Agency Administrative Expenses Reduction Act of 2009

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I wish to make a very brief statement while we are awaiting Members of the Senate to come and offer amendments. Senator Bennett and I have been very patient. We have a good many amendments filed, so we are waiting for our colleagues to come offer those amendments on the underlying appropriations bill. But I wish to take a couple of minutes while we are waiting, to offer a brief statement.

I am Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The Commission examines human rights and rule of law developments in China. I would like to talk for a moment about these issues and some developments in China that concern me a great deal.

I want to discuss the increasing harassment of human rights lawyers in China, which this Commission had reported on in great detail. Some have been disbarred, and their law firms have been closed. Others have been physically harassed or beaten. What do these lawyers share in common? The tenacity and courage to take on politically sensitive cases.

I wish to say a few words about China's most famous human rights lawyer, a very courageous man named Gao Zhisheng.

It is 174 days now since Mr. Gao was last seen taken from his bed by more than 10 men. His captors, apparently the ``national defense'' unit of China's public security agency according to the renowned China expert Jerome Cohen, had threatened to kill the young lawyer during previous detentions that were marked by horrific torture. What was his transgression? Why is he in trouble with the Chinese authorities? He agreed to take politically sensitive cases as a lawyer, and represented some of the most vulnerable people in China. He sought to use the law in China to battle corruption, to overturn illegal property seizures, to expose police abuses and defend religious freedom in China.

In October of 2005, Gao wrote an open letter to President Hu and Premier Wen detailing the torture of Falun Gong practitioners by authorities. A month later, the authorities shut down his law firm and revoked his license to practice law.

In 2006, he was convicted of ``inciting subversion of state power,'' and was placed under ``home surveillance'' which was harsher than prison, for Gao and his family.

In 2007, public security officers abducted him again. He was brutally tortured for 50 days. His abduction was prompted by the publication of an open letter he wrote to us in the U.S. Congress.

Think of that. A lawyer in China wrote an open letter to us, Members of the Congress. In it, he alleged widespread human rights abuses in China and described the government's treatment of him and his family. His captors called him a traitor. They warned him he would be killed if he told anyone about being abducted and tortured.

Once released, he was placed again under ``home surveillance''. His family faced constant police surveillance and intimidation. His daughter, barred from attending school, lost hope as a young girl. The treatment became so brutal the family finally decided that their very survival depended on their escaping from China.

But Gao was too closely monitored and could not think of leaving without placing his family at great risk because he was monitored 24 hours a day. He did not want to be in a situation where he would leave his family at even greater risk.

So in January of this year, Gao's wife, 6-year-old son, and teenage daughter were smuggled out of China and into the United States. This is a photograph of Gao, his wife Geng He, his son, and his daughter. This photograph depicts a beautiful family living in China, Mr. Gao and his family, a lawyer who practiced law in support of the most vulnerable in China. As a result, he ran afoul of the Chinese Government.

Mr. Gao disappeared 174 days ago, has not been seen or heard from since. After his family fled China, Gao was abducted once again from his home and no one has seen him alive. We know his situation is extremely grave. I have met with his wife. I have spoken about this on the floor of the Senate previously. His wife came to Washington, DC, and was in the balcony when I and other colleagues spoke about the plight of Mr. Gao.

Of course, he may have been killed. The Chinese Government has not let anyone know his whereabouts or given access to him despite repeated appeals by U.N. agencies, by our government, by foreign governments, NGOs, and the media. The Chinese Government has signed and ratified many international agreements, human rights agreements, that would require it to come clean about Mr. Gao.

I have written to the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, and received a letter back from him that was a nonanswer. I call on the Ambassador again to answer the questions: Where is Mr. Gao being held? Is Mr. Gao alive? What is the Chinese Government doing to this poor soul who had previously been tortured simply because he ran afoul of the state by speaking out and practicing law on behalf of those who are vulnerable in China?

We call on the Chinese Government to give us information about Mr. Gao, to allow him access to a lawyer and to his family and to publicly state and justify the grounds for his continued abuse. The right to speak freely and to challenge the government, all of these are enshrined in the constitution in China. Yet it appears the Chinese Government and the Communist Party seem intent on upholding the violation of these rights in the case of Mr. Gao.

What has the Chinese Government done to Mr. Gao? How do they justify it? When will they allow his family to see him? The government's continued refusal to produce Mr. Gao makes this case resemble those of the ``disappeared'' in Latin American dictatorships.

American law has the practice of habeas corpus. It is the legal action through which a person can seek relief from the unlawful detention of themselves or another. I am aware of nothing similar to America's habeas corpus that exists in Chinese legislation or

legal practice. But the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which China ratified almost 20 years ago, obligates it to come clean about Gao.

I urge the government of China to disclose his whereabouts and justify the grounds for his continued detention. Once again, this is a photograph of a very courageous man, a very courageous Chinese lawyer, who has been incarcerated and tortured and now has been apparently abducted, perhaps killed. We do not know. I call on the Chinese Government to tell us what has happened to Mr. Gao.

Mr. Gao's family and Mr. Gao's wife continually await word now 174 days after their father and husband--this courageous lawyer in China was abducted. Having been abducted before and having been tortured before, they worry very much about the safety of their husband and their father. My hope is that our government, and other governments can expect some word soon from the Government of China about the whereabouts and the well-being of Mr. Gao.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Will the Senator yield?

I ask unanimous consent that morning business statements during the consideration of this bill be limited to 10 minutes.

I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

While we are waiting for colleagues, some of whom will be offering amendments, I wanted to describe briefly an amendment I am going to offer.

Let me describe an executive order that was established by President Clinton in 1993. That executive order was titled ``Deficit Control and Productivity Improvement in the Administration of the Federal Government.'' Essentially what the President did in 1993 was require Federal agencies to delineate between their program costs and their overhead costs or general administrative costs. He wanted to begin cutting overhead or administrative costs.

The first thing a business will do, by and large, to deal with a downturn in business, is to begin tightening their belt on administrative or general overhead expenditures. We can't yet do that with Federal agencies, because there is no distinction between program costs and administrative or general overhead costs. The minute you propose any reduction, they say: OK, what you are doing is you are trying to cut these programs.

President Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 that required Federal agencies to separate out and report their administrative and general and administrative overhead expenditures versus program costs. Almost none of the agencies complied. So I began discussing with my colleague Senator Coburn legislation that we have since introduced. We may be an odd couple; we have different records on some issues, though not all. In any event, we decided to introduce legislation that would reinstate the requirements of the 1993 executive order, but in this circumstance make it stick and then, ultimately, begin a reduction in overhead expenditures.

The first step of that is to get the information with each of the major Federal agencies on what is general and administrative overhead expense and what are their program expenditures.

Let me give you some examples of administrative waste that are real head scratchers.

When the Transportation Security Agency was first created some years ago, they had to hire airport screeners. That gave rise to some unbelievable overhead costs in trying to recruit. We held a hearing on this. They had 20 recruiters begin a 7-week stay at the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, CO, a luxury resort hotel with an 18-hole golf course. After 7 weeks, the recruiters had hired a total of 50 people. On some days only one or two applicants showed up, but they hung in there. They also, as I began to investigate that, had recruiters show up at the Waldorf Astoria to interview people; the Manele Bay Hotel in Lanai, HI; Hawk's Cay Resort in the Florida Keys. They were recruiting people and having a grand time of it, and in the end they spent $700 million in this manner.

A couple years later TSA spent $1 million on an awards banquet. They hired a party planner for $85,000, three balloon arches for the party for $1,400, seven cakes for $1,800, and $1,500 for three cheese platters. That is some cheese.

I don't mean to pick on the TSA alone. Fore example, the Bureau of Indian Affairs spent $28,000 to send 14 of its most senior staffers to a 4-day Tony Robbins motivational seminar. Overhead? It seems to me it is not overhead anybody ought to be supportive of. The participants in that seminar were trained on how to ``shed excess weight quickly and enjoyably,'' and how to ``reignite the passion in your physical relationship.'' They were also asked to walk on hot coals with minimal training. The $28,000 from the Bureau of Indian Affairs could have paid the annual salary of a fifth grade school teacher at an Indian school.

