Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014

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

Mr. Speaker, I introduced the bill we are considering today, the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments, to give the American people access to records Presidents create while they are in office.

I appreciate, first of all, the kind words of the chairman, and I appreciate the support this bill has received from him, Chairman Issa, as well as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Carper.

The House passed this legislation in January by a vote of 420-0. This bill also passed the Senate with no opposition. There are not many bills that make it through both House and Senate without even a hint of opposition, but this is one of them.

When the Senate passed the House bill, it made technical changes that require us to pass the bill again. I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting this bill again, so that we can send it to the President for his signature.

The bill will amend the Presidential Records Act by adding procedures to ensure that the records of Presidents and their senior advisers are released to the public in a timely manner.

Under current law, Presidents can restrict access to their records for up to 12 years after they leave office. After that time, Presidents may continue to restrict access to their records by asserting that they are protected by executive privilege.

Under this bill, the records of current and former Presidents will continue to be protected for 12 years after they leave office. After that period, however, the bill would create a presumption of disclosure, and Presidents would have up to 90 days to object or those records would be automatically released.

In other words, when records are requested more than 12 years after a President leaves office, this bill would place the burden on the President to review those records and either assert executive privilege or allow them to be publicly disclosed.

This legislation would not impact the ability of Presidents to review their records before they are released. The legislation also would not impact the ability of Presidents to protect records because of national security concerns.

The bill has also been amended to address an issue raised by the White House. In the original version of this bill, Presidents would have had 40 days to review records. Based on bipartisan, bicameral negotiations, the current version of the bill now extends that review period to 90 days.

The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments would also require that any assertion of a privilege by a former President be affirmed by the incumbent President or through a court order for the record to be withheld from the public. This will provide an important check to ensure that Presidents cannot keep their records secret without accountability.

The bill also includes language based on an amendment that Chairman Darrell Issa proposed during the committee markup of the bill to address the use of personal email by Federal employees, and that amendment makes the bill even better.

This bill would continue to allow employees to use their personal email account for official business when necessary, but it would require employees to copy their official email account or forward their email to their official account.

The Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments updates the Federal Records Act to modernize the definition of what constitutes a record and to allow agencies to use digital reproductions when they are required to indefinitely maintain copies of documents.

Finally, this bill is an important step forward in protecting our historical record. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 1233 and send it on to the President's desk.

Again, I want to thank the chairman of the committee for your cooperation working with me over a good bit of time to bring this to the floor. I really appreciate it.

I urge all of our Members to vote in favor of this bill. I think it is a good bill. It has been made better because we had the input of both sides of the aisle and not only both sides of the aisle, but also the Senate.

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

Thank you, Mr. Pallone, for yielding time, and especially thank you for your leadership on our committee. It has been nothing less than extraordinary.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the Exchange Information Disclosure Act. This bill would cost millions of dollars of limited Federal resources but doesn't include any mechanism for paying for it. It is an unnecessary piece of legislation that will have no impact or benefit to the American people. It is just the latest attempt by the Republican majority to incite fear and distrust of the Federal health insurance marketplace and discredit President Obama and the Affordable Care Act.

Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote that the Exchange Information Disclosure Act is ``a political attack coming from a party that wants to see the law fail.'' The House has voted 47 times, Mr. Speaker, on bills that would repeal or undermine the Affordable Care Act, but not one of them has become law.

My friend Mr. Terry's bill that we are considering today marks the 48th attempt, and it is another nail in the coffin of haphazard Republican efforts to disenfranchise the American people by chipping away at the Affordable Care Act, with the ultimate goal of taking away Americans' access to affordable health care.

Make no mistake, this bill is not about transparency and open government. Its true purpose is to pile on more and more unnecessary, cumbersome, and unprecedented requirements so that HHS will be forced to focus time and attention away from managing the Federal health insurance marketplace and redirect it to completing worthless weekly reports.

I am particularly disappointed in the committee process--or more accurately, the lack of committee process--with regard to this bill. I sit on Energy and Commerce's Health Subcommittee, and at no point did the chairman of the subcommittee nor the full committee hold a legislative hearing or markup on this bill. I don't recall one. Surely, adding mountains of onerous reporting requirements that will cost the government millions in order to comply would have warranted an opportunity for members to weigh in before it was brought to the floor. Apparently, the

chairman of the committee felt differently.

This bill is now the 48th example of House Republicans pandering to their base by ramming through partisan policies that attack the President. The bill would require HHS to supply Congress weekly reports detailing the number of unique Web site visitors to healthcare.gov, the number of chat logins, the number of enrollees by ZIP Code, their level of coverage, and other data sets. What exactly my friends hope to accomplish with this weekly data dump still escapes me.

Perhaps House Republicans weren't aware of the extensive disclosure of data on health insurance enrollments that is already being provided on a monthly basis. The administration releases enrollment data monthly, Mr. Speaker, just like they do with Medicare, CHIP, and other Federal programs.

