Government Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Performance Improvement Act of 2010

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Mr. CUELLAR. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, for the leadership that both you and Chairman Towns have provided in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and, of course, your staff that has worked so hard on making sure that we get this passed. My staff also has worked very, very hard on this.

On the committee, also, I certainly want to thank Ranking Member Issa for his input and for his amendments also that we accepted and, of course, his staff also for getting this work done.

I certainly want to thank the other stakeholders--GAO, CRS, CAP, OMB, the Blue Dog Coalition, and other folks that have worked to make this into a bipartisan bill.

In particular, I want to point out my friend, Todd Platts, who has been working on this particular bill the last few sessions, building the foundation. And we went and looked at his bill, looked at some of the other things we were working on, and we put it together as a bipartisan bill.

H.R. 2142 creates a results-oriented government; a government that works with the people in a commonsense concept that emphasizes a couple of things: One, increases government accountability while Federal agencies must identify cost-cutting, outcome-based goals that have a direct impact on the American people; shines light on ineffective Federal programs to root out wasteful spending, where they're held accountable where they have to provide those goals every quarter; and more importantly, senior management will be held accountable for this work.

GAO oversight on the use of taxpayers' dollars to slash wasteful spending requires the GAO to perform frequent, detailed evaluations of the agency implementation of this legislation.

And, finally, if I can say this, it will not add to the Federal deficit. As you know, the CBO says that it does not affect the direct spending or revenues. Moreover, discretionary costs will be offset by saving from a ``more effective management of agency-lowered costs.''

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Mr. CUELLAR. Just to conclude, we added some specific language that says, ``Agencies shall fund the reporting requirements of this Act out of the existing budgets and authorized to make any necessary reprogramming of funds.'' So this addresses the issues of Mr. Chaffetz and some other folks, and I think this will be a good bill that we can all support in a bipartisan way.

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