Dan Burton: “Let me just say that AID, like every agency of Government, needs to be fiscally responsible. We have a huge national…”

“Let me just say that AID, like every agency of Government, needs to be fiscally responsible. We have a huge national debt, we have huge deficits, and this House and the Senate are trying our dead level best to get control of runaway Government spending. Here is an agency that has wasted money. I was a senior Republican on Africa for 10 years. I can tell my colleagues they wasted money in many countries over there. Some of the projects were good, but much of the money was wasted, and here we have, as I said before, a memo going out by the leadership in that agency saying that we have to spend money as fast as we possibly can because we are two-thirds of the way through our fiscal year and we have only spent one-third of our budget. We need to send a message to AID. We cut back Congress by a third as far as our staffs were concerned. They can stand a 20- to 25-percent cut. This is a good amendment which will save the taxpayers $65 million, and once again I would like to say I am very sorry that this was incorporated into this debate that is taking place right now on Bosnia. That should be a separate debate at a separate time. Unfortunately this is not the case.”