A week or two ago, the Bureau of the Public Debt at the Treasury announced it would hire a consultant to teach employees how to be funny in the workplace. The consultant was going to teach staff through the use of cartoons. I pointed out that there is very little funny to the taxpayers about the public debt. They scrapped that. In fact, I got a fairly upset letter from the cartoonist who bid the project.

My point is, there is fat in government agencies, especially the big agencies that have grown and have never had to trim overhead and general administrative expenses.

That brings me back to the Clinton order of 1993 that has never been complied with by Federal agencies, a Presidential order that directed certain things for which there has been no action. Senator Coburn and I introduced S. 948 with the objective of reviving that executive order and having the information by which to begin trimming back some or belt tightening some with the Federal agencies on overhead expenditures. I will not offer that bill in its entirety as an amendment to this legislation, but I will instead offer an amendment that represents a first step, which is that the Federal agencies will identify their overhead and general and administrative expenses, separately from program expenses. We need to know and should know.

My hope is, once we do know that information, we will be able to at least initiate some belt tightening because with the kind of Federal budget deficit we have--deficits are growing; I think they are unsustainable and very dangerous for our country--we need to be

tightening our belt in a wide range of areas.

The legislation we have introduced would begin to accomplish that. But in order to accomplish that, the first step must be to get the understanding of what the separate expenditures are of general administrative expenses and overhead expenses. So I will be offering that amendment as we go along.

We will be here apparently for a longer period of time, and at some appropriate moment, I will offer that amendment and hope for its inclusion in this legislation.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I will be glad to withhold my request.

Mr. President, we are waiting to try to see if we can have a vote on an amendment that has been offered. We, again, would ask colleagues to come and offer their amendments. We have been patiently waiting, Senator Bennett and I, to see if we could get amendments debated and voted upon.

I have a photograph I wish to show on another matter. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, at 8:30 p.m. on January 2 in 2008, fellow special forces soldiers found SSG Ryan Maseth on the floor in the bathroom at a security forces building in Baghdad, Iraq. His mother Cheryl Harris was originally told, when she was informed her son had died, that perhaps he had been in the shower with a radio and had been electrocuted. He clearly had been electrocuted when he was found unresponsive in January of last year.

But Cheryl Harris, she wanted to get to the bottom of this, and she would not let this drop. I held two hearings on this subject. We discovered that Kellogg, Brown, and Root had been in charge of fixing widely reported problems at the shower facility where Sergeant Maseth had been electrocuted, and had failed miserably.

Well, this week we obtained an inspector general's report, which shows that there were 230 electrical shocks of American soldiers in facilities in Iraq because they weren't wired properly. Kellogg, Brown, and Root was the contractor, and they failed miserably. In

fact, they were awarded $83 million in award fees, bonuses, for excellent work, which we now know was improper. They hired third country nationals who could not speak good English and didn't know the standards and, in many cases, didn't even do basic grounding of the wiring. We know that Staff Sergeant Maseth was electrocuted. We know there was a young man power-washing a Humvee who was electrocuted. We know that the U.S. Army criminal investigation is now investigating a number of these circumstances.

But when I held the hearings, there was denial all around by Kellogg, Brown, and Root; no, we did great work, they said. By the Pentagon, the Defense Department; no, things were fine, they initially said. It turns out that wasn't the case. We had to ultimately get an inspector general to give us the facts. It is not only on this case. The same thing happened on contaminated water brought to the military bases in Iraq. I held two hearings. The Pentagon denied that KBR had provided unsafe water to our troops. Kellog, Brown and Root--Halliburton, rather, in that case, denied it. But I asked the inspector general to investigate, and they confirmed it. Nonpotable water that was more contaminated than raw water from the Euphrates was sent to our soldiers at bases in Iraq.

These are two inspector general reports. Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense. There are two of them. They tell us what has been the result of improper wiring of facilities in Iraq. ``In the remaining 9 cases,'' they say, talking about electrocutions, not about the 230 electrical shocks--I am talking about the nine who died. ``In the remaining 9 cases, we determined that individuals were killed by improper grounding or faulty equipment. The equipment malfunctions could have related to whether equipment maintenance complied with proper electrical standards, or whether the respective chain of command acted responsibly in protecting servicemembers. As of June 30, 2009, five of those nine cases remained under criminal investigation.''

Until I did the hearings, these were largely unknown. Even when I did the hearings, KBR insisted that it had done nothing wrong.

In the case of SSG Ryan Maseth, specifically, let me read from the IG report:

An engineering evaluation of the failed pump [this is a

pump that serviced the building] determined that insulation

on the internal wires melted, causing a short to the metal

pump housing. Failure to ground the pump and improper

grounding of the building electrical system allowed the metal

pump housing and water distribution pipes in the building to

energize.

This says this soldier was electrocuted while taking a shower because contractors didn't do their job. It is not me saying that. I had hearings in which people working for that contractor showed up at the witness table and said: We worked next to people who didn't know what they were doing, and it subjected these soldiers to great risk.

As I indicated previously, in the Department of Defense, for this work, which we now know was shoddy work and improper work that put soldiers' lives at risk, for that work, this contractor got $83 million in bonus awards. It is unbelievable to me that this sort of thing goes on.

I think there are some in the Pentagon, in the chain of command, and certainly contractors, who have a lot to answer for. This Congress ought to insist upon it.

This mother of this soldier, Cheryl Harris, wasn't going to let this drop. Good for her. That is why I held these hearings to determine what is the truth, because we didn't get the truth from the people who talked to the mother of the soldier who died. In the hearings, witnesses who previously worked in Iraq told us that the KBR's wiring was improper. Now we get the truth from the IG report. We should not have to wait for the IG to confirm these things.

I would think the U.S. Defense Department would search more aggressively for the truth than anyone because it was their soldiers who were put at risk. Regrettably, the Defense Department has not pursued this with the zeal you would have hoped for. It doesn't matter whether it was the sodium dichromate case, where soldiers were exposed to the risks of cancer because of the water brought to the bases, which was more contaminated than raw water from the Euphrates. There were four or five cases. The contractor said it did nothing wrong in each case, and the Pentagon by and large said that KBR had done nothing wrong; but the inspector general said that the problems were real, and documented how the contractor had failed, and the Defense Department had failed to hold the contractor accountable.

This Congress deserves better than that from the Defense Department, the taxpayers deserve better, and a mother such as Cheryl Harris should not have had to wonder whether her son was in mortal danger through the mere act of taking a shower.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Senator Bennett and I are similar to the Maytag repairman in the old commercials, waiting for someone to come and offer amendments. Many have been filed. No one, apparently, has come to the floor to offer amendments.

I would not be surprised if at some point down the road someone will say: Well, we did not get enough chance or opportunity to offer amendments. Of course, in these intervening hours, there has been plenty of opportunity for someone to show up to offer amendments.

We had intended and hoped to have a vote at 4:30 on a relatively noncontroversial amendment. But for the last hour or so, we have been waiting, on a noncontroversial amendment, for a staff person to contact the Senator who is apparently not able to be contacted to tell us whether the Senate can vote on a noncontroversial amendment.

Such is the life of the Senate, a place where no one has ever been accused of

speeding. We only ask, having been here now yesterday and today, Senator Bennett and I only ask, having put together this bill that funds all of our energy and water issues, if there are Senators who wish to offer amendments--and many have been filed--they would come here and decide to offer them because we will not have floor time for the entire week this week. We are not going to be able to be on the floor. The time does not exist to allow us to be here all week.

Those Senators who wish to offer amendments are, it seems to me, going to find very little sympathy from me, and I hope from other Members of the Senate, if they at some point down the road say: Well, we did not have an opportunity. They have had plenty of opportunities. It is they have chosen not to come to the floor to offer amendments.

It may be they feel the amendments do not have merit or are not very important or whatever. But if they do have merit and are important--I assume some do--I would hope they would come soon and give us the opportunity to entertain amendments and discuss them, debate them and have votes on them so we can move this appropriations bill along.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, Senator Bennett and I have discussed the

McCain amendment. Senator McCain has offered his amendment. I will speak briefly in opposition to the amendment. I believe Senator Bennett also has spoken. We are prepared to have a vote at 6 o'clock. I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to a vote on the McCain amendment at 6 o'clock. I further ask consent that no second degrees be in order.

