Episode 383 - From the Beltway to City Hall: The Expanding Reach of Government Investigations

Absolutely.

Thank you.

And thanks for having me.

I think it's very important to recognize the trend that we've been seeing, especially in Congress, with an increase of investigations.

And I think the main reason we're seeing that more and more is you have these incredibly slim margins in both the House and the Senate.

And it makes legislating extremely difficult with such a tightly divided government.

And you don't need to take a vote in Congress for a chairman of a committee to have subpoena power.

And we're seeing members of Congress understand this more and more and use that power to advance all sorts of different goals, whether it's a political goal, a policy goal, some other strategic endeavor, press attention, right? There are all sorts of reasons why a member might take on subpoena.

this kind of approach.

But it's also proven to be effective in a lot of ways, both politically and to advance policy.

And so that trend has really been increasing over the last five to 10 years.

And we're expecting further increases in the number of subpoenas, the number of requests for documents that folks are seeing in the private sector, especially next year, as we see what happens in the midterm elections.

But we're expecting that trend to really continue.

Are there some issues that you think will be sort of front and center as these continue to go on in the next session, even perhaps in the next months?

Absolutely.

I think there's a lot of preparation going on among congressional investigators on both sides of the aisle, frankly, prioritizing potential targets for the next Congress.

And I think you're going to see two main areas.

One is This is obviously a big topic of debate in the election season we're in.

We're seeing congressional district debates, senatorial debates focusing on this issue and the actions of this administration over the last two years.

Democrats in particular, right, are very interested in exploring and investigating some of those activities and have made a real point publicly of saying that they plan to seek information from private sector entities that have done business with the administration.

So that's one area that I think will be.

major, major area of activity.

And the other one is a little bit more of a policy focus on affordability.

That's obviously kind of the word of the day, the hot topic right now.

And there is a lot that can be done to collect information from the private sector about what's going on in the economy to try to figure out where there are problems and where policy can advance solving some of those problems.