Mark Souder: “I first want to thank our majority whip, the chairman of Government Reform Committee and Senator Coburn in particular…”

“I first want to thank our majority whip, the chairman of Government Reform Committee and Senator Coburn in particular for the way they moved this bill, introduced the bill and moved this bill through. We all realize that the government needs to be more transparent and we are working towards those directions. But as you heard Mr. Blunt mention earlier, our subcommittee, the one that I chair, had one of the more frustrating experiences. Chairman Davis, myself, many of the subcommittee chairmen in Government Reform's job is to do oversight over the executive branch, and it is very hard to get the data we need to do proper oversight. We started in December, actually October 6, 2005, to ask USAID for some information on whether they were following congressional guidelines as far as a particular group and program that we had been tipped off may not have been following those guidelines. USAID at the meeting denied they were funding this organization. We asked them for documentation. They said documentation didn't exist. My staff director, Marc Wheat, and our hard-working staff, dug up on Google in actuality documents that the State Department said didn't exist. We also had people from other agencies that leaked us documents. So they in effect came to us and told us a mistruth about what existed and didn't exist. They also buried it in subcontractors.…”