Raw Story has put together a compelling case that the failures at Walter Reed came in large part from an ideological drive to privatize government services.
“We have learned that in January 2006, Walter Reed awarded a five-year $120 million contract to a company called IAP Worldwide Services for base operations support services, including facilities management,” Waxman continues. “IAP is one of the companies that experienced problems delivering ice during the response to Hurricane Katrina.”
Waxman notes that IAP “is led by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official who testified before our Committee in July 2004 in defense of Halliburton’s exorbitant charges for fuel delivery and troop support in Iraq.”
Before the contract, over 300 federal employees provided facilities management services at Walter Reed, according to the memorandum, but that number dropped to less than 60 the day before IAP took over.
“Yet instead of hiring additional personnel, IAP apparently replaced the remaining 60 federal employees with only 50 IAP personnel,” Waxman writes.
[…] A year ago, the Government Accountability Office “dismissed a protest filed on behalf of employees at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, ruling that the employee group had no standing to challenge the outcome of a public-private job competition initiated prior to January 2005,” GovExec.com reported.
“The American Federation of Government Employees, which provided funding to back the protest, said the impetus to appeal came from Walter Reed managers who were disappointed to see how the competition process played out,” Jenny Mandel reported in February of 2006. “While the initial employee bid was $7 million less than that of IAP Worldwide Services, a mid-stream solicitation change resulted in a recalculation of the bids by all parties and in IAP’s bid coming in $7 million lower, said John Threlkeld, a lobbyist for AFGE.”
The article continues, “Threlkeld said the process for recalculating the employee bid was flawed, resulting in the inflation of the estimate that rendered it uncompetitive with IAP’s bid.”
On Saturday, the Army Times revealed that the Garibaldi memorandum cited by Waxman states that “the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002.”
Also read this excellent work at Unbossed. Still more information, some of it overlapping, can be found in informative Kos diaries here, here and here.
If this story proves accurate it will mostly be remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Literally everywhere you look in today’s government you see management that is not up to the job. I have talked about this before. The main issue is not privatization, at least not in isolation. The problem is that the administration’s rigid fixation on privatization for privatization’s sake discards even free-market principles like competitive bidding. In cases where private competitors can’t turn in a credible bid, managers simply change the rules until the private sector wins. Imposing quotas, real or implied, has that effect on people. Leave out any oversight mechanism to make sure that the job is done right, stifle whistleblowers and you have a near-perfect system for incentivized failure. Lift the hood on any Bush disaster and you’ll find more or less the same thing.
***Update***
Dana Priest is at it again. In tomorrow’s WaPo, the problem extends much farther than Walter Reed.
***Update 2***
Zifnab
You still haven’t explained why you hate our troops, Tim F. Quit dodging the question!
Tim F.
Read it all in my new book – IF I Hated The Troops. Expect scandalizing hypothetical revelations (If I hate America and want the terrorists to win, here is how I might have undermined the president’s authority on my blog!). Due out this spring.
Demdude
There is no oversight becuase they awarded contracts to their supporters. I think it has more to do with that than their philosophy of privatizing.
cd6
But at least there wasn’t government beauracracy!!!!
Dug Jay
The outrageous and totally unacceptable situation at Walter Reed traces to a decision of the Base Closing Commission that set in motion a plan to close the bulk of Walter Reed later in the decade. This is NO excuse for the situation that existed there, primarily in Building 18. The nonsense in the post is interesting crap, but totally beside the point in terms of what happened.
RSA
Genius. Find a publisher who won’t back out on you, though.
Otto Man
I wouldn’t be surprised if the next president shows up at the White House to find that it’s nothing but a hollowed-out paper-mache shell.
scarshapedstar
The eight scariest words in the English language are, “We’re private contractors and we’re here to help!”
Zifnab
Perhaps we should let Brit Hume field this one:
~ThinkProgress
See, it wasn’t the private contractors mucking up the please. This mess was here before they got there. Brit Hume said so. The Administration was only trying to help.
ThymeZone
Excellent post.
Can we privatize the White House?
I suggest we farm it out to Ringling Brothers.
At least they have experience with clowns.
AkaDad
LOL
Try Regnery publishing.
AkaDad
Thank God Bush may not be hurt politically, because that’s what really matters.
