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:
“It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word “accident” makes sense.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“O, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
chorus: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)