Waxman ready to search for waste, fraud and abuse

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a series of hearings starting Feb. 5 to look at waste, fraud and abuse of government funds, the new chairman of that committee said Sunday."It seems to me that our top priority as the chief investigative and oversight committee is to make sure taxpayer funds are not being wasted, that there is no fraud and abuse," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in an interview on the ABC News program “This Week.”The new chairman said that only a small part of the money the government has spent in Iraq has been audited, but so far the findings have been "very, very frightening.""These are the taxpayer dollars. What we've seen so far in Iraq, according to the government's own auditors, is billions of dollars that have gone to waste, corruption and graft. We're going to look into that more carefully," he said.But Iraq isn't the only issue that will be scrutinized, he said. "When we look at the spending on homeland security, when we look at [the aftermath of Hurricane] Katrina, we see the same pattern -- of hiring big contractors, having them overcharge for the work they do. We've got to be the watchdog for the taxpayers," he said.As expected, Waxman was named chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the new Democratic-controlled 110th Congress. One of his first moves was to change the committee's name, adding the word “oversight.” Under Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the panel had been called the House Government Reform Committee.