Floor Statements

Mr. President, last week, the Department of Labor released its monthly scorecard for the U.S. workforce.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent, which is the lowest rate since December 1969--a new 50-year low. Moreover, an additional 263,000 jobs were created. Job gains have averaged a robust 218,000 over the past 12 months. Additionally, for the ninth straight month, year-over- year nominal wage gains have equaled or exceeded 3 percent.

It is good to see this administration's tax reform and pro-growth policies continuing to improve the daily lives of all Americans.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, the taxpayers spent $30 million on the special counsel's investigation. Now we know without a single doubt that there was no collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia. For more than 2 years, the Democrats screamed collusion and did so not based on fact but based on rumor, hearsay, and probably wishful thinking. They have done a huge disservice to the American people by taking that approach.

As I have said before, the real collusion was actually with the Democrats. Here is how it has evolved. It was the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee that hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research against Candidate Trump. Then Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, to compile what we now hear always referred to as the Steele dossier. That document was very central to the fake collusion narrative, and it reportedly used Russian Government sources for information. So the Democrats paid for a document created by a foreign national that relied on Russian Government sources--not Trump; the Democrats. That is the definition of collusion.

But Democratic collusion didn't stop there. Last week, The Hill newspaper reported that a Democratic National Committee contractor contacted the Ukrainian Government to get dirt on the Trump and Manafort during the Presidential election. Specifically, the Democratic National Committee contractor reportedly ``wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against U.S. interests.''

The Democrats were up in arms about the Trump Tower meeting when the Trump campaign was approached about dirt on Hillary Clinton. Here, the DNC proactively pounded the door of a foreign government for dirt. Where is the outrage at that? The special counsel ignored all of that in his report; thus, he didn't fulfill all of his responsibilities.

The Deputy Attorney General appointed Mueller in May of 2017 to investigate alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The Deputy Attorney General further ordered that if the special counsel believed it was necessary and appropriate, he was authorized to ``prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.'' But that is not what the special counsel did on the obstruction question. Instead, the special counsel declined to make a traditional prosecutorial decision. The report said that ``[t]he evidence that we obtained about the President's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.''

As the Attorney General said when he released the report and then again in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, the role of a prosecutor ``is to make a charging decision.'' It isn't a prosecutor's job to exonerate a subject; it is to charge a crime or, in the alternative, not to charge a crime. But in his report, the special counsel explains his decision not to even make a decision. He says, among other things, that stating the President had committed a chargeable offense without actually charging him, under the Justice Department's guidance, would be unfair to the President because, according to the special counsel, then the President couldn't defend himself properly before a neutral factfinder. Instead, the special counsel laid out 200 or so pages of facts and hand-wringing relating to the obstruction and then dumped all of this material on the Attorney General's desk.

It reminds me of former FBI Director Comey's declaration in the summer of 2016 that Secretary Clinton was extremely careless in handling classified information but that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case against Secretary Clinton. FBI Director Comey made a prosecutorial decision that wasn't his to make; it was up to the Attorney General to make. That was Attorney General Lynch. Comey also released derogatory information about Secretary Clinton and then refused to show all of his work.

The special counsel's report is at least equally problematic. The report lays out 200 pages of investigative product but leaves the charging decision hanging in Never Never Land. Nevertheless, the report asserts that if the special counsel team could have found the President did not commit obstruction, they would have said so. But, again, that is not what prosecutors do. That is a reversal of the innocent until proven guilty standard that is basic to American justice. If it really were a thorough investigation, it seems the inverse would be true as well. The inverse is that, after a thorough investigation, the special counsel did not have enough evidence to conclusively state obstruction actually occurred.

During the Attorney General's May 1 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he noted that if the special counsel found facts sufficient to constitute obstruction, he would have stated that finding.

Curiously, the special counsel spilled a lot of ink in his report to explain why he believed the President could be charged as a matter of legal theory. So why didn't he just make that decision or at least make a very clear recommendation to the Attorney General and stand behind his own theories?

The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General asked Mueller whether he would have charged obstruction but for the Department's guidance on charging sitting Presidents. The special counsel said no, which means, if warranted, that there was no barrier for him to make that charge.

In the absence of a decision from the special counsel, it was then up to the

Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, who appointed Mueller and supervised his work. The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General reviewed all of the facts and evidence that the special counsel collected. The Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General evaluated it under Mueller's own legal theories, even though they disagreed with some of those theories. After all of that, the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General determined that the evidence was not sufficient to charge.

Oddly, the special counsel's report is probably the most notable for what it doesn't address at all.

The special counsel's report does not address the genesis of the Russia investigation. It doesn't address whether the FBI used improper surveillance techniques on the Trump campaign or individuals associated with the Trump campaign. It doesn't address the credibility of the FBI's sources.

