A private nonprofit government watchdog group will soon work with congressional committees to help them oversee federal spending and programs.
The Project on Government Oversight presently offers lunchtime seminars to train Hill staffers in skills they need to conduct oversight research, from working with whistleblowers to digesting inspector general reports.
Given the relative success of its existing program, POGO began developing an expanded version of the seminars more than a year ago.
The group offered its first training session in 2006. POGO officials said they saw a need for oversight instruction among congressional staffers after several approached the nonprofit for help in filing Freedom of Information Act requests.
But the FOIA is a tool for journalists and private citizens. Congressional committees and their staffers can if necessary subpoena any executive branch document, subject only to presidential privilege claims.
Since the program’s inception, POGO has seen trained more than 1,000 individual staffers. The group recycles series topics each new Congress, adding more to its arsenal as need arises.
Recent additions include a session dedicated to teaching staffers how to work with whistleblowers in the intelligence community.
While POGO officials guarantee anonymity for program attendees, they say improvements have been made in the way individual staffers conduct research and run certain hearings.
The new initiative, which officials say will take shape after the midterm election campaign dust settles, will seek to extrapolate those results on the scale of whole committees.
