Last month’s mass firing of House Appropriations Committee investigators followed years of declining appetite for tough oversight and partisan squabbles that the investigators say often stalled their work.

Several members of the team, some of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified by name, defend their record against committee spokesman John Scofield’s charge that recent work was not good. They suggest instead that majority Republicans had no appetite for oversight of the Bush administration.

The investigators said they identified billions of dollars in potential savings every year, particularly in the Defense budget, and that they heard no complaints until Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., dismissed 60 contractors on Oct. 16.

Joseph Stehr, a retired FBI agent who had been a member of the team off and on since 1985, said he remains stunned by Lewis’ action. “It reeks, it really does,” he said. “It just amazes me that after 60 some years, that just with the swipe of a pencil the thing could all go away.”

Stehr said the team gave the committee a unique window into Defense programs. “Who is going to look into all of this? GAO? I don’t think so. They’re slow-pitch Wiffle ball, where we throw 90 miles an hour.”

Scofield said the dismissals were part of a review of the team, and that the investigators might be rehired.

But Stehr, who worked on a now-stalled study of Katrina relief spending as well as on Pentagon budget scrubs, said many of the former investigators are so disillusioned that they would not return if the committee decides to reconstitute its investigative team in the 110th Congress.

Investigators said committee requests for the type of bipartisan oversight provided by the team since its inception in 1943 waned after President Bush took office in 2001. In recent years, Stehr said, investigators had proposed studies in an effort to interest the committee leadership in oversight.

Partisan differences over the investigative team came to a head in 2003, when Lewis refused to support a request by the top Democratic appropriator, David R. Obey of Wisconsin, for an investigation of the intelligence operations run out of the Pentagon by Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of Defense for policy.

Lewis was then chairman of the panel’s Defense Subcommittee. Then-full committee Chairman C.W. Bill Young, R-Fla., said he supported Obey’s proposal but declined to overrule Lewis. In retaliation, Obey temporarily refused to support new defense or intelligence investigations.

“Obey took the position that if we weren’t going to do the one that he wasn’t going to give his okay on any others,” Young said.

A formal investigation by the Surveys and Investigations team requires signatures from the chairman of the full committee and the top-ranking minority member, and usually from top-ranking subcommittee members as well.

Obey eventually lifted his blockade. In a statement, he said that during the past two years he has approved every request for an investigation. “After trying for a number of months to force the committee to meet its oversight responsibilities, the minority reluctantly concluded that the majority would not face up to this,” Obey said.

Still, the committee has not begun any intelligence-related investigations since 2003, investigators said, despite rapid spending increases and a reorganization of the intelligence community.

The committee’s team of 12 experienced intelligence investigators “atrophied,” and by the time of the dismissals, only two remained, said dismissed investigator T. Peter Wyman, a decorated former Marine and FBI agent.

Wyman said committee leaders squandered a unique asset for investigating the shadowy and expensive intelligence bureaucracy. More than 20 proposals for intelligence studies were circulated to the committee leadership by investigators, to no avail, he said.

“There wasn’t anybody down there who gave a hoot about intelligence spending,” Wyman said.

Wyman sought repeatedly to entice top aides from both parties to meet with the intelligence team about resuming investigations, but the staff never showed up. “We even bought them some doughnuts one time. We ate the doughnuts,” he said.

Other controversies also surrounded the Appropriations team. In January 2005, just as Lewis took over the chairman’s gavel, Robert Pearre, the director of the Surveys and Investigations team and a former FBI agent, penned a controversial memo urging his staff to “be a junk yard dog” and saying he wanted to see “blood on the floor.”

“The first rule is: There aren’t any ‘good’ programs anywhere in this government,” Pearre wrote. “They are all chock-full of fraud, waste and abuse.”

Pearre added that “all program managers should be considered liars. . . . Never drink the Kool-Aid they’re serving.”

Former investigators suspect that Pearre’s memo worried appropriators, who generally have a more sympathetic view toward spending.

In September 2005, Lewis announced without informing Obey that committee investigators would look into Katrina spending. Obey objected publicly to the lack of consultation, and again complained about Lewis’ blocking of the investigation of Feith’s office.

According to investigators, a dispute between Lewis and Obey over how to conduct the Katrina investigation ensued, delaying it by a month as billions of dollars were being spent. A year later, interim reports have been filed to the committee but have not been made public as Lewis promised. A final report is now stalled because the team leader and about 15 others working on the study were among those dismissed last month.

Given how hard the team worked, Stehr said he is frustrated that the final Katrina report may never see the light of day.

“There were countless, countless, countless 14-, 15-hour days, living with the evacuees. It wasn’t the lap of luxury,” he said.

The Appropriations Committee team also encountered flak from the office of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., when it investigated a secret office overseeing security upgrades on and off Capitol Hill, according to two former investigators.

According to those investigators, Pearre strongly supported that probe until he abruptly ordered it shut down about a year ago as investigators were looking into allegations of kickbacks to a Department of Defense employee and concerns that the security upgrades installed on Capitol Hill would not work.

Scofield said that although the contract investigators were taken off the probe, it is ongoing.