If someone isn't fired over the Obamacare implementation debacle, then President Barack Obama is "missing the point of Management 101," says Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California.
"The president has been poorly served in the implementation of his own signature legislation," Issa said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation."
Asked specifically if he meant Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should resign, Issa said that if she can't reorganize and assemble a team to meet Obama's agenda, "she shouldn't be there."
Sebelius said last week in an interview with CNN's Sanjay Gupta that she wasn't aware of the website's problems before it went live on Oct. 1. Issa wants to know why she didn't know.
Sebelius declined to testify last Thursday, citing a scheduling conflict, but is set to testify Wednesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Using an iceberg analogy, Issa said his committee is looking for "quick answers" to straighten out as much of the "above the water" issues, such as the website glitches.
He also wants to address the 90 percent of the problems below the water. Those include 2,500 counties – 58 percent – that have only one or two companies bidding to provide health insurance.
It's "a question of cost and benefit" to people, Issa said.
Via: Newsmax
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Showing posts with label Darrell Issa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darrell Issa. Show all posts
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Issa Demands Answers from Verizon, Google, Microsoft on Healthcare.gov
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent letters Tuesday to five tech companies asking if they are involved with the efforts to fix the faulty Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov.
Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) asked Verizon Enterprise Inc., Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Expedia if they were assisting the government in attempts to fix of the site.
According to reports, President Barack Obama has already called upon Verizon to help fix the online marketplace Healthcare.gov, a website that cost over $600 million to produce that has been plagued with glitches and technical problems since its launch on Oct. 1.
The administration announced a “tech surge,” a group of government and private sector computer experts, to assist with the website. The team will include “veterans of top Silicon Valley companies,” said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
“The Obama Administration has announced it is ‘bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government’ to fix the seemingly endless problems with the healthcare exchange website, but has not provided details about what the problems are, who is being enlisted to solve them and how long the process is expected to take,” the committee said in a statement Wednesday.
Issa’s letters ask the tech giants to disclose any communication they have had with the administration regarding Healthcare.gov since Oct. 1.
Via: WFB
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Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Is This How IRS Cover-up Works?
Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he is confident the story behind the IRS’s targeting of tea-party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status will eventually come out. But patience will have to be a virtue. Issa’s staff acknowledged late last month that the IRS had handed over to the committee a little more than 10 percent of the documents the IRS itself has admitted are relevant to the committee’s investigation.
Last night, Issa spoke via Skype to the New York Meeting, a gathering of influential conservatives founded by Mallory Factor. Issa said that while his investigation is incomplete, he has concluded that at least one reform at the IRS is absolutely necessary.
“While the IRS formally has only two political appointees — its commissioner and its chief counsel — it’s clear that political people are embedded throughout the agency in ‘career’ slots,” he said. That can create real credibility and trust issues when the IRS is handling sensitive political matters.
Issa says he is thinking about a bill that would bar anyone from work in an apolitical “career” slot at the IRS for ten years if they come from an explicitly political position.
As an example, Issa mentioned the case of “Susanne,” a lawyer whom he said had worked for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee until 2008. His reference is to Susanne Sachsman Grooms, who NRO’s Eliana Johnson has reported joined the IRS in the year President Obama was elected. She served the IRS as an adviser to the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement and then as a senior counselor to the chief of criminal investigations.
Shutdown Continues, House Passes Solutions, President Still Refuses to Negotiate
Beginning on October 1, 2013, the federal government entered a partial shutdown due to a lapse in funding. Prior to this, the House of Representatives offered and passed multiple funding measures to keep the government open. The Senate and President Barack Obama, however, disagreed with some of the bill’s components. Instead of working with House leaders, they chose to let the government shut down over their insistence on a continuation of last year’s funding levels to support the expansion of Obamacare.
I know many Americans are concerned about the government shutdown and it can be disconcerting when our nation’s political leaders cannot get along.
This is not the first time that our country has had a divided government or experienced a shutdown due to disagreements between the President and congressional leaders of opposing parties. However, in prior instances, both the President and respective leaders have found ways to engage in regular discussions to resolve issues.
President Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich were fierce opponents publically, as were President Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill, but they always found ways to work together to advance our nation’s interests and their respective policy agendas.
What’s different today is that President Obama has repeatedly and preemptively announced his refusal to negotiate with congressional leaders about operations of the federal government or the level of spending under his Administration.
