Serving the families and taxpayers of Ohio’s Fourth District is a true honor. As congressman, my job is to study the issues, cast votes that reflect the values of my constituents, and demonstrate a conservative, fiscally-responsible approach to running my office. I am pleased to report that we continue to manage our office frugally and responsibly as we remain one of the lowest-spending offices in Congress. Once the final numbers are in for 2015, we expect that we will have saved the American taxpayers another $150,000 this year by reducing our office spending to 2007 levels. Over the past few years, we have been able to cut our budget and return over $2.2 million in savings to the treasury.
Another important focus of mine is holding our federal government accountable to the American taxpayer. As a member of the committee on Oversight and Government Reform, my colleagues and I are doing just that. Our committee and subcommittee held 90 hearings on topics ranging from consumer protection, to health care, to eliminating government waste, to investigating Obama administration scandals. The committee also passed 55 bills to take action on the results of our hearings. Some of our hearings were high-profile, such as those featuring IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, but many more of them were low-profile, examining important issues to expose, investigate and try to remedy problems in other federal programs.
Last year, the Judiciary Committee held 57 hearings and reported 44 bills out of committee, including many strong bills to fight illegal immigration and the Obama administration’s unconstitutional executive overreach. The Select Committee on Benghazi continued its detailed work by interviewing 69 individuals, including 54 witnesses who were never interviewed by another congressional committee. I’ve participated in many of these closed-door interviews, as well as last year’s high-profile public hearing featuring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Despite delay tactics by the Obama administration, the committee has also gathered approximately 100,000 pages of documents, about 70 percent of which were never previously obtained or reviewed by Congress.
My office has been actively communicating with Fourth District residents both in person at dozens of meetings and events throughout the district, and through traditional written correspondence. Each year my office responds to tens of thousands of letters, faxes, phone calls and emails from constituents on a wide range of issues. We have also begun to share more relevant information to constituents through social media. During the past year our Facebook page increased from 15,000 to almost 20,000 followers, and in the past three months our number of Twitter followers increased by 3,000 to 24,800. In addition to communicating through traditional means of letter, phone and email, we shared some of our activity by adding 69 videos to our YouTube channel, and our videos have been viewed 236,800 times.
Finally, some of our constituents followed the shakeup of political leadership in Washington late last year. Some of the shakeup was sparked by a group I helped form called the House Freedom Caucus. We are a group of conservative lawmakers who are tired of “business as usual” in Washington, and we seek to give a voice to the countless Americans who feel Washington does not represent them anymore. We share a profound belief that the federal government cannot continue spending money it doesn’t have, and we will continue working to find ways to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from government to save your money and better protect your tax dollars.
