This week's edition of Bill Moyers Journal takes a look at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and its work to investigate contractor waste, fraud, and abuse.

Here's the promo for the show, which airs on Friday:

The New York Times wonders why the president believes that a wartime contracting commission and protection for contractor fraud whistleblowers would hinder his constitutional duty to faithfully execute laws.

The [national defense authorization] bill included four important provisions that Mr. Bush decided he will enforce only if he wants to.

The president said they impinged on his constitutional powers. We asked the White House to explain that claim, but got no answer, so we'll do our best to figure it out.

The first provision created a commission to determine how reliant the government is on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, how much waste, fraud and abuse has occurred and what has been done to hold accountable those who are responsible. Congress authorized the commission to compel government officials to testify.

Perhaps this violated Mr. Bush's sense of his power to dole out contracts as he sees fit and to hold contractors harmless. The same theory applies to the second provision that Mr. Bush said he would not obey: a new law providing protection against reprisal to those who expose waste, fraud or abuse in wartime contracts.

When President Bush signed into law the National Defence Authorization act on Monday evening, not only did he sign into law the authorization for the Webb-McCaskill wartime contracting commission, but he also issued a signing statement indicating that such a commission may interfere with his constitutional obligations. However, the Senate plans to press ahead with its plans to establish a commission that would investigate waste and fraud related to wartime contracts.

Sen. Jim (D-VA) Webb delivered remarks on the Senate floor expressing his bafflement at the president's insistence that accountability would interfere with his constitutional duties.

In other words, the President of the United States—who has been in charge of the conduct of this war and whose administration has been in charge of executing these contracts, supervising them, making sure that they meet the requirements of fairness in the law—is now saying that he believes that a legislative body can enact a law that he can choose to ignore because he says it would interfere with his responsibility to supervise a war as Commander-and-Chief.

I am at a total loss here. I am amazed to see this kind of language employed with respect to this legislation.

The Commission was put into place with broad bipartisan and bicameral support, with the intention of studying systemic problems. I would think that these are the sorts of problems that this President would want to root out.

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Another unbelievable story on contracting in the Washington Post this morning. Walter Pincus reports that government officials (including Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William M. Solis, director of defense capabilities and management for the Government Accountability Office) testified before Congress that the Bush administration is unable to manage the enormous number of U.S. contractors currently working in Iraq and Afghanistan.