It started out as three pages.  What’s on the Post site is only about 42 sections - having read a few bills in my time, I’m not sure this is all.

This is a section-by-section summary of the bill, not the bill itself.

The following document may be the bill (or at least an earlier version of it):
http://financialservices.house.gov/essa/ayo08c04_xml.pdf
http://banking.senate.gov/public/_files/AYO08C04_xml2.pdf
It appears in identical versions on both the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee web sites. The file name indicates a drafter in the Senate Legislative Counsel’s office, suggesting that it is a joint product.

If I were designing this project, I would have required the Treasury (1) to document how it valued the major assets it purchased and (2) to retain the documentation for at least five years. The documentation would facilitate oversight by Congress and the Government Accountability Office. In so doing, it would help constrain overly sweet deals and other forms of favoritism.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

But what kind of accountability might we get from the bill’s declaration of congressional purposes?

The purposes section is (as often happens) a mishmash of potentially conflicting objectives. The summary describes section 103 as requiring the Treasury to consider “the interests of taxpayers, minimizing the impact on the national debt, providing stability to the financial markets, preserving homeownership, the needs of all financial institutions regardless of size or other characteristics, and the needs of local communities.”

You can find something here to justify (or criticize) whatever you want. Not much accountability in that.

At least the Treasury doesn’t have to consider “empowering and enhancing the self-esteem of any and all Americans in communities nationwide.”