Oversight Overload

Memo to federal agency officials: Start clearing your calendars and get ready to spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., incoming chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, tells Politico that he wants each of his seven subcommittees to hold one to two hearings each week for 40 weeks out of the year.

I'm not good at math, but by my calculations that's 280 to 560 hearings -- and that doesn't count full committee sessions. (By comparison, when Democrat Henry Waxman led the panel while George W. Bush was president, he held 203 hearings in two years.)

Even with the stepped-up pace, Issa thinks his panels won't be able to keep up with the full pace of oversight work, and will have to refer a lot of issues to other committees in the hopes they'll pick up the slack.

Don't expect a lot of good news or best practices to emerge from the sessions, either. Issa says their purpose will be to "measure failures."

Also, in case you were wondering, yes, Issa says he will "seriously consider" reverting the committee to its traditional GOP name, putting "Government Reform" before "Oversight." In recent years, every time control of Congress changes hands, the name that comes first in the panel's moniker changes, too.

Update, Nov. 9, 8:18 a.m.: The Project on Government Oversight says there's nothing to fear from stepped-up oversight, as long as "Republican committee chairs and leadership ... focus on investigating substantive problems with an eye toward finding solutions to benefit the public interest--rather than gunning for the 2012 elections."