Republican-led committee targets COVID relief aid for review

House Republicans on Wednesday began their promised aggressive oversight of the Biden administration, focusing on what watchdogs described as “indications of widespread fraud” in federal coronavirus aid programs initiated under President Donald Trump.

GOP lawmakers complained that too little attention was paid to the problems when Democrats controlled Congress. Democrats blamed the Trump administration for much of the mess.

More than 1,000 people have pleaded guilty or have been convicted on federal charges of defrauding the myriad COVID-19 relief programs that Congress established in the early days of the pandemic. More than 600 other people and entities face federal fraud charges.

But that’s just the start, according to investigators who testified as the House Oversight and Accountability Committee held its first hearing in the new Congress on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending. Congress approved about $4.6 trillion in spending from six coronavirus relief laws, beginning in March 2020, when Trump was in the White House and including the $1.9 trillion package that Democrats passed in the first months of the Biden presidency.

“We owe it to the American people to get to the bottom of the greatest theft of American taxpayer dollars in history,” said Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the committee chairman.

Gene L. Dodaro, head of the Government Accountability Office, told lawmakers that it will be some time before the full extent of fraud is known. The inspector general for the Small Business Administration has more than 500 ongoing investigations involving loan programs designed to help businesses meet operating expenses during the pandemic. The Labor Department’s internal watchdog continues to open at least 100 unemployment insurance fraud investigations each week.

The GAO said the more than 1,000 convictions related to COVID-19 relief fraud are one measure of how extensive it was. “There are definitely indications of widespread fraud, but it’s impossible to estimate right now what the full extent will be,” Dodaro said.

Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general who chairs the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, told lawmakers that the amount of fraud and misspent funds is “clearly in the tens of billions of dollars.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if it exceeds ultimately more than $100 billion, but we have so much work to do,” Horowitz said. “So we’re going to be counting and figuring this out for years to come. We’re going to go after every penny we can.”

Lawmakers were anxious to understand how much theft has occurred and what can be done to stop it in future emergencies.

“We must identify where this money went, how much ended up in the hands of fraudsters or ineligible participants, and what should be done to ensure it never happens again,” Comer said.