The White House announced a new independent review of the Department of Energy loan guarantee program this afternoon, as congressional Republicans scheduled a vote on whether to subpoena the Obama administration for documents on the loan provided to the failed solar manufacturing company Solyndra.

White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley said the administration's outside review would evaluate the DOE current loan portfolio and provide recommendations for improving loan monitoring. The portfolio, which covers three separate loan programs, currently includes 33 different loans and loan guarantees totaling about $25 billion. The portfolio also includes five loan or loan guarantee conditional commitments that would total $11 billion if they are all eventually finalized.

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.

The review will be led by Herb Allison, who previously served as assistant secretary of Treasury for financial stability and oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Allison is a former president and CEO of TIAA-CREF who, during the George W. Bush administration, was tapped to served as president of Fannie Mae after it entered into conservatorship.

Allison's review is expected to last 60 days, after which he will release an evaluation of the current portfolio's performance, recommendations for enhanced monitoring and a plan for establishing an early-warning system to identify troubled loans before they go the way of Solyndra.

"I look forward to getting to work examining the Energy Department's loan portfolio," Allison said in a statement. "This administration clearly recognizes the challenges and opportunities that coexist with these programs. My goal is to assess the current financial state of the portfolio and to ensure effective monitoring and management of the loan portfolio going forward."

In a separate statement, Daley said Allison "always tells it like it is" and that the administration is looking forward to his "candid assessment."

"The President is committed to investing in clean energy because he understands that the jobs developing and manufacturing these technologies will either be created here or in other countries," Daley said. "And while we continue to take steps to make sure the United States remains competitive in the 21st century energy economy, we must also ensure that we are strong stewards of taxpayer dollars."

But that announcement is not likely to keep the House Energy and Commerce Committee from moving ahead from its subpoena vote Thursday.

The subpoena vote marks a serious, but not unexpected, escalation of the ongoing tug of war over documents regarding the bankrupt solar tube manufacturing company, which received more than half a billion dollars in Department of Energy loan guarantee money.

The White House claims that the 900 pages of documents already provided by the White House, along with more than 69,000 pages of documents from the Office of Management and Budget, DOE and the Treasury Department, show that that Obama administration is cooperating fully with the congressional probe.

Administration officials say the continued document demands -- along with the insistence by the committee's chief investigator Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) that President Obama open up his personal BlackBerry to the committee -- represent the actions of lawmakers more interested in political theater than in conducting real oversight.

But Energy and Commerce Republicans say that it is not the White House's place to say which documents the committee should and should not have access to as it conducts its probe.

"What is the White House trying to hide from the American public?" Stearns and Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said in a joint release today. "It is alarming for the Obama White House to cast aside its vows of transparency and block Congress from learning more about the roles that those in the White House and other members of the administration played in the Solyndra mess."

The committee sent its first request for documents to the White House on Oct. 5 and a follow-up request on Oct. 18. In responses to both letters, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler has suggested that the committee's requests are encroaching on executive branch confidentiality interests (E&E Daily, Oct. 21).

"While we of course respect Executive Privilege, the White House Counsel ... has not asserted it," Stearns and Upton said today. "Moreover, we fail to see why internal White House communications about a loan guarantee to a solar panel manufacturer would implicate issues of national security or the other foundations upon which the Supreme Court has recognized the Privilege."

Earlier this year, the committee voted to subpoena OMB after criticizing the office for "stonewalling" requests for documents related to the Solyndra investigation (Greenwire, July 13). .