Subcommittee leaders say that is just one example. The subcommittee will come to order. Without objection the chair has authorized to declare a recess of the committee at any time. The subcommittee is convening a hearing on the document production efforts on the office of personnel management, the federal bureau of investigation and the General Services administration in response to various committees and subcommittee document request. I now recognize myself for an opening statement. I want to thank the witnesses for being here although i know there could be more comfortable hearings to attend. I regret we need to have this hearing. We are here because opm, the fbi has not substantially complied with the committees request for documents from several months ago. We will witness the stunning lack of cooperation across the administration in response to multiple congressional investigations. For this committee to inform its important constitutional oversight mission, we must have documents and information requested from agencies. That in turn requires cooperation. When the committee or subcommittee sends a written response for answers, we expect meaningful and timely compliance and not stall tactics and obfuscation. It is because of a breakdown in that process you three are here today. Today we will be asking each of you to justify your respective agencies troublesome production track record and to identify those hurdles preventing full compliance. And offer tangible solutions so the committee can fulfill its constitutionally mandated oversight duties. This morning we will examine the status of responses to three committee and subcommittee investigations. First, the committee is investigating the administrations plan to abolish the office of personal management. We believe on our side it is a reckless approachable that lacks merit, justification and coherent rationale. Frankly delta been raised about it on a bipartisan basis. The subcommittee has requested basic documents from opm, an agency that runs programs that serves 2. 7 million active employees, federal retirees and 8 million family members receive healthcare benefits. We requested documents that any project manager would have required or even a simple restructuring of an organization. We asked for legal analysis of the administrations authority to eliminate opm, a cost benefit analysis and a timeline. These arent intrusive requests. We wanted to know whether this would work and whether the administration had done in summer such that it could persuade us as to the merits. We have concluded it wont and they havent. We have received next to nothing in response to this straightforward document request and no information provided adequately demonstrates how this plan would improve services to former enteral employees and their families. If we have been unclear thus far, let me take the opportunity to clarify that from our point of view this haptic proposal is going to be dead on arrival hearing capitol hill. The administrations intention to dismantle opm is reckless. Its acting director has reportedly boasted about planning to play chicken with congress by furloughing or taking hostage 150 employees of opm if congress did not provide the administration with authority to eliminate the agency by october 1. This is not a game. These are real lives at stake. Opms linkage refusal to provide information the committee has requested is unacceptable. Opm offers additional records just this week which is ironic that the new records make reference to the documents we have been asking for without providing them. The latest documents convince us even more that the administration is attempting an end run in order to eliminate more than 130 years of meritbased nonpartisan Civil Service. Second, the committees investigating the abrupt decision to abandon the Long Term Plan to move the fbi headquarters to a suburban location and replace it with a more costly plan to keep pennsylvania avenue locations, demolish the existing J Edgar Hoover building and construct a new facility on the same site. In order to make that pivot, the administration had to abandon some compelling criteria that has dominated for well over eight years. And that included consolidation of the workforce, it included modernization taking cogginss of 21st century forensics and dna research and getting setbacks which cannot be achieved at the Current Location which has inherently urban setbacks that are inherently insecure. In february 2018 i wrote the gsa Inspector General and requested she investigate the decisionmaking role and the role of the white house if any in influencing the decision. In august 2018 the Inspector General issued a report that noted inaccuracies in the cost estimates presented to congress to the tune of more than a half billion dollars and revealed that the president was personally participating in discussions regarding this revised plan and there are pictures to prove it. Yet despite all parties within the administration claiming the fbi alone made the decision, the fbi has turned over just 1300 pages in the last 3 1 2 month and that includes a lastminute production last night. I might add, in talking to the fbi i was assured that they have gone through and filtered 1. 