Coburn comes through for government transparency
U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., isn’t shy about railing on the spending habits of government.
My colleague Chris Casteel has a story today about Coburn sponsoring a Senate amendment to post online the office and salary expenses of all senators. It follows previous calls for the same from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Here’s the text of Coburn’s amendment:
SEC. lll. REPORTING REQUIREMENT.
Section 105(a) of the Legislative Branch
Appropriations Act 1965 (Public Law 88-454; 2
U.S.C. 104a) is amended—
(1) in the last sentence of paragraph (1), by
striking ‘‘shall’’ and inserting ‘‘may’’; and
(2) by adding at the end the following:
‘‘(6) Beginning with the report covering the
first full semiannual period of the 112th Congress,
the Secretary of the Senate—
‘‘(1) shall publicly post on-line on the
website of the Senate each report in a
searchable, itemized format as required
under this section;
‘‘(2) shall issue each report required under
this section in electronic form; and
‘‘(3) may issue each report required under
this section in other forms at the discretion
of the Secretary of the Senate.’’.
Here’s what Coburn said on the Senate floor:
Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. It says we will take the money we spend and make available online to the American people how we spent it. Right now, there are a limited number of books published. We transfer it from computers to a book, but we don’t give it to the American people so they can see how we are spending money on our office accounts. Senators Nelson of Nebraska and Reid have graciously said they support this amendment. We will have limited debate.
The one way to get this spending under control in our individual offices, as well as in the Federal Government, is to make available to the American people how we spend it. So my hope is this will be a short period of time, and at the end of this year, the American people can go on a Web site and see how Tom Coburn spent his money, in terms of running the office of the junior Senator from Oklahoma. I think they will find I am as frugal with their money in my office as I am trying to be frugal on the floor when it comes to wasteful spending. There is $350 billion worth of waste that will go through this year, without one stroke of it being eliminated–$350 billion worth of waste and not one legitimate stroke will be eliminated as we go through the Appropriations Committees and the President’s budget–and he is trying to eliminate some. But we won’t even do a line-by-line review.
I hope we will accept this amendment and lead by example, and the American people can hold us accountable for how we spend their money.
After reading the amendment, I’m hopeful that the Senate won’t go down the same path as the House in this issue. The House plans to release its expenses online, but in PDF form. That is great for Web distribution and reading, but pretty terrible if you want to analyze the numbers using a spreadsheet or other software. The Senate’s amendment mentions “searchable” and “itemized,” which I hope means a better format than a PDF.
–Paul
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment