James Lankford

Is there an assumption at all in some of your conversations that that may occur again at some point?

Yeah, we could add a lot of tax dollars to it, or deficit dollars, and say we are just going to continue to fund it that way with deficit.

There are people all over the country that care deeply about this, small towns and big towns, and they stand with you.

I cannot imagine what it was like to start the travel here and to know that the destination was going to end up right here where you are right now after a very, very long day.

It was listed as a high-risk facility, and we seem to not have a contingency plan.

We didn't have a high enough number of diplomatic security personnel.

And that was our concern as well that obviously the Libyan militia was not sufficient.

The first line of defense is the local government.

Would you agree we did not have a sufficient number of our own armed security forces on the ground?

What about the high-risk posts? How many posts would you consider high risk high threat at that time?

Would you agree we had an overt dependence on Libyan security that night and the security team that was local that was not sufficient for the task and that we had an overdependence on them at that point?

Should those locations have a contingency?

Did you discover if there was a contingency plan?

I would say in my district, in Central Oklahoma, we have more advanced cancer care in Oklahoma City than in all of the U.K.

We have had a hearing on the data hub to ask some of the questions that should be asked about security.

This is in your lap in a lot of ways, as far as implementation.

We are America. We are better than that.

The difficulty is one group is talking about the dream of what these benefits might someday do and what they might actually occur one day if everything works, and another group that is dealing with the reality on the ground of…

Our solemn responsibility is to hold Government accountable to taxpayers, because taxpayers have the right to know what they get from their Government.

We exist to secure two fundamental principles: first, Americans have the right to know that the money that Washington takes from them is well spent; second, Americans deserve an efficient, effective Government that works for them.

To me, we have got to be able to evaluate this because the goal is not to throw money.

We still struggle with evaluating effectiveness for our programs.

Thank you. And I thank both of you for being here.

These folks have names and faces.

We don't know and we weren't a part of any of the conversation, but it is going to affect our economy significantly.