The Public Record
Tom Coburn is a former U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, serving from 2005 to 2015. A member of the Republican Party, Coburn was known for his fiscal conservatism and advocacy for government transparency. He was a practicing physician before entering politics, which influenced his views on healthcare and government spending. Throughout his tenure, he was a vocal critic of wasteful government expenditures and often called for reforms to improve accountability in Congress.
I wish to spend time talking about the bill we are considering. Yesterday afternoon, I had the great fortune--my daughter was performing in Florida and was driving back to New York. I got to see my 7-month-old granddaughter. Anybody who is…
we are going to have an amendment on the floor in just a moment that simply requires the Senate to post every time they create a new program and every time they spend money outside of pay-go so that we truly are transparent with the…
Every summer, we have thousands of kids hit the ER, whether they ran into a pole or they had a baseball bing them in the head. The standard of care now is to put that child through a CT scan. These are children the vast majority of whom…
What this amendment says is, where we violate our own rules in terms of pay-go, we will actually publish both the number of times and the amount of dollars we do that. It is about transparency of the Senate, being honest with the American…
If you are not going to pay us enough to sit down, we refuse to practice medicine the way Medicare is directing us to practice: Listen a little bit and then cover it with tests. The reason costs are out of control is because Medicare…
There are three very worrisome provisions in this bill. One is the Medicare Advisory Board that the Senator from Arizona just talked about that will decide what gets paid for and what does not, and Congress will either have to agree to it…
I am going to spend a few minutes talking about an amendment I have, No. 3358, which has already been pending, but I think, first, it is important for us to know that last year we borrowed $4 billion a day in this country. Mr. President…
The one problem with the $500 billion worth of cuts, if you read what the CBO said about that, they said it is highly unlikely Congress will ever effectuate those cuts. If that is true, then that means there is $500 billion in costs that…
I, along with Senator Barrasso, attended the summit with the President. If I recall his words, we were going to take 4 to 6 weeks to see if we couldn't work out some compromises to get a bill the American people would accept but we also…
This is an amendment that discusses the amount that the Secretary of the Senate will put up on our Web site, the amount of new programs; that we publish the total amount of spending, discretionary and mandatory, passed by the Senate that…
Is it always going to be possible for U.S. companies to operate in ways that support a global open Internet?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and due to being a little bit under the weather, I think I will just ask that my opening statement be made a part of the record.
Senator Coburn is right on point in my opinion in saying that we have got to stress the government-to-government part.
There are times for entities that we deem as standard risk, and when we know that customer or we know that entity, we will not gather that information.
I think that any additional information that is required, Senator, to open up bank accounts is, I think, business would deem a burden.
You see the fact of the theft of property from some of the poorest people in the world to live in luxury at the expense of their demise.
We have a significant problem in front of us as a Nation. We have before us an underlying bill that raises the debt that nobody in this room, save the pages, will ever pay a penny toward reducing--nobody except the pages and their…
What the American people are asking is, Why aren't the three nursing programs combined so you have one set of overhead to administer all three programs? That is what they are asking. This does not cut any money for the homeless. What it…
we just heard the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who is also chairman of the appropriations subcommittee, give the typical Washington talk on why we can't cut spending. In light of the fact there has been a 45-percent increase in his…
it is remarkable what length we will go to defend our budgets. The fact is, the assumption Senator Durbin made is that we are efficient. The fact is, we are not. Everybody in here could turn back at least 10 percent of their budget if they…
Last year Federal agencies ended the fiscal year with $657 billion in unobligated balances. There is no question a great deal of that is associated with the war efforts and other things, but according to OMB and CBO, approximately $100…
this amendment rescinds our increase for our operations. We increased our budget 5.8 percent at a time when there was no inflation last year, zero. The year before that, we had increased our budget in excess of 10.9 percent, which means we…
In 2005, 13 different Federal agencies spent $3 billion to fund 207 programs to encourage students to enter the field of math and science. In 2003, $30 billion was spent on 44 job-training programs administered by 9 different Federal…
Is the Senator aware that the foreign ops appropriation increased by 11 percent in 2009 and 33 percent last year? Yet the Senator is saying we can't trim 5 percent from that budget? Am I hearing the Senator correctly? We increased it 46…
Politicians like Tom Coburn
