ACTION Act

Mr. President, have you ever flown over the heartland of the United States and wondered how the Midwest and West got its distinctive and remarkable checkerboard pattern?

The reason for that extraordinary system is a law enacted on this date in 1785. On May 20, 1785, Congress enacted a bill that laid the foundation for American land policy. The Land Ordinance of 1785 provided that from a point of beginning in East Liverpool, Ohio, the new Northwest Territory was to be systematically surveyed and the lands subdivided into settlements and townships. Of the thirty-six sections of 640 acres in each township, the sixteenth was reserved ``for the maintenance of public schools.'' Congress began an extraordinary process of inventorying the lands to the west, providing for settlement and homesteads, surveying and subdividing the lands, and providing land for Revolutionary War soldiers, as payment in lieu of compensation to relieve the new Republic of its war debts to those who fought for our freedom.

But while these early Acts of Congress, beginning with the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, through the Homestead Act of 1862 and the more recent Federal Land Policy and Management Act FLPMA in 1976, all contributed to the inventorying, surveying, preservation, disposal and settlement of lands of the West, to this day the United States does not have a current, accurate inventory of the lands the Federal government owns.

The fact is, the Federal Government does not know what it owns, where it owns it, what condition it is in, what its characteristics are, or what its designated use should be. This is the third consecutive Congress in which Congress's watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office placed `Managing Federal Real Property' in the High-Risk Series, a category describing those activities with the highest risk of waste, fraud or abuse.

The GAO, GAO-03-122, found over 30 Federal agencies control hundreds of thousands of real property assets worldwide, including facilities and land. However, the portfolio is not well managed, many assets are no longer consistent with agency mission or needs, and many assets are in an alarming state of disrepair. Also, GAO, GAO-T-RCED-95-117, told Congress, ``The General Services Administration, GSA, publishes statistics on the amount of land managed by each federal agency. However, we found this information was not current or reliable.''

To remedy the lack of a current accurate inventory of all Federal real property, and the duplication and inefficiency of the many property databases the government does maintain, I am today introducing the Federal Land Asset Inventory Reform, FLAIR, Act, along with my colleague Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. Our bill is a companion to H.R. 5532, introduced in the House on a bipartisan basis by Representative Kind of Wisconsin and Representative Cannon of Utah.

There is no reason for the Government to lack a current, accurate inventory of all the land it has been entrusted to manage for the citizens of the United States. With the technology available, it should not happen that then-Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton would testify before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee on March 2, 2005 that ``The Department currently uses 26 different financial management systems and over 100 different property systems. Employees must enter procurement transactions multiple times in different systems so that the data are captured in real property inventories, financial systems, and acquisition systems. This fractured approach is both costly and burdensome to manage.''

It is time the U.S. Government invested in a methodology and technology to identify and inventory its land holdings. Such a system can help enhance the Federal land management, resource conservation, environmental protection, and use of Federal real property. We should not be creating multiple inventories when today's technology permits us to do it once and use it many times. Gathering information to solve national problems should not require an Act of Congress, particularly when a few keystrokes on a computer will do the job.

Although the Bush administration took a step toward solving this problem when President Bush issued Executive Order 13327 in 2004, the resulting GSA inventory is neither GIS-based nor includes public lands. Unfortunately, this means that more than 300 million acres are exempt from the inventory currently maintained by GSA.

Since 1980, the National Academy of Sciences has been calling for the development of a multipurpose cadastre, or land registry, in its report, ``Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre.'' The report said, ``There is a critical need for a better land-information system in the United States to improve land-conveyance procedures, furnish a basis for equitable taxation, and provide much- needed information for resource management and environmental planning.'' In 2007, the Academy renewed this effort and recommended the idea of the FLAIR Act, in its report, ``National Land Parcel Data: A Vision for the Future.''

This Federal effort will also help State and local agencies verify their ongoing efforts to identify what each level of government owns, and permit the fair, efficient and equitable taxation of private property. This will enable government at all levels to find missing lands through a gap analysis that identifies properties on which taxes are not being collected due to the inefficiencies in our systems. For example, when the State of Wyoming used a GIS to audit the mass appraisal process, it found that approximately 250,000 parcels were not on the tax rolls.