Mr. President, let me withhold for a moment.

I ask my unanimous consent request be considered.

Mr. President, in response to Senator McCain's amendment, he has come to the floor to talk about legislative-directed spending. We have some disagreements on that subject. I respect the opinions of Senator McCain on some of these issues. I disagree, however, with the proposition that somehow what is in a President's budget, that is the recommendation of a President in the President's budget, has any greater import than the recommendations of Senators about what kind of projects have merit.

The Constitution of this country provides that the President proposes and Congress disposes. The power of the purse is here. It is the Congress that raises the funds and it is the Congress that is responsible for the expenditure of those funds.

There has been a lot of discussion about ``earmarks.'' Congressionally directed spending is spending that has been dramatically reformed. We have substantially reduced the number of projects in this bill.

By the way, I indicated when I began discussing the bill that Senator Bennett and I have brought to the floor, talking about the number of earmarks the President has requested, a very large number of earmarks are in the President's request about what he believes we should pursue with respect to projects and how they should be funded. We have agreed with him in most cases, disagreed in a few cases, and in those areas where we have disagreed, we have not funded that which the President has requested because we didn't think it appropriate to fund it. We have in other cases funded other proposals that have come to us from Senators that have, we believe, more merit.

I do not believe the executive branch always gets it right and the congressional branch or legislative branch never gets it right. I think somewhere between represents the best of what both can offer. That is why we have preserved a substantial majority of what President Obama in his budget to the Congress has requested.

If you look back in history you will see there are a good many examples of projects that started out as legislative-directed spending, or funding, that have had major national implications. In 1873, Congress appropriated funds for the Indian police to keep order and prohibit illegal liquor traffic on Indian reservations. That was through a congressional add-on or earmark. Only later, then, were Indian tribal police forces and court systems authorized and included in the President's budget. But it was Congress that initiated the law enforcement approach that appropriated funds for Indian police.

In 1883, the U.S. Navy began moving from wooden to steel ships. That came as a result of a decision by the Congress. The Congress said we want to move from wooden to steel ships. That was appropriated in the Naval Service Appropriations Act. It directed the Navy to construct two steel steam cruising vessels from funds appropriated but not required for repairing wooden ships.

In 1943, the National School Lunch Program was established through a $50 million earmark in the 1944 Agriculture Appropriations bill. Of course, that turns out to have been a wonderful idea. The school lunch program is a remarkable success.

In 1987, it was the Congress that earmarked funding to what was called gene mapping, which later became the Human Genome Project. That didn't come from some bureaucrat or somebody down in an executive agency who said, You know what we should do, let's begin mapping human genes. Instead, it came from here, in the Congress. In fact, former Senator Domenici had a lot to do with that. So Congress originated the Human Genome Project. Guess what. We now have the first owners manual for the human body. It is changing everything about medicine. That didn't come because somebody in the executive branch said let's do that. That came because someone on the floor of the Senate here said let's do this because it has merit.

These are only a few examples of things that represent substantial progress as a result of ideas that come from the Congress. Despite what you hear from opponents of that sort of thing, if you got rid of all of the ideas that came from the Congress about how to spend money in the Energy and Water bill, we would still be spending the same amount of money because what we spend in this subcommittee is up to the allocation given us by the Budget Committee. The Budget Committee says here is what is going to be spent. That decision is made by the Senate. Then an appropriation, called a 302(b) allocation, I should say, goes to this subcommittee and that is what we allocate. That is what we decide we will have to spend.

If we did not do that, then that money goes down to an agency and someone in the Federal agency says here is what we are going to spend it on. So eliminating all of the legislative-directed funding would not reduce the Federal budget deficit at all. I know that is claimed but it is simply not the case. It just is not the case.

Let me also say the issue of legislative-directed funding is something we have dramatically transformed. No. 1, we have cut the amount of legislative-directed funding requests in half. By requests I am talking about those that made it into the bill. We have cut it by half. We got rid of half of it because I think it went way too far, so we cut it back by 50 percent. Second, every single request has to now be publicly disclosed and every single piece of legislative-directed funding that is in this bill is described by who asked for it, how much it is, and what its purpose is.

As I indicated before, what we are doing in this bill is investing in improving this country's infrastructure, improving and investing in this country's energy future and putting people to work, doing things that will pay dividends for decades to come. That is what this subcommittee does. This is not some routine subcommittee, this is the subcommittee that funds the substantial amount of energy projects and research in this country that will have implications for decades.

This is the subcommittee that funds all of the water projects--the dams, the harbors, the navigation, all of those issues that are so important to this country's water development and water conservation. So this is not some routine kind of expenditure, this is an investment that will create substantial jobs in the future. It will transform our energy future, in my judgment.

I described earlier the importance of the national laboratories we fund, the science laboratories, the energy laboratories, the weapons laboratories that represent the repository of the most breathtaking, cutting-edge, world-class research in so many different areas. All of that is done in this subcommittee.

I am pleased to have spent time with Senator Bennett. We Republicans and Democrats on this committee worked through a lot of requests, requests from President Obama, from his team, about how they want to fund a wide range of issues and requests from our colleagues.

I would say Secretary Chu had requested a number of research hubs he wanted to do, kind of a transformation in the Department of Energy. We decided to proceed with three of those hubs. It makes sense to us to begin to try moving down that road in a range of areas where you provide real focus on specific areas of energy and research into those areas.

If the McCain amendment were to be agreed to, my understanding is they would be considered not authorized and therefore not allowed. That doesn't make any sense to me. There has been, for a long period of time, general authorization for the programs in the Department of Energy. We routinely have

never authorized every year that which we are doing here. We fund programs that generally have been ongoing within the larger framework of the authorization of the Department of Energy.

I very much oppose the McCain amendment. I respect our colleague, Senator McCain. He is a good legislator. We have come to disagreement on this subject. I hope my colleagues will join myself and Senator Bennett in defeating the amendment.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Reserving the right to object, has the Senator provided copies of the amendment to our side?

If the Senator from Tennessee will visit with me just briefly, I object for the moment so I may take a look at the amendment.

Madam President, why don't we ask the Senator to proceed to discuss the amendment, and let's look at the language.

Madam President, if Senator Alexander would yield?

Yes, without the Senator losing his right to the floor. We think the way we would like to proceed is for the Senator from Tennessee to go ahead and offer his amendment and then finish his statement, after which we will go into a period of morning business, for not more than 10 minutes for each presentation. I believe Senator Kaufman has morning business.

So the point is, Senator Bennett and I have discussed it, and we feel it appropriate for the Senator from Tennessee to offer the amendment at the end of his discussion, after which we will go into morning business.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 15 minutes.

I would let the distinguished floor manager and the distinguished Senator from Utah know that if someone does come to the floor and wishes to do their thing with an amendment, please feel free to give me the high sign and I will conclude my remarks and allow the business of the floor to proceed. I do not wish to keep anybody from offering an amendment, if they have one.

But I did wish to take the time to talk for a minute about our health care system because I think people across the country are, right now, finding our dialogue in the Senate a bit confusing about health care, and they are starting to wonder what is going on. In particular, particularly for those who have insurance: What does this mean for me? Why is this important for me that the Senate be doing this work? I already have insurance. What do I stand to gain from all this?

There are a great number of things Americans stand to gain from all this. But the issue I wish to focus on today is improvements in our delivery system. It is important for Americans who are listening to realize that the personal experiences so many of them have had are not unique. If you have had a loved one in the hospital and you have felt constrained to stay with that loved one through their illness in the hospital, if you have felt you could not leave them alone in that hospital for fear that something might go wrong, some drug might be misadministered, some call might go unanswered, if you feel that way, if you have had that experience, you are not alone.

That is an extraordinarily common experience. If you have felt you missed an opportunity for the prevention of illness, nobody told you that you should have had this test, nobody told you this was a health consequence of something you were doing, that is an experience Americans have across this country.

If you have had to ferry by hand your health records from place to place or if, similar to many Rhode Islanders, you have been rushed up for emergency specialty care in Boston and your paper records did not come with you and you have been in real peril in a Boston emergency room as they try to redo the tests they did not have access to because you did not have a comprehensive electronic health record, you are similar to many Americans.