It doesn't address whether the Steele dossier was a Russian disinformation campaign. Even one of the reporters at the publication that initially dumped the dossier into the public domain wants to know where it came from and what it means. The special counsel's report doesn't address whether Department of Justice officials turned a blind eye to potential misconduct. It also doesn't address whether the Department of Justice misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when it applied for that court's decision against the Trump campaign.

So now we know what reasonable people have long suspected--there was no collusion and no obstruction of the collusion investigation. Yet we still don't know how this so-called collusion investigation got started in the first place.

In March 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey testified that he briefed President-elect Trump about these allegations in January 2017 even though, according to his public testimony, Director Comey considered them to be, in his words, ``salacious and unverified.'' If, in fact, they were salacious and unverified in early 2017, then what were they months before that when Comey started the investigation? We know the allegations against Page were unverified when they were used by the FBI and the Justice Department to support a FISA application to spy--yes, spy--on an American citizen, an American citizen who, by the way, has never been charged with anything.

In January of 2018, Senator Lindsey Graham and this Senator wrote to the Deputy Attorney General and FBI Director Christopher Wray about the allegations in the Steele dossier, about its author, and, more importantly, about its bankrollers. In that memo, we described inconsistencies between what Steele swore to a British court about his contacts with the media and what the Page FISA application represented to the FISA Court about those same contacts. The FISA application represented that Steele did not communicate with the media about his intelligence reports but that he told the British court he did.

We noted in our memo that if Mr. Steele had lied to the FBI about his media contacts, it would bear on his credibility. That would be a huge problem because the FISA application and its renewals depended on taking Steele at his word. Remember, at that time, the Steele dossier was still ``salacious and unverified,'' and those were Comey's words. So it mattered a whole lot whether the FBI and the Department of Justice could trust Steele and his dossier.

In our referral, Senator Graham and I also noted that Mr. Steele's contacts with the media likely affected, in our words, the ``reliability of his information-gathering efforts'' in compiling the dossier. By the time the Department of Justice and the FBI filed the FISA application and even before the FBI officially opened the investigation, the Steele dossier was probably the worst kept secret in Washington, DC.

The same can be said for the government's efforts to look for ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. All of these folks--the media, lawyers, lobbyists, campaign organizations, private research firms, FBI officials, the Department of Justice and Department of State officials, and even foreign intelligence agencies--reportedly had access to the dossier information or the dossier itself. An attorney for Clinton and the Democratic National Committee even passed on some aspects of this information directly to the FBI's general counsel before the FISA was issued.

Basically, this piece of paper was, in some form or another, all over this town, and the more the dossier was shopped around, the more vulnerable it became to its manipulation.

We also know that at least as early as the summer of 2016, foreign intelligence agencies were reportedly feeding information to the CIA about Trump campaign associates and that the FBI was using a source to seek information from individuals who were associated with the Trump campaign. At about that time, Fusion GPS had hired Steele on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

We need to know if leadership in the intelligence community and the FBI were already gathering intelligence on Trump associates when Fusion hired Steele. We need to know whether the Obama administration was looking so hard for connections that it figured the Steele dossier would justify efforts to continue its surveillance activities. Further, we need to know if the Russians knew our government was that hungry for information to the point they packed the dossier with disinformation just to sow chaos. If so, it looks like the Obama administration fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and it certainly seems like some in leadership may have ignored clear warning signs.

Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr spoke with top FBI leadership about Steele's work the day the investigation opened, and after the FBI terminated Steele as a source, Ohr continued to feed Steele's work to the Bureau. At various times, Mr. Ohr made it clear to the FBI that the information from Steele could not be taken at face value because it was based on hearsay. Ohr noted that Steele had an anti-Trump agenda and that the whole operation was bankrolled by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign wasn't keen on the world's knowing it was footing the bill for the dossier. Its lawyers even lied to the media about this fact for more than a year. That is not my saying it. A New York Times reporter said that.

So, by the time the FISA application was filed and every time it was renewed, FBI and Department of Justice leaders were very much aware of the political bias and the purpose of the unverified information that supposedly supported it, so much so that according to reported text messages between former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his staff, the FBI worked to create--these are their words--a ``robust explanation'' for ``any possible bias'' of the source ``in the package'' supporting the FISA application. It also seems from these text messages that the FBI was getting pushback from at least one individual at the Justice Department about seeking the FISA.

In the end, the FISA application was presented to the court with there being no mention whatsoever of Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, or any mention of the source's political bias and with only mere speculation by the FBI that its primary source was not peddling his information far and wide. The FISA application was then granted by the court and was renewed three times. Let me say that again. The FISA application was granted and renewed three times.

