Mr. Coburn: Mr. President? First, let me thank my colleague from Alaska.

As somebody who's been working on areas of fiscal management in our government for the last six-plus years, this is a one -- is one small step, whether it saves $500 billion or it saves $1 million.

The problem is America knows that we need to do this 1,500 more times. You hear a lot in the press now with the republican appropriators and the republican budgeteers about how much to cut, it's the wrong language. 4 trillion last year.

We have tons of areas like my colleague and my former colleague, the senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, knows full well we're don't effectively utilize the money that's been given to us or that we're borrowing against our kids' future.

So this -- this is great to start. We need to do this every day on every bill that comes before us. We can find it. We've identified 660 sets of duplications in the federal government and they're not small duplications.

There's 49 job training programs across nine different agencies, there is science and technology and math engineering programs, something that the president said at the state of the union he wanted in hand.

We already have 105 programs. We're spending $18 billion on job training. We don't know if it's working. We don't know if the people we trained got the job in the area that we trained them.

So I'm excited about my colleague joining with me and my hope is that we can set a trend.

That with every bill that comes out, we'll start looking. And, by the way, we do have coming from the government accountability office the first third of all the government programs where we inquired two years ago into the congressional research service and to the office of management and budget, we said, give us a list -- we said, give us a list of all the programs. We don't have a list of where we spend the money.

We're critical of the defense department because they can't pass an audit, but we can't pass an audit because we don't know what we're doing. This should not be controversial at all.

It would -- and it should save us close to a billion dollars when it's all said and done. And that's a billion dollars we won't borrow from the Chinese and all we've got to do is do that 1,500 more times. And the fact is, we can. We're like that little engine.

We can. We can get up that hill.

What it's going to take is reaching across the aisle and say here's an area of common ground.

It's based in common sense and it's something that should be done and should be done now so that we don't -- you know, in -- in the data, it's just – just to show you how silly this is, in Atlanta there's still money for the 1996 olympics.

14 Yea 7 million sitting in a bank account they can't spend on because the olympics already occurred. But we've still got that money out there.

That's the kind of silly stuff that happens when the federal government's reaching into areas that it shouldn't be reaching into. And what we can do is we can not to lay blame, not to say it's about earmarks or not earmarks, here's a commonsense solution that says here's a way to free up a billion dollars or $500 million.

If it's $500 million, great. But here's a way to do that. I would also take time to spend on the floor now, the president's fiscal commission outlined $4 trillion over the next 10 years that we can eliminate that will go a long ways towards starting to solve some of our problems.

So my hope is that with this amendment we'll start a trend where we can grab hold of and capture the things that make sense, that most Americans will never miss, and if they do miss it, it's because they're going to get something better instead and more efficient instead and we start down this road.

And this is a great start. I congratulate my colleague for his initiative in bringing this back up and what we need to do is get on the phone and get our colleagues in the house to do the same thing and make sure when this bill goes through and this amendment is adopted that it actually happens.

Don't forget that -- the – the bush administration wants this to happen.

So does the Obama administration.

Think about the amount of labor we're spending taking care of details on things that can't get spent or won't be spent and the amount of man hours that goes too that. And -- and I -- goes into that.

And I thought I would finish up on one of the recommendations of the fiscal commission was on the federal workforce and there's a wonderful article that was published by and murray on -- ann murray on february 3 about how many federal employees do we have?

And it's easy for us to think about the fact that when we count just true federal employees, it's 2.8 million. But that doesn't come close to the actual number of employees that the federal government has. When you add up what is actually there, and you add in postal employees, you add in military, you add in contractors, we're at 11 million federal employees.

And there's a lot of areas. We have a great federal workforce. There's a lot of areas where we can be efficient and downsize. We don't have to lay anybody off. We can just not add.

And what we can do is through attrition markedly decrease the number of federal employees that we have which will be the second and third and fourth billion dollars.

The other thing that the -- the -- the commission recommended, which the obama administration embraced was a freeze on salaries, but most of us don't recognize we've got $3 billion owed right now to in back taxes by federal employees that's already been adjudicated.

So, I mean, there's all sorts of things that we can do. So we've got lots of ideas.

My pledge is to work across the aisle with my colleagues to find one of these every day or every other day. And if we do that together, we don't have to borrow 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend in this country. We can take it down to 20 cents or 15 cents or down to zero so we can, in fact, ensure the future for our children.

I would thank my colleague, yield back the floor and recognize and yield back to my colleague from Alaska.

…

The federal government has $90 billion worth of government not being taken care of and we have a budget gimmick, that says an agency needs a new building, because we're going to account for that building in the year they buy it and charge it to the agency what are we doing? We could lease buildings.

We can own them much cheaper than we can lease them.

What we should be doing is changing that and getting rid of the excess property. Lowering the cost to maintain it. There's nine out of the 1,500 that we have right there. And change the way that we purchase the federal buildings for the government. Instead of leasing. It costs over the life of the building twice the life versus owning.