Truman Committee

The Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, was a United States Congressional investigative body headed by Senator Harry S. Truman. The bipartisan special committee was formed in March 1941 to find and correct problems in US war production—problems with waste, inefficiency and war profiteering. The Truman Committee proved to be one of the most successful investigative efforts ever mounted by the US government: an initial budget of $15,000 was expanded over three years to $360,000 to save an estimated $10–15 billion in military spending, and thousands of lives of US servicemen. For comparison, the entire cost of the Manhattan Project was $2 billion, at the time. Chairing the committee helped Truman make a name for himself beyond his political machine origins, and was a major factor in the decision to nominate him as vice president, which would propel him to the presidency following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Truman stepped down from leadership of the committee in August 1944, to concentrate on running for vice president in that year's presidential election. From 1941 until its official end in 1948, the Truman Committee held 432 public hearings, listened to 1,798 witnesses and published almost 2,000 pages of reports. Every committee report was unanimous, with bipartisan support.

The war production efforts of the US had previously been subject to congressional oversight during the Civil War (1861–1865) and following the Great War (1914–1918), but each of these were considered accusatory and negative. During the Civil War, the United States Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War hounded President Abraham Lincoln regarding his moderate stance on the prosecution of the war; the committee members wanted a more aggressive war policy. The many secret meetings calling officers away from their duties, caused rancor among the Union's military leaders, and delayed military initiatives. Confederate General Robert E. Lee said that the harm caused to the Union effort by the Union's own Joint Committee was worth two divisions to the rebel cause. Two decades after the Great War, the Nye Committee found that heavy US investments in the United Kingdom had predisposed US bankers and arms manufacturers to back the UK rather than Germany. The 1934–1936 investigation, led by Senator Gerald Nye, caused a noninterventionist backlash against any US involvement in European wars, and resulted in a much lower level of American military preparedness when European conflict erupted again in 1939.

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