John Ratcliffe: “I thank Chairman Graves and Ranking Member Wasserman Schultz for their hard work in crafting this bill. Mr. Chairman, in…”

“I thank Chairman Graves and Ranking Member Wasserman Schultz for their hard work in crafting this bill. Mr. Chairman, in this fiscal environment, we have to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars, and we have to scrutinize every program that we allocate money towards. We can't ever forget that every dollar that we spend is a dollar taken from our constituents' hard-earned paychecks. It is for that reason, Mr. Chairman, that I have offered this amendment to eliminate funding for the Open World Leadership Center--a program started in 1999 and housed in the Library of Congress with the purpose of bringing leaders from post-Soviet countries to the United States to learn about our legislative process. The gentleman from California spoke passionately a few minutes ago about his belief that we need to have programs like this, but his comments ignore the fact that there are nearly 90 other similar or nearly identical programs throughout the government aimed at achieving this same goal. At the same time, this program has now spent more than $150 million towards that duplicative purpose. So when you consider that duplicative purpose alongside a national debt of $18.2 trillion, we have got to honestly examine and reconsider whether this is the best use of taxpayer money.…”