By Joseph J. Schatz and Phil Mattingly, CQ Staff

If the House clears the financial bailout package, the federal government within weeks will be wielding new authority to buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mortgages.

And thanks to provisions added by lawmakers during the past two weeks, Congress would be ready to effectively oversee the program.

At least that’s the plan.

But in order to work, both the program itself and the oversight entities that are supposed to hold it accountable might require a significant infusion of financial markets expertise — perhaps from firms that have collapsed during the recent turmoil on Wall Street.

The process of managing, implementing and contracting out a huge program — in many ways akin to an investment bank located in the Treasury Department — would present Congress with a unique oversight challenge. Some suggest lawmakers would be hard-pressed to keep track of what’s going on.

“It’s almost a retail operation, and you can’t constantly be coming back to some congressional board for oversight or something like that,” William Gale, director of the Brookings Institution’s economic studies program, said during an Oct. 1 discussion on the bailout package. “Mainly what’s going to happen, is Treasury is going to do it, and they’ll report back to the public now and then. But I just don’t see a strong role for oversight in all this, despite what people say.”

If the House follows the Senate’s lead and clears the package, the Treasury Department wants to begin buying financial institutions’ shaky assets “as quickly as possible,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Thursday. “It’s a complicated thing that they’ll be trying to put in place, and I’ll let them explain it. . . . I think it’s at least weeks.”

At its core, the bill would set up a Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) at Treasury with authority to purchase mortgages or mortgage-related securities. As requested by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. , Treasury could decide whether those purchases occur through an auction process or directly from a financial firm.

“There’s a lot to work out and plan in terms of managing that process,” said Paul Wachtel, an economics professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “Developing a bureaucracy that can do so well is not a simple problem.”

“I think whomever is elected [president] in a month or so ought to designate his secretary of the Treasury pretty quickly,” House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank , D-Mass., said Thursday on CNBC.

Outside Help Needed

The Treasury Department might contract out a great deal of the work to stressed financial institutions — a possibility that some watchdogs see as raising conflicts of interest. The legislation would waive the normal federal contracting process.

“For all of the oversight, there may not be much in the form of accountability,” said Gary D. Bass, founder and executive director of OMB Watch. “You have to consider the possibility that some of the people who got us into this in the first place are the people who will be getting these jobs. Does it mean Goldman Sachs is now going to be arm-and-arm with the federal government?”