Tom Coburn

Our country is waiting and primed to burst into the greatest amount of growth our country has ever seen.

What we need is dedicated Members of Congress to get busy fixing it.

I am thankful that we have the leadership at GAO that has done the hard work over the last 3½ years.

Eliminating is a lot easier.

The closest thing to eternal life on this earth is a government program.

Yet, 95 percent of the Federal Government has no metric on its strategy.

Is there any program in the Federal Government that should not have a metric on it?

So we are throwing $19 billion out there every year for job training programs and your statement is there is little known about the effectiveness of most of these programs.

Oklahomans are going to do fine. We had a tragic loss of life. The material things can be replaced, and we will.

Can you think of a way we can motivate our colleagues to take your recommendations and act on them?

What would you think if we had a bill that allowed that?

When the Senate was created, the whole thought of our founders is that the Senators would think long-term, not parochially.

Would you think that would be a good rule for the U.S. Senate?

So the American people have to ask us, what are we doing? How are we doing it?

The other thing I would do is praise the House. They passed the SKILLS Act, which consolidated, I think, 36 of the job training programs into six.

Why would we not design the--you know, here is the problem with Congress.

However, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done to realize the full potential of the Act and we plan on using this Committee to fulfill our part of Congress' role in that shared effort.

Amendment No. 816 expands the review commission so that, in fact, it can look at everything. We have given them the responsibility. What the bill does is a great first step, but it protects all the earmarks from 1996 forward, so we are not…

The point I would make is the following: The big problem with WRDA bills is they become parochial in nature. So what we have excluded is everything since 1996 forward, which actually includes the present Members of Congress in terms of…

My question on the deauthorizing commission would be why would they not take into consideration all of the things the Senator just mentioned before they would recommend deauthorizing a program, if, in fact, the only reason they would not…

I have a question for the chairman through the Chair, if I might.

I ask to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 816. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Oklahoma [Mr. Coburn], for himself, Mrs. McCaskill…

I ask to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 815. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report. The legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Oklahoma [Mr. Coburn], for himself, Mr. McCain, and…

I would yield back the remainder of my time if the chairman of the committee would do as well.

I will get the Senator the actual statute. Federal structures are covered under another statute and I will get that statute for it. The reason we did not specifically represent that is because they are already covered. We did not exclude…