Russ Feingold Quotes

The taxpayers deserve accountability.

It's wrong that members of Congress can purchase luxury airfare with taxpayer money when many families in my district and across the county are struggling to make ends meet.

We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right [individually] to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

I've actually cut my personal pay individually; we didn't vote on that, but I've done that individually. It's important that folks know that we're going to roll up our sleeves and work on things, and members of Congress are going to sacrifice our own budgets first.

I firmly believe that if members of Congress fail to perform their most basic duty in passing a budget, then they do not deserve to be paid.

Staff expands to fill the office space available.... The basic obligation of Congress is to the tax payers, not to its own creature comforts.

He is guilty if he wastes the money of the people, the taxes which they have paid, in luxury, pomp, and debauchery. He who should improve the morals of the people, be the guardian of the law, and improve their education should not pervert them by his bad example.

I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election

Every public official concerned with administering public funds owes it to all our citizens to be prepared at any time to account to the last penny of the public money placed in his hands.

Elected officials should be held to a higher standard, and we cannot enable misbehavior with a system that secretly settles with public funds.

The CARFA Act is about accountability in the federal government: making sure that taxpayers are getting their money's worth and not being defrauded. This is a bipartisan concept, and it is worthy of broad support across the Congress.

The American people should not be footing the bill for federal employees who stonewall Congress or rewarding government officials' bad behavior.

There is no doubt that there is a very strange phenomenon called the 'State Comptroller.'

I'm running for Congress to reverse Obama's big government policies, to be faithful to the principles on which our nation was founded, and to make members of Congress play by the same rules as the rest of us.

It is not for the State Department or even the Secretary of State to say when and how the resources of the American people will be spent.

Since 2001, I've done what every elected official should be doing in government right now. My staff and I took a look at the books, thought outside the box and proposed reforms.

Any spending should be debated openly on the floor of the House and voted on in open session, with the American people having a chance to watch and listen.

Our constituents did not send us to Washington to shut down the government. They sent us here to make it more accountable.

Fewer than a dozen Members of Congress have any idea how much money the CIA spends each year, and probably none of them has much of an idea what the Agency actually does with that money.

The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying our own money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the dispensation of public moneys.

May the debt of the United States be discharged with speed and punctuality; and let not the people be deceived, by having the funds, established for that purpose, put to other uses.

There isn't a guy [Congressman] up there [Capitol Hill] who knows what's in this bill.

Members of Congress don’t read the bills.

Congress is not an ATM

From now on, the government has to make its accounts public on a quarterly basis.