Rep. Welch’s Success

After just 16 months as Vermont’s only member of the U. S. House of Representatives, Rep. Peter Welch has hit his stride and is becoming the effective Congressman that his prior record promised he’d be..

Most recently, Welch brought the glare of public exposure to a bureaucratic sleight-of-hand that would have exempted billion-dollar contracts from scrutiny.

In a crackdown on fraud in government contracts, the Justice Department is creating regulations that would force companies to file a public report whenever their internal audits find evidence of contract abuse of more than $5 million. When the final language of the regulations was published, however, it included a blanket exemption for overseas contracts. That would mean that there would be no requirement to report fraud that shows up in the billions of dollars of contracts spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places.

The Associated Press discovered the mysterious last-minute change, and Vermont’s freshman Representative jumped all over it, becoming the lead voice in calling for an investigation by Congress.

This week, the Bush administration abruptly changed course, eliminating the loophole. It claimed that the loophole was the inadvertent result of cutting-and-pasting some standard contract language on a computer. If you believe that, we have a bridge to sell you.

The Associated Press article about the change gives credit to the congressional uproar for getting the administration to change its mind, and it notes that Welch was mostly responsible for that uproar. This is a nice feather in the cap of any Congressman, to say nothing of a newcomer.

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Now, in his column on this page, Rep. Welch dives into another area of abuse that is desperately in need of federal oversight. Unlike frauds perpetrated by U. S. contractors, the abusive practices of many credit card companies personally touch thousands of individual Vermonters.

There’s been excellent reporting on the scandal, both on television and in the print media, but what is needed is for the federal government to jump into the arena with both feet and exert its regulatory authority. Some of the outrages are next to unbelievable, and they hurt the most vulnerable of our citizens the most.

We congratulate Rep. Welch and wish him well on his latest crusade.