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

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

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

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

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

Thank you. I am honored to get a chance to talk about a great American resource, and that is our energy. Let me take you back a little bit. I'm 43 years old. I can remember in elementary school I was allowed to be able to work with the…

Nineteen years ago, when my wife and I married, I was still in school, I was working as much as I could, and she was also working, but we were barely making it. But we made the decision we were not going to run up credit card debt and live…

Today I rise after spending the week of July 4th in the heartland of America, central Oklahoma, where I had the opportunity to hear the thoughts of the families in my district regarding our economy and the debt. No one approached me during…

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.

I completely agree on that.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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