“Ms. Lerner’s testimony remains critical to the Committee’s investigation,” wrote Chairman Issa. “Documents and testimony obtained by the Committee show that she played a significant role in scrutinizing applications for tax exempt status from conservative organizations. Documents also show that Ms. Lerner participated in “off plan” work to develop rules that would allow the IRS to stifle constitutionally protected political speech by non-profit groups. Ms. Lerner’s testimony ...

Key Findings: Insufficient authorization and guidelines. The monitoring was implemented with insufficient written authorization, no policy in place and no legal guidance given to the contractors conducting the monitoring. As a result, FDA captured communications that are protected by law, including communications with Congress, the media, and watchdog groups like Project on Government Oversight. Unlawful capturing ...

WASHINGTON – Today, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a joint report on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s highly-invasive surveillance program that monitored employees who contacted Congress and the media with concerns about FDA’s medical device approval process. In April 2010, the FDA initiated a surveillance ...

“As citizen watchdogs, Americans have the right to keep an eye on their government and are entitled to a federal government that is both transparent and accountable,” Chairman Issa said in a statement. “Disclosure should be timely, accurate, and routine. H.R. 1211 enacts commonsense reforms that will reduce the backlog of FOIA requests from federal agencies by strengthening the Office of Government Information Services and creating an online request system. The reforms in the FOIA bill ...

“Too often, our Committee sees and reviews billion dollar write-offs of IT programs, in which you cannot find out who was in charge, you cannot find out why they went on so long, and the hardest thing to find out is why they don’t work at the end of a billion dollars,” Issa said. “Good software saves billions of dollars and countless lives and countless hours if it works. Bad or poorly done software can frustrate the American public and deprive them of very product or service they ...

“The federal government is currently spending in excess of $80 billion dollars for information technology investments, and often we get little back in terms of results. IT acquisition program failure rates and cost overruns are between 72 percent and 80 percent. Some estimate as much as $20 billion is wasted annually in this area. We need to enhance the best value to the taxpayer by adapting the cumbersome federal acquisition process to major trends in the IT industry.