Zifnab
If Bush got hurt political, that would be politicizing Walter Reed! We can’t politicize an institution as old and venerated as this. Therefore me must give the President and his Administration a free pass.
Punchy
Let’s allow John Marshall to say it just as well as Timothy did.
Damn straight.
jake
But still, no worries, because this sort of thing is easily fixed, right? After Mayor WhereamI Barry’s thousand year rule ended the ginormous cluster fuck he made of DC’s government was quickly…er…quickly…uh…
Look! Britney cut her hair!
Kirk Spencer
The thing the pro-privatization folk seem to miss or dismiss is that the main goal of the private sector is money in their pocket. Profit. Better service is defined as service that’s done for less cost, not as improved benefits or delivery of benefits to the recipients. Note I did NOT say the same service for less cost.
And when profit’s the main goal, long-term care tends to go out the window. Walter Reed is a case in point.
Punchy
It appears that Plan B for Iraq is to force the media to focus exclusively on Af-gone-istan. Seriously, yesterday we cap a dozen cits just driving around in their cars, and today we (and/or NATO) follow that up by dropping a fat chubby down some completely innocent cit’s chimney?
Wow. Our soliders are so high-strung they’re just (allegedly) slaughtering anyone and everyone. Get these boys home and fork over a year’s supply of Hooters, head docs, and hookers. Pronto.
chopper
just like a blame-gaming democrat to try to place blame on some people who deserve it.
Zifnab
In a competative marketplace, private enterprise is supposed to allow the government higher service at a lower price than do-it-yourself work. You see this all the time in regular businesses. Small companies hire CPAs rather than getting their own accounting firms. Hospitals outsource their billing to billing companies. Office buildings employee a janitor’s service rather than hiring on individual janitors, so they don’t have to deal with administration.
That’s all cool, because if your janitor’s service craps out on you, you fire them and get a new one. But when you’re the VP of the
companycountry, and you’re hiring on your old friend from your old job and paying him with other people’s money, you care a whole lot less about quality of service. Who gives a shit about quality or quantity when the Good’ole Boy’s Club needs some more backscratching?The premise of privatization is fine, but Republicans aren’t interested in the premise, they’re interested in dooling out goodies to their friends. In such a senario, privatization is completely useless.
ThymeZone
Meet another fellow middle class American enjoying the benefits of Healthcare in Darrellworld.
About a million Americans a year are now being added to the ranks of the uninsured.
Many of them, like the subject of this story, are skimping on critical care because they just can’t afford it.
This is the future of life in America under the Rule of Darrell.
(Darrell is the Balloon-Juice mascot, the standard of thought to which this blog is held, for those of you who are new here).
Every one of us is just one doctor visit, one X-ray, one car accident, one heartbeat, one tiny blood clot, one bad lab test away from being the situation described in this article. That’s our reward for building the richest and most powerful nation on earth, which manages to be last when it comes to healthcare availability for its citizens.
Thanks, Frist family and big HMO providers, for fucking us over so completely and keeping healthcare availability firmly in the private sector all these years.
And thanks, Darrell.
numbskull
I am not well-experienced in this, but are there examples of privatization actually working? That is, working for the taxpayer as opposed to the winner of the bid? I’ve seen disasters on the local, state, and federal level. I haven’t seen any successes.
If there are no successes, should we start to ask whether privatization works on any level? Under any administration? If it doesn’t work, why not? If you have examples of where it does or did work, what factors allowed for success where other programs failed?
numbskull
In the previous post, I was of course referring to functions that at some point had been “assigned” to the government for some reason. I was not suggesting abandoning free enterprise.
Kirk Spencer
Zifnab,
I disagree that the premise of privatization is good. I cite two examples of such.
The first is collection of overdue personal income taxes. The GAO and the IRS did studies of the cost of collection. (x dollars recovered required fraction of x spent.) The lowest bidder was almost double that cost. The government still chose to go to the private industry.
The second is an entire industry – prisons. On every measure other than dollars expended per inmate, government prisons (state and federal) come out better. If all you want to do is house the inmates, private’s fine. If you’re trying to do right by society, private’s the worse choice.
Again, the difference is subtle but critical. Private industry makes profit goal number one. Public industry has other priorities. Sometimes we want profit to not be goal number one.