The monthly HHS enrollment reports are excellent, detailed reports. Weekly reports will shed no more light on enrollment in the health exchange than would monthly reports.

The bill also demands that HHS make publicly available a list of navigator grantees. Were my colleagues unaware that the Department released the entire list of navigator grantees back in October? I have those here for your inspection.

I will say it again: this bill is completely unnecessary, and it is Republican fear mongering. The fact is, Mr. Speaker, the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land. I ask my colleagues to embrace it. It is benefiting millions of Americans in my district and in your district as well.

Thank you for the time, Mr. Pallone.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, supporters of this legislation claim that it is simply an effort to get more information about how the Affordable Care Act is being implemented, but it is not really that. It is an effort to slow down the implementation of the new law by drowning the Department of Health and Human Services in red tape.

They want enrollment information, but this week, they got enrollment information from the administration. That enrollment information showed that 2.2 million Americans have signed up for private coverage. They want demographic information. HHS has given them demographic information. HHS is going to release all of the information that they are asking for every month, but the Republicans say, ``Oh, that is not good enough. We want it every week.'' They want more than what otherwise might be available to them because they want to know some things that I can't understand why they would want to know them.

They want to know the ZIP Codes of everybody who has signed up. They want to know what the details are of a chat between somebody who is asking a question on the Web site and what answers he got. I can't understand why that is important. They want to know what transpired in the call centers. In other words, they want to know what somebody said in a call center. Is it their business to know what questions are asked in a call center? They want a list of the people who are the adjusters and the brokers. There are thousands of them around the country, so there is no purpose to knowing that. They are not accredited by the government. If they are by the States, it is up to each State. They could ask each State that information.

Let me put this in perspective.

If anybody had a bill asking the private sector to come up with reports every single week on information that they could wait a couple of more weeks to get, it would be looked at as just straight harassment, government red tape, bureaucracy that is intruding into the business for no purpose. That is what this bill is all about. They want to intrude in a government agency. I guess, if they have a bureaucratic intrusion and the harassment of a government agency, it is okay, but if it were to happen to a private sector business, it would be inappropriate. If we asked polluters this information, you could get the information. If you asked them to give you the information every week, why do you need it every week?

I ask the Republicans: Why do they need this every week if they are going to get it every month?

It is obvious. This law is working, and they don't want to come again to the floor and ask for its repeal because people have insurance. Millions of people now have insurance. If they want to repeal the law, they are going to take that insurance away from them.

They want to continue to say: What are they hiding? What are they hiding that they are not giving you on a weekly schedule but that they are giving you on a monthly schedule?

Absolutely nothing that is significant. The enrollment reports we already have indicate that over 6 million people have signed up for coverage since October 1. The Web site can handle 80,000 simultaneous users, and it has been stable even though there was a surge of enrollment in late December.

The law is working. Republicans don't want to hear these facts. They don't want to know about it, but they think they should get everybody at HHS--maybe even have them hire more people--to report to them every week so they can still not recognize that there is good news in what is actually happening.

This is a goofy bill--it is absolutely unnecessary--and I urge my colleagues to vote against it.

Mr. Speaker, to clarify one thing, we did have a legislative hearing on this bill with robust debate on it in that committee hearing. Evidently, you didn't get the notice of that hearing.

No, I only have 3 minutes. If I have extra time, I will.

Today we are taking what should be an easy vote and, frankly, a bipartisan vote.

My legislation, the Exchange Information Disclosure Act, does nothing more than ask the administration to provide Congress, Governors, State insurance commissioners, and the American people with information.

By the way, the information that is outlined in this bill to be provided or accessible on a weekly basis is simply what most States already require to be done by health insurance companies within their States. This is a request by State insurance commissioners, especially ours from Nebraska that are very frustrated with the lack of information that they are receiving about who is signing up for what plans in the State of Nebraska.

This should be easy. What we are talking about here today is basic transparency so we all have the data to assess what is working and what is not. This bill is a mechanism for accountability so we can get the answers that both Democrats and Republicans and State insurance commissioners and Governors need to know in order to understand what is working and what is not.

We are asking for information that an entity overseeing a health insurance operation should have at the tip of their fingers at all times.

Our metrics are not complex. We are simply asking for: How many people have enrolled? How many of these people have paid their first month's premiums, which means they are actually insured, that they have been effectuated? What plans did they pick? What ZIP Codes are they from so we know if people from Nebraska or Iowa or Kansas have signed up? Were they already eligible for Medicare or are these new enrollees from the expansion? These are critical issues in determining the safety and soundness of the policies being issued, and is, again, information that State insurance commissioners usually receive.

