This morning's long-awaited showdown between House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa and Energy Secretary Steven Chu over the agency's stimulus spending kicked off early when the congressman yesterday took to cable news shows to level new accusations and the Energy Department released Chu's prepared testimony ahead of the hearing.

Chu will argue today that while there were some bumps in the road as DOE moved some $35 billion in stimulus funds out the door, the agency's recovery act efforts have been successful in creating jobs and putting the United States in a stronger position to compete in the global clean energy economy.

Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar company that received more than half a billion dollars through the agency's controversial loan guarantee program, isn't mentioned by name in Chu's testimony. But he will say the office that granted that loan is being closely monitored and "held accountable" for its efforts.

"The Loan Programs Office continues to work to make certain that its Portfolio Management Division has the resource capacity and expertise to actively monitor loan and loan guarantee transactions to protect U.S. taxpayers," the secretary is set to say. "The office is held accountable through a number of rigorous internal and external reviews."

Chu will also note that, to date, less than 0.1 percent of the department's 15,000 stimulus projects have resulted in a criminal indictment or conviction for waste, fraud or abuse.

"Each one of these cases was unacceptable, and we have taken aggressive action to address issues early on and hold responsible parties accountable," Chu will say. "Moreover, in addition to our own monitoring and oversight efforts, the department has cooperated, and will continue to cooperate, with the Inspector General's office as it investigates any allegations of waste, fraud or abuse."

Perhaps sensing the battle facing him today before a chairman who has been especially harsh in his criticism of DOE, Chu will say that he welcomes "any and every sincere effort" at oversight (E&E Daily, March 19).

"Where we find mistakes, we have and we will move swiftly to correct them," Chu will say. "I hope today can be an opportunity to have a serious, substantive dialogue."

But by the time DOE released Chu's testimony, Issa had already taken to Fox News yesterday to level new accusations against Chu's handling of stimulus dollars.

The California Republican charged that Energy Department officials brushed aside the objections of professional staff at the agency so they could grant a $967 million loan guarantee to an Arizona solar generation project last August.

Issa's committee cited documents about the project obtained by The New York Times yesterday that include emails from the director of the technical and project management division of the loan program, Dong Kim. The emails appear to indicate he was concerned whether the project qualified for the program under a rule that required that projects include new and innovative technologies as opposed to something already available on the market.

"The professional staff at the Department of Energy ruled against this and were overridden by political appointees who clearly wanted to make these loans and were willing to bend the rules to make them," Issa said on Fox News.

But Obama administration officials yesterday accused Issa of cherry-picking his facts and hiding exculpatory evidence, including a separate memo dated Aug. 4, 2010, in which Kim acknowledges that the New Mexico project did in fact include "new and innovative components" even though the company had decided to substitute commercially available cadmium telluride photovoltaic cells.

Another controversy

That battle likely will continue to play out today, but it appears to be only one front in Issa's planned assault on the Energy Department's stimulus spending decisions.

Republicans on the committee will also release their new report today that heavily criticizes DOE's $5 billion Weatherization Assistance Program, which was designed to provide efficiency retrofits to hundreds of thousands of homes using stimulus dollars.

The report blasts DOE for "a stunning lack of oversight" that allowed poor workmanship to go undetected and contractors to abuse the system and put homeowners' health and safety at risk.

"Many DOE contractors did not do the work promised by DOE and many of them actually damaged homes, created hazards and actually made houses less energy efficient," the report says.

The report cites numerous concerns raised by DOE's inspector general in some of the nearly one dozen audits his office has conducted on the program.

"The Weatherization Program represents the kind of failure that materializes when you have an economic stimulus strategy contingent on asking the federal bureaucracy to absorb billions of dollars when the structural infrastructure to administer, disseminate and manage that influx of new money is not put in place," the committee report says.

In his prepared testimony, Chu notes that since 2009, the weatherization program has completed energy-efficiency upgrades in about 860,000 homes, of which 680,000 were upgraded through the Recovery Act.

"These energy efficiency improvements are helping families to reduce energy waste and cut energy costs," the testimony states. "An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study found that weatherization services save families an average of more than $400 on their heating and cooling bills in the first year after services are performed."

Democrats fire back

Issa wasn't the only committee member kicking off today's battle a day early yesterday.

Panel ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) released a letter yesterday requesting that Issa stick to the facts when it comes to his 11 ongoing probes of DOE and its employees.

Cummings pointed to four occasions where he said Issa had leveled charges against DOE officials and employees only to have those charges proved false.

He noted, for example, that last spring Issa accused DOE employees of engaging in criminal conduct by directing General Motors Co. to withhold information from the committee about the agreement between the Obama administration and automakers on fuel economy standards.

"Further investigation revealed that your claim was inaccurate and that Department employees in fact had communicated with GM about how to expedite the Department's FOIA process," Cummings said.

"Although I fully support aggressive oversight to ensure that government programs work effectively and efficiently, I believe the Committee should refrain from making accusations without evidence to support them and should correct the record when claims turn out to be inaccurate," he added. "Only in this way will we be able to uphold the integrity of the Committee and protect the reputations of officials who have dedicated their careers to serving this nation."