Congress has a constitutional responsibility and authority to oversee federal spending and the Executive Branch’s execution of the law, including addressing our nation’s unsustainable debt levels and the problems associated with ObamaCare and its implementation.
The President himself has acknowledged some of the failures of ObamaCare by granting waivers to big business, big labor and other special interests, but insists on leaving individual Americans and families exposed to its serious flaws. He has granted these waivers unilaterally even though they are neither authorized by law nor consistent with his enumerated powers in the Constitution.
And now, because of President Obama’s continued refusal to work with Congress, the government remains partially closed.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Darrell Issa: IRS Officials Sent Private Data Over Personal Email Accounts
Senior Internal Revenue Service officials—including one at the heart of the IRS “targeting” scandal—violated agency policies and possibly federal records laws by using private email to send confidential taxpayer information, the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in a letter.
In a Sept. 30 letter to IRS Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel obtained by the Free Beacon, Oversight Chairman Darrel Issa (R., Calif.) said an investigation revealed a “troubling pattern” of at least four top IRS officials using their private email addresses to relay confidential tax information.
“This not only raises the prospect of violations of the Federal Records Act but it also raises data security concerns and violates internal IRS policies,” Issa wrote to Werfel.
The committee discovered the emails while investigating the ongoing IRS scandal that began earlier this year when an official admitted that the agency targeted conservative groups during the 2012 election.
Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS’ tax-exempt division at the heart of the scandal, is one of the officials named in Issa’s letter.
Issa said the committee’s investigation produced more than 1,600 pages of emails and documents housed in Lerner’s nonofficial email account related to IRS business, including nearly 30 pages of confidential taxpayer information. Included in the material was a summary of an application for tax-exempt status the IRS instructed Lerner’s legal counsel to redact.
Via: WFBContinue Reading.....
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
IRS officials thought Obama wanted crackdown on tea party groups, worried about negative press
IRS employees were “acutely” aware in 2010 that President Obama wanted to crack down on conservative organizations and were egged into targeting tea party groups by press reports mocking the emerging movement, according to an interim report being circulated Tuesday by House investigators.
The report, by staffers for Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, quoted two Internal Revenue Service officials saying the tea party applications were singled out in the targeting program that has the agency under investigation because “they were likely to attract media attention.”
In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives.
But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters.
“As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”
That finding contradicts Democrats on Capitol Hill, who argue that some liberal groups also were given special scrutiny, thus showing there was neither a witch hunt for conservatives nor political pressure from the White House.
Via: Washington Times
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Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Darrell Issa tweets out the Constitution
What if the Constitution wasn't written with parchment and ink but instead was tweeted out to the masses, 140 characters at a time?
Apparently, Rep. Darrell Issa wants to find out.
The California Republican began tweeting the preamble from his account just before 10 a.m. Tuesday — recognized on the calendar as Constitution Day — and is slowly and methodically working his way through the 4,543-word document.
Issa started the day by sending out "226 years ago, the United States Constitution was signed by 38 delegates in Philadelphia. #ConstitutionDay" and then dove right into the historic script.
One unverified online estimate counted more than 32,000 characters in the entire document, meaning it will take well over 200 tweets to send out the entire document through the popular social media site.
By 12:45 p.m., Issa's account, @DarrellIssa, was at Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. There are seven articles in all, though the first, which established Congress and its powers, is easily the longest.
Issa is known as a prolific tweeter and is often recognized for his digital savviness. His staff did not immediately respond to questions on why he decided to do this and whose fingers were busy all day punching in the tweets.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Congressional Report: Fast And Furious Scandal Result Of “Deliberate Strategy” Laid Out By Eric Holder, Other Senior Obama Officials…
The latest congressional report on Operation Fast and Furious found that the gunwalking-program-turned-scandal was the result of a “deliberate strategy created at the highest levels of the Justice Department aimed at identifying the leaders of a major gun trafficking ring.”
The report is the second installment in a three-part series from Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley and House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa.
That “deliberate strategy,” congressional investigators argue, sprang from “a series of speeches about combating violence along the Southwest border” that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered shortly after taking office.
