We believe members of Congress have time to put these bills together, and to READ them before they're passed. But they never will unless they're forced to.

This is why they should introduce and pass DownsizeDC.org's Read the Bills Act first. We encourage you to tell Congress to do this, and you may copy or borrow from this letter . . .

The fiscal year starts in October. This leaves you almost eight full months to . . .

* find ways to cut spending in each Department and eliminate needless and wasteful programs

* READ these funding bills

* and then pass them

This should be your priority. Do everything different from what Congress did last year when it . . .

* spent most of the year debating expansive NEW laws and bureaucracies

* increased spending everywhere

* did not have time to read any bill

* and passed funding bills months after they were due

If you remember, the 2010 fiscal year began Oct 1, yet . . .

* the 96-page Ag and FDA bill (H.R. 2997) passed (in final form) October 8

* the 1158-page Defense Authorization Act bill (H.R. 2647) passed October 22

* the 148-page Interior bill (H.R. 2996) passed October 29

* the 158-page Defense Appropriations Act (H.R. 3326) passed December 19

* the 375 (small print)-page Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 3288) passed December 13

This last, trillion-dollar bill bundled all the other funding bills into into one - months after they were due and weeks after Congress decided to debate healthcare instead! It was passed in such a rush, no complete version is found online except the small-print enrolled version!

This is intolerable.

* If the people's representatives fail to pass spending bills by the start of the fiscal year, this tells us Congress is incompetent

* And if you spend our tax dollars without knowing how they'll be spent by reading the bills, this tells us you are negligent

Pass the Read the Bills Act, and then get to work on cutting government spending and passing the bills on time.

END LETTER

(NOTE: The Defense Authorization Act funds military hardware; The Defense Appropriations Act funds personnel, operations, and maintenance.)

You can send your letter using DownsizeDC.org's Educate the Powerful System.

We also invite you to add your blog or website to the Read the Bills Act Coalition. By joining, you help to spread awareness about the Read the Bills Act. In return, your site will be linked on our blog and be listed in a Downsizer-Dispatch with more than 29,300 readers. You can learn more and join the Coalition here.

Finally, in January the House passed 19 bill totaling 371 pages, and the Senate passed  passed 7 bills coming to 138 pages. You can see summaries of these bills and their length in the blog version of this Dispatch.

James Wilson

Assistant Communications Director

DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

D o w n s i z e r - D i s p a t c h

Official email newsletter of DownsizeDC.org, Inc. & Downsize DC Foundation.

SUPPORT the "Educate the Powerful System".

Feel Free to Forward or Reprint, as long as attribution and action links are retained/included.