Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague, and I thank the distinguished chairman of the committee as well. I want to talk about the FITARA bill, the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, that I am a coauthor of with the distinguished chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Mr. Issa. This is the most sweeping reform legislation since Clinger-Cohen. Today, Federal IT acquisition is a cumbersome, bureaucratic, and wasteful exercise. In recent decades, taxpayers have been forced to foot the bill for massive IT failures that ring up staggeringly high costs and exhibit astonishingly poor performance. Program failures and cost overruns plague the vast majority of major Federal IT investments, while Federal managers report that 47 percent of the budget is spent on maintaining antiquated and inadequate IT platforms even today. The annual pricetag of this wasteful spending is estimated at $20 billion a year. The Air Force, for example, invested 6 years in a modernization effort that cost more than $1 billion but failed to deliver a usable product, promptly its Assistant Secretary to state: I'm personally appalled at the limited capabilities that program has produced relative to that amount of investment. Mission-critical IT investment failures not only waste taxpayer dollars, but they jeopardize our Nation's safety. Our bill would modernize, streamline, and make more transparent by actually posting 80 percent of all acquisitions on the Web site.…”