Following a slew of midterm victories this week, Democrats will take control of the U.S. Senate in January, and Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, says he’s confident he’ll still be able to pursue priority items on his agenda.
Bipartisanship is important and Grassley says he knows he’ll be able to work well alongside any number of Democrats.
Grassley says, “I think I’ve been successful under both Republican and Democrat congresses and Republican and Democrat presidents.”
He says one of his major annual goals is to bring about more oversight, which he says is an effort to make government more transparent. Grassley says he’s a big believer in government accountability and he’s co-founder and chair of the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus.
“Oversight is very important,” Grassley says, “because over the last 80 years, Congress has delegated so much legislative power to the president that there ought to be more time spent by Congress making sure that a Republican or Democrat president faithfully carries out the laws and spends money according to it.”
Grassley was a key player in enacting the Whistleblower Protection Act in 1989 and the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act in 2012. They are considered “anti-gag provisions” which require federal agencies to inform employees of their rights to report wrongdoing at any level.
“We often get information of wrongdoing from whistleblowers,” Grassley says, “so my oversight encourages people in the bowels of the bureaucracy to whistleblow, give us information of wrongdoing so we can pursue it and get it corrected.”
Grassley also led a bipartisan effort to update the False Claims Act, which allows whistleblowers to sue contractors that defraud the government on its behalf. It’s helped recover tens of billions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury.
