Dan Burton: “the traditional way of doing business in Washington is to create yet another program or spend more money whenever we…”

“the traditional way of doing business in Washington is to create yet another program or spend more money whenever we want to solve a problem. It is just more programs and more money. The President's fiscal year 1999 budget reflects this reliance on expanding government whenever possible. For example, the President wants to expand the Federal role in local schools. The President wants to expand job training, even though the Federal Government has 163 different job training programs. His budget contains 85 new spending programs, including 39 new entitlements. These entitlements add nearly $53 billion to Federal spending over the next 5 years. In short, 1 year after declaring that the era of big government is over, President Clinton is busy reinventing the era of big government. We are being asked to spend all of this additional money without ever having decent answers to some very common-sense questions, like, what is the purpose of the new program? Are there similar programs already in existence? Is it appropriate that the Federal Government should even do it? Or should it be done at the State or local level, or even by the private sector? In 1993, under a Democrat Congress, we passed the Results Act, a law to apply basic business principles to Federal bureaucracies.…”