Tom Coburn: “I thank the leader for working with me on getting the requirements of what we need to do to get control of our spending…”

“I thank the leader for working with me on getting the requirements of what we need to do to get control of our spending in this country. I also want to thank the House leadership for their commitment in attempting to do that. I had threatened to object to the unanimous consent request that we pass this bill. That is not a desire or something I want to do. But what I do want to do is make sure the money we spend actually goes for Defense. And we had, in both the appropriations bill and in the authorization bill, by a vote of 96 to 1 in this body, that even though we do not report earmarks in the Senate, we do not label them, we do not say who put them, we did have an agreement--with amendments in both those bills--that we will allow the Pentagon to report to the American public on the status of those earmarks and back to us as a Congress whether or not they met the mission of the Defense Department because about 40 percent of them do not. It is all about transparency, the American people seeing where we are spending our money.”