The consequences of that, of those problems, are renown throughout the health care system. The problems they cause are real ones. There are 100,000 Americans who die, who lose their lives every single year because of completely avoidable medical errors, most of them hospital- acquired infections. That is intolerable. That is a plane crash a day. Yet it is the status quo in the existing health care system.

We have the worst health care outcomes of essentially any civilized developed country we compete with. The worst. Even though we pay twice as much per person for our health care than most of them, we have worse outcomes. That is the status quo of our health care system. The Economist magazine has reported that the health information technology infrastructure that supports our health care sector is the worst of any American industry, except one, the mining industry.

That is not very reassuring, not in an industry where the possibilities for technology are so great, and where at the detection end and where at the treatment end, we are at the technological cutting edge of the world, but you get back to that back office and there you are with that paper record and no way to cross-reference for drug interactions.

We are at a primitive stage with our health information infrastructure. That is the status quo of our health care system. Everybody, I suspect, has had the experience themselves or of a loved one who becomes sick unexpectedly who turns to their insurance company, the insurance company they have been writing those big checks to year after year, only to find out that when you turned to that insurance company in your hour of need, they turned on you, they turned against you.

They tried to figure out a way to get you off coverage. They tried to talk you out of the coverage and the treatment your doctor has indicated. They fought with your doctor about whether they would pay it. For many people, the experience is not just of being the patient, the experience of being the spouse or the family member or the loved one of the patient who has to cope, who has to become the person who answers the deluges of mail, who makes the call after call after call, who waits through dial tones and through the voice mail and the voice messages to try to get to somebody to approve procedures the doctor has said you need. That is the status quo of our health care system-- millions of Americans told by their own insurance companies: Forget it. We are not going to pay for the treatment your doctor says you need.

The major reason American families go into bankruptcy right now is because of health care expense. It is not just the uninsured. These are insured families who find their coverage limits have been reached, who find the insurance company has found a loophole, who find they have exceeded, in terms of all the peripheral costs of durable medical equipment and other things that might not be covered, but it is more than they can bear to get by and they are struggling to get by and they are dropped into bankruptcy; the most prominent reason American families go into bankruptcy.

That is the status quo of our health care system. Those can all be better. We can revolutionize all those areas. We can revolutionize the quality of care and the safety of Americans when they are in the hospital.

We can improve our health care outcomes so we are the pride of developing nations, and not the lagger. We can improve so we do not have the worst health information technology of any American sector. We can eliminate denials of care by insurers for preexisting conditions. We can provide adequate supports to Americans so bankruptcy is not a common symptom of illness in this country.

The problem is, if we do not do anything about those existing problems, they are all going to accelerate. They are all getting worse. What do we have to look forward to? Well, we have to look forward to a $35 trillion Medicare liability, and we do not have $35 trillion to spend.

That is a future liability. It is coming toward us. The people who are going to cause it are alive right now. They are not going anywhere. They are getting older every day. Time is not going to stop. And they are getting sicker every day because it is never going to happen that older people are healthier than younger people.

There is a tsunami of health care costs bearing down on us. Just the Medicare slice of it is a $35 trillion liability for our country, and we do not have the $35 trillion. So it is either going to wreck us or we are going to have to take some very smart, very aggressive measures now to reduce those costs.

If we do nothing, a family in Rhode Island in the year 2016--that is not too far from now; that is 7 years from now--a family in Rhode Island making $52,000, which is a pretty good income, a family making $52,000 will spend more than half their income on health care. By as soon as 2016, a Rhode Island family making $52,000 will spend more than half their income on health care.

We use the word ``unsustainable'' around here. We are headed to where it is impossible for regular families to get health care. It is bad enough now, and it is getting worse. We have to act to stop it from getting worse.

We have pretty close to lost our car industry. People used to say: What is good for GM is good for America. It was the emblematic American company. It is gone. It is in bankruptcy, and it is gone. It is now coming back out of bankruptcy, but it had to be swept through a bankruptcy. The catastrophic effect on our country of the loss of those jobs in the Midwest and then through the secondary providers across the country is a very real problem, and it is being felt in large part because those cars were so burdened with health care costs.

If you go to Starbucks, there is more health care money in your coffee than there is coffee bean money. In those cars, there was more health care money than steel. The cost of health care per car was greater than the cost of steel per car. It is pretty hard to compete with Volvos and the Lexus and cars from places where they have a national health care system and the price of the health care is not buried in the cost of the car. It put our workers at a terrible disadvantage. That is only getting worse, and our manufacturing sector has enough problems without continuing to load health care costs on to it. If we can't get the message from the collapse of the auto industry, we are missing some very loud--indeed deafening--signals.

Our last Comptroller General warned that this health care mess will sink our ship of state. He phrases it as a national security issue to get this right. He left the job to go and spread the word around the country warning us of what is coming.

Not only is it bad now, it stands to get a lot worse. Here is the opportunity and the tragedy of this: It is that so much of this is waste. One recent voice on this subject is a former Cabinet member from the last administration. Paul O'Neill was the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. He is no fool. He is a sensible and thoughtful man. He ran, for years, Alcoa, one of America's biggest corporations. He has extreme business experience. He also ran something called the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative which looked at improving the quality of care of hospitals in the Pittsburgh area. He was a leader in all of this. He knows his health care issues well. Here is what he wrote recently: There is $1 trillion of annual waste in the health care system that is associated with process failures. A trillion dollars a year--even by Washington standards that is a big number. That is a target that is worth shooting for. That is a target that we shoot for hard in the legislation we are putting forward.

If we take a look at the President's own Council of Economic Advisers recent report, on July 9, a few weeks ago, they put out the report on the economic case for health care reform. They looked at the health care system from two measures: one, if you compare to it foreign countries and look at their gross domestic product share and extrapolate from that, what we could get our costs down to if we were sensible and thoughtful and didn't have such a wasteful health care system and, second, to look at the variation among the States, from State to State, from region to region, even as the recent article by Atul Gawande said, the differences within a State, between McAllen, TX and El Paso, TX.

If you look at those, that gives you another means of calculating what you could get the costs down to. If you could get the waste out of the system, efficiency improvements in the U.S. health care system potentially could free up resources equal to 5 percent of U.S. GDP. From the Council of Economic Advisers, that is over $700 billion a year. Maybe it is a trillion, maybe it is $700 billion. Per year that is a big number.

Looking at the internal discrepancies, they note:

[It] should be possible to cut total health expenditures by

about 30 percent without worsening outcomes [which] would

again suggest that savings on the order of 5 percent of GDP

could be feasible.

Again looking at the calculation two separate ways, coming to the same number, $700 billion a year. The problem is, it will take some executive administration to get there. It is not easy. You don't just make your decision, flip up or down the light switch, it goes on, and you don't have to worry about it. This isn't like the sniper who lines up his shot, pulls the trigger, and the projectile goes. This is a problem where you are like the pilot landing in rough weather. You have to continue to steer through it. You have to continue to seek the savings. As the market adapts, you have to adapt with it. It takes executive leadership and administration to make this happen. That means the Congressional Budget Office can't score it. All they can say is that it promises a ``large reduction'' in American health care costs. But they can't score it.

So the American public, with a lot of misinformation out there, has been beguiled into believing that what we are doing won't save money. We are determined to save money doing it. The Medicare system and the American health care system and the American economy will fail if we don't save money doing this. The target is as big as $700 billion to $1 trillion a year.

Our health care system has been described memorably as a ``carnival of waste.'' It is time to bring the carnival to an end and give Americans the health care they deserve.

There are a couple of pretty sensible ways to do this. The administration has focused on all of them. The first is, as I said earlier, health information infrastructure. Why should every American not have an electronic health record? Why, when you go to McDonald's, should the checkout person have a more robust health information infrastructure backing them up and connecting to inventory and connecting to sales than your doctor does? It makes no sense. We could save enormous sums if we had a national health information infrastructure--secure, confidential, reliable, interoperable. So if you went to get a lab test, it went into your record. If you went to the emergency room, it went into your record. If you stayed at the hospital, it went into your record. If you saw a specialist, it went into your record. All of your practitioners would know what was going on in your care. The more complex and chronic your conditions, the more valuable that would be. We don't have that now. It is the worst of any American industry except the mining industry.

