A key Republican lawmaker upbraided the Department of Health and Human Services for its lack of response to questions from Congress about major health issues.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is best known for his role leading a controversial investigation into the Obama administration's response to the Benghazi attacks. On Wednesday, he announced he would not seek reelection this fall, which perhaps explains why he did not hold back in his criticisms of HHS leadership.
In a letter to newly appointed Health Secretary Alex Azar on Monday, Gowdy said that HHS had not provided any meaningful answers about its involvement in dealing with the public health crisis brought by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands that the committee had requested on Oct. 17.
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Instead, wrote Gowdy, the department responded more than two months later with "182 pages on a single CD, consisting mostly of public information, including flyers, press releases, HHS web pages, and a page of hyperlinks to HHS websites."
Gowdy added: "The production did not contain any of the requested communications."
The response to the committee's request for information about HHS' response to the opioid epidemic was similarly sparse and non-germane, said Gowdy. Ironically, the department justified its failure to produce documents by saying that it was busy dealing with hurricane response.
Gowdy specified four other requests for information relating to cost-sharing reduction payments, HIPAA/HITECH and HHS guidance documents. In all of those instances, the department failed to meet the agreed-upon deadlines and responded with publicly available information likely gleaned from nothing more than a Google search.
When asked to provide the committee with HHS guidance documents from the past 10 years, the department responded that it was unable to locate any such documents published during the Obama administration.
"It seems HHS does not have a handle on these supposedly authoritative guidance materials. HHS is, after all, responsible for nearly a quarter of federal outlays and administers more grant dollars than other federal agencies combined," said Gowdy. "This exchange and others raise questions of competence and basic operational functionality of the (HHS) legislative affairs department."
If the committee does not get a more satisfactory response to its inquiries by Feb. 5, it will exercise its right to issue subpoenas that will compel the department to provide the information, said Gowdy.
Gowdy's letter is notable because it is one of the only instances of a Republican affirming a concern expressed by Democrats and many commentators that the Trump administration has failed to fill key positions in the federal government and in many cases has appointed those with no relevant experience to important government jobs.
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