Purposes
Oversight, as an outgrowth of this principle, ideally serves a number of overlapping objectives and purposes:
- improve the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness of governmental operations;
- evaluate programs and performance;
- detect and prevent poor administration, waste, abuse, arbitrary and capricious behavior, or illegal and unconstitutional conduct;
- protect civil liberties and constitutional rights;
- inform the general public and ensure that executive policies reflect the public interest;
- gather information to develop new legislative proposals or to amend existing statutes;
- ensure administrative compliance with legislative intent; and
- prevent executive encroachment on legislative authority and prerogatives.
In sum, oversight is a way for Congress to check on, and check, the executived directors
Read more about this topic: Congressional Oversight
Famous quotes containing the word purposes:
“One of the baffling things about life is that the purposes of institutions may be ideal, while their administration, dependent upon the faults and weaknesses of human beings, may be bad.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)