5 million documents. When we had that conversation we were in possession of 490. Some of them reductive, some of them redundant. While we can admire the production going on at the fbi, we are not so sure we admire the responsiveness to this committees request. To say that Congress Continues to have questions about the abrupt reversal in the fbis years long plan and that the change of heart involved direct medications with the chief executive of the country is an understatement. Third, the committee is actively investigating the post Office Building between gsa and the Trump Organization. Because President Trump, he booked a landlord and attendant tenant of what is now called the Trump International hotel. Today it gsa has refused to turn over financial documents relevant to the committees investigation which would headlight on any potential complex of interest or constitutional concerns with respect to the clause. Finally i want to address a Troubling Development across several committee investigations. All three agencies represented here today, opm, gsa and the fbi have suggested that they are withholding many documents because they are draft documents regarding Decision Making. There is a problem. That decisionmaking is exactly the focus of the committee and subcommittees investigations. It is not anything to this congress. Whether it is the decision to abolish a federal agency, a federal workforce, a multibilliondollar construction decision affecting thousands of fbi staff and security and safety of the country, or the decision to allow a president to service the tenants of his own hotel which is on government owned property, such decisionmaking documents are critical to our examination and investigation. Lastly, as i said, the fbi Deputy Director called me personally to discuss the agencys compliance or lack thereof and as i said, while i thanked him for the outreach and the 1. 5 million documents he said have been examined, i did give him specific directions in terms of what would satisfy the committees inquiry. Unfortunately those conditions have not been met. It is my hope that todays hearing will provide some answers and prod our federal employees to cooperate with the committee of jurisdiction so we dont have to resort to methods of compulsion. And with that, i turned to my distinguished Ranking Member, mr. Meadows. Thank you mr. Chairman. Thank you for your leadership and for all of you being here this morning. Candidly, document production is something that i know a little bit about. And i guess i have expressed more than a little frustration with some document production. Instead of doing prepared remarks, let me perhaps get into where the chairman and i agree. If any of you are here today to say that it is part of the deliberative process that somehow congress cant see the documents, i would urge you strongly not to go there. You will find the full forcible republicans and democrats coming together to acknowledge that that is not a legitimate reason for you to withhold documents. Secondly, if you think that somehow the lack of giving documents to this committee is serving a greater purpose, i would assure you that it is not. Ms. Tyson, you have been very helpful and i want to just say thank you for your help in trying to get through some of the documents to address some of the concerns and certainly with regards to the fbi building and working with mr. Borden and gsa guys, let me just tell you i dont agree that we should be building the fbi building and tearing it down and doing it there. And i can tell you that i have been vocal about that. I think it is the wrong decision from a real estate perspective, i think it is the wrong decision in terms of efficiency. That being said, it is not my call. What is my call is understanding the parameters that went into that decision. I can tell you in talking to the administration at the highest level they are agnostic on whether it gets built in dc or virginia or maryland or wherever it needs to go. I think most of this from what i understand ms. Tyson was more of an fbi decision than it was an executive Branch Decision at 1600 pennsylvania avenue. So keeping documents would allude to nefarious purposes that dont exist. So, the more you can be transparent in that, i think on the democrat side they will have a divided concern on whether the fbi goes in dc or somewhere else in maryland or virginia, i am not divided and on our side i think what you do is keep a small footprint for the fbi headquarters to allow them to work with doj and you move the majority of the fbi folks to a more efficient location, that is my take. But again, we have to have the documents to do that. As it relates to the trump hotel and some of those documents that are in the custody of gsa or others, guys, let me just tell you everybody would have had to believed that this president was going to get elected when he started those negotiations and nobody believed it. So, holding back documents on potentially nefarious purposes for the trump hotel, we were all celebrating the fact that the Old Post Office was going to be renovated and used for something other than a food court and museum. Everybody was applauding that including the mayor of dc until the president became the president. So, giving us documents that allow us to get to the bottom of this and that they are not fully redacted is key. From an opm standpoint here is one of the areas that i am very troubled. I dont agree with the decision to take the security clearances and move them to dod. I think i have been very open about that. Heres the problem. Congress voted for that and now what weve got is we have a situation where over the objection of mr. Connolly and i they voted to move the security clearances to dod, now we are implementing that and we are coming up with all kinds of problems. I was very troubled at the i. T. Capacity of opm. We have got to do something, whether that is consolidation, moving to gsa let me just tell you, we have a third world computing system for opm, no wonder we got hacked. And maybe we are not as vulnerable to hacks because we have a third of World Computers system because all the hackers are on a complicated system. Going going there, i want to say thank you to the opm folks for allowing me to really see firsthand what is there, we have to find a solution and this is not about downsizing jobs or getting rid of jobs, in fact i want the opm folks to know that that is very clear from my standpoint, we want to make sure that their jobs are protected. At the same time we cannot continue to do business the way we are doing business from a computing standpoint at opm so i am using that to say the more documents that you give us in a transparent fashion even if you think that it gives the wrong impression it is better