Marsha Blackburn: “One of the things I hear from my constituents so regularly is: What are you doing about our Nation's debt? What are you…”

“One of the things I hear from my constituents so regularly is: What are you doing about our Nation's debt? What are you doing about this out-of- control budget? From time to time, at our committee, we would hold hearings on an inspector general report and actually look at some waste. This started our office thinking and some of us on the Budget Committee thinking about: How do you begin to quantify that and hold these agencies accountable? As one of my constituents said: You know, it seems that they are always after one of us, a small-business owner, but they never go ask a Federal bureaucrat or a Federal agency to pony up or to pay back money or to be held accountable. In our office, our interns this summer have worked with us on a project to actually begin to quantify this waste and to look at these inspector general reports. Mr. Speaker, this is what we found. Just taking the reports from the 70 agencies that have inspector generals and looking at a 4-year period of time, from 2011 to 2014, what we found is this: we could put our finger on $105.7 billion of waste, and that is $105.7 billion of waste, of taxpayer money that is being wasted. It has been identified by the inspector general's office. That works out to about $1.5 billion for each of these 70 agencies.…”