You don't win championships by having the cheapest budget.
SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, also has no executive powers and operates abroad on CIA lines, but with a tiny percentage of the budget and a tiny percentage of the personnel.
The 9/11 Commission strongly recommends that the National Intelligence Director be fully in control of the budget, from developing it to implementing it, to ensuring that the National Intelligence Director has the clout to make decisions.
Eurobonds are absolutely wrong. In order to bring about common interest rates, you need similar competitiveness levels, similar budget situations. You don't get them by collectivizing debts.
When completed, the budget must provide the services we have promised to our constituents.
Foreign aid, though less than 1% of the annual federal budget, is often a hard case to make to constituents who are rightfully worried about domestic and economic issues.
Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts, they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.
For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it.
Trying to balance the budget through defense cuts is both counterproductive and impossible.
In Congress, while the House's proposed defense budget calls for significant increases, it also cuts 11 billion dollars from veterans spending - including healthcare and disability pay. Be clear: we can't equate spending on veterans with spending on defense.
When you cut a half-a-trillion dollars from the defense budget, it affects almost every area in the defense budget.
I have long believed there is a lot of waste in the defense budget.
If we can't find cuts in the defense budget, we're not looking carefully enough.
If the military is to show the capabilities that we demand and expect of it, then the defense budget has to continue to rise.
At Concerned Veterans for America, we've made the case that the defense budget could be targeted for spending reform, but in a targeted fashion that genuinely changes unsustainable spending trajectories while preserving U.S. defense capacity.
I ask the American people to consider the legacy this administration has handed us in the defense budget as we spend billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars without the tools and ability to track these dollars.
I was able to promote a strong defense budget when it could have been cut a lot more severely.
Cold-turkey deficit reduction would cause a significant recession. A recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that going headlong over the cliff would cause our gross domestic product, which has been growing at an annual rate of around 2 percent, to fall at a rate of 2.9 percent in the first half of 2013.
The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn't go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.
Reforming public education, cutting property taxes, fixing adult and child protective services and funding our budget can all occur when Democrats and Republicans engage in consensus and cooperation - not cynicism and combat.