Corporate Bailout Fund Watchdog Panel Misses First Deadline

(Bloomberg) -- The Congressional Oversight Commission, responsible for overseeing $500 billion in corporate aid, missed its first public disclosure deadline Friday as the group waits for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to appoint a chairman.

“Although we will not issue a report today, we are working to fulfill
our responsibilities, even in the absence of a staff, a budget, and a
chairperson, and intend to publish one soon,” according to a joint statement Friday from the panel’s two Republican and two Democratic members.

The deadline is set by by the law that created the panel.

The commission’s appointees -- Representative Donna Shalala, a Florida Democrat; Senator Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican; Bharat Ramamurti, a former aide to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren; and Representative French Hill, a Republican of Arkansas -- have begun informal conversations about the direction of the panel’s work, but are waiting for a chairman to begin substantive oversight.

Pelosi said Thursday that she and McConnell are still negotiating over who should lead the commission, and hopes that a decision can be made in the coming days.

“We’ve been talking about it for about three weeks,” Pelosi said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “It is essential to do. I think we can come to terms. I wish we could have done it sooner.”

That individual will play a large role in shaping the scope and direction of the panel’s oversight work.

Ramamurti and Shalala have emphasized they want to focus on how the money flowing to corporations affects the company’s workers. Toomey has said he views the oversight work with a more narrow lens, and wants to focus on whether Treasury and the Federal Reserve are complying with the restrictions Congress put in place.

The commission had been given a Friday deadline to issue its first public report about how it plans to proceed in overseeing hundreds of billions in loans and grants made by the Fed and Treasury Department. The clock started a month earlier when the central bank announced the rollout of a new emergency “Main Street” lending facility.

The measure is meant to be a key pillar of the government relief effort while much of the U.S. economy is shuttered; it will provide loans to companies with as many as 15,000 employees or as much as $5 billion in annual revenue. A start date for the facility is expected to be announced soon. The commission is required to issue follow-up reports every 30 days.

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