Can you guess which prominent American politician made the following statement in 2008:”I will conduct an immediate and periodic public inventory of administrative offices and functions and require agency leaders to work together to root out redundancy. Where consolidation is not the right strategy to improve efficiency, I will improve information sharing and use of common assets to minimize wasteful duplication.” If you guessed Republican John McCain, you guessed wrong. Those words were spoken by then-candidate Barack Obama as part of his promise of “a net spending cut” in Washington. But instead of going down, federal spending has skyrocketed, with the annual deficit tripling to more than $1.4 trillion. This extravagance is among the reasons Massachusetts voters just elected Republican Scott Brown, who promised to support lowering federal taxes and spending.
As Democrats come to grips with the Massachusetts returns, up steps Sen. Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma Republican who collaborated with then-Sen. Obama on the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, aka “Coburn-Obama.” That law led to the creation of USASpending.gov, the searchable Internet site that puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every citizen. Coburn is offering an amendment today on the Senate floor that will help Obama make good on his promise in 2008 to root out duplication and redundancy in federal spending programs. As a step toward a renewed bipartisanship, Senate Democrats should support Coburn’s amendment, as should Obama for the same reason.
Coburn’s amendment would rescind $120 billion in previously approved federal spending by consolidating more than 640 overlapping government programs. Much of the money has yet to be spent by the agencies administering these hundreds of duplicative programs, so pulling the money back now should be possible with minimal management disruption. As Coburn wrote in The Examiner recently, his amendment “would be the first serious step toward cutting spending in Congress in 15 years.”
Coburn made another equally important point in hisExaminer op-ed: Proposals to create a spending commission to recommend cuts to Congress can easily be abused and converted into little more than cover for a tax increase while making only token reductions in expenditures. That’s the business-as-usual approach in Washington that Massachusetts voters so soundly rejected in Tuesday’s special election. By reaching across the aisle to support the Coburn amendment today, Democrats can graphically demonstrate emphatically that they got the message.
