House Republicans are kicking off their investigation into the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a hearing on fraud and abuse in federal spending.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is holding a hearing titled “Federal Pandemic Spending: A Prescription for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse” beginning at 10 a.m. Wednesday. It will scrutinize allegations that pots of money directed toward pandemic assistance wound up being used for unrelated programs.
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“We owe it to Americans to identify how hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent under the guise of pandemic relief were lost to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement,” Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in a statement announcing the hearing. “For the past two years, Democrats in the Administration and Congress have spent far too much time pushing money out the door and far too little time conducting meaningful oversight of how that money is being spent.”
The hearing will also ask if the Biden administration has attempted to regain the money not spent on relief programs. Democrats are expected to defend President Joe Biden’s handling of the pandemic, while questioning the efficacy of former President Donald Trump’s response in the first few months.
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Witnesses include Michael Horowitz, the chairman of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee; Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general of the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and David Smith, the assistant director of the Office of Investigations, U.S. Secret Service.
The Judiciary Committee will also hold its first hearing of the new Congress on Wednesday about the crisis at the southern border.
