In a closed-door meeting with Mr. Sperling, a policymaker with limited oversight experience, Mr. Biden issued a blunt directive: “You better work closely with I.G.s, like I did,” he said, according to a person to whom Mr. Sperling later relayed the story. Later, at his first cabinet meeting, the president pressed his appointees to cooperate with oversight officials.
White House officials said the current oversight system, which relies most heavily on the independent inspectors general already working in federal agencies, was operating efficiently, even with occasional turf battles.
Mr. Sperling is holding regular meetings with Michael E. Horowitz, who leads the pandemic relief committee, along with officials at the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Management and Budget. They are also requiring states and localities to publish performance reports that explain how they money they received is being used.
But Mr. Biden’s team is equally concerned about imposing too many burdens on hard-hit recipients, and Mr. Sperling is especially worried about the slow pace of programs intended to speed $25 billion for emergency housing relief passed last year.
Watchdog groups are wary that speed could sacrifice accountability.
Under Mr. Trump, the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for setting policy in federal agencies, refused to comply with all the reporting requirements in the 2020 stimulus that called for it to collect and release data about businesses that borrowed money under the small-business lending programs.
To some observers, Mr. Biden’s budget office has not moved quickly enough to reverse the Trump-era policy. Instead, Mr. Sperling’s team is working on a complex set of benchmarks — tailored to individual programs included in the $1.9 trillion relief bill — which will be released one by one in the coming months.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/us/politics/pandemic-relief-funds-oversight.html
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