CAPITOL HILL – Government waste and inefficiency: there’s so much of it, it’s actually hard to keep track of it. Still, Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford believes it’s important enough to find, then share it in a report titled Federal Fumbles.
He both announced the release of that report and talked about it on the Senate floor Tuesday.
Here’s one small example he shared with CBN News.
“It’s just personally frustrating to me. There was an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) grant for a professor in California to be able to study Soviet wines. I understand why the wine industry would want to do that study. I don’t understand why the taxpayer would need to be able to do that study.”
Or pay for it.
He pointed out, though, how hard it is to find out about this wasteful spending, even for Congress – which is supposed to legislate, regulate and control all of it.
“If we can’t get transparent information – if it takes 18 months for a member of Congress to be able to hear how many programs we have on any specific issue — we’re never actually going to solve it, because it’s all hidden,” the senator said, exasperation in his voice.
Major Federal Fumble: Getting the Budget Done
That’s when Lankford outlined the bigger problem: the whole budget.
“If we don’t fix the budget process, we’re never going to fix the budget product,” the senator said.
He then explained what happened to the latest effort to solve this.
“I was on the budget process reform committee – an ad hoc committee, eight Democrats, eight Republicans. There were several ideas that everyone agreed on.”
Then party politics and accusations derailed it.
Lankford continued, “Senator Schumer notified the Democrats on the committee ‘Hey, I think McConnell’s going to try to pull some procedural trick when this comes to the floor and add something else to it.’ And so everyone walked away.”
“McConnell assured everyone publicly and privately and on the floor that he’s not trying to pull some trick on it,” Lankford summed up. “But at that point, trust is already broken down, and everyone walked away from it.”
Political Foes Stymied Obama, Stymying Trump
The Oklahoma senator is frustrated because although he desperately wants to cut the federal budget, the broken system makes it almost impossible.
He declared, “If we don’t fix the way we do budgeting, we’re never actually going to do any kind of reduction of spending.”
Both Presidents Obama and Trump have made major reorganization proposals but been stymied by their political foes in Congress.
It’s happening to Trump right now.
Lankford explained, “I think we’re in a presidential election mode, and my Democratic colleagues are going to try to oppose anything that he brings forward.”
Could You Wait 400 Days to Get Hired?
Another highly inefficient area frustrating the senator is government hiring practices.
He pointed out it takes an average of about 100 days to hire a federal worker, and in some cases 300 to 400.
“That’s not rational. You’re just not going to get competitive people to come in and do that process. So we have to be able to fix that,” Lankford argued.
A Massive Emergency, But Little Panic
One federal fumble the Oklahoman sees as an emergency is the massive debt. And he’s amazed very few people in government are panicking about it.
He mentioned a Congressional Budget Office report that warned, “We would either have to increase taxes or reduce spending by 400 billion dollars a year for 30 years to just keep our current debt-to-GDP ratio. Should be chilling to everyone, but everyone seems to just greet it with a shrug.”
He concluded, “It seems that the problem has become so large, that people just say ‘it’s unsolvable. We’ll move on.’ We can’t do that.”
How Tax Cuts Lead to More Taxes Coming In
Lankford admits he and his allies face charges they’ve committed their own federal fumble.
He said, “I’ve had a lot of folks who have said to me, ‘How can you be serious about debt and deficit when the Republican-led House and Senate just blew a hole in government based on the tax reduction that just occurred?’”
The senator defended himself and other tax cut advocates by saying they were trying to get the economy going again, which ends up creating enough wealth that tax revenues actually end up rising.
That’s exactly what’s happened in the last few months since the tax reduction.
“So after the tax cut that everyone said would blow a giant hole in the budget, our revenue has actually gone up 14 billion dollars from the previous year,” Lankford explained.
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