Over the past decade, nearly 30 Governors and State Legislatures have created State land inventories. Let me give you a few examples of what some States have found.

In California, an inventory discovered that in 1955, the State purchased a golf course in Oakland to make way for a highway. The road was never built, and the State still owns the land, unbeknownst to any State agency.

In South Carolina, a State commission found the University of South Carolina, a State university, still owned Wedge Plantation, a 1,500 acre tract valued at $5 million, originally used for research of insect-borne diseases, but now leased to a half-dozen hunters who pay no rent.

While serving as Missouri State Auditor, my office issued a report noting that the Missouri Department of Transportation lacked accurate and reliable records of excess property and property being held for future projects. The best MoDOT could do was estimate

the amount and value of the land they held.

The FLAIR Act addresses the twin problems of a lack of a single, interoperable, current and accurate Federal land inventory, and the proliferation of inefficient, duplicative, costly, inaccurate and out- of-date inventories by authorizing the Department of the Interior to develop and manage a single multipurpose, uniform Federal GIS database to track and account for all Federal Real Property, as called for by GAO and recommended by the National Academy.

Waste and duplication can be avoided if the Government knew what inventories it had. The FLAIR Act also authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to conduct an ``inventory of inventories'' to identify all inventory databases, whether efficient or inefficient. The efficient databases will be merged into a single multipurpose cadastre while the inefficient databases are repealed, thus preventing waste and duplication from continuing. By integrating the efficient databases, redundancy can be identified and eliminated. Resources can be applied to gaps in data rather than duplicative data.

Once a multipurpose inventory is complete, the government can become a better real property asset manager, and a responsible steward of its land holdings. This will result in more efficient land management, again providing savings. That is what the FLAIR Act provides.

I urge my colleagues to join Senator Hatch and myself in enacting this good-government bill.

Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation with the senior Senator from Nebraska, Senator Hagel, to establish an independent commission to address long-standing, systemic problems in the collection, reporting, and analysis of foreign intelligence as well as diplomatic reporting and open source information. First, as the DNI has testified, we continue to direct ``disproportionate'' resources toward current crises, rather than toward long-term strategic issues and emerging threats. Second, we don't have the geographic distribution of resources needed to anticipate threats around the world. The lack of ``global reach'' has also been acknowledged by the Intelligence Community leadership. And third, we lack a comprehensive strategic approach to the collection of information by the entire U.S. Government, including not only the Intelligence Community, but also State Department and other Government officers who are based in our embassies.

To put it simply, the Government does not have a process for asking the following questions: What do we need to know, not only today but in the future? Who is best suited to get that information and where do they need to be? Is our analysis up to the task? And how do we allocate resources, across agencies, so that these requirements are met with adequate funding? These big strategic questions are critical to our national security, yet they don't get asked, much less answered. These problems extend well beyond the authorities of the DNI and the jurisdiction of any one congressional committee. That is why we need an independent commission to finally address them comprehensively and to make recommendations for the executive branch and for Congress.

There are concrete reasons why this is so important. Around the world, including in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, there are current and potential terrorist safe havens. There is also the potential for instability and the persistence of political, economic and social conditions that can result in a crisis that threatens our national security. Do we need more clandestine collectors in these parts of the world? Do we need more embassy political officers doing more diplomatic reporting? After all, information gleaned from conversations with government officials, civil society and tribal and religious leaders can be critical to understanding potential terrorist safe havens and can often be obtained more effectively than through the IC. What about other U.S. Government officials based overseas, such as FBI officers? What mix of these personnel is appropriate? What does a U.S. Embassy in one of these countries look like, from an interagency collection and reporting perspective? Are more consulates and out-of-embassy posts part of the solution? And how do we connect the requirements of our embassies overseas to Washington, where administration budget requests and congressional budgetary allocations and appropriations should reflect a broad, multi-year interagency collection strategy?

