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:
“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)
“I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates ... as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Virtuous people are simply those who have ... not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)