The FBI surveilled an American citizen for many months based on salacious and unverified information that had been gathered by a former foreign intelligence officer who was desperate to keep the President out of office. He was British Agent Steele. That former intelligence officer used Russian sources, including Russian Government sources, at the behest and with the funding of a rival political party and campaign.

The Democrats and the mainstream media have been screaming at the top of their lungs about salacious, unverified allegations that this President stole an election by working with the Russians, but it is a sobering and verified fact that the Democrats actually paid for dirt from the Russians to damage their political opponents.

So now, after the taxpayers have spent $30 million to work through this swirling cesspool of allegations, when

the Attorney General says he has concerns about certain aspects of this investigation, I agree with him. I don't know whether laws were broken or protocols were breached or rules were violated, but for decades, I have been doing oversight of the Federal Government, including of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and I think there is certainly enough there to be asking questions.

For example, did the Obama administration improperly use the U.S. intelligence community to attempt to neutralize and denigrate a political opponent? Did the Obama administration fail to properly assert oversight of the Department of Justice and the FBI FISA process?

These questions must be answered.

It is fundamentally American to care not just about what laws the government enforces but also how the government enforces those laws.

If the greatest enemy we see is the person on the other side of the political spectrum, then the foreign powers who seek to divide and weaken our Republic are going to succeed.

Now, I have been trying to get to the bottom of all sides of this issue for years, and I have urged my Democratic colleagues to join me.

I am encouraged that the Attorney General is taking a look, and I am encouraged that the independent Department of Justice inspector general has been looking at these issues as well. I have no idea what they are going to find.

I know Mueller turned a blind eye to what they are investigating, however. The American people need answers--all the answers.

It is not just this administration that has been dragged through the mud with wild collusion and obstruction theories. The American people have had to listen to those falsehoods now for years. Many in the media have been breathlessly flooding the airwaves with speculation and what- ifs about the bogus Trump collusion narrative.

Now that the report is out, some media figures are still struggling to come to terms with Mueller's findings and decisions. It is as if they are unhappy with the results or perhaps they are embarrassed that the world is learning that we have been sold a bunch of snake oil for the past 2 years and now they are finding out that the jig is up.

I hope the mainstream media will pursue the origins of the Russian collusion investigation and do it with the same vigor as they have been pushing the collusion narrative for the last 2 years, and there ought to be some apologies from some of them. This would all go a long way to restoring their damaged credibility.

So I am going to do whatever I can to make sure the people get these answers.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I would like to first give approximately a 1-minute speech and then speak for a longer time on another subject.

I am happy to recognize small businesses in Iowa, and, of course, we should recognize them all across our country. We do that by celebrating National Small Business Week.

In my State of Iowa, 99 percent of all businesses are small businesses. Also, almost half of Iowa's employees are employed by small businesses.

Government regulations have a disproportionate impact on small businesses, often costing them 20 percent more than the average of all businesses. So we need to remember that small businesses are the main source of America's innovations and economic strength. We should all be proud of and support these men and women who work hard to keep our communities vibrant.

This week is devoted to honoring small business.

Mr. President, I hope that the New York Times article will be a wake-up call to congressional Democrats and people outside of Congress to abandon this misleading rhetoric. Unfortunately, it is more likely they will continue their campaign of misinformation. Yet, as more and more hard data come in on the benefits of tax reform, it will become harder and harder for the American public to take the Democrats seriously with their rhetoric.

With the tax filing season now behind us, we are finally starting to get some of this hard data. H&R Block has released data for this filing season based upon its experience in helping taxpayers during this filing season, which demonstrate how taxpayers fared in each State. Again, as you can see from this chart, taxpayers who are in red and blue States alike have all benefited from tax reform.

One knows what the rhetoric was around here even before we voted on this bill: It is an attack on the blue States. Well, it didn't turn out that way. On average for all States, taxpayers saw a 24-percent reduction in their tax bills.

This data directly contradict misleading arguments by these Washington Democrats, as I stated, that tax reform was an attack on high-tax blue States due to the cap on the State and local tax deductions, and we set that cap at $10,000.

According to H&R Block, not according to this Senator, some of the largest tax reductions are actually found in the high-tax blue States. On average, taxpayers in New Jersey saw the largest reduction in their tax bills at 29 percent. New Jersey, based on the last several elections, is a blue State. Massachusetts had the second largest reduction of 27.6 percent, and California had the third largest with 27.1 percent. They are blue States.

The fact is, on average, taxpayers in every State have benefited from tax reform, and in some cases, high-tax blue States have fared even better than red States.

