"Fertile ground" or just a pile of manure?

In an article titled "House GOP investigator to scrutinize major Obama legislation", Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who helped run investigations for the House Energy and Commerce Committee when the Republicans last were in control prior to the 1996 elections, is quoted as saying, "These will be very fertile grounds to find waste, fraud and abuse. It will be a gold mine that goes to the heart of some of Obama's signature legislative issues." Well, I wish them luck. I suspect that the ground that they will be treading over will not be a fertile as, for example, the issue of the missing billions of U.S. dollars unaccounted for in Iraq. But, nevertheless, it could be fertile enough that the investigators might want to watch where they are stepping.