Tom Coburn

This Committee and my office have struggled to receive timely responses from the Department of Homeland Security to our inquiries.

I think it is important to have you do an analysis of that from where you stand with your experience and then get back to us within 6 months on what your thoughts are.

I think he has the potential of being the best Secretary for this Department we have ever had.

I will not consider that his questionnaire has been completed.

I am very worried about that program, both from a national security standpoint and from an effectiveness standpoint.

Will you publicly commit today to give us your word that under your leadership, you will require the Department to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely fashion?

I surely hope we can work together through the upcoming years to fix the Department of Homeland Security.

I do not care if Oklahoma never gets another dollar of Homeland Security grants as long as the dollars that are spent are spent on high-risk areas.

We are not handling it. We are limiting practicing physicians' ability to notify.

I think it is the most difficult position of all the Cabinet Secretaries.

I am extremely disturbed by the responses to the questionnaire because the staff...has cut and pasted the identical answers.

It is an important area because it may mean that we need to maybe modify some of the student debt parameters and restrict its use somewhat.

Why should you automate it? Why shouldn't you force your contractors to automate it and present it to you?

It is the responsibility of each individual agency to make sure they comply with that.

I believe that this is an important issue that we have to get at.

To me it begs the question, you are not up to date on your taxes, you no longer have a clearance, period.

The American people ought to be asking what in the world is going on.

I kind of see this as a multitude of problems. I mentioned in my opening statement we overclassify, which is a problem for the American people because that means it is not transparent.

Is it a requirement of their contract to do joint training with local law enforcement?

That is not a clear part of this statement.

A large proportion of our officers that we either contract or have are not trained.

To me this is not a political issue. This is an issue of us failing to do our job in a proper way when it comes to security clearances.

Do we require our contractors to do joint training with local law enforcement so that we have dry runs?

We have way too much stuff classified, we have way too many people who have to have a clearance.

We need an automated system to do that? What about random audits? How about firing a contractor who does not perform?