GOP Eyes Congressional Fiscal Reform

This is also a national radio hit on the Dobson Focus on the Family network.

A group of House Republicans is highlighting the progress in reining in the budget and asking their colleagues to continue tightening their belts.

The message from members of the Waste, Fraud and Abuse Public Affairs team in the House is that government bureaucracy has woven a web of redundant and ineffective programs.

“Thirty percent of the programs we have in the federal government could not even determine their results,” team chair Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said. “That is something that should be cause for concern.”

But change is coming, according to Blackburn, who said next year’s budget calls for $212 billion in discretionary spending cuts over the next five years.

“There are more and more members of Congress,” she explained, “who are saying, ‘It is time for us to begin to turn this around.’ “

Spending cuts, Blackburn added, need to come from both discretionary and fixed spending.

She’s calling for performance-based funding for government agencies. Chris Kinnan of FreedomWorks said that’s a good start, but there’s a lot to do.

“Spending has gone through the roof,” Kinnan said. “It’s growing—both entitlement spending and discretionary spending—at a pace that we haven’t seen since LBJ was in office, and it was the 1960s and it was the Great Society.”

Calls to restrain spending have been around for almost as long.

“We really know what needs to be done; the question is will Congress really have the will to do it?” Kinnan said. “But it’s great to see members move the ball forward and for the Office of Management and Budget put this out there.”