Tom Coburn: “One of the first things we found out after 9/11 was a lot of our emergency workers could not talk to each other. That…”

“One of the first things we found out after 9/11 was a lot of our emergency workers could not talk to each other. That was one of the most glaring, obvious defects in our response to emergencies--that emergency personnel had difficulty, from one group to another, talking to one another. As a matter of fact, it limited their ability to save lives. From the beginning of the 9/11 Commission and from the start, in 2002, that has been addressed in multiple ways. The purpose of this amendment is to describe what is obviously something that is not good for us as a nation. We presently have occurring with the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 an electromagnetic spectrum which was sold off and $1 billion reserved under a program called the Public Safety Interoperability Public Service Grant Program. That $1 billion was carved off and that is where we are going to spend it. I don't disagree with that at all. What this bill has is another $3.4 billion for interoperable grants addressing the same problem in a different way than what the other grant program was. One of our problems as a nation is we have too many programs that are doing the same thing. They duplicate one another. One is better and the other is not. Yet we continue sending money down both holes, not making adjustments as to which gives us the best value for our money.”