Those up-and-down negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner on a debt-ceiling agreement aren’t the only drama unfolding in the nation’s capital. Monday morning, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., chairman of that panel’s oversight subcommittee, will learn if Obama’s senior appointees in the Office of Management and Budget are blinking or digging in for a pitched battle. The immediate issue is the 9 a.m. Monday deadline that Upton and Stearns gave OMB to comply with a document subpoena issued last week. Based on OMB’s actions since March, when Upton and Stearns first requested documents concerning a $535 million Department of Energy economic stimulus loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc., odds are Obama’s appointees will cough up just enough documents to look as if they are complying. But chances are odds-on that close examination will reveal they are still holding something back. What that something is shouldn’t be a mystery. The Energy Department made the loan with funds from Obama’s $859 billion economic stimulus program two years ago. It appears that documents produced in the course of OMB’s review of the loan guarantee top the list of those not provided to the committee. Stearns expressed an understandable frustration Friday in announcing this morning’s deadline: “The entire reason that we were forced to issue the subpoena was OMB’s recalcitrance. For an administration that parades around the banner of transparency, they have been anything but forthcoming. What is the Obama administration trying to hide as their actions suggest they do not want the facts of the Solyndra loan to come to light? The public and Congress have a right to know if billions of taxpayer dollars are being invested wisely.”
Solyndra has encountered some management difficulties since receiving the loan guarantee, but CEO Brian Harrison issued a statement last week that suggests those problems are behind it: “The fact is that Solyndra is growing rapidly. We are installing our products around the globe, we have created and supported thousands of American jobs, and we are on track to nearly double our revenue this year. Solyndra just completed a record quarter for shipments, with strong demand in the United States and major exports as well. Last year, we shipped 65 megawatts of panel production and expect that to double again this year.”
If Solyndra is doing as well as its CEO claims, we would expect the Obama administration to be heralding it as proof of the success of the economic stimulus program. But apparently there is something about how the company got the loan guarantee that OMB doesn’t want the public to know. Since Solyndra’s investors included a major donor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, it’s understandable that Upton and Stearns want documents that shed light on how OMB assessed the propriety of handing $535 million to the company. What is beyond question is the right of Congress to see documents concerning how the executive branch has spent tax dollars authorized by the legislative branch. OMB should stop the games and produce the requested documents.
