On the recordMay 11, 2015
I am back on the floor again for ``Waste of the Week'' No. 10. As my colleagues know, I have been coming down every week talking about waste, fraud, and abuse, ways we can save taxpayer dollars. While we have not been able to address, unfortunately, tragically, the larger issue of the plunge into deficit spending and debt that our Nation has incurred over the past several years, in particular--every effort, every bipartisan effort, has been thwarted by the President's refusal to engage in that, and yet the debt clock keeps on ticking. We keep spending more money than we take in. We keep putting more and more of a burden on future generations as well as our own. Our economy is not growing. One of the reasons is that we have not achieved fiscal responsibility in the Congress. So while we have not been able to address the larger issue, we can at least address some of those issues that have been documented as waste, fraud, and abuse, documented by nonpartisan agencies that are established for the sole purpose of weeding out some of the excess spending that is not essential to the functioning of government. We have put up some pretty interesting numbers relative to what we have achieved. We are already over $50 billion of spending that has been documented as totally unnecessary. Some of it has been of the character of somewhat ridiculous. Some has been very, very substantial.…
