James Lankford

I just want to have some conversation on it.

Ms. Warren, honored for you to be able to be here. You are a fellow Oklahoman from the Fifth District of Oklahoma.

Which, by the way, we would completely concur with that.

Obviously that is unacceptable in a technology environment to wait 12 years to be able to integrate that.

One of the things that came out was that there was a lot of manual input still of data.

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

I agree with what you were saying on the additional unfunded mandates. I completely agree on that.

It is essential that every area of Government spending is fully transparent and beneficial to the Nation.

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

Our duty on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is to protect these rights.

On the transparency side, not only coming back to Congress to be able to denote that, but also we need to be able to get it out just to the general public.

I completely agree on that.

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

But ATF did permit those knowingly, understanding they were headed toward the border, and that was well-known...

This has to be a very difficult day, and not a day that you had ever hoped to be testifying in front of a congressional hearing.

So if we're doing a grant for a certain project that denotes some research to something out there, at the end of it we can also say, this was allotted, here is how it was spent, and here's the final paper that was presented at the end of…

Is it appropriate for DOJ to redact documents, sometimes heavily, page after page after page, in response to a subpoena?

Hundreds of pages of documents don't help to be able to count that they have turned over hundreds of pages when they are all heavily redacted at that point.

But the last thing we would want to do is to be able to try to put out the word and say this group gets a higher score based on the fact that they are unionized, and discourage other people from engaging in a competitive environment.

But by increasing the point scale on them, as we talked about before, it gives them an immediate advantage...

We want that to be available, not to dictate it.

This is not anti-PLA to say they're in the toolbox.

So the report wasn't consistent with the policy, and so the report is set aside.

This report does not support what you're saying on the pilot program. This report is fairly discouraging of PLAs.

I will not. I want to be able to look at the full record of the history of this committee and be able to determine that.