WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama wants to make it easier to monitor how the second $350 billion installment of the financial bailout is spent and says homeowners and small businesses should get some help.
“We can regain the confidence of both Congress and the American people in that this is not just money that is being given to banks without any strings attached and nobody knows what happens, but rather that it is targeted very specifically at getting credit flowing again to businesses and families,” Obama said in an interview aired today.
Obama’s economic team has been talking with the Bush administration about having Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ask Congress as early as this week for access to the rest of the bailout fund. If Congress rejected such a request, a presidential veto could still free up the money, unless Congress overrode the veto.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated during a rare Senate session today that Bush and Obama officials are near agreement on submitting notice to Congress about using the remaining $350 billion.
“We’re waiting to hear from President Bush and or President-elect Obama as to what, if anything, they’re going to do,” said Reid, D-Nev., “and that’s occurring as we speak.”
The Congressional Oversight Panel raised detailed questions last week about how banks are spending the first $350 billion, how the money will combat the rising tide of home foreclosures and Treasury’s overall strategy for the rescue. In instance after instance, the panel said, the Treasury Department did not offer adequate responses.
In an interview aired today on ABC’s “This Week,” Obama said he has asked his economic team to develop a set of principles to ensure more openness about how the money is spent. Under consideration by Obama aides and congressional Democrats are proposals to limit executive pay at institutions that receive the money and to force such institutions to get rid of any private aircraft they may own or lease.
“I think that when you look at how we have handled the home foreclosure situation and whether we’ve done enough in terms of helping families on the ground who may have lost their homes because they lost their jobs or because they got sick, we haven’t done enough there,” he said.
Obama conceded it will be difficult to enforce his pledge to ban congressionally earmarked projects from the nearly $800 billion economic stimulus plan he’s negotiating with Congress.
“In a package of this magnitude, will there end up being certain projects that potentially don’t meet that criteria of helping on health care, energy or education? Certainly,” he told ABC in the interview taped Saturday.
But Obama said inaction carries too great a risk. “We can’t afford three, four, five, six more months where we’re losing half a million jobs per month. And the estimates are that if we don’t do anything, we could see 4 million jobs lost this year.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that the economic package being negotiated might well end up costing more than $775 billion. Some lawmakers have put the price tag at nearly $1 trillion.
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