An independent commission will be able to answer these questions. It will be able to look at the Intelligence Community, the State Department, and other departments and agencies to ensure that strategic and budgetary planning is not only consistent with national requirements, but is part of a larger, interagency process. The commission will consider the role of the National Security Council and the OMB in this process. It will look at the problem from top to bottom, interviewing NSC officials in Washington and visiting country missions overseas. This would not be a confrontational or accusatory investigation. It is an inquiry intended to produce concrete recommendations to fix long-standing problems. Those recommendations will be of enormous benefit to whoever the next president is. It will help Congress as it conducts oversight and considers the role of the Intelligence Community, the DNI, the State Department, and other agencies in the context of broader interagency strategies.

This legislation has been endorsed by a broad range of people, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Donald Gregg, Carl Ford, Larry Wilkerson, David Kay, Gayle Smith and Rand Beers. I am pleased that the Intelligence Committee approved the legislation earlier this month as an amendment to the fiscal year 2009 intelligence authorization bill. I will continue working with Senator Hagel to ensure that this important legislation is enacted.

Mr. President, the Feingold-Hagel bill establishes an independent Foreign Intelligence and Information Commission, appointed by Congress, to review strategies for collection, analysis, and reporting of intelligence and diplomatic information from our outposts around the world. The Commission would have a 2-year lifespan.

We must ensure that the United States is prepared to face the challenges of the 21st Century. Our intelligence agencies and diplomatic outposts must provide policymakers with information that helps anticipate threats before they loom large, and our efforts must not be focused solely on the ``threat of the day.''

As observers and veterans of the intelligence community--including the 9/11 Commission--have noted, the U.S. Government and intelligence community obviously have to focus on current threats, many times at the expense of having the ``strategic depth'' to analyze and anticipate potential threats and surprises lurking over the horizon. The focus mainly on current reporting has been cited within the Intelligence Community as inhibiting its ability to forecast significant longer term problems.

With the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, DNI, and the National Counterterrorism Center, NCTC, Congress helped move the Intelligence Community in the right direction, but we need strategic intelligence not just on terrorism, but many other threats that our intelligence agencies and policymakers must anticipate.

This bi-partisan Commission would enhance--not supplant--the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's oversight of intelligence.

``Strategic depth'' in collection and analysis is an issue that cuts across the oversight responsibilities of both the Senate's Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees. This Commission would examine diplomatic as well as intelligence reporting, which would help provide an in-depth analysis of issues that are not entirely within the scope of responsibilities of the DNI. The Commission would be able to probe these areas in depth and would have two years to issue its final report.

We have seen how Commission reports can be useful tools to both Congress and the Executive branch to highlight needed reforms. For instance, the 2001 Carlucci Commission report on ``State Department Reform'' proved to be a tremendous resource for Secretary Colin Powell as he developed an action program to revitalize the State Department and make needed reforms. Secretary Powell studied the findings and recommendations of this and other panels. He met extensively with Carlucci and other members of various

commissions, and relied on their detailed insights in formulating his reform efforts.

The Feingold-Hagel legislation's commission report would help the next administration evaluate and improve the effectiveness of key instruments underlying our national power. The Commission would provide recommendations on how to improve collection strategy, analysis, interagency information sharing, and language training.

A bipartisan group of respected intelligence and national security experts have endorsed the Commission, including former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; Donald Gregg, former Ambassador and National Security Advisor to Vice President George H. W. Bush, and Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary Colin Powell. Earlier this month, in a bipartisan vote, the Senate Intelligence Committee endorsed the Feingold-Hagel legislation setting up this commission.

This Commission would help Congress and the Executive to better position our intelligence agencies and diplomats to provide the information the United States Government needs to anticipate future strategic challenges, and I urge my colleagues to support this measure.

Mr. President, I rise today with Senator Cochran and others to introduce legislation that will build on one of the best service success stories of the last quarter century: AmeriCorps. Fifteen years ago, as he swore in the first class of AmeriCorps members, President Bill Clinton said, ``When it is all said and done, it comes down to three simple questions: What is right? What is wrong? And what are we going to do about it?''

Since that time, more than a half-million AmeriCorps members have taken it upon themselves to try and answer those questions in communities across this country.

They have done so by serving in a variety of settings from senior centers and veterans' hospitals to schools and afterschool programs. They have helped clean up our neighborhoods and rebuilt our houses. These members have sacrificed their time and energy to meet the fundamental needs of our nation.

