Political Quotes

“If people call my office and ask a simple question, something as simple as, How much did this cost?, it is difficult for even a Member of Congress to be able to track down all the details. How much was allotted for that grant? How much was actually spent? How much was that contract? How much was actually spent? How much does this agency spend on X number of programs or on this specific program? An individual hardworking taxpayer should be able to go research that out. Outside groups should be able to research that and should be able to develop some way to systematically research and compare. Right now, we can't do that. {time} 1340 We may do something as labor intensive as mail them something, or email them some things that we found, or maybe get a PDF document and be able to send it in, or send them to an agency Web site, but there is no systematic structured way to be able to compare last year to this year, one agency to another agency, how this contract was done, how this grant was done. This is a great moment to be able to bring all that information together so that every group, including Congress, can pull that data and can research it. This gets to the essence of why transparency is such a big deal because we want every single taxpayer to be able to look in and be able to see how their money is spent. That's an appropriate way to be able to respond to this.…”