Truman Committee Exposed War Profiteering

In 1941, American senator Harry S. Truman began leading the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program after finding waste, profiteering, and corruption in U.S. war production. The Truman Committee held hundreds of hearings, exposed bad contracts, corrected inefficiency, and saved an estimated $10 billion to $15 billion in military spending. That was several times the roughly $2 billion cost of the Manhattan Project. Truman’s success made him nationally known and became a major factor in Democrats choosing him as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president in 1944.

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