority control Oversight and Government Reform 1816 establishments in Washington, D.C. Organizations established in 1816 Parliamentary committees on Justice