[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18791]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



        WASTE, FRAUD, AND ABUSE AT U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

  (Mr. THUNE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. THUNE. Mr. Speaker, our children are our most important and 
precious resource. We ought to make very certain that they have the 
opportunity to learn in safe and drug-free schools, to be taught by our 
brightest and best teachers, and to ensure that they have the highest 
possible opportunity to learn. And that is one thing we have been 
failing our children on.
  Mr. Speaker, today the other thing I would note about our educational 
system is that our parents ought to know that when they send their 
education tax dollars to Washington that they are going to get spent on 
our children, on helping them learn at the fastest rate possible. This 
last week we learned of another blatant example of waste, fraud and 
abuse in Washington, and that was when $2 million at the Education 
Department was siphoned off from two schools in South Dakota and spent 
to buy a Cadillac, an SUV, and a house in Maryland. It took a car 
dealer, a car dealer, who broke this story, because the Education 
Department did not know what was going on.
  It is another example, Mr. Speaker, of why we need to get the 
education dollars back into the classroom, back to our school 
administrators, and our school boards and our parents so that they are 
being spent on our children and not in the Washington bureaucracy.

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