How Senator Harry Truman's Committee Investigated Wartime Contract Waste

Early in 1941, a senator from Missouri whom most of Washington regarded as a machine politician's errand boy got into his own car and started driving. Harry Truman had just survived a bruising primary to win a second term, and he had been hearing from constituents about the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, a new Army camp in the Missouri Ozarks: men standing around, materials piled up, contractors paid regardless of results. The United States was not yet at war, but it was spending enormous sums to get ready for one. Truman drove from camp to camp and plant to plant through several states, looking at what was being built and how. He did not bring reporters. He took notes. When he got back to Washington, he gave a speech on the Senate floor about what he had seen and asked for a committee to investigate. His colleagues gave him one, with a starting budget of $15,000, a sum so small it suggested nobody expected much. Within three years that committee would make him a national figure, and within four he would be president.

In short: The Senate's Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, chaired by Harry Truman from 1941 to 1944, examined how defense money was spent during the Second World War. It exposed defective engines, falsified steel tests and wasteful contracts while staying out of military strategy. Its bipartisan, fact-first approach became the model for congressional oversight of military spending, which is still badly needed.

The problem with cost-plus

To understand what Truman found, start with how the government was buying things. The rush to build camps, ships, planes and factories in 1940 and 1941 relied heavily on cost-plus contracts, under which the government paid a contractor's costs plus a fee. In a hurry, this made sense: nobody could estimate costs precisely for projects that had never been done at that scale, and the government wanted builders to start at once.

The trouble is the incentive. A contractor paid its costs has little reason to keep them down. Under some versions of the system, the more a contractor spent, the more it earned. Truman saw the results at camp after camp: idle workers on the payroll, equipment rented at high rates, little attention to schedules.

He also noticed who got the contracts. Large firms, often already well connected in Washington, were winning most of the business, while small manufacturers in places like Missouri struggled to get any. To Truman, a product of small-town Missouri who had once run a haberdashery that failed in the recession after the First World War, this was not an abstraction.

Building a committee that people would trust

The Senate approved the committee on March 1, 1941. Its official name was the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but everyone soon called it the Truman Committee.

Truman made a few choices early that shaped everything after. He hired Hugh Fulton, a former federal prosecutor from New York with a reputation for thoroughness, as chief counsel. He insisted that the committee's staff find facts before the members held hearings, so that the public sessions confirmed what investigators already knew rather than fishing for it.

He also chose to keep politics out as much as possible. The committee included Republicans such as Owen Brewster of Maine, Joseph Ball of Minnesota and later Homer Ferguson of Michigan alongside Democrats. Truman worked to produce reports that members of both parties would sign, which gave its findings weight that a partisan document would never have had. Agencies and contractors could brush off a report from one party as politics. It was much harder to wave away a report signed by both.

Finally, Truman drew a line he never crossed. He had been an artillery captain in France in 1918, and he had read his history. During the Civil War, a congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had second-guessed generals, held hearings on battlefield decisions and, in the view of many historians, made things worse. Truman said his committee would not do that. It would investigate how money was spent and how things were made, not how battles were fought.

What the committee found

Once the United States entered the war in December 1941, the stakes rose. Waste was no longer just a matter of money. Defective equipment could kill American servicemen.

• Aircraft engines. In 1943 the committee investigated the Curtiss-Wright plant at Lockland, Ohio, which made engines for military aircraft. Investigators found that defective engines had been approved and shipped, with inspection records altered to cover it up. The committee's report was scathing, and the Army made changes at the plant.
• Steel plate. The committee examined steel produced for Navy ships at a Carnegie-Illinois Steel plant and found evidence that test results had been falsified so that substandard plate would pass. Again, the danger was concrete: ships were only as strong as their steel.
• The Canol project. The Army had built a pipeline and refinery to bring oil from Norman Wells in northern Canada to Whitehorse in the Yukon, to fuel operations in Alaska. The committee concluded that it had cost far more than planned and delivered little, and pressed for an explanation from the War Department.
• Shortages and planning. The committee also looked at broader problems, such as shortages of aluminum and rubber, and pushed for better coordination between military buyers and civilian production agencies.

There was also one investigation Truman chose not to pursue. His investigators noticed enormous sums flowing to mysterious projects in Tennessee and Washington State. Secretary of War Henry Stimson asked Truman to stop asking, telling him it was a top-secret project of the highest importance. Truman agreed. He learned what it was, the atomic bomb, only after he became president in April 1945.

Why the method worked

The Truman Committee is often credited with saving very large sums, and historians generally agree it did, though any precise dollar figure is an estimate. Its more lasting achievement was showing that oversight during a war could make the war effort stronger rather than weaker.

A few features of its method stand out.

It started with facts gathered on the ground. Truman's original road trip set the pattern: investigators went to plants and bases, talked to workers and inspectors and read records before anyone testified.

It focused on systems rather than villains. When the committee found a problem, it asked what rule or practice had allowed it, and recommended a change. Individual wrongdoers were named when the facts warranted, but the point was to fix the process.

