Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. Chair. This amendment, amendment number 47, I believe, in the queue, would bring standards of good government and good government practice to procurement across the Federal agencies. What it does, in fact, is it takes a set of standards that has been put in place already with respect to the Department of Defense as a result of the DOD authorization bill of 2008, as well as standards that were built into appropriations bills applying to other agencies over the last couple of years, and it makes it clear that those are going to be authorized standards going forward to apply to non-DOD agencies as well now as to DOD agencies. As many people know, over the last few years, the impulse to contract services out on the part of the Federal Government went too far. And in fact, studies have demonstrated that, for example, the Department of Defense's service contractor workforce grew from 732,000 in 2000 to 1.3 million in 2006, a huge increase. And this kind of phenomenon was not limited to the Department of Defense. We saw it in other agencies--the Department of Homeland Security and other places across the Federal workforce. Secretary Gates, recognizing that things have gone too far in this direction, is looking for a better balance and has already declared that DOD will examine this reliance on contractors and begin to bring more of a balance back into the equation.…”