As such, the funds will be released without any further conditions attached to them. Given that incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been closely involved with the disbursement TARP funds so far, virtually nothing will change about the program whatsoever. We still won't know which firms are receiving the money. We still won't know how that money is being spent.
All that was necessary to secure a seamless transition from the Bush bailout to the Obama bailout were two letters sent from Larry Summers to members of Congress. This is the same Larry Summers who, just last week, drafted a massive business tax cut for the stimulus package, which even moderate Democratic Senators found abhorrent. That tax cut was removed from the stimulus because, unlike anything that happens with TARP, one chamber of Congress can shoot it down with a simple majority vote. By comparison, for TARP to be stopped, a two-thirds majority was required from both branches of Congress.
Dodd's willingness to just trust the administration is, as Elena Schor noted earlier in the week, similar to the trust many Senate Democrats placed in the Bush administration when granting them authority to use military force in Iraq. Keep in mind that Dodd was one of the Democratic Senators who gave that authority to the Bush administration. While it can be safely said that there are good reasons to trust the Obama administration more than the Bush administration, HOPE and trust were abandoned as systems of government a long time ago. A far greater level of assurance than a letter to Congress would have been President Obama signing a Senate-approved version of HR 384 into law. It is a willingness to sign such laws, beyond HOPE, that was the reason so many Americans voted for Obama back in November. Letters of assurance are no substitute for actual laws.
TARP money will be released, without any new conditions, oversight or transparency attached to it. At this point HOPE has moved from a campaign slogan to a system of governance.