It worked with the executive branch rather than against it. Truman was a loyal Democrat investigating a Democratic administration. He often shared findings with agencies before going public, giving them a chance to fix problems. Officials learned that a call from the committee was an early warning, not an ambush, which made them more willing to cooperate.

And it earned public trust by being visibly fair. In March 1943 Time magazine put Truman on its cover. The senator who had been dismissed as a product of the Kansas City machine had become known as a watchdog.

The objection: oversight during wartime

The strongest argument against an investigation like Truman's is an old one. In a war, speed matters more than efficiency. Contractors need to start work immediately. Questions from Congress take time and energy away from production, and public hearings about failures can damage morale at home and give useful information to enemies abroad.

Truman's answer, I think, holds up well. Waste is not just a loss of money; it is a loss of capacity. Every dollar spent on idle workers, every engine that fails, every ship built of bad steel is a dollar, an engine or a ship that is not helping. Oversight done well, focused on production rather than strategy, makes the effort faster in the long run. The committee's restraint on military operations and the Manhattan Project also showed that a congressional body could respect real security needs while still asking hard questions.

That answer applies well beyond wartime. The Pentagon is the largest single part of the federal government's discretionary budget, and it has never passed a full financial audit since its first one was completed in 2018. Defense contractors still operate under complicated contracts in which the incentives can push costs up. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a Commission on Wartime Contracting, created by Congress in 2008, estimated that waste and fraud in contingency contracting ran into the tens of billions of dollars.

The tools that exist now, and their gaps

Congress today has more permanent machinery for watching defense money than Truman ever did. The Government Accountability Office reviews major weapons programs every year and publishes its findings. The Defense Department has its own inspector general. The Defense Contract Audit Agency audits contractors' books. A 1962 law, the Truth in Negotiations Act, requires contractors on many large, noncompetitive deals to hand over certified cost and pricing data, so the government can see what it is paying for.

There is also a much older weapon. The False Claims Act was first passed in 1863, during the Civil War, after reports of contractors selling the Union Army sick mules, rotten supplies and guns that did not fire. It lets the government recover damages from anyone who knowingly bills it falsely, and it lets private whistleblowers bring cases on the government's behalf and share in the recovery. Congress strengthened it in 1986, and it has since returned large sums to the Treasury, much of it from health care and defense fraud.

The gaps are less about tools than about attention. Reports pile up, and many recommendations go unaddressed for years. Big weapons programs gather political protection because their work is spread across many states and districts. Oversight hearings compete for members' time with everything else. What Truman's committee had, and what is often missing now, was a group of senators who made this their main job and stuck with it.

That is a choice any new majority can make. A committee that spends its time on a few major programs, follows the paperwork and reports in plain language, as Truman's did, can still move an institution as large as the Pentagon.

The progressive case for watching the Pentagon

For progressives, it can be tempting to approach military spending only as a question of how much. That question matters, and there are strong arguments that the country spends too much on weapons and too little at home. But Truman's example points to a second question that unites people across the political spectrum: whatever we spend, are we getting what we pay for?

That framing has practical advantages. Many conservatives care deeply about waste in the Pentagon, and some of the most persistent congressional critics of defense contracting have been Republicans. Bills to require the Pentagon to pass its audits, to make contractors justify prices and to protect whistleblowers in the defense industry have drawn support from both parties. Progressives who want to redirect money from weapons to people can build coalitions around accountability that would never form around cuts alone.

It also keeps the focus where Truman kept it, on the people affected. The pilots who flew planes with faulty engines were not abstractions to him. Neither should today's service members be, nor the taxpayers whose money pays for systems that do not work, nor the communities waiting for investments that never arrive because the money went elsewhere.

From Missouri to the White House

Truman's work on the committee was the main reason Franklin Roosevelt chose him as his running mate in 1944, though the choice was the result of complicated party politics. After his nomination that summer, Truman stepped down as chairman. The committee continued its work after he left.

He became vice president in January 1945 and president on April 12, 1945, when Roosevelt died. The man who had spent three years scrutinizing the war machine now commanded it. He was the first president in years who knew from personal experience exactly how the government bought weapons and where the money tended to disappear.

The committee's example has been invoked many times since, by members of both parties, whenever large sums of public money flow quickly to contractors. Its lessons still apply: start with facts, look at systems, be fair, respect real secrets but not convenient ones, and make clear that the goal is to make the government work better.

What you can do

• Contact your members about defense spending. Use our representative lookup to find your representative and senators, call or write them, and see their latest votes. Ask what they will do to make the Pentagon pass a full audit.
• Track military spending debates. Our coverage of the Pentagon and militarism follows defense budgets, contracts and oversight hearings.
• Find bipartisan wins. The common ground page lists bills both parties passed together, including measures on oversight and accountability.
• Watch what Democrats do with the gavel. Our page on Democrats in Congress follows how the party uses its majority, including its oversight committees, after January 2027.

Truman did not set out to become famous. He set out to find out why a camp in the Ozarks was costing so much. The habit of asking that kind of question, patiently and in good faith, is one any member of Congress can adopt.