Frank Lautenberg: “Never, not even in the years that I spent in the private sector, and I ran a pretty good-sized company with 16,000…”

“Never, not even in the years that I spent in the private sector, and I ran a pretty good-sized company with 16,000 employees when I left. It did better after I left. It now has 30,000 employees. Never have I seen it. Never, when one works with Government, have I seen this kind of an arrangement that has a peculiar odor, and it is not Chanel No. 5. The fact is that to give away Government funds in a program as sensitive as this to take care of the poor--listen, all of us have seen the abuses of private sector companies that have taken over health care and things of that nature. It just blows one's mind when you see that the president of a company that is in the health care business made $22 million in a single year and meanwhile is squeezing down because that is where the profits are going to come from, from cutting conditions. They are cutting programs that are supposed to take care of people's health. Well, do you want to have someone up there whose bonus, whose stock options, whose salary depends on making sure that they service as few people as possible, reduce expenses as much as possible when, in fact, the WIC Program is designed to take care of people who are really impoverished, people who need the nutrition that comes through the program to sustain them? So do you want to have some executive sitting at some remote place--and I liked that executive life when I was there, but it was never at the Government's expense--at Government expense.”