than the impression of us not getting the documents believing that there are bad things youre keeping from us, does that make sense . As you have your testimony today, if you do not go to the deliberative process and that we dont have a right to it you will find a very unified pushback and with that, i will yield back. I think my distinguished Ranking Member and he is consistent and i really want to thank him and expressed my admiration. Whether it is democratic or Republican Administration all of us have a stake in the integrity of the document request. And all of us need to be consistent in insisting on compliance with those requests. What we end up doing with it that is a different matter. We may part ways on some decisions, although i would agree with almost everything you said, both about the fbi and opm, no one is denying there is a problem but how we get at the solution has to be examined and that is really what we are trying to do. I see the distinguished chairman of the full committee is here and i want to give mr. Cummings an opportunity to make whatever statement he wishes to make with respect to the subject, welcome mr. Cummings. Welcome mr. Chairman and i want to commend you chairman connelly for holding this hearing and i want to commend mr. Meadows, our Ranking Member not only for his statement that he just made, but for his spirit of cooperation. Under this administration we are witnessing simply a stunning lack of cooperation that is hampering multiple investigations and it appears to be a part of a large scale coordinated pattern of obstruction. I do not say that lightly. It is frustrating when you cannot get documents. It hampers us in doing our job and it literally takes away power from the congress of the United States of america. It takes away our power. Clear and simple. The documents that we seek in investigations we will discuss today our documents that we would have received in previous administrations. Many of them without any reductions and without a fight. Some of them are even the type of documents that we did receive in the beginning of the trump administration. Before the president declared that he and his administration were and i quote fighting all subpoenas. Come on now. This is the United States of america. Fighting all subpoenas . Congress has a constitutional duty, we have a duty to conduct oversight over decisions that have been made in the executive branch especially regarding leases or contracts that impact taxpayers. It is our job to ensure that these decisions are being made in the most costeffective and efficient fashion. Without favoritism or abuse. The committee is conducting two separate investigations involving dsa, one of his role in the decision again a plan to move fbi headquarters to a new site, suburban campus. And the other of gsas management of the lease for the trump hotel and the district of columbia. My interest in these topics is not new and should not be surprised to gsa. I wrote my first letter on the trump hotel and questions about possible breach of the lease shortly after the president was elected in the fall 2016. Along with several members of congress i first wrote to administrator emily murphy raising questions about the fbi headquarters eight months ago. Eight months ago. After becoming the committee chairman, chairman connelly in his great wisdom and i and others send new request letters on these topics. One category of documents are monthly reports that the Trump Organization is required to file with gsa about the trump hotel in the district of columbia. At the beginning of the administration we received those reports but then something worrisome happened. Without explanation gsa reversed course and just stopped producing them. It is now two years later. After democrats were voted in to the majority we again requested that these Monthly Financial reports be done. But now instead of producing these documents, gsa questioned the committee and i quote legitimate legislative purpose. And i have to tell you at some point this is the kind of language that becomes very frustrating and the courts have ruled on this very issue. If that language sounds familiar it is because it is the same language and the same line that the president s personal attorneys have been using to challenge congresss authority to conduct oversight in other areas. A Federal District court has already rejected this argument decisively. It was an ace, slamdunk. An airtight case. I told my staff i have been practicing law for 40 years and i have never seen a case this tight in missouri. And he wrote this. This is a quote. As long as congress investigates on the subject matter on which legislation could be had, Congress Acts as contemplated by article 1 of the constitution. To our witnesses here today as i close, any other executive Branch Agency that may be watching, we want the message to be abundantly clear and i have no doubt about it, Congress Must obtain the documents necessary to fulfill our constitutional response abilities. Stop obstructing us. Stop blocking us. We are trying to do the job the voters sent us here to do and to do the job we swore we would do. If you will not provide those documents willfully, willingly, we will issue subpoenas to compel them. In closing let me say this. Todays hearing is not the end of the story. I appreciate that the agencies have made some Movement Towards compliance in anticipation of todays hearing. What you have offered is simply not enough. You have not committed to provide us with the unredacted documents that explain your decisions. And number 2, to mr. Chairman and mr. Meadows, i thank you for the cooperative spirit that we have on this subcommittee. I have to tell you, when i listen to mr. Meadows and connolly, they are bending over backwards to work with you all but at some point you feel like you are getting slapped in the face. I dont know how they feel that that is how i feel. And you are sticking up your nose at us saying we dont care. We have to do better than that.