Actually, I’ll use your own examples to emphasize the point. The companies outsource their service for profit. For customer support and satisfaction, in-house billing and in-house make better sense. (Primarily but not solely because of accountability.) And once the costs of passing the buck are worked back in outsourcing is often not as profitable as it might seem.
But again, the company’s profit is goal one. And a government’s primary objective should not be profit.
garyb50
The hearing is live on C-SPAN right now. I don’t have words. Just watch it.
Tim F.
I am fairly certain that there are plenty of examples where it works fine. As I said in the post the problem isn’t privatization per se, in fact the problem is exactly the same dysfunction that often prevents government qua government from working either. Things don’t function in a vacuum – you need competent planning and functional quality control to ensure it. Initiatives start to fail when you have cronyism in government, cronyism in the private sector or an ideological compulsion to privatize/de-privatize every activity on earth.
ThymeZone
All systems are flawed. The appropriate response is to understand the alternatives thoroughly, choose the best response, and manage the implementation for best results.
This is basic stuff, and it’s what government is supposed to do. Right now we have government that can’t do it effectively.
In terms of healthcare in general, you have to start with the revenue-cost model. That’s why every other first-tier country has government-involved insurance for their citizens … and we don’t. We don’t start with the proper analysis, we start with political bullshit and try to fit a solution into that framework. We’ve allowed our politics, and then our government, to be hijacked by the stupid people. The people who can’t govern. The people who believe in a 6000-year-old earth, and believe that government is bad, so the remedy must be bad government. Outsourcing without accountability is a good example.
People today have figured out that government has failed to live up to its responsibilities. That ship has sailed. Time to get new government.
Maybe a government whose reason for existence isn’t “We may be stupid, but we hate faggots!” would be a better idea? Just saying.
Punchy
But than Ann Coulter would go hungry.
What? She does anyways? Nevermind. I guess to make Ann disappear, she just has to turn sideways.
jenniebee
Well, there are museum concessions privatizations… the gelato stand in the Smithsonian has been a runaway hit, I’ve got to admit. And here in Richmond, VA, there are some major traffic arteries that are privately owned. The citizens of Richmond have paid for the roads several times over now in tolls, but the roads are functional – no less so than the public highways – so I guess that meets the definition of “working fine.”
I take more joy than I ever anticipated in announcing: I’m with numbskull. I can’t think of any situations where a long-term, large-scale for-profit privatization of public functions yields outcomes superior to government administration.
I’ll grant the “Privatize Now!” crowd the museum concessions, though. The sandwiches in the Museum of Fine Arts cafe aren’t bad at all, except the turkey’s a little dry.
The turkey’s a little dry!
Oh, foe, the cursed teeth! What demon from the depths of hell created thee!
Richard 23
Well it should be obvious that just because privatization “failed” in this case it doesn’t mean privatization should be scrapped altogether. It simply means it hasn’t been implemented properly. So this should not be used as an excuse to move back in the direction of big government and titanic bureaucracies.
Just like in the areas where George W. Bush has not been a success in the way many would like (spending, immigration) it’s not because conservatism doesn’t work. He’s just not a real conservative in every way.
The implementation may “fail” in specific cases (outliers) but conservatism and privatization, when practiced correctly, are always the best ways to go.
Compare the conservative ideal to actual liberalism (socialism and communism) which fails every time it rears its ugly head.
Richard Bottoms
I continue to enjoy the utter destruction of the conservative agenda, brought on by their own inability to manage wars, disasters, and of course care of wounded soldiers.
They talked big shit for 25 years or so, from Reagan to GW, and what have they to show for it? Injured vets sleeping with rats and bugs while Haliburton rakes in millions.
You fuckers are going to get roasted next year.
BTW, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said this was going to be a monster issue, the second Katrina of the Bush administration?
Well, I told you so. Again.
numbskull
Still waiting for specific examples of privatization successes.
A Gelato stand is not what I’m looking for. What I’m looking for is an example of a large entity or project that, for some reason in the past, was more-or-less run by a government and has since been taken over lock, stock, and barrel by a private company. An example might be a state park. Sure, there are Gelato stands in the park and other ‘free enterprise’ entities in the park (tour operators, for instance), but what happens when the management of the whole park is awarded to a private company?
