Political Quotes

“I thank the chairwoman for her kind words. It is necessary that we move this bill, I agree. I am thankful to Senator Landrieu and the ranking member for the movement on some of the commitments they made to me on programs that don't work within the small business area. I have multiple amendments, but in due deference to the chairwoman, I will not call those up. I am going to call up two. I wish to explain both of them. Amendment No. 184. Everybody was excited about the GAO report that looked at the first third of the Federal Government in terms of all the duplication. We don't know the extent of that duplication, and we are going to have to do some hard work to winnow out a lot of savings, but there are a lot of savings. People don't agree with me on my estimate, but nobody knows these programs better than I do. I have been studying them for 6 years. There is at least $100 billion where we can save the American taxpayers and actually do a better job through redesigning the programs and eliminating the bureaucracies that make them less than effective. So one of the things we need to do to help GAO is have the agencies report to OMB and to us on a yearly basis on their programs. There are at least 2,100 programs that we know of in the Federal Government. When GAO looks at this, it is very difficult for them to ferret it all out. We only have one agency that publishes a list of their programs every year, and that is the Department of Education.…”