Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I am sort of surprised by this amendment. It seems to me that if we want to have control over the contracts in the procurement process, if we want Congress to be able to know what is going on, if we want to be able to save money, which is what we keep talking about, you want the process that we have here. Perhaps you want an improved process, but you want an inventory. I mean, certainly no one will deny that some, perhaps many, of the private contracts that the Pentagon lets have been wasteful. Many have not been, but certainly an inventory so that Congress can keep a closer eye on it is calculated to reduce the waste, to reduce the wasteful expenditures, to enable us to have better oversight. So why you would want to change that? And I am given to understand that this provision originated with the Republican Congresses during the Bush administration, and, frankly, it was a good innovation. Congress ought to be able to watch more closely what any government agency that is spending the kind of money the Pentagon is spending, hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it to private contractors--we ought to be able to watch what they're doing, watch what they're doing more closely, keep an eye on it, and be able to rein it in and say, hey, wait a minute, that contract is being well administered but that one isn't; that contract we have a lot of questions about. So why would we want to eliminate that provision that has worked well?…”