There are bureaucrats at every level. There are over 5,000 in the Department of Education, which administers about 260 of these programs. There are bureaucrats at the local level who are trying to figure out what is coming from Washington.

And the issue that we are going to be talking about tonight builds very much off of the problem that you describe. We are going to be talking about the myth of the magical bureaucrat, the myth of moving all of this power and responsibility…

As we move forward this evening, we are going to talk about this myth as it applies to education, as it talks about creating jobs, as we talk about Medicare, as we talk about environmental types of legislation, so that is one of the key…

Thank you. Let me just give a little bit of a brief introduction about what we want to accomplish this evening. This is an election year. We are in the middle of a lot of rhetoric flying around. Those of us in Congress who want to focus on…

I think if we take a look at Habitat for Humanity, it is active in Michigan. They take a caring attitude in reaching out and finding the people to move into these houses. These people are part of the process. They maintain their dignity…

I think we should just also say that if we go into Washington, DC, we go to the public housing projects, to get to the public housing projects that are inhabited today we go by 3 and 4 empty buildings. We go into Chicago, we go by almost a…

No; they would not have given me $1 billion. They would have asked me to come up with a new plan, to come up with a new process, to systemically take a look at what I was trying to do and figure out what the real problem was. It is very…

I now want to turn our attention to another myth. We have talked about the one that Washington creates communities, Washington creates homes, and we have found out that after $5.5 trillion that is not the reality. I would now like to…

But you know, that is the other myth that we are fighting here, that Washington bureaucrats, that a Washington bureaucracy cares more about the education of our kids than what parents in local communities do. This myth is also hurting…

If I were still employed, most likely if these were the results of my area of responsibilities, I would be unemployed. The business would have never let such a key part of its future languish with these kinds of results for this long. They…

Let us talk about truth in budgeting. This country is $4.9 trillion in debt, rapidly moving to $5.5 trillion in debt. That is truth in budgeting. This is an effort by one group to grab dollars, to grab turf and to expand its power. What do…

Tonight I want to talk a little bit about actually building off the comments of my colleague about the need to downsize Government. I think we, as a Nation, have kind of become afflicted with what I call the myth of the magic bureaucrat…

These are just 2 examples: The Corporation for National Service, the direct lending program. There are many more. Bureaucrats at the Commerce Department know another myth is that the bureaucrats at the Commerce Department know how to…

Good idea, let's audit the books. I bet you had that done, Mr. Goodling, when you were on the school board. You had your books audited. But this a Fortune 500 company. So I called my stockbroker today, and I was going through a scenario…

Just in closing, at the beginning of the year we got together and talked about what our vision was for our committee, where we wanted to drive the education agenda. We started out not with the bureaucracy, not with the dollars, not with…

In time, also just happens to be the largest funded program of those 760 programs. So for a program that is a half a billion dollars, we cannot keep the books. Whey you get to a program, the Federal family -- or Federal family education…

I have got good news, bad news, and some more good news. The good news is there are a lot of people around the country that recognize we have this difficulty, and on the chart up there we are focusing too much on the dollars spent. We are…

We really are talking about focusing on how do we make kids scholars... Seven hundred and sixty programs. The number of programs for arts promotion and education, and arts are important, are 39. What I did not know is that the arts are…

let me also just inform some of my colleagues of what is happening. In the State of Oklahoma, two wage analysts have been responsible for handling the data submitted to and generated by the Department of Labor for the 11-state region that…

we need only use the same wage determiner as used in the Private sector, which is supply and demand. Only the market can accurately set wages that reflect reality.

But then it became very, very clear that the two sides are playing with a different set of rules. The Republican plan scored under this Congressional Budget Office does within 7 years get to a balanced budget. The President's plan scored…

I support Mr. Traficant's amendment because I feel that it is necessary that before the Coast Guard closes a station, they should develop and implement a transition plan in consultation with the affected communities. I have expressed this…

I get the sense from reading the papers, from listening to my constituents, and from participating in the legislative process in Congress, that people are quickly approaching a boiling point over the direction and future of the United…

I think we have a fantastic opportunity. Here is another book that was prepared by the Congressional Budget Office, something that we should read every night, ``Reducing the Deficit.'' It talks about spending and revenue options. I think…

The problem is the first part. The first part of the book talks about spending cuts, and that is exactly what we are going to have an opportunity to do after we get 218 signatures on the A to Z plan.