I am proud of the work we did on tax reform. No bill is perfect, and we still have work to do in addressing a number of technical correction issues, but we have kept our promise to enact meaningful reform that has cut taxes for the middle class.

Even more important is what tax reform means for long-term economic growth. It doesn't take a tax expert to see that income, wages, jobs, and unemployment numbers have all very much improved since the enactment of this tax bill. That then reflects in significant benefits obtained by American workers. Of course, that is on top of the direct tax relief that hard-working individuals and families are already receiving, which I described at the beginning of my remarks.

Annualized growth in real after-tax personal income averaged 2\1/2\ percent during the Obama administration; it has averaged 3.3 percent since tax reform.

Annualized growth in real average hourly earnings averaged a mere 0.6 percent under Obama compared to 1.7 percent following the enactment of the tax bill. So it is about three times as much.

Monthly job gains averaged 110,000 under President Obama; they averaged 215,000 after this tax bill passed.

There have been nearly 5.4 million jobs created since January of 2017, with more than half of that job creation having occurred since the enactment of tax reform.

Under President Obama, the unemployment rate averaged a whopping 7.4 percent. Today, it averages 3.9 percent.

Following tax reform and for the first time since 2001, the number of job openings in the national economy has exceeded the number of unemployed Americans--a phenomenon that has continued for the past year. That means an American who wants a job can get a job.

To say it simply, tax reform is working for America. For the Democrats to suggest otherwise is nothing more than their continued effort to mislead the American public. I invite the Democrats to take a page from the New York Times article, acknowledge the facts, and work with us to continue to improve the economic environment for hard- working individuals and families all across this great country.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, I have worked to secure tax policies to help spur entrepreneurship, competition, and innovation. Opportunity zones are a perfect example of the type of tax policy that creates that kind of growth in our economy.

Opportunity zones were created under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by the President in December 2017. That bill stimulates economic development and job creation across the country by incentivizing long- term investments in economically distressed neighborhoods. Last year, more than 8,700 census tracts were identified as opportunity zones by the Governors of each of the 50 States. These zones are home to approximately 31 million Americans, or roughly 10 percent of the population.

Even in just this short period, we are already seeing wage increases within these economically distressed areas after their having been designated as opportunity zones. For example, during the second and third quarters of last year, our counties with a large presence of opportunity zones experienced an annualized wage growth of 8 percent. That is compared to other economically distressed counties that were not designated as zones, which did not see a significant spike in wages.

We are also seeing States across the country showing an interest in opportunity zones, with at least 17 State legislators considering their own opportunity zone measures at the State level.

Although States can't make direct investments into the Federal opportunity zone projects, many are considering measures to encourage initiatives such as solar energy or affordable housing. Even in my home State of Iowa, cities such as Iowa City and Coralville have made local investments in their economically distressed communities and are actively recruiting investors for development projects in their opportunity zone areas.

I also want to applaud the efforts of the Treasury Department to provide much needed clarity for community leaders and investors. These include two packages of proposed regulations dedicated to implementing opportunity zone rules.

As the Treasury Department works to finalize these regulations and provide other guidance, I will continue working with Secretary Mnuchin, States and cities, and the investment community to ensure that opportunity zones succeed in driving new business investment and activity to America's low-income communities.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, for the leader, I ask unanimous consent that following disposition of the Wolson nomination, the Senate proceed to legislative session and resume consideration of the veto message on S.J. Res. 7, and the Senate vote on passage of the bill, the objections of the President to the contrary notwithstanding, with no intervening action or debate, at 1:45 p.m., Thursday, May 2, and with 5 minutes of debate prior to the vote under the control of Senator Menendez.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Yes, there is.

Mr. President, for the leader, is there a message at the desk in reference to S.J. Res. 7?

Mr. President, for the leader, is the veto message with the papers attached at the desk?

For the leader, I ask unanimous consent that the veto message on S.J. Res. 7 be considered as having been read and that it be printed in the Record and spread in full upon the Journal.

Mr. President, for 1 minute, I will speak to a piece of history of the Senate.

I call to the Senate's attention this fact: When the Senate first convened in 1789 at Federal Hall in New York City, one of the Senate's first orders of business was to appoint a committee to recommend a candidate for Chaplain. On April 25, 1789, the Senate elected the Right Reverend Samuel Provost, Episcopal bishop of New York, as its first Chaplain.

That means 230 years ago this week, the Senate elected its first Chaplain, and since then the Senate has had 62 people serve in the position as Chaplain of the Senate.

Healthcare

Mr. President, additionally for 1 minute, I would like to speak to the issue of healthcare. Some elected officials are proposing radical changes to our healthcare system. These proposals include Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, Medicaid for All, and expansion of the Affordable Healthcare Act. All of these are versions of completely government-run healthcare.

