Political Quotes

“First, let me thank Mr. Burgess for his very diligent and hard work on this amendment. It is a pleasure to work with the gentleman to bring transparency and accountability to Pentagon spending so taxpayers know where their hard-earned dollars are going. I also want to thank Congresswoman Schakowsky for her support and work on this very important amendment. I am pleased to be working with Congressman Burgess and Congresswoman Schakowsky to build upon the work that we are doing with our bipartisan Audit the Pentagon Act, H.R. 942. Mr. Chairman, I have offered an Audit the Pentagon amendment since 2011, and this work continues now with Representatives Burgess and Schakowsky. This is a commonsense amendment to ensure audit-readiness at the Pentagon, something that Congress mandated I think it was 25 years ago; yet two-plus decades later, Pentagon officials continue to tell Congress that audit-readiness is still years away. This is simply unacceptable. So our amendment is simple. It would require a report ranking all military departments and Defense agencies in order of how advanced they are in achieving audit-readiness. Taxpayers deserve to know how and where their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Pentagon spending accounts for more than half of Federal discretionary spending and totals more than half a trillion dollars. The fact that any part of the government cannot pass an audit is unacceptable, let alone a department that spends more than $600 billion annually.…”