Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn will be leaving his seat at the end of this year but it's not because he lost in last Tuesday's midterm election.

When he was first elected to the Senate in 2004, Coburn pledged to his constituents that he would only serve two terms so he could focus on what is best for the nation and not on his next re-election. That's a rare quality among today's lifetime politicians.We'll miss Coburn because he espoused traditional values and was sickened by out-of-control spending in Washington. His annual Wastebook on government spending was a must-read for anyone concerned with how Washington spends our tax dollars.By calling attention to the pork barrel abuses, Coburn helped to prevent billions of dollars in wasteful spending.Coburn also stepped up to the plate on other issues.He was one of the first to sound an alarm on the deficiencies at Veterans Affairs clinics, and he spearheaded a law prohibiting the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security from paying billions of dollars in undeserved taxpayer funded bonuses to government contractors for shoddy and incomplete work.He also successfully fought the excessive spending by bureaucrats at junkets.In his most recent Wastebook, Coburn slammed the National Institutes of Health for complaining about lack of Ebola research money while it used federal funds to study the effect of Swedish massages on rabbits.Coburn chided the NIH director who claimed a vaccine for Ebola "probably" would have been developed by now if not for the stagnant funding for the agency, which has a $30 billion annual budget.Yet the NIH did come up with that money to fund those Swedish massages for rabbits.Although Coburn is retiring at the end of the year, the "Wastebook" needs to continue.Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has said he would relish taking the lead on the spending report.The national debt is now over $17 trillion, which computes to a tab of $54,000 for every American.Taxpayers need to know that there's someone trying to police and expose the wasteful spending in Washington.By JIM ZBICKeditor@tnonline.com