Tom Coburn News

How bad is crime in the National Park System? That question comes up every year, and it gained heightened attention earlier this year when U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn claimed that murders had greatly declined thanks to legislation that allows park visitors to carry firearms with them.

I have always believed that regardless of the laws of a nation, the social fabric that binds it is woven of mutual trust between the people and their private and governmental institutions.

Ulises Serrano, a college student at Oklahoma City University, practices the viola at his home in Edmond, OK, Friday, June 7, 2013, Photo by Paul Hellstern, The Oklahoman If Judith Huerta had been in Washington last week, she would have told senators stories of some of the undocumented immigrants she works with each day.

Americans' confidence in Congress has reached a historic low, with just 10 percent of respondents in a new poll claiming a favorable opinion of the federal legislature.

Senate Republicans used a parliamentary move Thursday to force Democrats into a battle with President Obama over government subsidies for student loans, upping the stakes in the fight with less than three weeks to go before interest rates rise.

Presented by the Senate Employee Assistance Program, Senate staffers were able to partake in the webinar class on forgiving Monday.

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe is asking federal officials to delay for another six months a decision on whether to list the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species.

Once again this week, there were questions for a federal agency about travel and conference spending, as a Senate GOP budget hawk pressed the Justice Department for answers on why it spent more than $58 million on conferences in Fiscal Year 2012.

Sen. Tom Coburn sent a bracing letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday accusing him of failing to redirect wasted money within the Department of Justice from frivolities to necessities.

Two bills were voted down by the Senate on Friday that would have halted the spike in rates on federal student loans, which are set to double on July 1 from 3.4% to 6.8% .

It's off to the U.S. Senate - finally - for the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act of 2013, which cleared a key committee June 6. You could almost hear the brokerage and financial advisor community leap for joy - or was it a sigh of relief? "It's less red tape to be licensed in multiple states," Jill Hoffman, assistant ... (more)

Wyoming U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi has joined four other senators in promoting the replacement of dollar bills with coins.

Howard Shelanski, a dual threat economist and law professor whom President Obama has picked to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, fielded high-stakes questions from senators of both parties on Wednesday without any apparent harm to his prospects for confirmation.

It already has taken twice as long as President Obama ordered, and yet his administration is still only about halfway to meeting his June 2011 vow to cut the number of federal websites in half within a year - one of the marquee pledges in his Campaign to Cut Waste.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn is demanding details from the Department of Justice about the agency's spending on, among other things, employee conferences under sequestration.

The last time Congress passed a farm bill, Democrats had control of the House and the food stamp program was about half the size it is today.

The White House is trying to jump-start budget talks with Senate Republicans to avoid a showdown over raising the national debt ceiling later this year.

Amid widespread agreement that the federal government has a long way to go toward improving efficiencies in its IT operations, U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel argued before a Senate committee on Tuesday that giving department and agency CIOs stronger, central authority could help eliminate or consolidate duplicative technology projects.

National security programs that collect phone and Internet data are legal, and the country is significantly more vulnerable to attack since the programs were exposed, Sen. Tom Coburn said Tuesday.

David Powner, director of Information Technology Management Issues at GAO, said that OMB had failed to force agencies to be sufficiently transparent about IT spending.