Americans don't support a government-run healthcare system when they are told about the tradeoffs. Medicare for All would eliminate private health insurance companies. Medicare for All would require middle-class Americans to pay much more in taxes. Medicare for All would threaten the benefits that current Medicare beneficiaries receive, and those people who have paid into the system for a lifetime should not have Medicare, which has been part of the social fabric of America, put in jeopardy by loading more people into it.

Government-run healthcare is a slogan, not an answer.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I want to call my colleagues' attention to an issue that has affected many families in Iowa and throughout the country, and that issue is the cost of prescription drugs. The cost of prescription drugs is an issue that comes up at almost every Q and A I hold with Iowans at my annual 99-county meetings. During the last Easter break, which was just completed, I did 20 of those 99 counties.

In the last 2 months, I started a bipartisan investigation with my colleague, Ranking Member Wyden of the Finance Committee, into the pricing of insulin. That investigation extends to insulin manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers. We need to find out how manufacturers price their insulin products, and we need to find out if pharmacy benefit managers are negotiating the lowest drug price possible from manufacturers on behalf of insurance plans.

This isn't my first drug pricing investigation. In recent years, I have investigated Gilead's pricing of hepatitis C drugs. The names of those drugs are Sovaldi and Harvoni. I have been investigating Mylan's EpiPen price increase.

Let me tell you, oversight by Congress in doing our constitutional job does accomplish things. I have said it before and I will say it again because you can't say it too often: Congress has a constitutional responsibility to engage in robust and aggressive oversight of the Federal Government and its programs.

My EpiPen investigation is a perfect example. Several years ago, I began to receive letters, phone calls, and emails from my constituents about the rapidly increasing, high price of the EpiPen. In 2007, a pack of two EpiPens cost $100. By 2016, it had skyrocketed to over $600. Of course, anybody paying it or even anybody hearing about it knows that to be a substantial price increase. I wanted to find out what was happening and what could be done to fix this problem of dramatically increasing prices and maybe unwarranted prices.

My investigative and policy focus soon turned to the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Medicaid Drug Rebate Program is a contributing factor that has played a part in how much money the government and the taxpayers pay for some drugs, and, as you will find out, the waste of some taxpayers' money.

Now, as a condition for participating in the program, drug companies have to pay a rebate to the Federal Government and the States for the drugs they offer. Generally speaking, the rebate dollar amount is contingent on whether the drug is considered a brand name drug or generic drug. A brand name drug pays a rebate of the greater of 23.1 percent of the average manufacturer price or the difference between that and the drug's best price.

In the rebate program, the dollar amount is raised if the average manufacturer price has increased faster than the rate of inflation. A generic drug's rebate is 13 percent of the average manufacturer's price.

Unfortunately, the rebate program has not worked as it was designed to work. Drug companies have been able to game the system by paying smaller rebates than they are supposed to, and, of course, the taxpayer foots the bill.

EpiPen is a perfect example of this gaming of the system. This is how the scheme works. Mylan classified the EpiPen as a generic under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program rather than as a brand name drug. After I asked those at CMS about that classification, they told me the EpiPen should not have been classified as a generic. Of course, because of this incorrect classification, Mylan only had to pay a 13-percent rebate instead of the 23.1-percent rebate. That means less money was returned by the company to the Federal taxpayers and to the States' taxpayers.

According to CMS, from 2011 to 2015, total Medicaid spending on the EpiPen was $960 million. After rebates, net Medicaid spending was still approximately $797 million. As opposed to Medicaid spending, Medicare spending on the EpiPen in those same years was

$335 million. Taxpayers and the States' taxpayers were also on the hook for these exorbitant overpayments for the better part of 10 years.

When I saw what was happening, I asked the Health and Human Services' inspector general to look into these practices. Based on data already on file, the inspector general was able to calculate the potential lost rebate value dating back to 2006. The inspector general found that the taxpayers may have overpaid for the EpiPen by as much as $1.27 billion over a 10-year period of time because of the incorrect classification. Eventually, Mylan settled a False Claims Act case with the Obama administration's Justice Department for $465 million. Now, that $465 million is a far cry from how much Mylan got from the taxpayers while it was pulling off this charade--in other words, $800 million less.

Upon learning of the settlement, I expressed my extreme disappointment to the Justice Department. It just didn't seem that the taxpayers had been made whole. Obviously, they had not been. According to Attorney General Miller of my State of Iowa, my home State received $1.5 million from the settlement. However, after my having made repeated requests to justify how much that amount has made Iowa whole, I have not received an answer yet. So, not only did Mylan's steep price hike for one of the most widely needed drugs in this country hit families hard, but it also hit the taxpayers' bottom line. We shouldn't have to depend on lawyers and lawsuits to get the taxpayers' money back. Government Agencies should be responsibly overseeing any program that they are in charge of.

