Just when you thought the controversy over Solyndra might be dying down, along comes House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to keep the issue square in the spotlight.

Nine months after the House Energy and Commerce Committee kicked off its investigation into what was then a little-known California solar energy company, Issa is in the early stages of what he is calling a wider probe of political interference in the federal grant and loan application process.

"These loan guarantees and grants all go back to the question of is there an objective process?" Issa said in an interview last week. "Is that process well monitored, is it controlled by career professionals and is there a predictability of outcome?"

SPECIAL REPORT

Solyndra, a solar manufacturer that was given a $535 million loan guarantee and touted by the White House as a model for the clean energy economy, has filed for bankruptcy. E&E examines how it got there and what it means. Click here to read the report.

But some Democrats on the oversight panel say that is territory that the Energy and Commerce Committee has already covered.

When Energy Secretary Steven Chu appeared before the Energy and Commerce panel three weeks ago, committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in his opening statement that "the number of red flags about Solyndra that were raised along the way -- many from within DOE -- and either ignored or minimized by senior officials is astonishing. ... The truth is, the expert staff were concerned that the company was bound to fail."

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who serves on the Oversight and Government Reform panel, said this week that he is not sure what new information his panel could expect to uncover.

"I just think that's not a wise way to proceed," Connolly said. "I think we ought to respect the work that's been done on Energy and Commerce and actually embrace our own agenda."

But Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), who leads the Energy and Commerce subcommittee that has been investigating Solyndra, said yesterday that he welcomes the work that Issa is doing.

"I think he has his role and I have my role. I talk to him regularly and I respect what he wants to do and I respect what he wants to do," Stearns said.

Both Issa and Stearns said that there has been no request for Republican leadership to get involved to determine the specific lanes the two committees should operate in.

"He's sort of, I think, concentrating on the campaign side and we're concentrating on the substance of the loan and why [Solyndra] went bankrupt," Stearns said. "He's looking for influence on campaign contributions, I think."

Issa offered a slightly different take.

"Energy and Commerce can decide that you're not going to have grants or loan guarantees for clean energy, green energy. That would be in their jurisdiction, not mine," he said. "But the grant process, the government employees and civil servants bypassed, was the process politically influenced, were there violations of the Hatch Act, those fall under my jurisdiction."

One-two GOP punch

The loan guarantee probe is not the first time this year that Issa's Oversight and Government Reform Committee has followed up on the Energy and Commerce Committee's investigations.

In late February, the Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Chu regarding a plan to scuttle the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project. Issa sent a letter in mid-March to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also requesting information about plans to end the Yucca Mountain project.

When it comes to Solyndra, Energy and Commerce's first letter to Chu also came in February of this year. Issa sent his own letter to the White House asking about Solyndra in September, after the company went bankrupt.

"I really think that this is in the jurisdiction of Energy and Commerce and I think one of the problems our committee is having because of the peripatetic nature of the chairman's legislative ambitions is that we keep encroaching on other committees' turfs," Connolly said yesterday.

More recently Issa has requested documents relating to another DOE loan granted to the Severstal steel plant in Dearborn, Mich. That $730 million loan, which Issa has questioned the market need for, was granted through the DOE's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan program.

As he waits for a response from Severstal, Issa held a hearing last week to scrutinize the alleged politicization of grants from the Department of Health and Human Services.

"This committee has a responsibility to see that the [grant] process is predictable at the end based on the applicants' expectations at the beginning," Issa said at that hearing. "Whether it is ... the award of tanker contracts by the Air Force, whether it is green energy proposals, whether in fact it's the underwriting of the purchase of a steel mill somehow deemed to be green."

Issa said last week that Republicans on the Oversight panel "don't have further questions at the present time on Solyndra."

Solyndra "was an earmark. ... We know enough to know that the process got distorted. At Severstal we're still looking for more information," he said.

The Severstal probe and larger focus on the grant and loan process comes at a time when some have said the Energy and Commerce investigation into Solyndra has started to fizzle.

Solyndra became a household name this fall when the company went bankrupt after receiving more than a half-billion dollars through a controversial DOE loan guarantee program. The company became a punch line for host Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and images of Solyndra executives exercising their fifth amendment right during a Energy and Commerce hearing in September were widely covered on cable news programs.

But while the disclosure of various emails by Obama administration officials regarding Solyndra has been embarrassing for the White House and Department of Energy, Republicans have yet to produce a smoking gun. And the five-hour hearing last month featuring Chu may have been the dramatic high point of the ongoing saga, but it failed to produce anything particularly new or shocking.

"The Republicans hoped to prove that the Solyndra loan was a political favor to wealthy investors with Democratic ties, chiefly George Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire. They have not made this case," The New York Times wrote in an editorial following Chu's testimony. "Nor have the Republicans succeeded in showing President Obama's green energy strategy to be a flop."

Stearns caused a bit of a stir following the hearing when he called for Chu's resignation.

"He was unaware of so many things," Stearns said of Chu's appearance before the committee. "He was over his head in the financial understanding of Solyndra as well as the politics."

Out of proportion?

The Energy and Commerce Committee's probe does have the potential to heat back up as Stearns has indicated that he plans to hold more hearings -- perhaps before the end of the year -- and could eventually call senior White House aides to testify. He also continues to bash the White House for not responding to subpoenas for Solyndra-related documents.

But last week, a Bloomberg Government report took a critical view of Stearns' investigation, noting in part that the focus on Solyndra has not been proportional to the project's impact.

The report found that the DOE Section 1705 loan guarantee program that Solyndra was funded through constitutes 1.7 percent of the federal government's guarantee commitments across all agencies. And Solyndra's guarantee of $535 million is 3 percent of that $16.1 billion portfolio.

The controversy over Solyndra "has overshadowed the need for substantive evaluation of loan-guarantee initiatives at the Department of Energy," the report stated.

And while Issa may intend to cover that subject in the course of his broader investigation, the report also found that ending DOE's loan guarantee authority would result in no budget savings and would potentially hinder energy development.

"Ending DOE's loan-guarantee authority would have no budgetary impact and may jeopardize the remaining projects under review, calling into question the potential of new-to-market energy projects for renewable, nuclear power, advanced fossil fuel and carbon capture technology," the report found.