Taxpayers Right-To-Know Act

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1423) to provide taxpayers with an annual report disclosing the cost and performance of Government programs and areas of duplication among them, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today because I believe that the American people should know what their government spends and what their government does. It is a reasonable request to be able to make of a government that is designed to serve the people. The people should be able to look back and be able to evaluate, Is this government serving the people, and are they doing it in such away that is actually efficient and making a difference?

Every company in America can tell you what their staff is spending their time on and what the cost of their activities are, how many customers they have, and whether they are successful at reaching their basic goals. But we do not have that within the Federal Government.

H.R. 1423 asks just a few specific things of our government to be able to delineate, again, what every business in America does. It is just six specific things, such as the name of the program, the basic description of that program, the administrative costs of that program, the number of staff for that program, the number of beneficiaries of that program, the statutory authority for that program, and, very importantly, how that program is actually evaluated and what are the metrics to determine if this program is getting the job done that it needs to get done.

We have started in the right direction. OMB is working to comply with the Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 by publicly listing all of the programs that the government administers and their performance goals, but that information is incomplete.

H.R. 1423 fills the gaps in the information provided to the public by requiring OMB to include such vital information as the administrative costs and expenditures of each Federal program, the number of people the program serves, the number of employees working on the program, and where in the statute the program is authorized.

This bill offers a simple list that Congress can use to evaluate Federal programs and to make informed decisions about how to make government work smarter and better. Agencies could cut billions of dollars in costs, without compromising services. In many cases, they could improve their services while we are still saving money to the taxpayer.

If we just cut duplicative administrative costs and eliminate the programs that do not work, we can protect taxpayer dollars. We have an enormous Federal deficit. We should do everything we can to be able to evaluate what we are doing as a government and be able to determine where are we wasting taxpayer dollars. There are not taxpayer dollars left to waste.

Under the bill, any person anywhere in the country can, at any time, access information about the cost, scope, and performance of every Federal program.

H.R. 1423 requires OMB to report publicly any finding of duplication by GAO, an inspector general or any other report. It also requires GAO to maintain a database that tracks how quickly and how well Congress and the administration respond to these findings of duplication.

It may come as a surprise: Congress occasionally finds duplication and does nothing about it. This would provide the opportunity for the American people to be able to look back and to be able to track, are we doing something about inefficiencies that have already been isolated in government?

The Vice President was asked during the State of the Union, in this very Chamber, by the President of the United States, to begin a study of job training programs. We know there are more than 57 job training programs that already exist across the Federal Government in multiple agencies. The Vice President was asked to be able to locate those programs, evaluate those programs, and to help determine what is the right process forward for those programs.

Now, that is something that we in the House did earlier last year, the SKILLS Act, but it is something that we would welcome participation from the administration on.

I ask the question: Why can't we already do that in every area, not just duplicative job training programs?

We have multiple programs in multiple agencies that are duplicative. Why do we just do it in job training programs?

Let's do it in all of them. This is the beginning of a process to get after that duplication and that waste. No one here, on either side of the aisle, wants to see a program that is unnecessary or ineffective.

Waste in government is not a Democrat or Republican issue; it is a Big Government issue. With a government the size that we have, we have duplication and we have waste. Let's identify it.

The Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act will ensure we do that. I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I remind my colleagues that multiple groups have already leaned into this bill to say, please pass this, including the Citizens Against Government Waste, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, and the National Taxpayers Union.

America is watching us. Let's deal with our inefficiency.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, let me make one quick comment, then I would like to yield a minute to my colleague.

This does allow us to be able to gather that information. It is a good thing to have the information.

Over the past several years there has been a push to provide greater transparency in the Federal Government, but the difficulty of bits of information scattered in different parts in different reports has forced the need for this; to say, let's put all that data together.

Not only the number of staff and the number of programs and duplication reports, but let's gather that into one readable report so that every American doesn't have to know where to chase down to get bits of information. They can actually go to one spot and be able to look at it, whether it is a watchdog group, Members of Congress, or any citizen at any computer in America, they can be able to do that kind of research.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Issa).

Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the conversation and the debate today. This is something that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. We should have transparency. Again, this is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. This is a size and scope of our government issue.

We have grown extremely large in the Federal Government. We have duplication that none of us can even find, large budget categories with no specific items underneath them to be able to identify how much things cost, what their effectiveness includes.

This is a moment for us to begin to get the details of all these programs that Congress has authorized back to the Congress for us to be able to evaluate their effectiveness.

This is the right move to be able to make in the days ahead, for us to be able to get our arms around an extremely large, extremely complicated budget with a tremendous amount of duplication and waste that we can't find until we shine some light on it through this bill. I urge all Members to be able to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I wanted to thank Chairman Issa and the sponsor of this bill, Chairman

Lankford, for working with me to improve this legislation.

I respect the sponsor's goal with his bill, which is to provide taxpayers more information about how their money is being spent by the Federal Government. I think most people don't mind paying taxes, but they want to know that they are spending them and that they are being used in an effective and efficient manner and for the purpose intended.

However, the Congressional Research Service identified multiple areas of potential overlap and duplication between the bill as it was introduced and the current statutory requirements.

For example, the bill, as introduced, would have required each agency to report information on improper payments, but the Improper Payments Information Act already requires agencies to report information on improper payments.

The current bill, as amended, eliminates much of that duplication. This is a much better bill, and I applaud the majority for their work on it.

There is one provision in the Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act that I want to note because I think it will be a real improvement with regard to transparency. The bill would require agencies to report the number of full-time positions that are paid, in full or in part, through a grant or a contract.

We do not currently know how many employees are working for the Federal Government through contracts. This bill would require agencies to disclose this information on an annual basis.

This bill also includes an amendment that was offered by Representative Speier during our committee markup to require agencies to report for their programs any findings of duplication or overlap identified by internal review, an inspector general, the Government Accountability Office, or other report to the agency.

This requirement will help agencies keep track of areas of duplication. It also will increase accountability by making this information easier to find for government watchdogs, including Congress.

I appreciate the improvements that have been made to the bill. I appreciate the bipartisan spirit by which we were able to come to the floor today. I intend to support the legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, as I close, I urge all Members to vote in favor of the legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I will be brief.

When our committee works together in the way they have, particularly under the leadership of Chairman Lankford, we can do some amazing reforms. This is, in fact, more amazing than people might at first gather.

For example, this requires something as simple as to have the Office of Management and Budget report what is called the all-in cost of Federal programs. For too long, the American people have heard about what a program costs, only to find out that if you go through all the various budgets that a particular action is spread about, it might cost five or six times as much.

That kind of single point accountability is just one of the many reasons that this well-thought-out, bipartisan legislation, led by Mr. Lankford, really needs to be passed today as part of this package of reforms to get a government accountability to the American people.

I thank the chairman. I thank the ranking member.