Political Quotes

“What we are attempting to do is to reestablish congressional oversight. Congress authorizes and appropriates money, but we don't actually spend it. So when we are asking the administration, whoever it may be, Democrat, Republican, whoever, to come up here and explain some of the things that we have seen in the paper by this instrument we are talking about here, I think all of us benefit. What basically H.R. 40 does is it puts in place a systematic mechanism for regular oversight, not only just waste, fraud and abuse, but, as Mr. Cardoza said in his opening remarks, whenever there is an auditor's disclaimer, that will trigger a hearing to hopefully ask them why they had to file a disclaimer; what is the information they didn't receive, why didn't they receive it, who is withholding it, so we can actually fix something around here for a change. And then, of course, the third thing, those two look backwards sort of at what already may have happened. The third provision looks ahead. Every year, as you know, the GAO identifies, or every Congress, high risk programs. That basically is government talk for programs that don't work as they were intended when they were passed by Congress.”