The Truman Committee, formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, was a United States Congressional investigative body, headed by Senator Harry S. Truman. The bipartisan special committee was formed in March 1941 to find and correct problems in US war production with waste, inefficiency, and war profiteering. The Truman Committee proved to be one of the most successful investigative efforts ever mounted by the U.S. government: an initial budget of $15,000 was expanded over three years to $360,000 to save an estimated in military spending and thousands of lives of U.S. servicemen . For comparison, the entire cost of the simultaneous Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bombs, was $2 billion. Chairing the committee helped Truman make a name for himself beyond his political machine origins and was a major factor in the decision to nominate him as vice president, which would propel him to the presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Truman stepped down from leadership of the committee in August 1944 to concentrate on running for vice president in that year's presidential election. From 1941 until its official end, in 1948, the committee held 432 public hearings, listened to 1,798 witnesses and published almost 2,000 pages of reports. Every committee report was unanimous, with bipartisan support. Background The war production efforts of the US had previously been subject to congressional oversight during the Civil War (1861–1865) and after the Great War (1914–1918), but each of these were considered accusatory and negative. During the Civil War, the United States Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War hounded President Abraham Lincoln on his moderate stance on the prosecution of the war; its members wanted a more aggressive war policy. The many secret meetings, calling officers away from their duties, caused rancor among the Union's military leaders and delayed military initiatives. Confederate General Robert E. Lee said that the harm caused to the Union effort by the Union's own Joint Committee was worth two divisions to the rebel cause. Two decades after the Great War, the Nye Committee found that US bankers and arms manufacturers supported the US's entry into the war to protect their large investments (including $2.3 billion of loans) in the UK. The 1934–1936 investigation, led by Senator Gerald Nye, caused a noninterventionist backlash against US involvement in European wars and resulted in a much lower level