117: #tbt to when Congress actually worked

DecodeDC

In today’s political atmosphere of partisan bickering and congressional dysfunction, there’s something reassuring about reflecting on a time when things actually worked on Capitol Hill. On the latest DecodeDC podcast, we’re traveling back to the 1940s to tell you a story about Congress at its very best. It’s a story about a little known senator named Harry Truman and the committee he led that investigated waste, fraud and abuse in the lead up to the United States entering World War II. “It really seemed to be, for this brief moment in history, the work of the Truman committee was about saving money, was about saving lives, and about winning the war, and they did it in a non partisan, or a bipartisan way,” said Steve Drummond, who wrote an essay on the committee and spent months researching its work. The Truman committee remains one example, perhaps a fleeting one, of when members of Congress really did work together across the aisle for a common cause.