A Fighting Chance

The congressman took a few more passes at his point. Sure, he understood that we were working together, and that was all very nice. But I obviously didn’t know the ways of Washington. He chuckled and smiled, but he kept coming back to the same point: What part of the budget would the Democrats get to control and what part would go to the Republicans?

After a few more rounds, his tone got hard. “Look,” he said, “the game is shirts-and-skins.” A vivid image immediately shot into my brain: boys with sharp elbows playing pickup basketball, everyone hogging the ball, one team in shirts and the other bare-skinned. (No girls on either team, of course.)

Hensarling’s point was obvious: he wanted to make sure his team got its share.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. The very first question the congressman had asked back in our very first phone meeting two weeks earlier had been about dividing up the staff. I’d never thought about such an idea, and on that first call I was unprepared for the question. But now we had just spent two weeks bashing our brains out to write an oversight report to pin Treasury down. We still had no office space, no phones, and no coffeepot. We certainly had no clear plan for overseeing the biggest bailout in the history of the United States. There were a million things we needed to figure out—and the congressman thought the most important thing we needed to do was slice up the operating budget so each political party was assured its “fair share”? Welcome to Washington.

Once I had gotten over my shock after that first call with Hensarling, I’d had a chance to think about this issue. The way I saw it, we were a short-term committee trying to operate in the middle of an earthshaking crisis. The bill authorizing TARP and the oversight panel had been bipartisan. And the problems our country faced would definitely require bipartisan solutions. I thought Hensarling’s plan—he wanted the Democrats and Republicans to have separate staffs and separate priorities—would mean that the panel members would spend too much of their time sniping at each other and not enough time overseeing the biggest bailout in the history of the country.

Besides, the government had already proven that a nonpartisan approach could work. The 9/11 Commission, for instance, had conducted an in-depth investigation and written a clear, powerful report—all of it done with one staff and one budget. I thought that was the right approach: COP should avoid partisan divisions all the way.

So I drew a line in the sand right there in the congressman’s office: The staff would be nonpartisan and would work for all of us. The panel would have one budget, not two. Period. If Hensarling wanted to go to war over this issue, so be it. As he said, I didn’t understand the ways of Washington. The part he didn’t seem to understand yet was that I didn’t really care about the ways of Washington.

Later that day, the House held a hearing on TARP, and Congressman Hensarling testified. He used the occasion to explain his vote against the report. He said that he was not yet assured “that every panel member has the resources and rights necessary to conduct effective oversight.” Until that happened, Hensarling said, he could “not in good conscience approve any reports.” It didn’t matter what we would write in our reports, he announced he would be voting no.

I guess I wasn’t the only one to draw a line in the sand that day.

There was a lot of jockeying, but in the end we stuck with the nonpartisan approach. We hired an executive director who had worked for Democrats and a deputy director who had worked for Republicans. For the rest of the staff, we did our best to hire first-rate people to do a first-rate job, without regard to party affiliation. We asked all the panelists for recommendations for who should be hired and what we should work on. And I did my best to pull everyone together—panelists and staff—as one team.

Even so, I worried about the lesson from the shirts-and-skins lecture. No matter the crisis, no matter the urgency of the moment, in Washington it was always “my team vs. your team.” And in all that pushing and pulling, too many times the people we were supposed to serve got left behind.





COP on the Road

With our first report out the door, it was time to hold our first hearing. We thought Clark County, Nevada—the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis—was a good place to start. So we scheduled a hearing for December 16, about a week after COP’s first report came out.

Las Vegas had been a boomtown, and now the bust had exploded with a vengeance. This was nothing like the quiet, formal hearings from my days on the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, with all the lobbyists in expensive suits and carrying elegant briefcases. This was more like a PTA meeting or a church revival.