For the most part, Treasury’s new Office of Financial Research has gone unnoticed as Washington and Wall Street agonize over other aspects of last year’s Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law.

Indeed, the office’s mandate to description as a provider of data and economic analysis to federal regulators hardly sounds like ingredients of controversy. But the new office and the man in charge of setting it up – former chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, Richard Berner – felt some heat this afternoon.

The subject of an oversight hearing Thursday, the investigating subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R., Tex.) criticized the office’s data-collecting mission as “Orwellian” in his prepared remarks, and painted an image of powerful bureaucracy with no limits on how much it can spend or what information it can demand from the industry, a characterization echoed by many of his Republican colleagues.

Author and investor Nassim Taleb, one of the witnesses at the hearing, described the office in his prepared testimony as an attempt to create “an omniscient Soviet-style central risk manager.”

Dodd-Frank created the new semi-autonomous office to support a new council of regulators – the Financial Stability Oversight Council, or FSOC – that is charged with spotting and tamping down emerging risks to financial stability. The OFR has two key components – a data-collection arm that has broad power to request any kind of information from financial firms it deems necessary, and a research and analysis arm that to be focused on monitoring the financial system for risk and producing research to improve regulation.

“As we learned during the financial crisis, many firms did not understand what they had on their own balances sheets, let alone how their balance sheets interacted with their counterparties. The goal of OFR is to standardize and coordinate data with the aim of reducing firms operating costs while protecting taxpayers from another forced Wall Street bailout,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.), who helped write the provision creating the OFR.