Spoiler Alert!  In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, is ultimately gunned down in a case of mistaken identity.  In another case of mistaken identity, the Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GATB), an entity established by executive order on June 13, 2011, as part of the Obama Administration’s “Campaign to Cut Waste,” can be easily confused with the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (Recovery Board), a separate operation that manages the Recovery.gov website and oversees spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, more commonly known as the “stimulus.”

The Recovery Board is chaired by Kathleen S. Tighe, the inspector general (IG) of the Department of Education, with Calvin L. Scovel, III, the IG of the Transportation Department, serving as the board’s vice chair.  The remainder of the board is comprised of IGs from various departments, including Agriculture (Phyllis K. Fong), Commerce (Todd J. Zinser), Energy (Gregory H. Friedman), Health and Human Services (HHS) (Daniel R. Levinson), Justice (Michael E. Horowitz ), Defense (Jon T. Rymer), and Treasury (Eric M. Thorson).  The board is rounded out by J. Russell George, the Treasury IG for Tax Administration, and Mary L. Kendall, the Deputy IG at the Interior Department.

Established for the purpose of providing transparency and exposing any potential waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, Recovery.gov was skewered in a May 21, 2009 article in the Washington Post, entitled “Tracking Stimulus Spending May Not Be as Easy as Promised.”  In a reference to a mix-up by Vice President Joe Biden, who directed interested parties to the privately-run Recover.org website, the Post opined that the private site offered detailed spending information, while Recovery.gov offered “little beyond news releases, general breakdowns of spending, and acronym-laden spreadsheets and timelines.”

Fast forward two years later, when the “transparency board” concept was rebooted, or rather, cloned, by President Obama’s June 2011 executive order creating the GATB.  On July 28, 2011, the President appointed the members of the GATB.  In the federal bureaucracy’s version of musical chairs, the current GATB includes the following individuals:  Chair Richard Ginman, Director of Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy (DOD); Vice Chair David Williams, the Postal Service IG; Nani Coloretti, Deputy Assistant Secretary at Treasury; Scott Gould, Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs; Allison Lerner, IG at the National Science Foundation; Ellen Murray, Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources and Chief Financial Officer at HHS; and Norman Dong, the Deputy Controller at the Office of Management and Budget.   Serving double duty on both the GATB and the Recovery Board are:  Friedman (Energy IG), Levinson (HHS IG), Scovel (Transportation IG), and Tighe (Education IG, as well as Recovery Board chair).

What makes this redundancy all the more ironic is this morsel from the “Campaign to Cut Waste” rollout:  “As one of the campaign’s first steps, the Administration will be targeting duplication and waste among federal websites.”  Apparently, that does not apply to duplicative government boards.

To be fair, the scope of the GATB is broader than that of the Recovery Board, whose jurisdiction was limited to stimulus spending.  And with the Recovery Board slated for sunset in 2015, the GATB represents an effort (at least lip service) to keep the hope of government spending transparency alive.  In the meantime, the GATB operates without a budget or a staff, depending on such support from the Recovery Board.  In a sense, taxpayers are buying one and getting one free.

In yet another bit of irony, the first open meeting of the so-called “transparency” board was slated for January 22, 2014.  As wryly observed in a December 31, 2013 FederalTimes.com article, “it may say something about federal attitudes toward openness that the Government Accountability and Transparency Board typically meets in secret.  But for the record, the board… will hold a public meeting next month.”  The upshot?  A weather-delayed late opening of the federal government on January 22 resulted in the hearing being postponed.

Not to worry, though.  The hearing was re-scheduled for February 7, 2014, with representatives from Citizens Against Government Waste being the first presenters on the docket.  Stay tuned for what happened next.

To be continued…