Early in his congressional career, Cox befriended two anti-Communists in Hungary and Lithuania who had been prisoners of conscience and who later became presidents of their countries after the end of Soviet domination.
In 1994, Cox was appointed by President Clinton to the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, which in 1995 published a unanimous report warning that the nation cannot continue to allow entitlement programs to consume a rapidly increasing share of the federal budget [REF].