Quality improvement: In Michigan, there was a fascinating project, called the Keystone Project, where they went into the intensive care units in Michigan--not all of them but a great number of them--with process reforms in the intensive care units to reduce respiratory problems from not being elevated, to reduce line infections from catheters and from blood lines. The effect of that was, in 15 months, to save 1,500 lives and $150 million just in one State and not even all the intensive care units. It proves the proposition that quality improvement can save money and lives.

Prevention is obviously the same. We will be on the floor shortly to debate Judge Sotomayor's nomination. She has lived with diabetes since she was a child. She has taken good care of herself so she had not created a lot of cost for the health system, but many people who don't manage their disease well, who don't get the prevention they need, end up with amputations, blindness, long and unnecessary hospital stays. There are areas where, by investing in prevention, we can save fortunes.

Why don't we do this then? Why don't we have electronic health records on every doctor's desk for all Americans? Why don't we have every intensive care unit participating in a Keystone-type quality initiative? Why doesn't every community health center have a robust diabetes prevention program? It has to do with the bizarre economics of our health care system. Because the same thing is true for all three entities. If you are a doctor and you want to put electronic health record systems in for your patients, if

you are a hospital and you want to improve the quality of care in your intensive care unit and put in a program that will do that, if you are a community health center that wants to invest in prevention to help the diabetic population stay healthy, you face the exact same predicament: The investment you have to make is 100 percent out of your pocket. The risk of the investment is 100 percent on your neck. The administrative burden is 100 percent on you. The hassle of it is 100 percent yours. All of the costs are on the desk of the doctor, on the desk of the hospital administrator, on the desk of the community health center. But the benefits from the electronic health record, the benefits and the savings from the quality improvement, the savings and the benefits from the prevention don't find their way back to that same desk. They go off to Medicare. They go off to the insurance industry. They connect to the patient in better care, but investment doesn't get the reward.

The basic principle of American capitalism, which is the connection between risk and reward, has been broken in the American health care system. That is one of the things we get after in this bill. We could have electronic health records for every American, our hospitals and doctors highly motivated to pursue all the quality initiatives that will improve the quality of our care while it lowers the cost and avoids unnecessary hospitalizations and delays and infections, and so forth, and we could have the best prevention program in the country, but we have to make it work for people. That is part of what we are about in this health care reform.

I will continue to explain why it is important that we reform our health care system and what the average American will gain from it. Today I focused on the elements of why delivery system reform can be improved. But every American will see that in their lives, their parents' lives, and in their children's lives. When we look back to where we are today from where we can be and where, with President Obama's leadership, we will be, we will look back and ask: My God, how could we have been living that medieval setup? Look how good it is now.

That is our goal. That is our purpose. That is the promise of health care reform.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment so I may call up an amendment.

I have provided it to the desk. I guess the answer is no, but I will be happy to do so.

Madam President, if the manager of the bill is congenial with my idea of going ahead and talking about the amendment while he considers the terms, I will see that he has a copy.

I thank the Senator from North Dakota for his courtesy, and I will ask that my staff get copies of the amendment to Senator Dorgan.

I am offering today the auto stock for every taxpayer amendment. This is an amendment I and a number of other Senators, including Senators Bennett, Kyl, and McConnell, have introduced before. It basically would require the Treasury to distribute to all Americans who pay taxes on April 15 all of the government common stock in the new General Motors and Chrysler within 1 year following the date of emergence of General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy proceedings. In addition, General Motors, we are glad to say, has now emerged from bankruptcy proceedings, so the amendment becomes very timely.

The amendment would prohibit the Treasury from using any more TARP funds to bail out GM or Chrysler, and it would require that the Secretary of the Treasury and his designee have a fiduciary responsibility to the American taxpayer to maximize the return on their investment as long as the government holds stock in these companies.

This is the best way to get the auto companies out of the hands of Washington bureaucrats and politicians and into the hands of the American people in the marketplace where the companies belong.

There is a great deal of sentiment on the Democratic side as well as the Republican side about this. I know Senator Nelson of Nebraska had introduced legislation along the lines of finding a way to move the stock of auto companies out of the hands of government and into some other hands as quickly as possible, taking the very sensible notion that the job of the U.S. Government is not to operate automobile companies in the United States. And Senator Thune, Senator Corker, and Senator Johanns all have offered amendments to that effect.

I would like to suggest to my colleagues that this amendment, which I hope we have a chance to consider, is the most responsible way to take the taxpayers' investment in General Motors and Chrysler, maximize the return on the investment, get it out of Washington, DC, so we politicians are not tempted to meddle with it, and get it back out in the hands of the American people in the marketplace. It will create a sort of ``Green Bay Packers'' fan base for Chevrolets and whatever else General Motors decides to produce.

Most Americans know that in the National Football League there are a lot of teams who have a lot of loyalty, but the Green Bay Packers have more loyalty than most. One reason is that the fans own the team. In this case, the taxpayers would own General Motors and the taxpayers would own Chrysler or at least part of it. They would own 60 percent of General Motors and about 8 percent of Chrysler. That would give about 120 million Americans who pay taxes on April 15 a few shares in General Motors and Chrysler. And it might make them a little more interested in the next Chevrolet, and produce a little consumer interest.

That is not the best reason to do this. The most important reason to do this is that the American people, by overwhelming margins, understand what I think most of us understand: that the federal government has no business trying to run a car company. We do not know anything about running car companies. Yet, if we own it, we cannot keep our hands off of it. We have seen many examples of this on both sides of the aisle, I may say.

I started giving out car czar awards a few weeks ago. I gave the first one to the distinguished Congressman from Massachusetts who called the president of General Motors and said to him: Don't close a warehouse in my congressional district. And, lo and behold, the warehouse was not closed. Well, the Congressman said he was only doing what any Congressman would do about a warehouse in his district. I think he is right about that. But the problem is, the Congressman owns part of the company. He happens to be the chairman of the House bailout committee--the Financial Services Committee--in addition to that. So it creates a political incestuousness that we need to end.

Now, lest my colleagues on the other side think I am trying to pick on Democratic car czars, I had to give the second car czar award to myself because, lo and behold, General Motors came around visiting the delegations of Michigan, Indiana, and, yes, Tennessee to try to see where they might build a plant for small cars. Now, what was I to do, as a Senator from Tennessee and as the Governor who helped recruit Saturn to Spring Hill, TN, 25 years ago? I got with Senator Corker, and we got with the Governor, and we had a meeting in my office, and we met with the General Motors executives, and we put our best case forward.

Of course, we own 60 percent of the company. I counted up that there are about 60 committees and subcommittees in the House and the Senate that conceivably could have jurisdiction over General Motors and Chrysler and could hold hearings about the color of their cars and why they are buying a battery for the Chevy Volt in South Korea when they could be buying it from Tennessee, or why they do not make a car that is this big or that big or that many miles per gallon. Or what about the dealers? That has been a matter of great concern in the Congress. There is legislation pending that would overrule whatever the management's decision on dealers is. You name it, we have a reason to meddle. And most of us have been meddling.

So what do we have here? We have these chief executives of major companies for which we have now paid almost $70 billion of taxpayers' money for 60 percent of the stock in General Motors and 8 percent in Chrysler. And what do these CEOs do? They are reduced to the status of some assistant secretary, driving their congressionally approved hybrid cars from Detroit to Washington to testify. They dare not fly in an airplane or we would want to know what kind of airplane they are flying in. So they come to Washington. They testify all day before the committee. Of course, they have to get prepared for that, which takes some time. Then they turn around and drive back home. My question is, How many cars did they design that day? How many cars did they build that day? How many cars did they sell that day while they are up here talking to all of their distinguished owners--Senators, Congressmen-- all of us who are here in Washington, DC?

Now, we are well meaning, and they are well meaning. But my point is, the chief executives are never going to be able to succeed if we are constantly meddling in their business. So this amendment would make sure we move the ownership of stock from the government in Washington, DC, into the marketplace. Madam President, I see the manager of the bill. I would be glad to yield to him for a moment, if I could retain the floor.

Madam President, I would like to be able to reclaim my time.