During the course of my investigation, it became clear that CMS didn't believe that it had the legal authority to require drug companies to reclassify drugs and impose civil monetary penalties for incorrectly classifying drugs. Except for a few emails sent from CMS to Mylan's representatives that questioned EpiPen's classification, for years CMS did nothing. In other words, CMS was not doing its job, and Mylan was taking advantage of it.

The inspector general has also stated that he lacked the legal authority to affirmatively pursue penalties for the submission of inaccurate drug classification data. As a result, Mylan was able to escape accountability for a long time, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars. This is just one case. Other drug manufacturers are gaming the system as well.

In a December 2017 report, the inspector general found that 885 drugs may have been potentially misclassified. Specifically, the inspector general found that from 2012 to 2016, Medicaid may have lost $1.3 billion in rebates for just 10 potentially misclassified drugs with the highest total of reimbursement. It is clear that the law needed to change to provide much needed clarity on who had what authorities and in order to hold the government, as well as the private sector, accountable.

As a result of the findings in my EpiPen investigation, I, along with my colleague Senator Wyden, drafted--and Congress later passed--the Right Rebate Act. That all happened just a short period of time ago. The act, which passed with strong bipartisan support, fixes the problems that I identified through my investigation.

It closes the loophole that has allowed pharmaceutical manufacturers to misclassify their drugs and overcharge the taxpayers by billions of dollars.

The bill provides the HHS Secretary the authority to require drug manufacturers to reclassify their drugs and impose civil monetary penalties when drugs are knowingly misclassified.

It provides HHS with additional authorities to monitor drug manufacturers that participate in the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, and the legislation provides the States the ability to recover incorrect rebate amounts.

Finally, the bill imposes reporting and transparency requirements on HHS. An example of additional reporting requires the Secretary to submit a report to Congress on an annual basis that describes four things: one, the covered drugs that have been misclassified; two, the steps that have been taken to reclassify the drugs; three, the actions the Secretary has taken to ensure the payment of any rebate amounts which were unpaid; four, an accounting of how funds have been used for the oversight and enforcement of this new law.

All of these fixes and updates are now in place because my constituents contacted me about the real-world problems they were paying for and that were affecting their health as well as their wallets. I instructed my oversight staff to investigate the problem. They acquired the evidence, uncovered the facts, and, obviously, exposed the holes in the existing law. Then, I instructed my policy staff to take those findings to plug the holes and solve the problem with new legislation, which is now law. This is exactly the purpose of oversight. This is exactly how oversight is done.

Pretty simply, this isn't like reinventing the wheel every time. This is oversight 101. Oversight means to bring transparency, and transparency is meant to bring accountability. Oversight works, plain and simple, and the Right Rebate Act that Senator Wyden and I brought to passage is proof that oversight is working.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 2 minutes as in morning business.

Madam President, some officials are proposing radical changes to our healthcare system. These proposals include Medicare for All, Medicare Buy-in, Medicaid for All, and expansion of the Affordable Care Act. All of these are versions of government-run healthcare.

These are, of course, better campaign slogans than serious solutions to the problems facing Americans.

On a certain level, I have found that most people would rather have control over their own healthcare than have the government make those decisions for them. A single-payer healthcare system would be devastating for our seniors, people with disabilities, and people with preexisting conditions.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, Members of the Senate, if you look at the poster I just put up, you know what I am going to talk about--the devastating floods in Iowa and the Midwest.

In Western Iowa, we still have areas underwater from flooding on the Missouri river and its tributaries. In the east, we are dealing with the Mississippi River and tributary flooding. Unfortunately, the weather isn't cooperating with additional storms and rain throughout the Upper Midwest, as I speak, that could exacerbate flooding and hinder cleanup and repairs.

This flooding is still a very active event, but as we move to recovery, we know the original damage estimates in Iowa are increasing. I can say that for Nebraska as well. Many roads are still closed; levy damage is extensive; towns are devastated; and many individuals lost their homes and businesses.

In just 6 of our 99 counties in Iowa, 416,000 acres of cropland was flooded. Much of that cropland is still underwater. These farmers are facing the challenge of not being able to plant this year. Unfortunately, many of these farmers' fields were just recovering from previous years of major flooding. In this area of Iowa, that would have been in 2011.

This is compounded by many losing their previous harvest through having their on-the-farm storage bins destroyed, as you can see here.