“Although [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] ATF did not officially open the Fast and Furious investigation until the fall of 2009, the groundwork for the strategy that would guide the operation began shortly after new leadership took control of the Department of Justice nine months earlier,” the report reads. “On February 25, 2009, just one month after Attorney General Eric Holder took office, he gave a speech noting the danger of the Mexican drug cartels, focusing on the Sinaloa cartel in particular.”
On Feb. 25, 2009, Holder said the drug cartels “are lucrative, they are violent, and they are operated with stunning planning and precision” and, under his leadership, he promised “these cartels will be destroyed.”
A little more than a month later, on April 2, 2009 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, congressional investigators say Holder “gave further insight into the department’s new strategy for combating these dangerous cartels.”
Via: Daily Caller
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Thursday, October 18, 2012
Issa To Issue Subpoena Over ObamaCare Docs
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa plans to press ahead with a subpoena for health department documents on a program he claims is being used to "buy" the election by hiding the effects of ObamaCare.
The Department of Health and Human Services handed over reams of material just minutes before a 5 p.m. ET deadline Thursday in response to Issa's demand 24 hours earlier. However, Issa's office called the cache "embarrassing," insufficient and not responsive to the congressman's request.
The subpoena is expected to go out Friday morning.
"Basically somebody hit a button and said print out a bunch of spreadsheets in an illegible format," Issa told Fox News. "So we will be issuing the subpoena."
The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee effectively is accusing the department of stringing them along for months in their request for documents about an $8 billion program that pays bonuses to Medicare Advantage plans.
Issa claims the bonus program is being used to mask the first round of Medicare Advantage cuts in connection with the health care overhaul -- in order to win favor with seniors.
"It's an unbelievable abuse of power," he said Thursday. Issa said the program basically funds "what ObamaCare took away."
The program in question is called a "demonstration" project. But Issa complains the project is far more sweeping than a run-of-the-mill test program, and conveniently lasts until 2014.
"This is larger than every test they've ever done at HHS combined," Issa said. Issa's committee put out a video Thursday explaining its allegations.
The congressman further says the effects of ObamaCare's $200 billion in Medicare Advantage cuts over the next decade would have been felt starting this week -- if not for the bonus payments. Thanks to them, he wrote in an August letter, the project offsets 71 percent of the cuts this year.
But the department portrayed the program differently.
Via: Fox News
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Monday, October 1, 2012
WH Aide Involved in Fast and Furious Was 'Suddenly' Transferred to Iraq; Issa Threatens Subpoena
The transfer took place shortly after the ATF agent had testified in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the White House had provided the committee with a series of emails that O’Reilly and the agent had exchanged while Fast and Furious was underway.
Since then, the White House has declined to allow O’Reilly to be interviewed either by the committee or by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who conducted the administration’s internal investigation of Fast and Furious. The White House also refused to give the inspector general access to internal White House communications relating to Fast and Furious.
Under Fast and Furious, the ATF and the Justice Department deliberately allowed known straw purchasers for Mexican drug cartels to buy about 2,000 guns at U.S. gun stores. In December 2010, two of these guns were found at the scene of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Many more of the guns were found at crime scenes in Mexico.
In Sept. 20 testimony before the Oversight Committee, Horowitz said that the White House’s refusal to let O’Reilly speak and to provide the IG’s office with access to relevant internal White House communications “made it impossible” to “pursue that aspect of the case.”
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Issa Threatens To Subpoena HHS Over Medicare Bonuses
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Thursday that he's willing to subpoena documents from the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), alleging a conspiracy to hide the impact of President Obama's healthcare law.
Issa, as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is investigating an $8 billion demonstration project in which Medicare pays bonuses to certain private Medicare Advantage plans based on quality.
The congressman has suggested that HHS is using the bonus payments to mask the healthcare law's cuts to Medicare Advantage plans ahead of the election.
The congressman has suggested that HHS is using the bonus payments to mask the healthcare law's cuts to Medicare Advantage plans ahead of the election.
A committee spokeswoman confirmed that a "compulsory process" includes subpoenas.
Obama's healthcare law made several cuts in government payments to privately run Medicare Advantage plans, including a new system for giving bonus payments to high-quality plans.
But in November 2010, HHS announced that it would not immediately implement the health law's changes, and would instead test a different system — the demonstration program Issa is investigating. The demonstration program will mean bigger payments, delivered earlier, to more plans, according to the Government Accountability Office.
