Committee Formed to Investigate Why Previous Committee Accomplished Nothing

The Department of Organizational Oversight announced Thursday the formation of a new committee tasked with investigating why the Committee on Operational Efficiency, formed in 2022 with a two-year mandate and a $340,000 budget, produced no findings, no recommendations, and no final report. The new body, officially designated the Committee on Committee Effectiveness (CCE), has been given a two-year mandate and a $340,000 budget. 'We take the failure of the previous committee very seriously,' said Deputy Director Harold Triplicate at the CCE's inaugural meeting, which was held in the same conference room where the previous committee had met 47 times without producing a single deliverable. 'Our goal is to determine what went wrong and ensure it doesn't happen again.' Minutes from the CCE's first meeting indicate that the body spent two hours debating its own name, forty-five minutes selecting a committee chair, and the remaining fifteen minutes scheduling the next meeting. 'These things take time,' said newly elected CCE Chair Patricia Quorum. 'You can't rush an investigation into why a committee was slow. The irony would be inappropriate.' Records from the original Committee on Operational Efficiency, obtained through an interdepartmental records request that took eleven months to process, reveal that the body spent its first year establishing subcommittees and its second year attempting to schedule a joint meeting of all subcommittees, a task complicated by the discovery that two of the subcommittees had identical mandates and a third had no members. When asked whether the new committee might suffer the same fate, Chair Quorum responded that the CCE has 'a clear sense of purpose and a firm commitment to accountability,' adding that the committee's first substantive session would be scheduled 'once we've finalized the seating chart.'