Political Quotes

“I will be brief. Mr. Cuellar, you have been a good Member. You have worked hard on this. We worked together on this. When this number left the House, it was a different bill. In the first hour of the new Congress, I intend on working hard to bring up a bill that looks more like your original bill, has some additional learning experiences, and try to bring it back as quickly as possible. I cannot support your bill today. This is not the bill that left the House. It is also a bill that still has $75 million not paid for. But it's not the $75 million. As much as we talked about paid-for and PAYGO and offset and how do we do things, our real problem here today is that, as it came back from the Senate, it looks an awful lot like somebody just picked up your number and redid your bill. Now, I know you want this, and you deserve it for the hard work you did. But this bill is simply a series of mandates that codifies a management style that needs no legislation. This legislation does not create something that the President cannot and is not already doing. We, in Congress, want goal-setting. Historically, we look to OMB, and that goal-setting is intended to be objective, to hold agencies to standards determined not just by their own agency. As the bill is written today, basically, an agency sets its own goals, announces its own goals, and OMB has a secondary role. This does not create a real requirement for performance-based program analysis.…”