Madam President, I thank the Senator for his courtesy. And I see the Senator from Delaware. I will take just a few more minutes, if I may, to explain the amendment.

So the reasons for doing this, to summarize, is that all of us seem to say--the President has said he does not want to micro-manage the auto companies. But if we own the companies, it is kind of hard for him not to do that. He fired the president of General Motors. His representatives are appointing the board. The President himself called the mayor of Detroit and seemed to get on the side of the issue of where the General Motors headquarters would be--in Warren, MI, or in Detroit. He has an Auto Task Force, whose business it is to pay a lot of attention to how these companies are running. There is a pay czar over in the White House whose job it is to check on the pay of certain executives in General Motors and Chrysler.

It is hard for me to see how General Motors and Chrysler--with all they have to do and the challenges they have ahead of it--how they are going to compete with Honda and Nissan and Toyota and Ford, which posted a big profit. If General Motors is spending a large percent of its time responding to meddlesome questions and directives by its majority owner, the U.S. Government.

I am not the only one who thinks that. According to the Nashville Tennessean, an AutoPacific survey reports that 81 percent of Americans polled ``agreed that the faster the government gets out of the automotive business, the better.''

Ninety-five percent disagreed ``that the government is a good overseer of corporations such as General Motors and Chrysler.'' Ninety- three percent disagreed ``that having the government in charge of (the two automakers) will result in cars and trucks that Americans will want to buy.'' According to a Rasmussen Poll done in June, 80 percent believe the government should sell its stake in the auto companies to private investors ``as soon as possible.'' According to the Wall Street Journal on June 18, 70 percent of those surveyed said ``they had concerns about federal interventions into the economy, including Mr. Obama's decision to take an ownership stake in General Motors Corp.''

But I do not think that is news to any of us. I think almost every Member of Congress understands that General Motors and Chrysler would be better off if we did not own them.

So that leaves the remaining question: What is the best way to get the stock from where it is in the government to where it needs to be, which is in the marketplace?

There have been a variety of good proposals made. I mentioned Senator Nelson's proposal, Senator Corker's, and Senator Thune's. But I would argue that a straight, simple stock dividend, which is what I am proposing, is the simplest and most effective way to accomplish this job. It is called a ``corporate spinoff,'' in corporate terms, or a spinout. It is a new entity formed by a split from a larger one.

It often happens with very large companies. It usually happens when a major company--in this case, the U.S. Government--has a subsidiary--in this case, General Motors and Chrysler--which has very little to do with the business of the major company. Well, surely operating a car company is not the main business of the U.S. Government, which has a lot on its plate, when we go from health care, to climate change, to energy, to the budget, et cetera.

Examples of corporate spinoffs are pretty familiar to us. Procter & Gamble did a spinoff with Clorox in 1969. In other words, Procter & Gamble owned Clorox. Procter & Gamble declared a stock dividend. It gave its shareholders shares in Clorox, and Clorox and Procter & Gamble were severed. Time Warner did a spinoff with Time Warner Cable in March 2009. Time Warner stockholders received a pro rata share of Time Warner Cable common share stock. That is the same idea I am proposing here today. Then PepsiCo did a spinoff with its restaurant business--KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell in 1997. This is also something familiar. PepsiCo shareholders each received 1 share in the new restaurant company for every 10 PepsiCo shares they held.

The idea of Americans owning stock is not a new idea in the United States. Fifty-one percent of families hold stocks in publicly traded companies directly or indirectly. And many big companies have many shareholders.

Several of us Congressmen and Senators were on a phone call with Fritz Henderson, the General Motors chief executive officer, several weeks ago. The question came up about, what is the government going to do with all this GM stock after the bankruptcy? Mr. Henderson made very clear that was not his decision, it was the Treasury's decision to make. But he said this is a ``very large amount'' of stock and that the orderly offering of those shares to establish a market might have to be ``managed down over a period of years.''

Well, if the government in Washington holds the shares of General Motors and Chrysler for a ``period of years,'' I cannot think of anything that will make it less likely that General

Motors will succeed because we will be meddling every single day, and GM will never have time to design, build, and make cars. Instead, the government could declare a stock dividend within the next few months, which should be relatively easy to do because we have the names and the accounts of the 120 million people who pay taxes on April 15. The principle here is: they paid for it, they might as well own it. So if the taxpayers own it, and that is good for them, and if getting rid of the stock from the government is good for the government and good for General Motors--just like creating a fan base of 120 million Americans who might be interested in the next Chevy, like Green Bay Packers fans are interested in the next quarterback--then, it seems to me this is a very wise idea.

I have talked with a number of corporate lawyers and bankruptcy lawyers and securities lawyers. I have discussed it with Governors. I have discussed it with financial officials. And I have talked about it with average Americans who are not happy about the fact that the government owns 60 percent of General Motors. They all think this stock distribution is a good idea.

I am afraid some of my colleagues think: Well, he is just making a point. He is just being facetious. I am not. We need to get rid of this stock. We almost all agree with that. It will take us years to do it if we sell it just in an orderly way over a period of time. The single best familiar way to get the stock out of the hands of the government and into the hands of the marketplace is a stock dividend. Give the stock to the people who have now paid almost $70 billion for it--the 120 million people who pay taxes on April 15--and let's get this economy moving again.

Not many weeks ago, a visiting European auto executive said to me, with a laugh, that he was in Washington, DC, which he referred to as ``the new American automotive capital: Washington, DC.'' Well, it would be a little humorous if it were not so sad. None of us like the fact that we are in the situation we are in. But to give General Motors and Chrysler a chance to succeed, let's get our auto companies out of the hands of Washington, DC, and back into the marketplace. And the sooner the better. The amendment I offer will achieve that purpose.

At this point, I wish to once again ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up my amendment No. 1862.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Madam President, I believe that concludes my remarks and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to take a few minutes this afternoon to discuss the recent developments on the health care issue and particularly with Senator Bennett on the floor, my friend and colleague, and the effort to make sure health care reform is bipartisan. Also, Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley on the Finance Committee, on which I serve, are putting in killer hours now in an effort to come up with a bipartisan approach in the health care area.

I wanted to take a few minutes and talk about a particularly important part of the health care debate, and that is what the middle class is looking for in terms of health care reform. I think when you talk about middle-class folks, most of whom have health care coverage, they are looking for a way to be wealthier, they are looking for a way to be healthier, and they want to make sure that if they leave their health care coverage, or their coverage leaves them, they can get portable coverage.

Perhaps as much as anything, middle-class folks want choice. They understand--and this is a matter that Senator Bennett and I have talked about often--that if you are going to come up with a health care reform effort that is going to save money, create incentives for people to stay healthy and services to offer prevention, and coverage that is portable, you have to give everybody the chance to choose those kinds of health care plans and those services.

The President, to his credit, has made the matter of guaranteeing choice--what I have put up here on the chart--President Obama has said that is one of his bedrock principles for health care reform. The President has said every American must have the freedom to choose their plan and their doctor. He clearly is on target when he talked about choice being one of the best ways to hold health care costs down, reward people for staying healthy and getting coverage that is portable.

For example, every Member of Congress has the capacity to choose a plan that is more affordable for them. When the sign-up period comes in the beginning of each year, you get a menu of various health services, and you want to choose the one that is the most economical for you, the one that rewards you for staying healthy. All Members of Congress have the opportunity to do that. The President is absolutely right in saying that choice ought to be a bedrock principle of health care reform. Clearly, that is what middle-class folks in Colorado, Utah, and Oregon are looking for; they want to make sure they have choices. Frankly, they wish to have as many choices as we have in the Congress.

So Americans want these kinds of choices. But for too many of our citizens, under the health care reform bills that are now being considered in the Congress, lots of people won't have the kinds of choices that Members of Congress have, or any choice at all. There are proposals in the Senate to create what is known as firewalls, to keep people from being able to go to what is a ``farmer's market''--they are called insurance exchanges--where people could get these kinds of choices, and these exchanges are to be created in the reform legislation.

As odd as it sounds, Congress is going to be creating these insurance exchanges, designed to help people shop around for their insurance, but then limit who can shop at these exchanges.

