[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 17]
[House]
[Pages 23848-23849]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  WASHINGTON WASTE WATCHER SPEAKS OUT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mario Diaz-Balart) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. MARIO DIAZ-BALART of Florida. Madam Speaker, I was not going to 
speak today but I felt compelled after I heard some remarks by one of 
our distinguished colleagues from the other party about the spending 
that the United States is proposing to do in Iraq and his concerns for 
the deficit situation in the United States of America. And I share his 
concern for the deficit, but I need to clarify some facts if we are 
concerned about the deficit, and then we must be consistent.
  Madam Speaker, that same party in this Congress, and this is my first 
term here, has proposed amendments to major pieces of legislation that 
would have increased the deficit by $890 billion. Members heard me 
right, almost a trillion dollars of an increase on top of the deficit 
that exists right now. And yet in the Committee on the Budget when the 
chairman proposed a 1 percent cut, just a 1 percent cut in waste, fraud 
and abuse, Madam Speaker, the distinguished members of the other party 
all, 100 percent of them, voted no. The chairman did not get one single 
vote to cut just 1 percent in waste, fraud and abuse in that committee.
  Is it because there is no waste, fraud and abuse in the Federal 
Government? Is the Federal Government so efficiently run that we cannot 
find 1 percent in waste, fraud and abuse?
  Madam Speaker, I have been mentioning lots of examples as part of the 
Washington Waste Watchers Group that the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Hensarling) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Feeney) and I created 
with a number of our colleagues, but let me mention a couple of small 
examples to illustrate how much waste exists.
  For example, Medicaid alone paid $1.6 million to a Wisconsin 
transportation company for multiple round-trip billings for people that 
were dead or that were hospital-bound that were not moving anywhere.
  There is a lot more. The Veterans Affairs inspector general has 
identified over 5,500 possible cases of individuals who may be 
defrauding the government by receiving benefits intended for veterans 
who have died, who are dead, who are not there, who do not exist. 
Totally fraudulent. Again, that is money that does not go to the real 
veterans that deserve it.
  Over the past 5 years, 6,733 fugitives have been arrested for 
illegally receiving food stamps. By the way, 1,500 of those were drug 
offenders, 31 were murders, 45 were sex offenders and child molesters, 
and hundreds were wanted for assault and robbery, and yet they received 
benefits they are not qualified for.
  And yet some will say it is not enough to cut 1 percent in waste, 
fraud and abuse, and we see what they request as opposed to that, and 
we hear time and time again, the Democrats keep saying we have to raise 
taxes. We have to raise taxes because there is not enough money, 
because the Federal Government is run so efficiently that we cannot cut 
1 percent of waste, fraud and abuse.
  Madam Speaker, the facts do not bear that out. The Federal Government 
does waste people's money. The Federal Government loses almost $20 
billion a year that just evaporates, they do not know where it is. The 
Federal Government cannot even misspend it because it is lost. And then 
they still say, the Democratic side, that we have to raise the hard-
working American taxpayer's taxes because there is no waste, fraud and 
abuse.
  Madam Speaker, the American people know better. We can and we must 
cut waste, fraud and abuse; and clearly, the days of raising taxes on 
the American people have to be over, and they are.

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