Jeff Duncan: “in a few days we will be asked to vote for the annual Labor-HHS appropriations bill. I have voted for this bill every…”

“in a few days we will be asked to vote for the annual Labor-HHS appropriations bill. I have voted for this bill every year because it contains some very good programs. However, one of its programs has become one of the most wasteful and inefficient in the entire Federal Government and should either do much, much better or be abolished. Yet this agency, because on the surface it appears to be one for young people, seems to believe it should be immune from criticism and simply get one increase after another. I am speaking of the Job Corps. Today, it costs over $26,000 per year per Job Corps student, according to the GAO. We could give each Job Corps student an allowance of $1,000 a month, send them to some expensive private school and still save money. If we did, these young people would probably think they had gone to heaven or hit some type of lottery. These Job Corps students would probably be shocked if we told them we were spending $26,000 per year on them, because the people who get the big bucks out of this are the fat cat contractors and the bureaucrats who run the program. Programs like the Job Corps are really, in the end, harmful to young people, because they just take more money from parents and children and give it instead to bureaucrats and contractors. And we are not talking about small change here.…”