Another example is air traffic control. Sure all of the equipment is built by contractors, but what happens when large swathes of the management of the system are taken over by a private company?
What happens when the military is privatized?
What happens when the penal system is privatized?
These types of privatization have occurred in the US and in other countries. They have been disasters for the taxpayer.
So again I ask, has privatization worked? If not, why not? If so, what allowed for success where other projects failed?
If there are no examples of successes, shouldn’t we at least ask if that has implications for policy?
Quiddity
I would like to know what the “mid-stream solicitation change” was. My guess is something like more ultra-low level tasks, which IAP could bid by using minimum-wage labor, leaving the employee bid in the lurch.
Third Eye Open
Richard23,
I hate to throw sandbags your way, but what exactly keeps ANYONE from using that excuse?
If we want to get to our most base assertions here, then perhaps we should be taking a second look at Communism; I mean it’s not a bad philosophy…just implemented improperly…right?
on second thought, No, let’s just commence with running these theives out on a rail, and making sure the penalties are enough to knock a few peoples’ dicks’ straight (Or, vulvas, as it may be)
Zifnab
Privatization is too prone to corruption, Rich. That’s its biggest, fatalist flaw. It will never be practiced correctly because government contracts inevitably trample over every rule of smart business you could name. They don’t hire the most efficent contractors. They don’t manage their money wisely. They don’t change providers or switch to in-sourcing/out-sourcing the services when necessary. Government is just as slow and unweldly and vulnerable to corruption when contracting labor as when doing it themselves. Private contractors just end up costing more because its easier to write one big blank check to a mega-corp than a bunch of little blank checks to in-housed lackies.
Not to say that you can’t. I think FEMA, DHS, the EPA, the FCC, the SCOTUS nominations, and every other non-elected post the executive branch has rule over has proven that.
…
…
Hell, maybe you’re right and I’m wrong after all. But this administration is the absolute worst test case for any set-up. I admit, I can’t name a Bush-appointed privitization effort that has gone well. But then I can’t name a Bush-appointed government effort that has gone well either. So its kinda a failure on all fronts. Might as well call Democracy a failure and point to the burning Reichstag. Bush wasn’t really shooting to set up a model system anyway, so its a fool’s errand to use his system as a model.
Pb
How many of these are there, really. The postal service almost qualifies, and Amtrak is in that same category. The Internet has done pretty well. And then there was the privatization of the legislative branch, which was a great success for many large businesses and their lobbyists.
louisms
The Bush administration seems to see every government responsibility, every social need, as just another opportunity to funnel more taxpayer dollars into the coffers of private corporations. There are surely some services best handled by the private sector, but the dogmatic insistance by conservatives that everything ought be privatized results inevitably in such debacles as the Walter Reed story. How is the domination of society by big business better than big government. The latter is accountable to the people, the former only it’s stockholders.
Katie
I’m sure that there are some examples of where it’s worked just fine, but from what I can tell there are a LOT more examples of where it’s f(*& up beyond belief and ends up costing the taxpayers more money than we would have spent prior to privatization.
The federal government started this privatization move an awfully long time ago with some of the smaller agencies, with the idea that once they ironed out problems they would migrate it over to larger agencies (a good idea).
Unfortunately they never bothered to fix what was wrong with the system before they implemented it all over. Now we are not only paying way more for services that should theoretically cost a lot less under competition, we are paying a lot more than it would have cost using federal employees. The main thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot less people doing actual work, but a lot more people either supervising them, or supervising the contracts, effectively adding two more layers of administration to a function that used to have one line of supervisors and one line of workers. Now we seem to have a lot of non-productive watchers watching the watchers, who watch the actual workers. And then we need government contract monitors to watch all that……
The argument that always seems to come from the right is that by using contractors the federal government gets out from under the retirement costs for employees, but I would argue that we are still paying those costs through higher contract costs.
I’m not a federal employee, but I am a federal contractor and it’s appalling how much waste I see in contracts.
It’s not just federal contracting that’s the problem either–you see the same problems on a smaller scale with state and local governments. It doesn’t seem to be centered on one group either, we see it in everything from health care to security services in Iraq, to the Space programs.
Bubblegum Tate
Jebus bless you for this, jenniebee.