Last year alone, 75,000 AmeriCorps members gave back to our communities, serving in over 4,000 schools, faith-based and community organizations, and nonprofits across the country. They also brought reinforcements--recruiting another 1.7 million community volunteers to work alongside them. Because of AmeriCorps, our communities have been strengthened, and our democracy fortified.

Unfortunately, as the hours AmeriCorps members have contributed to our communities have increased, the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award created to help members pay for their college tuition has remained flat at $4,725. Meanwhile, the average college tuition has skyrocketed. The education award previously paid for two years of college, but currently it does not even cover the cost of a single year. I am introducing the AmeriCorps: Together Improving Our Nation Act, ACTION, in part, to update the education award to keep pace with 15 years of tuition increases.

The ACTION Act will raise the education award to $6,185 and increase the award annually to match the average tuition at a 4-year public university.

That figure, $6,185 is the average cost of tuition at a four-year public university according to the College Board. The act will also make the education award tax exempt to ensure that students are able to use their entire award to advance their education.

In addition, to recognize service as a national priority, this legislation promotes the position of Executive Director of the Corporation for National and Community Service to Cabinet status and reestablishes the Corporation for National and Community Service's authority to partner with other Federal agencies. As partners of equal status, Federal Departments will be able to coordinate their priorities and have AmeriCorps members work to meet their needs.

For example, the Department of Education could use volunteers to help solve the ``Dropout Crisis'' and the Environmental Protection Agency could use volunteers to increase our energy efficiency.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I know that national service ought not to simply be virtuous, but rather, a resource with which we can carry out our most urgent national priorities, from tackling poverty to making our communities cleaner and more vibrant. We need to recognize service as a national priority, and with passage of the ACTION Act, we will.

Mr. President, I rise today with Senator Cochran and others to introduce legislation that will build on one of the best service success stories of the last quarter century: AmeriCorps. Fifteen years ago, as he swore in the first class of AmeriCorps members, President Bill Clinton said, ``When it is all said and done, it comes down to three simple questions: What is right? What is wrong? And what are we going to do about it?''

Since that time, more than a half-million AmeriCorps members have taken it upon themselves to try and answer those questions in communities across this country.

They have done so by serving in a variety of settings from senior centers and veterans' hospitals to schools and afterschool programs. They have helped clean up our neighborhoods and rebuilt our houses. These members have sacrificed their time and energy to meet the fundamental needs of our nation.

Last year alone, 75,000 AmeriCorps members gave back to our communities, serving in over 4,000 schools, faith-based and community organizations, and nonprofits across the country. They also brought reinforcements--recruiting another 1.7 million community volunteers to work alongside them. Because of AmeriCorps, our communities have been strengthened, and our democracy fortified.

Unfortunately, as the hours AmeriCorps members have contributed to our communities have increased, the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award created to help members pay for their college tuition has remained flat at $4,725. Meanwhile, the average college tuition has skyrocketed. The education award previously paid for two years of college, but currently it does not even cover the cost of a single year. I am introducing the AmeriCorps: Together Improving Our Nation Act, ACTION, in part, to update the education award to keep pace with 15 years of tuition increases.

The ACTION Act will raise the education award to $6,185 and increase the award annually to match the average tuition at a 4-year public university.

That figure, $6,185 is the average cost of tuition at a four-year public university according to the College Board. The act will also make the education award tax exempt to ensure that students are able to use their entire award to advance their education.

In addition, to recognize service as a national priority, this legislation promotes the position of Executive Director of the Corporation for National and Community Service to Cabinet status and reestablishes the Corporation for National and Community Service's authority to partner with other Federal agencies. As partners of equal status, Federal Departments will be able to coordinate their priorities and have AmeriCorps members work to meet their needs.

For example, the Department of Education could use volunteers to help solve the ``Dropout Crisis'' and the Environmental Protection Agency could use volunteers to increase our energy efficiency.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I know that national service ought not to simply be virtuous, but rather, a resource with which we can carry out our most urgent national priorities, from tackling poverty to making our communities cleaner and more vibrant. We need to recognize service as a national priority, and with passage of the ACTION Act, we will.