Throughout the Midwest area that had severe flooding, 832 on-farm storage bins have been identified as being like these, destroyed. We don't have a complete estimate of that, but I think 832 on-the-farm storage bins would be at least a figure up to a certain date.

These bins hold an estimated 5 to 10 million bushels of corn or soybeans, so, collectively, that would be a loss of worth between $17 million and $34 million.

There is an existing program that goes by the acronym WHIP in the Department of Agriculture that is designed to address agricultural losses not covered by crop insurance and other programs. I reached out to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to see if this program could be used for losses such as those seen here, particularly in Iowa and Nebraska, for corn and soybeans.

I was told because the WHIP program was designed for other commodities affected by hurricanes and wildfires, they needed a few words added to the law to extend the same help to these problems we now have in the Midwest. I asked what those words were, and I spoke to Senator Shelby, who manages this bill on the floor of the Senate, and to Senator Perdue, who has a great deal of interest in the bill because of agricultural losses in Georgia. These two Senators agreed to work with me. These two Senators agreed to work with me. So I filed a shorter amendment of a disaster bill along with Senator Ernst and several of my colleagues from the Midwest to make sure that devastation like this is covered. I am optimistic that this simple fix, which will mean so much to farmers facing such unusual catastrophic losses, can be included as the disaster bill moves forward through the Senate.

Yesterday, as another way of helping more than just this type of farmer but, generally, other disaster victims, I joined Senators Fischer, Ernst, and Sasse in introducing a tax bill that goes by the title of the Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2019. This bill includes a series of disaster tax relief provisions that will help American families and businesses recover from the terrible disasters that have occurred so far in 2019, including the Midwest flooding.

On February 28 I introduced a bipartisan bill with Senator Wyden that included the same tax relief provisions that would assist the victims of disasters that occurred in 2018. So I view the Fischer bill and the Grassley-Wyden bill as complementary, providing disaster tax relief with respect to the disasters that occurred last year, as well as this year. The bill that I introduced in February also includes extensions of

a series of tax provisions that almost every Member of this Senate would like to see passed. These are the tax provisions that expired in 2017 and 2018. We labeled all 25 or 26 of these as tax extenders. These are things that, over the last two decades, have been extended almost automatically after they have sunset, and we need to get those provisions enacted, just like the disaster tax relief provisions.

I encourage the House Democrats to send the Senate a bill that addresses both tax extenders and disaster tax relief provisions. When I say House Democrats, people listening are going to say: He is being partisan.

No, I am being constitutional. The Constitution says that all tax bills have to start in the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is controlled by the Democrat majority. So that is why I am saying to the House Democrats: Get these bills over here to us so we can help not only the people that benefit from what we call tax extenders but, more importantly, those who with the urgency of the disaster that we are facing.

The importance of passing these bills is because Americans need certainty as they file their taxes in 2018, and they need the tax relief as they recover from these natural disasters. They really need the House Democrats, under the Constitution, to pass a tax bill because we can't act on these tax bills before. The custom around here is that the Constitution says that all tax bills have to start in the House of Representatives. If we pass even a simple tax bill--let's say we pass it as part of an appropriations bill--and we send it over to the House, they don't accept it. That has been the tradition around here for centuries. That is why I am calling on the House Democrats to move that bill.

The disaster relief provisions included in the bill that we have introduced reduce penalties and make it easier to access retirement funds so individuals and families can get back up on their feet and rebuild their lives. In other words, these are retirement funds that people have set aback and that the law doesn't allow them to access for disasters. It is just a simple thing. If somebody is hurt by this disaster and wants to go to their retirement fund and borrow on it for a certain period of time to help them get relief, it is a pretty simple thing. Maybe, momentarily you could say it costs the Federal Government something, but they are still going to owe these taxes regardless of whenever they start drawing for retirement.

These bills also make it easier for disaster victims to claim personal casualty losses, and they suspend certain limitations on charitable contributions to encourage more donations for this disaster relief. For businesses affected by these disasters, this tax relief is available to help them retain employees while businesses get back up and running.

Let's continue the bipartisan tradition of helping our fellow Americans with disasters. When these disasters strike, we ought to do it by enacting this tax relief for both 2018 and 2019, so that disaster victims don't have to wait any longer to access this important assistance and continue to get back on their feet.

It may sound like I am talking about something new. I don't know whether this just started with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or before, but I remember being chairman of the Finance Committee then. We passed similar legislation to help the victims of hurricanes. So this is really nothing new. Since it is nothing new and we have done it before, what is wrong with doing it now?

The Democrats in the House of Representatives can get this bill over to us so we can get it enacted over here and get it to the President. We want to provide the certainty that taxpayers deserve by enacting extensions of not only those disasters but also the expired tax provisions. I encourage the House Democrats to move swiftly. The Senate and the American people are waiting.

