WASHINGTON — Since March 2013, Sen. Marco Rubio has co-chaired a Senate arms control task force that has met only three times, yet his office has accepted each year a $100,000 reimbursement for the costs of staffing the group.
A week before he was named co-chairman of the working group,
Rubio was one of 11 Republican senators joining 42 Democrats to vote down a proposal by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to shut it down because it has a $700,000-a-year budget. But the panel doesn't appear to do much since it provides no public records of its meetings and offers no disclosure of how its money is spent.
The panel operates on a bipartisan basis — Dianne Feinstein of California is the Democratic co-chairwoman — but the group has not met at all since Republicans took control of the Senate in January 2015. Senate expenditure records indicate Feinstein's office received $94,000 in 2013, but nothing since.
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Rubio, who is running for president, has been criticized by his opponents for shirking his Senate responsibilities, a charge he dismisses.
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When he made his motion to kill the working group, Paul said there was no public record of the group having met since 2010 and no public record of how the salary allotments were being spent. "To fund a group that has no records and no records of them meeting and doesn't tell you where they are paying the salaries I don't think makes any sense," he said at the time.
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More:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...te-national-security-group-meetings/80932848/
