“Let me just issue a warning,” said subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), his voice booming across the Rayburn House Office Building meeting room. “If this [spending and lack of information] continues to go on . . . I am prepared to systematically pull apart GSA to the point where we will make it a question to the American public on whether GSA is needed at all. But the wasteful spending is going to stop and the transparency is going to begin.”

Any other time, a threat to essentially decimate an agency would be partisan fighting words. But the minimal response from Democrats to Denham’s warning shows how far out of favor GSA has fallen.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, was more low-key than Denham, but clearly upset that “the expensive partying at a four-star casino resort occurred . . . as millions of Americans were living hand to mouth, struggling under debts and the worst recession since the Great Depression.”