If you have coverage, for example, and somebody in the government says you ought to consider it affordable, you ought to like it, you are not going to be able to go to this ``farmer's market,'' this exchange, and shop for a plan that is better for you and your family. You aren't going to be able to enjoy more choices; you aren't going to be in a position to get more for your health care dollar. You aren't going to be able to get an affordable package, because only some people will be allowed at these exchanges.

I think everybody ought to be able to shop for their health care insurance like Members of Congress do today, and like our esteemed colleague Senator Kennedy called for in a very fine essay last week.

I have been able, working with colleagues, to come up with a way to do that. I call it the Free Choice proposal. Our Free Choice proposal lets workers who like what they have keep it. But it also lets workers who don't like what they have choose other plans. Half of those fortunate enough to have employer-sponsored insurance today don't have any choice of health plans at all. Think about that. Most Americans don't have the capacity to choose, like we can here in the Congress.

Unfortunately, under the health care reform plans that are being considered in the Congress, we are still going to leave millions and millions of Americans without a choice of health services and health care plans. Under our Free Choice proposal, everybody who has employer coverage is going to have new choices. They can certainly keep what they have. But if they choose, they can take what their employer now pays for their insurance and go to the ``farmer's market'' and buy a plan that is a better fit for them and their families.

It also gives employers more options. If the insurer isn't going to sell them an affordable plan, the employer could then take the whole group to the exchange and get a discount.

What the distinguished Senator from Utah and I have been talking about these many months is something that would give more clout to workers and more clout to employers on day one. It would give employers and workers the ability to save money at the get-go, largely through an old-fashioned concept that is about as American as we have, which is choice and freedom, and the ability, when you shop wisely, to benefit financially and, particularly, our employer approach, where the employer could take the worker to the exchange on day one and get a discount. That the employer could get a discount is one that, in my view, is going to give employers the bargaining power in negotiating with insurers that they don't have today.

This is a proposal we can do without making any adjustments to the Tax Code. The independent analysis Senator Bennett and I got a few days ago indicates we could save consumers $360 billion over the next decade. Those are savings to our people. Those are savings in the health care system. It is an approach that is very much in line with what the President has identified as a bedrock principle for health reform.

I have talked about the value of choice, particularly this August in Colorado, North Dakota, and around the country being able to tell all middle-class people they are going to have more choices. But what I think is particularly useful about the Free Choice proposal, it is one of the pathways to getting more affordable coverage because once you have these choices, just like Members of Congress--if at the beginning of the year the Senator from Colorado does not like one particular plan, he can go to one of the other plans that is a better fit for him and his family. We are talking about using the same principles that have worked for Members of Congress for many years.

I believe that middle-class folks, as they try to sort through this debate, are going to be looking at a handful of fairly straightforward principles. They are going to want to be wealthier, they are going to want to be healthier, they are going to want coverage they can take with them from job to job.

We have had 7 million people laid off since this recession; 3 million of them do not have health care. What happens to them is they go into a program called COBRA. COBRA is the only Federal program named after a poisonous snake. Given how hard it is for people to afford that coverage and all the bureaucracy for employers and employees, we can do better by both workers and employers. Let's make coverage seamlessly portable. Senator Bennett and I have included that in our Free Choice proposal. On day one, more choices for the middle class. On day one, the opportunity to save money. If you don't like the first plan, choose one of the other plans. On day one, coverage that is portable. That is what I think middle-class folks are looking for.

That kind of market competition is what the Congressional Budget Office has scored as actually producing savings in the private sector, not in 10 years, not in 15 years, but in a matter of 2 or 3 years. It actually bends the cost curve downward without exploding the debt and the deficit.

I hope my colleagues on the Finance Committee and here in the Senate and on the HELP Committee--I had a very constructive conversation about the Free Choice proposal with Chairman Dodd recently. I hope colleagues will see this is an approach that can win bipartisan support.

The guarantee of choice is a bedrock principle in President Obama's agenda. For the middle class who is asking now how this is going to work, this is the path that is going to let middle-class people be wealthier, healthier, and protected when they lose their job or if they want to get another opportunity. I am very hopeful that this bedrock principle of President Obama's agenda for fixing health care can win the support of colleagues on both sides of the aisle because I think that is the pathway to responding to the question middle-class people are asking all over this country today: How we are going to make this work for them?

I hope colleagues who have additional questions about it will see my friend from Utah or me. We will be happy to discuss it with them further.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to take an additional minute. I thank my friend from Utah.

What is striking about this debate is the opportunity to bring both sides together. As I outlined the Free Choice approach and the pathway to savings for middle-class folks--portable coverage, incentives for prevention--it could work its way into a variety of different bills that are being considered. Obviously, Senator Bennett and I feel very strongly about our legislation, the Healthy Americans Act, but I was very pleased with the discussion I had the other night over dinner with the distinguished Senator from Connecticut, the chairman of the HELP Committee, who has some good ideas as well.

What I hope we will do, what Senator Bennett and I have sought to do lo these many months, is focus on some bedrock principles. I cited the three that have been important to President Obama: the question of holding down costs, ensuring choice, maintaining quality.

I believe--Senator Bennett and I have worked together on this--that our approach with Free Choice in particular making sure we don't have all these firewalls that would prevent choice for millions of Americans would--would actually reward Americans for shopping wisely.

I was very glad that both Chairman Baucus, who said he would look at our Free Choice proposal, and Chairman Dodd, the same openness at looking at our proposal, captured that this would be a way to carry out the President's agenda for addressing the questions middle-class people are talking about all over the country.

Obviously, Senator Bennett and I--and I am very pleased the distinguished Senator from Delaware has joined us. He is certainly a veteran of the Senate and what it takes to come up with bipartisan coalitions. I am very pleased to be on the floor with two good friends who know a lot about health care and what it takes to build bipartisan coalitions.

What I wanted to do was to say that in addition to our legislation, which we obviously feel strongly about, this concept of Free Choice and making sure you reward individuals, as we do in so many areas of American life, could really pay off quickly for middle-class people in terms of savings and access to quality health care.

I am very hopeful that as we go into these last couple of weeks before the recess--and we have offered this proposal to Chairman Baucus, the chairman of the committee on which I serve--Democrats and Republicans can come together so that before the August recess, we will have at a minimum identified some ideas.

Our Free Choice proposal is just one that will allow us through the month of August to show middle-class people that we are serious about their concerns.

Right now they are trying to sort this debate out. Suffice it to say, they see a lot of arguing in Washington, DC. They hear a lot of the discussion about health care, which almost sounds like gibberish when you listen to all the technical lingo. If we can come back with ideas such as Free Choice and say: Look, middle-class people, you and your family can be part of a system that is very similar to what my family enjoys--and it has paid off for my family at the beginning of the year when I was choosing a plan that is more economical for me, or rewards prevention--then we get behind proposals that bring Democrats and Republicans together. I point out this is one area that the budget office has indicated will actually score substantial savings--not in 10, 12, 14 years from now, but in the second year after it is fully implemented.

I thank my colleague from Utah for all his support and counsel.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know we are on the bill. As the manager on the Republican side, I want to stay on the bill, but, my colleague from Oregon having raised the issue with respect to the consumer choice and our proposal, I ask unanimous consent that I can proceed as in morning business in order to respond.

Mr. President, I am grateful to Senator Wyden for the leadership he showed here and the tenacity with which he has pursued all of these issues. As I have sat here and listened to the various interventions in morning business about health care, I found the common theme that I want to comment on with respect to it. I think Senator Wyden's comments helped me frame this theme.

The theme I have heard over and over again from speakers has been: We can't stay where we are. And then the argument has been framed: We either have to move ahead with the President's program or stay where we are. As Senator Wyden has indicated, there are other alternatives besides moving ahead with the President's program and staying where we are.

I would like to draw this analogy that I hope will help us understand at least this Republican's position. I won't try to speak for all members of my party, although I think many of them would be sympathetic with what I am about to say.

Let's assume your neighbor's house is on fire. This is a serious problem. Your neighbor comes to you and says: My house is on fire. Lend me your garden hose so I can put the fire out.

And you say: My garden hose isn't long enough to reach the fire.

You don't understand, your neighbor says, my house is on fire. There are children in the house. There are women in the house. They will die if you don't put out the fire. Lend me your garden hose.

