Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Senator Joe Lieberman:
Mr. Chairman, I'm delighted
to welcome the ranking member
of the committee, Darrell Issa,
who brings,
among many other talents,
actual experience
in the private sector
and, I know as of help to him
and will be of help to us
in the country, in supervising
and overseeing the management
of the federal government.
Mr. Issa, welcome.
Congressman Darrell Issa:
Thank you, senator.
For all my colleagues behind me,
what you see here today is
that unlike what you normally
see in Washington,
we are neither divided
by our parties nor divided
by which side
of the dome we work on.
What you heard,
day before yesterday,
from President Obama is,
in fact, a paradigm shift--
we are no longer divided
by what the administration
thinks that they will do
and what the Congress believes
they will do.
I think when the President,
in his Inaugural speech,
included the very topics we're
on today, in a very short
19-minute speech,
it said a great deal
about his priorities.
Of course, his priorities
include two wars
and an economic disaster,
but it also includes,
most importantly,
that once the House, the Senate,
and the President have concurred
on how money is to be allocated,
that in fact it be spent wisely.
To that extent,
I believe you're going
to see no difference
between my chairman and myself,
and I'm confident no difference
between the four members
of the Senate,
who together have the
overlapping jurisdiction
with the House as a counterpart.
As Chairman Waxman left his role
to move to a new committee,
Chairman Towns
and I inherited 13,000 IG
reports that were unanswered
by President Bush's
administration, out of 98,000.
Statistically,
it's a good number,
but it's certainly unacceptable.
We will make it a point to stay
in touch with those 13,000
reports to ensure
that they are quickly answered
by the new administration
as more come in.
But additionally,
we're going
to do everything we can
to align ourselves
on a bipartisan, bicameral basis
with the new President,
and his effort to recognize
that we're really a two-party
town now-- the party
of people elected
to represent the American people
and the permanent bureaucracy,
both public employees
and often contractors,
who believe they can outlast
us all.
They have outlasted us all
for many years
because we've been divided.
I think that era has changed
with the new administration
that pledges to work
with the Congress to ensure
that we will prevail
in saving the American taxpayers
from waste, fraud, abuse,
and a culture of inefficiency
that permeates federal offices
around the globe.
During the last Congress,
we had an incredibly active
House Committee
on Government Oversight
and Reform.
However, we still only touched
12 out of the 30 programs
on the high-risk [list].
We certainly did not begin
to work in the way that I intend
for us to work in this Congress.
Lastly, at least
on the House side, we are going
to concentrate
on an ongoing waste report.
The waistline
of government is not
about the size of the dollars--
it's the size
of the dollars wasted.
And so the chairman and I intend
to work, on a completely
seamless basis,
to publish an ongoing list
of where we have reduced
that waste and where waste has
been added on.
So it's not a Jenny Craig
report, but we will have--
maybe it is a Jenny Craig
report-- but we will have an
ongoing, at least every quarter,
recognition of whether
that waste has increased
or decreased.
We look forward to working
with the GAO and all of our IGs,
both in the unclassified world
and in the classified world
because, suffice to say,
we are all aware that that
which has some transparency has
a great deal of waste
that which has a total
opaqueness, rest assured
as a former member
of the House select intelligence
committee, we see plenty
of it there too.
We look forward
to your vigorous support
of our doing
that by reporting our successes
and our failures.
And I thank you.
Senator Lieberman:
Thanks very much, Mr. Issa,
for your statement.