Republican Congressman Tom Latham says the budget deal he voted for earlier this month which cleared the U.S. Senate last week is a major breakthrough. “We’ve been going on with ‘Continuing Resolutions’ which just extend funding from year to year to year for the last four years and the bureaucracy has become extraordinarily arrogant because there’s no way to rein them in if you’re not doing appropriations and put limitations on their activities,” Latham says. “And so that’s what I’m going to be really focusing on, certainly, is to try to get the appropriations, the process going, to have congress actually function again.”

Latham is a member of the Appropriations Committee in the U.S. House. “I chair a subcommittee — Transportation, Housing and Urban Development — on Appropriations,” Latham says. “We will actually have numbers agreed to between the House and the Senate so that we can write bills for this fiscal year and next fiscal year, so that’s going to be a huge part of what my time is going to be consumed with.”

Latham announced last week that he will not seek reelection in 2014. Latham made his comments during a weekend appearance on the “Iowa Press” program on Iowa Public Television.

(Radio Iowa)