This administration and some on the other side say that this information that we are requesting is extraneous and costly and burdensome, but yet this data is already being obtained; it is already on a realtime basis being calculated. It is just the issue of when and in what form this is released to the public. As to cost, here is the CBO score--zero--not the millions that we are being told by our friends on the other side of the aisle and the White House. This is necessary, usual course of business data.

We do add another part in here and another frustration from our State insurance commissioners, which is that they don't know who is selling the insurance. They would like to have the names of the people who are the navigators out there. Grants go to organizations, but we don't know who is actually sitting down and selling policies or helping them through the exchange. That is, again, basic information that is the normal course of business in the insurance world. We are just asking that they provide the same information that the State law would require of an insurance company that has had a salesman who is out signing people up.

So that is the totality of this bill, and you have to ask the question: If they are fighting so hard, what are they trying to hide?

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

I am.

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

This is the final amendment to the bill. This amendment will not kill the bill; and should it pass, the House will immediately take up the bill, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, having just been sworn in a month ago, may I first say, it is an honor to serve the Fifth District of Massachusetts. My district is looking to us to focus on jobs, rebuild the economy, and extend unemployment benefits. Instead, Republicans have scheduled the 48th vote to undermine the Affordable Care Act.

We have a job to do. We have to ensure that the hardworking families we serve are able to navigate the health care law and are able to make informed decisions about their health care coverage. Our job is to ensure that should problems arise, we are able to direct resources toward a timely fix.

Some of my colleagues believe that an increase in transparency will help us achieve those goals. So why not do that? Why not let Americans know exactly what has been going on since this law has been implemented? Why not let people understand all facets of this law? I support transparency and making the law the best it can be for millions of families and children who will benefit from it.

I know firsthand how good this reform will be for the American people because I watched it happen in my own State. In 2006, Massachusetts implemented health care reform which today is benefiting hundreds of thousands of families. It took hard work, and it meant lawmakers who didn't always agree on everything had to work together to do right by those they served. Today, 98 percent of the people in Massachusetts are benefiting from some form of health care coverage.

Because I was not yet elected last fall, like millions of Americans, I watched from home as the destructive and irresponsible fight against the ACA shut our government down. It is time to stop the obstruction over this issue and get back to work for the American people.

If our goal is truly transparency--not just harassment to make sure the law never works--why not give the full picture? Let's give families and businesses all of the information they need regarding what is available to them, as well as what we are going to do to make the law work better.

My motion to recommit will better inform those we serve with facts about the benefits which millions of American families are seeking. My amendment will provide the full picture, not just data handpicked to support a partisan argument.

This includes information regarding how many families and individuals have received tax credits. It will include disclosures on the number of Americans who are no longer subject to discrimination based on preexisting conditions. Families at home will know how many people are no longer subject to annual and lifetime limits on coverage. They will know how many people who were previously uninsured are now able to access health care and plan for the future.

If we are to do right by those we serve--do what we were elected to do, which is to make health care reform work for the American people-- then we should spare the partisan agendas and pass this commonsense amendment.

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

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for the great work that he has done on this bill.

What is so interesting and one of the reasons we find it necessary to come and address these issues is Secretary Sebelius told us in December that 5,000 people a day were getting access to health care that they had not had before.

The other side of that story, which was not told, is 74,000 American families a day were getting cancelation notices. They were looking at one another across the dinner table and saying, Guess what, our insurance has been canceled.

It has had a devastating effect. And as we try to do oversight and due diligence and continue to push for that oversight and due diligence and carry it out, even this morning at the Energy and Commerce Committee, where we had Mr. Cohen, what we have found is it is very difficult to get information, even when we are sometimes hearing from employees admitting what they told us was wrong; but then we do not get the straight story.

So it is very appropriate that we require HHS to release weekly detailed reports about the exchanges, including their enrollment, their functionality, and efforts to address the technical issues at healthcare.gov.

It is absolutely appropriate because this is all being done with the taxpayers' money. The American taxpayers have paid for every bit of this. It is not the Federal Government's money. It is not President Obama's money. It is not Congress' money. It is the taxpayers' money. This is a failed rollout and a failed program.

This administration was supposed to be the most transparent administration in history. It has not been that. It is well documented that it hasn't been. Indeed, the rollout and the implementation of this law have been even less transparent. The reason, I think, is because there have been so many problems, such as millions of Americans losing access to their health insurance.

None of the information being shared by the administration regarding enrollment means much of anything. We talk about people that enrolled, but we don't know how many people have paid and how many people have completed that process. What are the demographics of the individuals that are enrolling?

All of this is information that the individual that is paying for this--the American taxpayer--deserves to know.

Who has paid for this insurance? The White House has backed away from using any measure of enrollment as a means to determine success.

As recently as September, Secretary Sebelius herself said that 7 million enrolled by the end of March would define success of the law. Well, is that 7 million that go to the Web site, put an insurance product in their cart, and then go think about it?

