Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley from Iowa has penned a letter urging Defense Secretary Jim Mattis about the “ongoing waste” in the Defense Department.

The handwritten letter calls for fiscal responsibility, and it follows another letter the Senator sent to the Department of Defense Inspector General (IG) Glenn Fine regarding an audit report that cited improper payments of up to $81.2 million made by the Defense Health Agency (DHA) to TRICARE providers in 2015 and 2016.

“Despite providing a number of pointed questions aimed at getting to the bottom of these overpayments, IG Fine side-stepped providing detailed and specific answers in his response letter to Grassley,” the Senator’s office recently said. “In fact, the letter did not include a timetable requested for recovering the TRICARE overpayments, it did not acknowledge accountability for the overpayments and did not recommend solutions to ensure accountability moving forward.”

“This is simply one more blemish on a disturbing trend of fiscal irresponsibility at the Department of Defense,” his office said. “Grassley, a longtime watchdog of the agency, most recently received the results of an audit he requested in 2016, along with then-Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The audit is the result of conscientious oversight efforts conducted by Grassley over several years of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), specifically Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).”

This is the full text of the Senator’s recent letter to Mattis:

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