02.28.12

‘Shocking Report’: Sessions Reacts To Identification Of Trillions In Long-Term Waste, Inefficiency

“The Democrats running Washington want higher taxes that will shrink the private sector in order to expand the wasteful public sector.”

WASHINGTON—U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, issued the following statement today about a new report from the Government Accountability Office detailing over one thousand examples of waste and inefficiency in the federal government. Among other findings, the GAO report points out that only a small fraction of waste identified in the previous year’s report was meaningfully addressed:

“This shocking report identifies more than $400 billion in annual government spending on 1,500 different programs that are wasteful, duplicative, or inefficient. Over the course of a decade, this translates into trillions of wasted taxpayer dollars. Yet the president’s budget plan proposes to raise taxes by $2 trillion in order to increase spending by another $1.6 trillion—subsidizing even greater waste in Washington. It emphasizes more spending, and does not execute the kind of dramatic efficiencies necessary to alter our debt course. The president’s budget is a massive bailout for big spenders.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are adamantly refusing to even do a budget at all for the third straight year.

In short, the Democrats running Washington want higher taxes that will shrink the private sector in order to expand the wasteful public sector. They don’t want to offer a budget plan because it exposes this painful truth.”

NOTE: To view a Committee summary of the GAO report, please click here.