Mr. Speaker, when I was growing up, I spent a lot of time working in the retail industry selling clothes in a little dress shop. Every once in a while we would have somebody that would come in and put something on hold. They would say, I'm going to be back.

Well, we called them the ``be-backs'' because, guess what, more often than not, they did not come back and complete that purchase. Yes, they put it on hold. Yes, they put it in an online shopping cart. But then they move away from it because this program is broken, it is too expensive to afford, and the American people do not want it.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3362, the Exchange Information Disclosure Act.

This bill would require that HHS provide weekly progress reports regarding the President's health care law and attempt to ensure greater transparency from an administration that has done everything that it can so far to bury the facts when it comes to its signature health care law. Remember, this is the administration that knew millions of Americans would receive cancelation notices, but they only acted to allow people to keep their health care plans that they had and liked after we forced their hand back a few months ago. Perhaps by acting today we can again force them to do the right thing and share basic information with policymakers and the public about how the law is working or not.

In building healthcare.gov for the October 1 start of open enrollment, the administration chose not to allow Americans to window- shop and find accurate and reliable prices of health care plans in the exchange.

Over the last 17 weeks since the law was launched, this administration has released enrollment figures on just a handful of occasions. We are still left asking the most important question: ``Who's paid?''

Instead, the administration has gone to great lengths to redefine enrollment as the number of folks who have selected a plan through the exchanges. These numbers simply don't tell us the true status of the law, however. More than 3 months after the start of open enrollment, we still don't know how many Americans have actually enrolled in health plans by paying their first month's premium.

Just 1 day before the start of open enrollment, Secretary Sebelius defined success as enrolling 7 million Americans by the end of March of 2014. The administration has since distanced itself from enrollment being a measure of success at all. If enrolling individuals in health plans is not the goal, what is?

Preventing access to reliable data about the exchanges is not exactly what you would expect from the self-proclaimed ``most transparent administration in history.'' It should not take a vote in Congress to get basic information from the administration, but without voluntary transparency, we don't have any other choice.

The bill before us would require HHS to provide accurate, useful figures about enrollment and the operation of the exchanges on a weekly basis. It also is going to require HHS to report to the American people other key metrics, including demographics of enrollees, Medicaid enrollment, regular reporting on ongoing problems with healthcare.gov, and HHS' efforts to address those issues.

The President's health care law will cost the taxpayers an estimated $2 trillion over the next decade. At the very least, the administration should provide the American people regular and ongoing information about its implementation. There is no reason for the administration to keep the public and the Congress in the dark. Whether the news is good or bad, it is time for full disclosure.

I urge my colleagues to support the bill, and I applaud Mr. Terry for his leadership.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I think informed people are asking why are we taking up this bill this morning. I guess one reason is the Republicans will do anything they can to undermine ACA. Indeed, the more it is successful, the more desperate they become.

The administration says it quite clearly:

To implement this new reporting system, contracts may need

to be modified and new staff would need to be hired on an

expedited basis, adding millions of dollars in costs to

States and the Federal Government, without additional funding

from the Congress, for information that is already largely

being provided on a monthly basis, consistent with other

publicly funded health care programs.

Maybe a second reason we are taking up this bill is because the Republicans in this House think there is nothing else to do. This bill is going nowhere in the Senate, and you know that. You know that. But there is something else that we should be doing.

We are leaving here for 11 days. The House Republicans have said we are not going to be in session next week. 1.5 million Americans have lost their unemployment insurance because of inaction from this House of Representatives. Next week, 72,000 more will be added to the 1.5 million people, 50,000 in the State from which Mr. Camp and I come, 50,000 left out in the cold--left out in the cold--left, really, to their own devices, without a single bit of assistance that they really worked for. These are people out of work through no fault of their own, looking for work, and essentially they get, from this institution, action this morning on a bill going nowhere when there is somewhere we should be going.

I think this morning represents maybe more vividly than in recent times a reprehensible distortion of priorities of the majority in this House. There are 50,000 people in Michigan looking for work at a time when there remains a historically high percentage of the unemployed who are long-term unemployed. There are three people looking for work for every job that is available. And we come forth here with a bill that is going nowhere? Reprehensible. Inexcusable. You can go home.

I suggest you go home and talk--I guess you haven't done this yet--to the long-term unemployed. Every single person who votes for this bill should go home and talk to those out of work and out of luck, because the majority in this institution, in this House, are simply out of synch with the needs of the American people.

We shouldn't vote ``no'' on this bill, because we need the opportunity to vote ``yes'' on what really matters.

I reserve the balance of my time.

The SPEAKER PRO TEMPORE. Members are reminded to address their remarks to the Chair and not to others in the second person.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Crowley), a member of our committee.

Mr. Speaker, how much time is left on either side?

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of our time to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott).

(Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)