Tom Coburn: “Above the spending caps agreed to in 1997. I would like to make a point. Our country is rightly worried about education.…”

“Above the spending caps agreed to in 1997. I would like to make a point. Our country is rightly worried about education. We are going to have a lot of debates on this House floor on how we do that. But to assume that we cannot reprioritize the spending of the Federal Government to direct more money to education by eliminating waste, eliminating duplication, by doing the oversight to make sure that the programs that are out there are working means that we are lazy and we are not willing to do our job. Nobody feels that this government is efficient. It is not efficient by any standard. We can exact more efficiency from this government. If we had a crisis today in this country, if we were to go to war or some other, we would come in here and we would make the cuts that we need to make to still offer the services but we would ensure that it was done efficiently. That is what we have to do. We have to restrain spending. We can direct more money to education, but that money should not be stolen from Social Security. It should come from the wasteful programs that this government funds today. For us to do something less than that means that we violate the very oath for the reason that we came up here.”