Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act

Floor Speech

Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today because I believe that the American people should know what their government spends and what their government does. It is a reasonable request to be able to make of a government that is designed to serve the people. The people should be able to look back and be able to evaluate, Is this government serving the people, and are they doing it in such away that is actually efficient and making a difference?

Every company in America can tell you what their staff is spending their time on and what the cost of their activities are, how many customers they have, and whether they are successful at reaching their basic goals. But we do not have that within the Federal Government.

H.R. 1423 asks just a few specific things of our government to be able to delineate, again, what every business in America does. It is just six specific things, such as the name of the program, the basic description of that program, the administrative costs of that program, the number of staff for that program, the number of beneficiaries of that program, the statutory authority for that program, and, very importantly, how that program is actually evaluated and what are the metrics to determine if this program is getting the job done that it needs to get done.

We have started in the right direction. OMB is working to comply with the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 by publicly listing all of the programs that the government administers and their performance goals, but that information is incomplete.

H.R. 1423 fills the gaps in the information provided to the public by requiring OMB to include such vital information as the administrative costs and expenditures of each Federal program, the number of people the program serves, the number of employees working on the program, and where in the statute the program is authorized.

This bill offers a simple list that Congress can use to evaluate Federal programs and to make informed decisions about how to make government work smarter and better. Agencies could cut billions of dollars in costs, without compromising services. In many cases, they could improve their services while we are still saving money to the taxpayer.

If we just cut duplicative administrative costs and eliminate the programs that do not work, we can protect taxpayer dollars. We have an enormous Federal deficit. We should do everything we can to be able to evaluate what we are doing as a government and be able to determine where are we wasting taxpayer dollars. There are not taxpayer dollars left to waste.

Under the bill, any person anywhere in the country can, at any time, access information about the cost, scope, and performance of every Federal program.

H.R. 1423 requires OMB to report publicly any finding of duplication by GAO, an inspector general or any other report. It also requires GAO to maintain a database that tracks how quickly and how well Congress and the administration respond to these findings of duplication.

It may come as a surprise: Congress occasionally finds duplication and does nothing about it. This would provide the opportunity for the American people to be able to look back and to be able to track, are we doing something about inefficiencies that have already been isolated in government?

The Vice President was asked during the State of the Union, in this very Chamber, by the President of the United States, to begin a study of job training programs. We know there are more than 57 job training programs that already exist across the Federal Government in multiple agencies. The Vice President was asked to be able to locate those programs, evaluate those programs, and to help determine what is the right process forward for those programs.

Now, that is something that we in the House did earlier last year, the SKILLS Act, but it is something that we would welcome participation from the administration on.

I ask the question: Why can't we already do that in every area, not just duplicative job training programs?

We have multiple programs in multiple agencies that are duplicative. Why do we just do it in job training programs?

Let's do it in all of them. This is the beginning of a process to get after that duplication and that waste. No one here, on either side of the aisle, wants to see a program that is unnecessary or ineffective.

Waste in government is not a Democrat or Republican issue; it is a Big Government issue. With a government the size that we have, we have duplication and we have waste. Let's identify it.

The Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act will ensure we do that. I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I remind my colleagues that multiple groups have already leaned into this bill to say, please pass this, including the Citizens Against Government Waste, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, and the National Taxpayers Union.

America is watching us. Let's deal with our inefficiency.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Source