GAO recommended that HHS cancel the demonstration, which it estimates will cost $8.3 billion over 10 years. Issa has repeatedly emphasized GAO's recommendation, saying it's the first time the auditing and investigative office has taken such a step.
Issa has suggested that HHS is using the added payments under the demonstration program to ensure that seniors won't see fewer Medicare Advantage options before the election
But in November 2010, HHS announced that it would not immediately implement the health law's changes, and would instead test a different system — the demonstration program Issa is investigating. The demonstration program will mean bigger payments, delivered earlier, to more plans, according to the Government Accountability Office.
GAO recommended that HHS cancel the demonstration, which it estimates will cost $8.3 billion over 10 years. Issa has repeatedly emphasized GAO's recommendation, saying it's the first time the auditing and investigative office has taken such a step.
Issa has suggested that HHS is using the added payments under the demonstration program to ensure that seniors won't see fewer Medicare Advantage options before the election
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
VA under investigation over $5M conferences featuring 'Patton' parody
The price tag on those conferences, held last summer, far exceeds the roughly $830,000 spent by the General Services Administration in Las Vegas. The VA inspector general's office says it's been investigating since April and is preparing to release a report by next month.
The potential spending scandal sequel has now caught the eye of House oversight committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who fired off a letter to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki last week pressing the department for answers.
Issa revealed several conference details, including the claim that $52,000 was spent "to produce an 18-minute video starring a paid actor satirizing the opening scene from the movie Patton" -- the 1970 film starring George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton.
Issa questioned why the VA hired an outside group to make the video when the department "has videographers and editors on staff."
Issa also wrote that another $84,000 was spent on "promotional items such as branded pens, highlighters, hand sanitizers and USB drives."
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Fast and Furious Question: Can/Will Romney-Ryan DOJ Pursue Chicago-Bound Eric Holder?
Congressman Darrell Issa and the House Oversight Committee filed the civil lawsuit yesterday against Attorney General Eric Holder in the Fast and Furious case. To be clear, there are no charges that Holder had anything to do with Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry's death, or the walking of guns across the U.S. border into Mexico. The charges are simply that Holder has ignored subpoenas and withheld Fast and Furious documents from Congress, and thus, is in Contempt of Congress. The documents are the starting point to actual prosecutions of criminal and civil liability in one of the worst acts of Government against The People's Second Amendment rights in our Nation's history. It is reasonable to assume the civil litigation will not be resolved before the election, and perhaps not by the time Obama and Company exit Washington, D.C. It begs the question, what can a Romney-Ryan White House do about it?
The House voted for both criminal and civil Contempt of Congress. Obama's spokeskid, Jay Carney, announced in June that the White House will NOT act to direct the DOJ to prosecute Holder criminally on the Contempt of Congress charges - with Obama claiming Executive Privilege. So the only avenue is civil "justice" for The People to force the administration to produce documents that many of us believe will show Fast and Furious was devised to weaken Second Amendment rights, and along the way managed to kill a Border Patrol agent.
The question: when we have an Romney-Ryan DOJ, which will undoubtedly be a strong Second Amendment protector, can and/or will the new DOJ be directed to take up the criminal charges against Holder for ignoring subpoenaed documents, which will be the only way to eventually receive justice for Agent Brian Terry, and hold Eric Holder accountable?
Via: Free Republic
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Monday, August 13, 2012
Darrell Issa to Sue Eric Holder Monday
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa plans to sue Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday for refusing to provide documents related to the "Fast and Furious" gun-smuggling operation.
"The committee expects to file the civil contempt suit against the attorney general Monday," a Republican source said. The suit will be filed in the federal district court for the District of Columbia.
The action is the latest escalation in the dispute between House Republicans and the Justice Department over the documents, which relate to a botched gun-smuggling operation.
On June 28, the House voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress and authorized the Oversight panel to bring suit to enforce its rights.
In Fast and Furious, agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed assault guns to "walk," which meant ending surveillance on weapons suspected to be en route to Mexican drug cartels.
The tactic, which was intended to allow agents to track criminal networks by finding the guns at crime scenes, was condemned after two guns that were part of the operation were found at Border Patrol agent Brian Terry's murder scene.
In the most recent conflict between Congress and the president over a Congressional subpoena, Democrats' and Republicans' roles were reversed.
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