Almost half the $700 billion bailout money has been shoveled out the door, but nobody is keeping track of it.
“It’s a mess,” says Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who has overseen the dispensing of $290 billion so far until a special inspector general takes over. “I don’t think anyone understands right now how we’re going to do proper oversight of this thing.”
Nobody expects neatness from a rescue operation in panic mode, but the spectacle of Bush Administration ineptness coupled with Congressional turf warfare in an interregnum is distressing.
Six weeks have passed without White House naming of an inspector general to conduct audits and investigations of the bailout…