Bubblegum Tate
In classic wingnut style, Michelle Malkin manages to draw the exact opposite (which is to say, wrong) conclusion: Walter Reed proves that government-run health care sucks. And she notes the Volokh Conspiracy noting:
Except that, as it turns out, it is private companes mismanaging things.
The ironing is delicious.
RSA
Based on this description, it might be argued that the years-long transition between ARPANET and the modern Internet is one example of a project that started out within a government agency and has been taken over and expanded by an enormous number of private companies. I’m not sure that this fits what most people think of as privatization, though.
Andrew
I heard that you can use an iron to make really good grilled cheese sandwiches.
Andrew
I’m sure that Republicans will claim it to be so, but it is obviously very different.
ARPANET was gubmit R&D. ARPANET technology was used by many people as a networking testbed. MILNET split from ARPANET in the early 80s and became DDN and then NIPRNet, all of which are government programs. Nothing was privatized in any sense.
Richard 23
And yet lefties want to bring this high quality of care to everybody through government-run socialized health care for all! Comedy gold!
The ironing is certainly delicious. The iron shall lay down with the lamp.
Kirk Spencer
I’d like to also point out one more cost in government that privatizeers fail to note: oversight.
As anyone who has worked in government can tell you, a significant fraction of time is spent documenting what is done. The reason is because people don’t trust their government to spend the dollars where they want them spent (instead of dropping mysteriously into the politician’s pocket.) One of the sections privatizeers never add is the accountability section. Eventually people realize that their tax dollars are going not to the politician’s pocket but to that of their friends (who are in turn filling the politician’s pockets). And that’s when privatized government gets hammered.
Except that barring lingering lawsuits, the business just goes bankrupt and the players move on to a new company and play the game again.
This will repeat until finally the voters get enough congresscritters in charge to restore the services to the control of the government.
I invite those who want to see the pattern in action over and over again look at commissary provision for the military since the 1700s.
ThymeZone
And incompetant government sucks.
Now that we know that, can we move on to competant government, please?
Thanks.
RSA
You’re right, I think; I retract the example.
numbskull
[In reference to large projects that have been privatized.]
Actually, I think that there are a lot of such projects. State parks have been turned over to private contractors. Basic services like sewage and garbage collection on the city and county levels have been privatized. Road construction and management has been privatized on several levels. And as noted, prison systems (both building and managment) and air traffic control (in some countries) have been privatized.
There’s lots of these examples everywhere I look. When I said large, what I meant was something bigger than small (A Gelato stand is small. The state park where the Gelato stand resides is bigger). A useful privatization exemplar doesn’t have to be enormous, like the USPS, it just needs to be large enough that I care about arguing about it.
In cases of privatization, by definition what you have is an entity that at some point was run by the government for some reason. Now, that reason may no longer be valid, or it may have never been valid, or it may be perfectly sound, reasonable, and still in effect. So, the first step in privatization should be an analysis of the history of the privatization target. Why is it governmental currently? Does that reason still hold? Are there other, current reasons for it to be governmental?
I never see those questions asked or answered.
Once those questions are answered, then the analysis should move on to questions about probable outcomes of making the switch. What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?
I sometimes see those questions asked but rarely answered.
What do we normally see? “Uggah! Uggah! Me big time conservative! Privatization goooooood! Government baaaaad! Uggah! Uggah! Drool drool drool. Gimmee gimmee gimmee.”
Not a compelling argument, but apparently effective.
Richard 23
Ah, you must be a Brownback supporter then.
Pb
About those internets:
ThymeZone
Does he think the earth is 6000 years old?
Is he the guy they made that “Brownback Mountain” movie about? So I assume he hates faggots?
chopper
i love lamp.
garyb50
blah blah blah… All of you are asshole navel gazing gits.
Each & Every One of You.
In love with yourselves, your words.
You All = Disgust
RSA
Obviously someone who doesn’t even like words.
ThymeZone
I think the correct term is “All y’all.”
For future reference.
garyb50
“ThymeZone Says:
I think the correct term is “All y’all.”
For future reference.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:01 pm”
Good point, asshole; I forgot a very important WORD…
My bad-allow me a rewrite: “blah blah blah… All of you are CONDESCENDING asshole navel gazing gits.”
ThymeZone
Well, cocksucker, so far you haven’t actually written one coherent WORD.
