Huban Gowadia, left, acting administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, felt some real heat at a congressional oversight hearing on March 2, where Inspector General John Roth and Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner also testified. (C-Span)

A hard-hitting, bipartisan congressional oversight hearing is good government at work — especially if you like blood sports.

It can be a brutal experience for an agency head in the hot seat when Republicans and Democrats are rightly and mutually disgusted with a bureaucracy’s performance and its leaders.

That was the case with Huban A. Gowadia, the acting administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Thursday.

The committee has had petty, partisan, politician-promoting disputes, but this wasn’t one of them.

Outraged members, both red and blue, lambasted TSA’s refusal to provide the independent Office of Special Counsel (OSC) all the documents needed for its whistleblower-retaliation investigations.

The hearing pointed to issues beyond the importance of principled, bipartisan oversight — the lack of transparency, whistleblower revenge, collusion to deny employee rights — that stain many agencies.

Yet TSA, more than others, uses a fictional claim of attorney-client privilege to thwart the special counsel’s work. And a December report by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general cited TSA’s “unjustifiable and … inconsistent and arbitrary” use of the “sensitive security information” (SSI) designation to avoid release of even innocuous material.

Citing reports from “as far back as 2005,” Inspector General John Roth testified that TSA’s “aggressive approach to restricting information from being made public … is deeply rooted and systemic.”

He pointed to examples where the agency’s misuse of security information “bordered on absurd,” including when officials attempted to redact this line — “passengers are not required to remove shoes, belts, laptops, liquids or gels” — from a report, while that information was publicly posted on TSA’s website.

Similarly, TSA considered the entire, blacked-out page of a document to be privileged, including the date.

“There’s simply no basis for federal agencies to assert the attorney-client privilege during an OSC investigation,” Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said at the hearing.

The IG’s December report was blunt, saying the agency “cannot be trusted to administer the (SSI) program in a reasonable manner.”

Reading that statement during last week’s committee hearing, a head-shaking Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said, “That’s about as damning as it gets.”

TSA’s sorry history with whistleblowers includes losing a Supreme Court case involving retroactive designation of information as sensitive to justify the 2006 firing of air marshal Robert MacLean. But even now, the record shows it can’t be trusted to treat its employees fairly. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, complained about a now-discontinued policy of “forcing employees to move entirely to … new locations as punishment for raising concerns.” Added Cummings, “it was punishment, punishment.”

The whistleblower, attorney-client privilege and SSI issues were bad enough for TSA. Gowadia’s quandary made it worse.