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Portsmouth
Daily Times
Portman
works to cut wasteful
spending
By Wayne Allen
U.S.
Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio),
in a conference call with Ohio reporters Thursday, highlighted some of
his and
others efforts to curtail wasteful government spending.
“Today
we issued another example of
Washington wasteful spending, every month were doing this. An example
of
wasteful spending at the Department of State, we have received
information they
have spent $630,000 to persuade people to like their Facebook page,”
Portman
said. “I don’t know how this helps promote our foreign policy agenda.”
Portman
said, with the federal
government running budget deficits with averages about $10,000
per-household
per-year and a debt of $17 trillion dollars, his office is going after
examples
of waste.
“This
shows there is an opportunity
to tighten the belt further in government,” Portman said. “Wasteful
spending
like this has to be part of the solution in addition to entitlement
reform and
other things we’ve talked about.”
On
Wednesday Portman and Tom
Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) introduced the Federal Employee Accountability Act,
a bill
aimed at reducing ‘official time’ for government employees.
According
to released information
from Portman’s office, “under the practice of ‘official time’, as
authorized
under 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, federal employees can be paid by
taxpayers
to complete duties that are not related to the mission of their agency,
allowing in some cases for employees to perform union-related
activities – some
even full-time – while on federal payroll. According to the Office of
Personnel
Management, in 2011, the government spent $155 million on 3.4 million
hours
used for ‘official time.’”
“Using
taxpayer dollars to finance
what is often highly partisan and political full-time union work is a
grievous
violation of the public’s trust,” Coburn said in a released statement.
“Sadly,
this is a widespread problem. Agencies like the IRS and VA have
hundreds of
employees on their payrolls that do nothing but full-time union work
paid for
by taxpayer dollars. This bill will restore the public’s trust by
ensuring
federal employees – and the taxpayer funds that support them…
Read
the rest of the article at the
Portsmouth Daily Times
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