Democratic lawmakers who control the State Legislature in New Jersey advanced a bill on Monday that would severely weaken a watchdog agency responsible for investigating fiscal misconduct by state leaders and scrutinizing government contracts.
The legislation would defang the Office of the State Comptroller by removing its subpoena powers and would instead rely entirely on the troubled State Commission of Investigation to lead inquiries into misuse of taxpayer funds and political self-dealing.
The bill is advancing weeks before Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who campaigned on a commitment to government efficiency and transparency, is set to be sworn in as governor. The comptroller is appointed by the governor and cannot be removed from office by state lawmakers, imbuing the agency with investigatory independence.
The bill’s lead proponent, Nicholas Scutari, the Democratic Senate president, said he sponsored the legislation to streamline the roles of the two watchdog agencies and to bolster the investigatory muscle at the commission, which he said was better equipped to police state employees and agencies.
The commission, in its heyday, was known for its efforts to combat organized crime. But it has been less relevant for years and in 2025 did not issue a single investigatory report. It recently hired Bruce P. Keller, a former federal prosecutor, as its executive director, and supporters of the bill said they were hopeful that he would reinvigorate the agency.
The comptroller’s office, on the other hand, has issued reports on 25 investigations this year, including several that have drawn the ire of political leaders in New Jersey.
The effort to dilute the comptroller’s power led to a nearly five-hour committee hearing Monday at the State House that drew a room filled to capacity, mainly with opponents of the bill, including Senator Andy Kim.
Mr. Kim, a first-term Democrat who was elected to replace Robert Menendez, a longtime Democratic power broker in New Jersey now serving an 11-year prison sentence for taking bribes, had arrived in Trenton at 9 a.m., and was among the first three people to request to speak at the hearing. He was instead called to address the committee dead last, more than four hours after the hearing began, prompting objections from several other speakers, who attempted to cede their time to him. They noted that he was trying to catch a train to Washington, where voting was set to start Monday evening.
Senator James Beach, the Democratic chairman of the committee on state government, refused the requests.
“Nobody’s special,” he said. “I have a list.”
New Jersey is well known for the types of explosive, headline-grabbing acts of political corruption that typically fall to the U.S. attorney’s office or the state attorney general to investigate and prosecute.
The comptroller’s office, however, was established in its current form in 2007 to root out less sensational, but often more insidious, forms of waste and wrongdoing at government agencies and on local and county boards. Local governments routinely award lucrative contracts, and in a state with a rapidly shrinking press corps, there is often limited public accountability surrounding these decisions.
The comptroller’s office is led by Kevin Walsh, a former civil rights lawyer appointed in 2020 by Gov. Philip D. Murphy. Mr. Walsh has become known for his willingness to use the office’s subpoena power to aggressively investigate payouts to public employees, police misconduct and the allocation of government assets, including opioid settlement funds.
In September, he released a report that exposed problems with the way local governments and school boards were awarding health insurance contracts.
His vigilance has made him unpopular in Trenton; he remains the so-called acting comptroller because the State Senate has for five years refused to confirm him.
Mr. Kim told state lawmakers that elections last month across the country showed that voters were craving a new, more responsive governing approach. “You live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust in politics in modern American history,” he said. “People want a politics that isn’t some exclusive club for the well-off and the well connected.”
He said he could not criticize actions taken by President Trump to eliminate inspectors general and gut government agencies if he did not also call out problematic actions proposed in New Jersey, even by fellow Democrats.
“What we have come to see here in New Jersey must be fixed, and the people demand it,” Mr. Kim said. “The people of New Jersey are sick and tired of this.”
Mr. Beach cut him off, noting that his three-minute speaking window had ended.
“Sir, I have been here for five and a half hours,” Mr. Kim said. “Give me 30 seconds.”
“Why do you think you’re special?” asked Mr. Beach, who throughout the afternoon allowed other speakers to extend their time.
“Because he’s got integrity,” a woman in the audience yelled.
Mr. Scutari released the bill three days before Thanksgiving, and he placed it on a fast track for approval by setting a hearing for Monday morning. In addition to watering down the comptroller’s powers, the bill would give the commission the ability to seek wiretaps of law enforcement officers, including those in the attorney general’s office.
“If there’s real corruption, we want to root it out, and that’s why we want to reinvigorate a powerful state independent agency — not one that’s appointed by the executive,” Mr. Scutari told reporters before the hearing.
“This is for more independent investigations and not less,” he added before suggesting that the comptroller was “somebody that is just clamoring for headlines.”
Only about a half dozen of the scores of people who spoke or registered written opinions about the bill said they supported the legislation.
Still, it passed out of committee unanimously. To take effect, it would need to be approved by the Democrat-led Senate and Assembly and be signed by Mr. Murphy.
The governor’s spokeswoman declined to comment on the proposal; a spokeswoman for the Democratic majority in the State Assembly also declined to comment.
Ms. Sherrill, who will be sworn in as governor in January, said last week that she did not plan to weigh in on the specifics of the legislation.
But she said she was “opposed to efforts that weaken essential accountability and oversight, including with our watchdog agencies that root out government corruption, waste and abuse.”
Mr. Walsh, in his testimony to the committee, said that the legislation would hamstring the incoming governor from accomplishing her campaign promises — “and that,” he said, “might be a lot of what’s driving this.”
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
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