The Weekly Standard

The Weekly Standard

TARP Oversight Chair Says She Doesn't Know Whether It's Working

Obama's transparency czar is using $84 million to build a web site that won't be usable until October, and may not be useful until four years from now.

Obama's stimulus oversight guru, Joe Biden, says "people are being scammed already" in the disbursement of $787 billion.



And, when asked whether TARP is working, Prof. Elizabeth Warren— head of the Congressionally formed oversight committee for that particular trillion-dollar project—says:

"We can't disclose what isn't known. We've disclosed as much as we can, we've addressed this in our various reports. The Secretary of the Treasury says there are some positive indicators and there some negative indicators still in the economy. And that's the best we can do.”

"We can see changes, we try to document those and we try to point out where their continue to be weaknesses,” she continued. "You know this isn't resolved yet, congressman. I'm sorry, it's just not. We're still in mid-crisis and there are both up arrows and down arrows."

Aren't giant, cumbersome government programs fun, especially now that the Obama administration's cult of competence is in charge and offering unprecedented transparency and accountability?

To be fair, Warren took on a terrible job knowing it would be terrible, but it's discouraging that so little headway has been made. Her interviews, upon appointment, reveal that she understood she couldn't measure success of TARP when it was utterly unclear what TARP was ever supposed to accomplish.

Q: You've been quite critical of the Treasury. What troubles you most about what you're getting and what you're not getting?

A: There's no discussion of the overall policy. Instead, there are specific programs that are announced, and from that, it's necessary to reason backwards to figure out what the goal must have been. It's like a "Jeopardy!" game. If this is the answer, what was the question? It's frustrating because without a clearly articulated goal and identified metrics to determine whether the goal is being accomplished, it's almost impossible to tell if a program is successful.

Q: Do you have a clear sense of what the overall TARP plan at this point is supposed to do? Are you capable of summarizing what it's supposed to be doing?

A: No. And neither is Treasury. Treasury has given us multiple contradictory explanations for what it's trying to accomplish.

Posted by Mary Katharine Ham on June 9, 2009 03:24 PM | Permalink
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