Political Quotes

“It is a fair thing for the American people to expect competence from their government. They expect us to manage their money well, to manage it wisely, to be smart and be prudent and to be basically competent. That is one of the things that an effective government does. When you think about some of the ways that our government has unfortunately mismanaged the effort in Iraq, the imagination cannot even keep up with what kinds of things have gone on. Here are a couple of things. We know that the Bush administration has tragically mismanaged the war. The money we have spent on contracting has just been like throwing it out the window because we have had contracts upon contracts and subcontracts, nobody knows where the money has gone. Somebody is making a lot of money in Iraq. It was a free-for-all from the beginning with no-bid contracts, contractors piled on top of each other, and millions and billions of dollars. We heard in one of our hearings in the Oversight Committee how we shipped $12 billion in cash over to Iraq during the early days of the occupation. The money was just given away to the ministries in Iraq and spent without any kind of accountability. And there have been how many prosecutions for war profiteering? Very few. Luckily, our Congress in the past few days has enacted the War Profiteering Act, and we hope that will mean some real accountability. But there are billions unaccounted for. We have spent more than $50 billion on U.S.…”