The Public Record
Claire McCaskill is an American politician and attorney who served as the United States Senator from Missouri from 2007 to 2019. She was the first woman elected to the Senate from Missouri. A member of the Democratic Party, McCaskill focused on issues such as healthcare, military support, and government accountability during her tenure in the Senate. She played a significant role in various legislative efforts and was known for her outspoken views on military contracting and defense spending.
Common sense tells me that what we ought to do is tell every American President that they cannot stand in front of a microphone and talk about sanctions against Iran ever again if they do not begin to take the sanction laws that are on the…
I think you are going to be a great addition to the intellectual heft of the body in which you serve.
I think we have determined here that we have made this a harder task than, in fact, it may be.
I believe we spend over $130 million a year with that contractor and it puts them in the top five of the companies that you contract with.
If the only way you get paid is to drive miles, then we are incentivizing the system to drive as many miles as possible.
It seems like to me we could avoid a lot of problems here because what we are doing is incentivizing unsafe conduct.
I think we are setting up a system for unsafe behavior just by the incentives that are inherent in it.
I would certainly encourage someone to do that study because that would also contribute, I think, to less driver turnover.
It was thrilling to hear Sen. McCaskill bring this up: paying truck drivers by the mile is clearly asking for the death and injuries that we experience each year in crashes involving these trucks.
I think that if the compensation was changed and truck drivers were paid for overtime, if they were paid for loading and unloading the truck, that would be a significant step forward in addressing truck safety.
I just think it would be time--and I would encourage everyone who cares deeply about truck safety to try to motivate some carrier to look at payment by the hour as opposed to miles driven.
So there is an assumption that the invoice be paid unless someone raises something negative?
We have watched, especially in the Department of Defense, when people don't get disciplined, nobody takes it seriously.
I am not against contractors, but it does appear that our government, especially in the last decade, has really expanded contracting without the requisite acquisition personnel and oversight to manage it.
This is really important, that we hone in or home in on this problem because this is a huge amount of money.
I think just saying to people, we really mean it this time, it may take more than that.
Because you are an Alaska Native corporation should not allow you to get non-compete contracts that you actually aren't doing the work on.
That is when I realized we needed to do a hearing on contract oversight at CMS.
There has been a way-too-common practice in government just to give award fees because everybody gets them. That needs to stop.
We should not be giving award fees to sole source contractors that are cost-incurred contractors unless we are confident that they deserve an award fee because they have done an outstanding job.
I am concerned in some ways that we feel that we need to contract out somebody to tell you how many folks you need to do just acquisition.
If this GAO stuff doesn't get done, like immediately, it is a real problem because this is really not low-hanging fruit.
Politicians like Claire McCaskill
