On the recordFebruary 7, 2011
First of all, let me thank my colleague from Alaska. As somebody who has been working on areas of fiscal management in our Federal Government for the last 6-plus years, this is one small step. Whether it saves $500 million or whether it saves $1 billion, it is important that America knows we need to do this 1,500 more times. We hear a lot in the press now from the Republican appropriators, the Republican budgeteers, about the battle of how much to cut. It is the wrong language. The deficit is $1.5 trillion this year. It was $1.4 trillion last year. We have tons of areas, as my colleague knows full well, as does our former colleague, the Senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, where we don't effectively utilize the money that has been given to us or that we are borrowing against our kids' future. So this is a great start. We need to do this every day on every bill that comes before us. We can find it. We have identified 50 sets of duplication within the Federal Government, and they are not small duplications. There are 49 job-training programs across 9 different agencies. There are 105 science, technology, engineering, and math programs--something the President, in his State of the Union Address, said he wanted to enhance. We don't have a metric on any of them. We already have 105 programs. We are spending $18 billion on job training, and we don't know if it is working, and we don't know if the people we have trained have gotten jobs in the areas in which they were trained.
