James Lankford

Americans deserve an efficient and effective government that works for them.

Americans have the right to know the money Washington takes from them is well spent.

I also think that what comes through is that CMS, in conjunction with the Inspector General's Office and GAO, is working forward in a way that is learning from the mistakes of the past.

I would encourage you to keep it as a matter of a great deal of internal discussion so we can try to evaluate it...

This is someone we should be serving. We should hold people to account, but we should also be serving them...

The appeal rate seems to be extremely high when we are looking for fraud, and we are fighting back and forth...

Yeah. They are really going in looking for overpayments, obviously, on that.

The way it is set up.

Still paying people a contingency based on what they find?

As a Federal Government, we are designed to serve the people, rather than them serve us.

Thank you. Let me do a quick follow up statement, finish out talking about the RAC audits.

The goal of this is that it is right the first time, not that we are paying chasing

But it also is a benefit to us in that it keeps our interest rates low because people do not invest in their sovereign debt, did invest in ours.

Increased government borrowing generally draws money away from or crowds out private investment and productive capital, leading to a smaller stock of capital and lower output in the long run that would otherwise be the case.

There is a difference between trying to just employ people and trying to target for an industry that may or may not be there actually for employment.

It is only a political debate because it is designated for just green jobs, and that is the challenge of it.

My concern, my charge when I took this job was to make sure that job training was aligned to the needs of employers.

The challenge is not employment, the challenge is the number of what is a green job and what is not.

I am astounded at the number of times that we are talking about the GM bailout.

It is interesting when we talk about targeted tax cuts that we always do seem to go back to the same areas, that all the problems in America seem to reside around the energy companies.

There is an answer I haven't heard in a long time in Congress.

The President and the Administration talk often about production and how production has increased. Can anyone identify an element that this Administration has done to increase production?

It is as if the train is moving and they ran and jumped in the engineer's position and said, hey, look, I'm at the front of the train.

So I am astounded by the fact that if we were to really become energy independent, to really go after the energy that we have, to produce that and to use it ourselves, the job creation, the tax revenue that would be the least money that we…

If we are going to have all of the above, let's do all of the above.