Political Quotes

“Federal job training programs are seldom evaluated to determine whether they are meeting their intended purposes. However, when the United States is $17.5 trillion in debt, we as representatives of the American taxpayers should do a better job to ensure that the programs we are funding are actually working and we are working with them. We should pay particularly close attention to programs that receive billions of dollars every year from the Federal Government when their authorization lapsed over one decade ago. The Murray-Isakson-Harkin-Alexander substitute amendment takes important steps to ensure title I State and local programs are more accurately evaluated, meaning performance measures and held accountable for unmet goals and resubmitted reports. More specifically, the bill would sanction State and local programs should they continually fail to meet their performance measures or fail to submit required reports. The substitute amendment does not hold the Department of Labor to similar standards. The Department is required to conduct evaluations and to submit separate reports to Congress. I was very pleased to work with Senators Alexander and Harkin to include in the managers' amendment a provision that would require the final evaluation reports to be made public and available to the public.…”