Tom Coburn: “As this bill is drafted, its implementation authority never expires. It never stops. So what we have is approximately $4…”

“As this bill is drafted, its implementation authority never expires. It never stops. So what we have is approximately $4 billion a year from now on. Actually, what we say is: however much money is needed in year four of the bill to be spent on homeland security, whether or not we need to or whether it is time to relook at the priorities of the bill. This is an amendment that I offered in committee. I got one Democratic vote for it and my own. But what this amendment does is sunset this bill in 5 years and says it is time to take a look at it again. One of the critical things we did following 9/11 was the PATRIOT Act, and we sunset it. Last year we took it up again and we sunset a good portion of it again. So we will look at it again. This bill is never sunset. It is like the hundreds of other bills this body has passed, that we pass and we never look at again. We never do oversight. We never make the decisions. We just let the money keep rolling out the door and charging it to our grandchildren. This is a very simple, straightforward amendment.”