In June: “D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray has selected a former chief technology officer for the city to help root out wasteful spending and find potential new non-tax revenues.”

Today: “Brown said he will probably push to establish a commission to explore potential cuts and savings to the city’s budget. Brown said the commission would include government officials and citizens who will work to ferret out ‘wasteful spending within the government.'”

In the midst of a fight with Gray over when a new tax on out-of-state municipal bounds should go into effect, D.C. Council Chair Kwame Brown today offered to establish a committee that would work to ferret out waste and inefficiency in the District’s government. The idea, while noble in its own right, closely mirrors a step Gray himself took two months ago when he appointed former D.C. Chief Technology Officer Suzanne Peck to do pretty much the same thing.

In short, we’d have two bodies doing what one could pull off just fine if everybody just cooperated.

In a June statement when he announced Peck’s appointment to lead a citywide performance review, Gray said, “I’ve stressed that we can’t afford to keep doing business as usual in hopes that our finances will dramatically improve.” Today, Brown said basically the same thing, arguing, “If this city has a problem, it’s overspending and not dealing with its fiscal problems.”

Beyond the redundancies involved, some of the more cynical types out there have argued that it’s a little early for Brown to be presenting himself as the fiscal hawk. After all, it was but eight months ago that we discovered that he had rented not one, but two fully-loaded luxury SUVs at significant cost to District taxpayers. Additionally, Brown heads up a legislative body that isn’t exactly cutting its own expenses in these difficult times. Greater Greater Washington also notes that even if the commission is put together quickly, it certainly won’t be able to wrangle any new savings before the next fiscal year starts in October.

Should the commission come to pass, though, it would be the second commission created this year — the 2012 budget establishes a commission to revise the District’s tax code.