Washington Discovers It Has Been Investigating Itself Investigating Itself Since at Least 2017

By Chip Wentworth III | The Proceedings Today

Congress announced this week the formation of the Bipartisan Subcommittee on Subcommittee Efficacy and Procedural Redundancy Review, a 12-member panel whose sole mandate is to determine whether the subcommittee that preceded it — the 2019 Subcommittee on Interagency Task Force Coordination and Deliverable Alignment — was, in the broadest possible sense, necessary.

The 2019 subcommittee was itself assembled to evaluate the findings of the 2016 Task Force on Federal Working Group Consolidation, which had been formed to assess the recommendations of the 2013 Commission on Commission Outputs, the records of which are currently stored in a climate-controlled facility in Bethesda, Maryland, that no one can locate the key for.

"This is exactly the kind of rigorous, layered accountability that the American people deserve," said Subcommittee Co-Chair Representative Dale Fentworth (R-OH), who later clarified he believed he was speaking about a separate infrastructure subcommittee he had been on since March. He was not.

A Panel Born of Other Panels

The origins of this latest body trace back, as most things in Washington do, to a memo. Specifically, a 2023 memo from the Government Accountability Office noting that Congress had, at that point, 47 active subcommittees whose primary function was reviewing the work of other subcommittees, and that at least 11 of those reviewing subcommittees were themselves under review.

The GAO described this arrangement as "procedurally self-referential" and "not, strictly speaking, governance."

Congress responded by forming a subcommittee.

The new panel, which held its inaugural organizational meeting on Tuesday in a conference room that three members agreed was "definitely not the right room but fine," has been allocated a staff of nine, a budget described only as "appropriate," and a mandate to produce a preliminary framework document outlining the scope of a potential report on whether the 2019 subcommittee's findings — which were themselves a summary of an earlier summary — constituted a meaningful use of congressional resources.

The preliminary framework document is expected by spring 2027, assuming the subcommittee can first agree on what "preliminary" means in a binding procedural context.

Members Unclear on Which Committee They Are Currently Attending

Of the twelve members appointed to the new subcommittee, The Proceedings Today was able to speak with four. Their accounts varied.

Representative Connie Abernathy (D-CA) expressed enthusiasm for "finally getting to the bottom of the task force situation," before her communications director quietly noted that the task force in question had been dissolved in 2018 and that Representative Abernathy was thinking of a different task force, possibly one from a different Congress entirely.

Representative Jim Pollard (R-TX) said he was "proud to serve" and confirmed he had reviewed the subcommittee's charter document, which he described as "pretty long." When asked whether he recalled the specific findings of the 2019 subcommittee his panel is tasked with evaluating, Representative Pollard said he would have his office "circle back with the relevant materials" and has not yet done so.

Senator Margaret Hoole (D-MN), who sits on the subcommittee in an advisory capacity that several other members said they had not been informed of, described the exercise as "genuinely important oversight work" and noted that the Senate had been doing something similar since 2015, though she acknowledged the Senate version had "sort of merged with something else" and she was no longer entirely sure it still existed.

The fourth member, who asked not to be named because he "honestly wasn't sure if this was on the record," said he had assumed the meeting was about broadband.

Experts Weigh In From a Safe Distance

The formation of the new subcommittee has drawn commentary from the think tank community, which is itself no stranger to producing documents about documents.

The Meridian Center for Legislative Process Studies released a statement calling the subcommittee "a natural, if somewhat vertiginous, expression of Congress's commitment to procedural completeness." The Center's senior fellow for oversight policy, Dr. Ronald Besh, told The Proceedings Today that recursive committee review of this kind is "not without precedent" and that similar structures had been observed in the British Parliament, the European Commission, and, he believed, a mid-sized regional airport authority in Ohio.

"The question," Dr. Besh explained, "is whether oversight of oversight produces insight, or simply more oversight. Our preliminary view is that it's complicated. We expect to have a fuller view once we complete our report on the question, which we're hoping to have done by late 2026, pending the outcome of our internal review of whether the report is within our mandate."

The report will be 280 pages.

The Proceedings, As They Stand

For its part, the Subcommittee on Subcommittee Efficacy and Procedural Redundancy Review has set an ambitious internal calendar. A working group — technically a sub-working group, as a broader working group on working group formation met in January and produced a terms-of-reference document — will convene in the fall to discuss the methodology by which the subcommittee will assess the 2019 subcommittee's methodology.

A second working group will review the first working group's methodology.

The subcommittee's full report, assuming the preliminary framework leads to a scoping document, which leads to a draft report, which leads to a revised draft, which leads to a final draft for member review, which leads to a revised final draft incorporating member comments, is expected to be delivered to the full committee no earlier than 2031. At that point, it will be referred to the relevant committee for consideration.

That committee, sources note, is currently under review.

"We are committed to getting this right," said Co-Chair Fentworth, who by the end of the press availability had successfully identified which subcommittee he was on and appeared genuinely pleased about it. "The American people sent us here to do a job. And that job, right now, is figuring out whether a previous job was a job worth doing. That's accountability."

The subcommittee's next meeting is scheduled for September, in a room that will be confirmed closer to the date, pending availability, pending confirmation of the confirmation process.

The Proceedings Today will continue to follow this story as it develops, stalls, is referred to a working group, and eventually resurfaces in a footnote of a future subcommittee report.