I respond or you respond: I understand there are children in the house. I understand allowing the house to burn down is a tremendous mistake. But my garden hose won't reach. We need a different garden hose if we are going to put out the fire.

No, no, no, the fire is reaching now, it is down, it has destroyed the top stories, it is getting down to the bottom

stories; people are fleeing. Give me your garden hose or you are a terrible person.

And you respond: I will be happy to give you a garden hose that would work, but the garden hose I have right now will not solve your problem.

We need that kind of an understanding here.

I am not a Republican who says: I defend the present system. I listened to the speeches being made about how terrible the present system may be, and I say I agree with them absolutely. I listened to the letters being read from home States that say: I was denied coverage by an insurance company bureaucrat. I lost my job and I lost my coverage. These are tragic, and I agree they are tragic, and I agree something ought to be done about it. It is just that, in my opinion, the President's garden hose will not reach. In my opinion, the President's garden hose will not only not put out the fire but, to stretch the analogy beyond all credulity, will make it worse. We heard about people who are being denied coverage under the present system. People will be denied coverage under the President's system.

If we look at other countries that have adopted similar public plans of the kinds we are talking about, we are going to see people whose coverage is denied again and again. Indeed, the comment was made about Senator Kennedy and the brave battle he is putting on against his problem. If he lived under the single-payer coverage of other countries, he would be denied coverage because of his age. We don't want that in America. We don't want people like that to be denied opportunities.

Senator Wyden and I have worked as hard as we can--back to the analogy--to create a garden hose that will reach, to create a garden hose that will, in fact, put out the fire, solve the problems, and change the present system.

I thank the Senator from Oregon for making it clear that there are alternatives to the present system that are not necessarily the bills that are coming out of the two committees.

I am not going to embarrass my friend from Oregon by insisting that he take the same position I take with respect to the bills that are coming out of the two committees, but together we have formed a solution that we think will solve the problem, we think will put out the fire, we think will turn down the cost curve. And we have now a growing chorus of voices of people who are saying: You know, Wyden- Bennett looks as if it will work; why don't we try it.

The only question I am asking here is, Why don't we try it? So far, neither committee has been willing to look at the details of what we are talking about. All we are asking is that they do so because we are convinced that when they do, they will come to the conclusion that our garden hose will, in fact, put out the fire and it will do it more cheaply and more efficiently than the proposals that are before us.

Again, Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his leadership and his tenacity in going forward with this proposal. I am honored to be associated with him in this effort. I agree with all of the speeches that have been made that the present system is not acceptable. I hope we can get together and solve the problem in a truly effective and bipartisan fashion.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Senator Dorgan is temporarily away.

I am sure there will be a sufficient second when Senator Dorgan has returned.

Mr. President, I listened with interest to the statement by Senator McCain. I rise with some responses to the comments he has made, which I hope will clarify the situation. Senator McCain, the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, serves with great distinction and has helped manage that bill on the floor. In the Defense authorization bill, which he helped manage, there are specific authorizations for every defense program, and there is a Defense authorization bill that passes every year.

If, indeed, we had a similar situation with respect to those items under the jurisdiction of this appropriations bill, I would be more supportive of the position Senator McCain has taken with respect to the provisions of the bill. However, this is not a defense bill and not every department authorizes, each and every year, the same way the Department of Defense does.

Indeed, this is not the way Congress intended the Department of Energy to operate. When the Department of Energy was organized in 1977, making it one of the more recent departments, its organic statute provided broad authorities to support a diverse research and development mission with the goal of energy independence. This is not a project-based account and, therefore, it doesn't receive annual authorization.

Recently, there has been more attention on energy, which has resulted in two Energy bills in the past 4 years. But you need to go back 13 years, before the 2005 bill, to find another Energy bill passed by Congress. Obviously, the organic statute creating the Department anticipated that there would be an organic authorization for these items, and they would be handled in the appropriations bills. If we passed Senator McCain's amendment, it would eliminate any discretion of this subcommittee or of the Congress itself, for that matter, to make changes in the Department of Energy's budget priorities for spending plans. The Appropriations Committee would, therefore, become a rubberstamp for the administration's budget. Since we do not pass something like the Defense authorization bill, and there is no corresponding authorization bill for the Department of Energy, we would simply take the President's proposal and pass the money to support it, and I do not believe that is acceptable.

Senator McCain ran through a list of projects for which he had little or no patience because he said he did not understand them, and they struck him as being projects that possibly had questionable merit. I have a list of projects that were funded by the administration out of the blanket authority the Congress gave the Secretary in what we call the Stimulus Act. We passed the Stimulus Act without any specific earmarks. We simply said: Here is your money and you get to decide how it is spent. Congress will not intervene. I voted against the stimulus bill for a variety of reasons, but we now have the announcements from Secretary Chu as to the specifics of the wind program funding awards.

To quote Senator McCain in his comments about the earmarks in this bill: ``It may be that every one of these projects is legitimate and every one of them has merit.'' But this is the way the administration hands out money compared to the way the Congress hands out money. The Mountain Institute, Inc., in Morgantown, WV, overcoming barriers to wind development in Appalachian coal country, $99,000; the West Virginia Division of Energy, in Charleston, WV, overcoming the challenges in West Virginia, $100,000; in Austin, TX, $118,000 to fund solutions for wind developers and bats; for the board of trustees of the University of Illinois in Champaign, IL, studying ``are flying wildlife attracted to, or do they avoid wind turbines?''; Kansas City University in Manhattan, KS, the environmental impact of wind power development on population biology on greater prairie chickens; Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, an assessment of lesser prairie chicken population distribution in relation to potential wind energy development; Western Ecosystems Technology, Inc., in Cheyenne, WY, $100,000 to study greater sage and sage grass telemetry for the Simpson Range Resource area; finally, in Kalamazoo, MI, the Western Michigan University receives $99,933 to study genetic approaches to understanding the population level impact of wind energy development on migratory bats.

These, as I say, may all be very worthwhile items. I don't think they are any more worthwhile items than the items we put in our bill. I say to those in support of the McCain amendment, if the McCain amendment passes, you take away from the Congress the right to determine how this money is spent and you turn it over to the President entirely and let him or his administration decide. It does not mean the money will be saved; it simply means the money will be spent in the way the administration wants it rather than in the way Members of Congress want it. The last time I read the Constitution, article I of the Constitution gives the power of the purse to the Congress and says Congress shall determine how much money shall be raised and how much money shall be spent, and that is what the Congress has done. It has given an organic statute to the Department of Energy, and then it allows the Congress, under that statute, to come up with the specifics of how the money is spent.

The Senator talked about report language not being binding in the bill. The bill, by legislative language, incorporates the specific projects in the report by reference. Therefore, it does become binding.

If we pass the amendment Senator McCain has proposed, it would have a devastating impact on the Department's environmental cleanup requirements. These are cleanup programs that receive annual authorization for cleaning up sites and projects under the Defense Authorization Act. But it also has similar authorization on sites that are outside the Defense Department.

Included in this nondefense category are ongoing cleanups in the following places--and I will repeat that again: ongoing cleanups. These are not new starts or projects that have come out of nowhere; these are items that are going forward, that have been authorized by past Congresses, under the organic statute of the Department of Energy: Paducah, KY; Portsmouth, OH; Moab, UT; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; Idaho National Laboratory, in Idaho; Brookhaven National Laboratory, in West Valley, NY; Santa Susana, in California; Hanford, WA; Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois; Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.

If I might focus on the one in Moab, UT, this is a cleanup of a uranium site, where there was a uranium plant during the boom times, when we were mining uranium as rapidly as we could, processing that, and we left behind tailings that have been judged as being damaging. These tailings are very close to the Colorado River. Indeed, the Senator's own State of Arizona is downstream from this tailing site.

By appropriating this money in this bill in a manner that would be outlawed by the Senator's amendment, we are accelerating the cleanup process in this time of economic difficulty, adding more jobs, more activity, and, quite frankly, lower prices, as contractors are anxious to gain work and will bid lower than they would otherwise; it is the logical thing to do. It would be dropped from the bill if we proceeded with the Senator's amendment.

For these reasons, I think the Senator's amendment would be a mistake. I urge my colleagues to vote it down.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on the McCain amendment.