Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to make a couple of comments. I said in my earlier comments there are some good things about the EDA. But the fact is, they are all self-reported. There is no data. There are no methods. Any time you send money to the State of Oklahoma, I guarantee you the people who are going to get the money are going to like it. But there isn't one metric, one set of metrics that measures the effectiveness of the money that has been spent through EDA in terms of job creation. Fully one-third of the dollars don't get through to completion over the history of the program. The very idea we would defend the bureaucracy--the bureaucracy didn't help us on 9/11 because they were stovepiped and they didn't communicate. The bureaucracy failed to ensure the safety of the levees in New Orleans--this same bureaucracy that doesn't need to be controlled. The bureaucracy didn't protect us from the financial crisis of 2008 because we didn't do the oversight. The bureaucracy didn't protect the gulf from the Deepwater Horizon. We had a bureaucracy that was supposed to be in charge of that, but they didn't do their job. The SBIR--you had my full support on SBIR; the Senator from Louisiana knows that. She had my support on that because that is one of the proven programs inside the SBA that actually has metrics on it that works. So the debate is whether we hold back the regulatory framework.…”