Sam Brownback: “I rise today to join Senator Abraham in introducing the Department of Commerce Dismantling Act. This legislation was…”

“I rise today to join Senator Abraham in introducing the Department of Commerce Dismantling Act. This legislation was completed after months of research and hearings in which we investigated the many costly structural, managerial, and programmatic problems confronting the Department. We have concluded that these problems are so severe and systemic that the department cannot be reinvented. To provide American taxpayers with the services they require at the level of efficiency and quality they demand, the Department of Commerce must be dismantled. The Department of Commerce is a hodgepodge of unrelated functions and missions ranging from antidumping investigations to zebra mussel research. It is comprised of 11 unrelated agencies, overseeing more than 100 programs, catering to more than 1,000 customer bases, and overlapping the work of 71 other Government offices and agencies. This entire agglomeration is unmanageable, and diminishes the quality of those Commerce functions which must be provided by the Federal Government.”