Tom Coburn: “first of all, I am the individual who has a hold on that bill because I think we need to have real property reform, and…”

“first of all, I am the individual who has a hold on that bill because I think we need to have real property reform, and there is a bill that is coming out of the Homeland Security Committee that is a bipartisan bill authored by Senator Carper, with the cosponsorship of both Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman, that has real property reform. As the Senator knows, McKinney-Vento places a limitation on all Federal properties before they can ever be disposed of. So the real property reform needs to go through at the same time the McKinney-Vento bill goes through so that we reform both of those, so that we still protect the rights of the homeless in this country but at the same time enable the agencies of the Federal Government to dispose of them. We now have 22,000 pieces of property the Federal Government does not want but we can't get rid of. So the reason that is being held up is we are trying to get those to move together and in tandem so that we can fix both problems at the same time. I would say this in response to the Senator. I understand how you have locked arms to move this bill, but what the American people are not going to understand is, if there is $2 billion worth of waste--and there is; the IG of HUD said it, there is no question about it, a billion dollars worth of fraud, a thousand convictions, another $1.2 billion in overpayments to supposed landlords. There is no reason not to fix that right now. It can be fixed with this bill.”