You might notice that, uh words are the only means of communication here, so if you hate them, maybe another hobby would be a better choice for you?
Just sayin.
numbskull
Like I said,
Punchy
It beats using the toaster. By a smidgen.
BARRASSO
Isn’t the free market just the choice on what will be the most effective service for the lowest cost, therefore the majority of Americans want universal single payer coverage because it is the most effective for the lowest cost. That is the free market at work.
BTW Richard23 liberalism = socialism/communism is incorrect that is why there are different words for each of these things. But then again conservatism = nazism/fascism wow now that is deep thinkin’.
garyb50
Thank you, ThymeZone, for informing me of my obvious lack of proper participation vis a vis coherent words. Seems you even accuse me of lack of thought. I confess, guilty as charged. My initial post was to inform ASSHOLES & COCKSUCKERS like you that the hearing into the WR situation was live and happening in real time. Why I had no WORDS was because I was too emotional, too blown away, too caught up in the testimony to express my anger.
So, whatever, you and all the other assholes here, no matter what political stripe or bullshit belief just went on & on & on making cute ‘look at me’ posts.
(give your camera to somebody)
just sayin
ThymeZone
Well played, I must say.
Are you a lawyer, by any chance?
Or a dentist?
ThymeZone
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!
Funny, yet pathetic.
When’s your birthday? I’m sending you a sandwich board.
garyb50
“ThymeZone Says:
Thank you, ThymeZone, for informing me of my obvious lack of proper participation
Well played, I must say.
Are you a lawyer, by any chance?
Or a dentist?”
No, dickwad, I’m a PHOTOGRAPHER & GRAPHIC ARTIST… and painter and father of twins and vegetable gardener and worm farmer etc etc etc
But my wife is an attorney (we wordsmiths prefer attorney to lawyer, you know?)
What’s your point?
chopper
BWA HA HA HA HA!!! ooh, that’s rich. ‘graphic artist’. (wipes tear).
ThymeZone
Um, the one on the top of your head?
grumpy realist
And after this back-and-forth and silly stuff goes on for long enough….
….I predict that we will finally decide on some form of top-down, either government or government-supervised system with checks-and-balances, auditors, and transparency built in.
Just as anyone with a grain of business sense would have started in the first place.
ThymeZone
Do you need a good yard man? I got one who is a savior, I tell ya. Really, the guy walks on water.
RSA
What’s wrong with “lawyer”? Is this like doctors who prefer the term “physician”?
garyb50
1: I knew that was ridiculous – graphic artist – but I had to use WORDS, and I foolishly thought it would suffice (foolish thinking, I admit)
2: Surprisingly, ThymeZone, I get the top of my head dig.
Did anyone watch the hearing?
ThymeZone
Really?
My grandmother had a cedar chest.
And grandpa had a wooden leg, so those two got along great.
ThymeZone
Hey, as long as it keeps your hat on, I say.
Punchy
Or fat chicks who prefer “well-built”?
Gary Letter Number–what’s going on in this thar meetin’ of yore telly that’s got you all atwitter?
garyb50
Jesus Christ, Punchy, it’s the hearing ! ! !
The first 3 real living breathing panel witnesses at THE HEARING ! ! !
ThymeZone
Heered ’em on my car radio (Xm satellite ch 122, CNN) and I must say, they were devastating. I mean, that one lady might single handedly have set the GOP back about four decades with her emotional testimony.
Looks like the gummint has truly screwed this pooch and then snuck back in and screwed it a few more times for good luck.
The incompetance of this government could not have been anticipated.
garyb50
ThymeZone:
I’m out of here… can’t compete with the snark.
…but, really, give someday your camera. Anybody.
garyb50
I know all you geniuses will already know this, but:
someday was supposed to be somebody
adios
ThymeZone
Stick around, we’re much more fun than you’d think.
Seriously. Well, I mean, unseriously. Seriously unseriously.
garyb50
“garyb50 Says:
I know all you geniuses will already know this, but:
someday was supposed to be somebody
adios
March 5th, 2007 at 6:21 pm”
I have no idea what that is but it was not me. Bizarre.
dreggas
I couldn’t listen to the hearing, well I could have since I can listen to C-Span but man had I been I probably would have hurt someone.