The JFK secrets survived another Congress. Imagine that.

Hours after Democrats won the House on Tuesday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), poised to chair the Oversight Committee, offered two words: “Lawyer up.” He has named four priorities: Trump family business dealings, Homeland Security and ICE, corporate corruption, and public hearings on the Epstein files. The JFK and RFK assassinations, the CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments, and the government’s UFO secrecy are absent from that list.

That leaves the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets in trouble. Established by the Republican-led Oversight Committee, it will not automatically continue when the new Congress convenes January 3. Democrats could renew its work, but they would have to choose to do so.

If Congress walks away without even documenting the obstruction, every agency inclined to stall will have learned the same lesson: Waiting works.

At a hearing last year, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) accused agencies of making jokes and trying to distract investigators. “I think they’re just trying to run the clock out on us,” he said. The election has brought that warning uncomfortably close to reality.

The strange part is that the task force’s leading Republicans survived. Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna won re-election in Florida, Eric Burlison held his Missouri seat, and Burchett prevailed in Tennessee. All three return in January, but without the majority that gave their investigation its authority.

I heard variations of Burchett’s complaint while reporting on the task force. Agencies can outlast a congressional investigation. Their officials have every incentive to delay if they believe the political winds will change.

When I interviewed Luna on July 30, I asked what remained unfinished. She said journalist Jefferson Morley was writing a final report on the JFK assassination. She said Sirhan Sirhan had agreed to testify about the murder of Robert F. Kennedy and that investigators planned ballistics tests on a firearm once owned by Thane Eugene Cesar, the security guard whose role has long figured in second-gunman theories.

Luna also told me that government insiders had been released from nondisclosure agreements so they could speak and that the CIA had located missing MK-ULTRA files and included them in a declassification order.

As far as I can determine from the public record, Sirhan has not testified, no new Cesar ballistics findings have been released, and the MK-ULTRA material Luna described has not appeared. Morley has confirmed that he is working on the JFK report. The public still needs to see it.

RELATED: Inside the Langley showdown over JFK and MK-Ultra secrets

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I want to be fair. Some Democrats on the task force took some whistleblower questions seriously. Nothing prevents a Democrat majority from continuing this work, and if its members believe in transparency, they should. But I have watched Washington long enough to know how this can go: The inquiry ends, the staff moves on, witnesses stop returning calls, and five years later someone writes a book about how close Congress came.

Luna and her colleagues have less than two months. Publish Morley’s report. Pursue Sirhan’s testimony and the Cesar ballistics. Press for release of any MK-ULTRA records that can lawfully be made public. And for every unfinished lead, leave a written accounting: which agency has the records, what it promised, what it withheld, and how long Congress waited.

January 3 need not be the end of the search for answers. But if Congress walks away without even documenting the obstruction, every agency inclined to stall will have learned the same lesson: Waiting works.