On another point about flooding, generally, not just dealing with this flood, this flood brings to attention something we have to deal with, with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Next week the Environment and Public Works Committee is holding a field hearing in Southwest Iowa to provide oversight on the Army Corps of Engineers management of the 2019 Missouri River flooding. Senator Ernst, my colleague from Iowa, will be chairing this hearing, and I am going to be participating.

Flood control should be the No. 1 priority of the Corps in its management of the Missouri River. I hope that tomorrow, when I get to travel with Vice President Pence as he views the same area that I viewed 2 weeks ago--the same area covered here--we have the Army Corps of Engineers there so that we can talk to them about the issue of the Missouri River Master Manual authorizing eight purposes as they control the water up and down the Missouri River. They do that through the dams on the Missouri River.

It happens that seven of these can be at cross purposes with the eighth one--flood control. I hope flood control is No. 1 and not No. 8. We need to discuss with them how to prevent massive flooding and how to act to ensure that folks in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas are not faced with devastation every few years. Eventually, this water ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. So States below Missouri are going to eventually be affected by it.

I appreciate the stamina and determination of Iowans whom I have seen out there, not only in this flood of 2019 but in the flood of 2011. The one of 2019 was much more devastating. I think we have great resiliency. We will come back and pull together to get the job done, but there is a very long recovery ahead of all of these Iowans affected by it and Nebraskans and, maybe to some extent, Kansas and quite a bit in Missouri.

I will continue to do everything I can at the Federal level to help the State of Iowa, Iowa communities, and, more importantly, in fact, as individual Iowans are affected, I am going to help them to recover and to rebuild.

Thank you.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak to the Senate for 1 minute as in morning business.

On Monday, I spoke about the Clinton investigation, and I want to reiterate one very serious issue. The FBI apparently had highly classified information potentially relevant to the Clinton investigation in its possession.

The FBI drafted a memo in May of 2016 to get access to the information. That memo said review of the information was necessary to complete the investigation. Sadly, that memo was never sent.

How could the FBI finish the investigation of the Clintons if they never got access to all of the potentially relevant information?

Congress needs to know what happened in that instance.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today marks the 30th anniversary of a very important law--the Whistleblower Protection Act. It is very important because people in government ought to listen to whistleblowers. They are very patriotic people.

The law is a critical foundation for the whistleblower protections we have in place today. The Whistleblower Protection Act has helped to usher in a

new era at our Federal Agencies. Government employees who are aware of waste, fraud, and abuse can now step forward and do the right thing, and they can do it with the law on their side.

As one of the original cosponsors of the Whistleblower Protection Act, I remember what things were like before that law was passed. I will give some examples, and these examples aren't pretty.

Back in the 1980s, I used to say that the whistleblower's only hope was like the desperate Charge of the Light Brigade. There were rarely any survivors. At the time, the executive branch saw whistleblowers not as patriots but as threats. Agencies wouldn't even verbally acknowledge the importance of whistleblowers in making government accountable to the people. Our whistleblower laws had no teeth, so there was nothing to stop it from happening and nothing to provide any relief at all to the patriotic whistleblowers who were then experiencing retaliation.

To give an idea of just how bad things were, let's start in 1984. A study conducted by the Merit Systems Protection Board found that nearly 70 percent of government employees who knew of fraud and impropriety wouldn't even report it and wouldn't say what they knew about it. They believed that no corrections would result if they did, and their No. 1 reason for nonreporting was fear of reprisal.

The sitting special counsel from 1982 to 1986 said that if he were an attorney advising whistleblowers, he would tell them this: ``Don't put your head up, because it will get blown off.'' At the time, the Office of Special Counsel was part of a bigger organization that we refer to as the Merit Systems Protection Board. Instead of protecting whistleblowers, it protected the merit system--not individual employees, and, let me emphasize, certainly not whistleblowers. The special counsel's office would pursue only those cases it thought it could win. If a whistleblower came to it with a retaliation case that was difficult to prove, the whistleblower was simply out of luck.

So the Whistleblower Protection Act, 30 years old, addressed all of these problems and then some. That law made the Office of Special Counsel into a separate body, and it firmly established that the Office of Special Counsel was there solely to protect employees, especially whistleblowers.

In doing so, it gave whistleblowers a new and important ally. The law also established that the Office of Special Counsel should act, not just when it had an open and shut case but whenever it was likely that a prohibited personnel practice had occurred against a whistleblower. It made the Office of Special Counsel a chief defender of employees subject to prohibited personnel practices. The law addressed other problems as well.

I remember back in the 1980s, the Office of Special Counsel had developed a disturbing practice of providing information on whistleblowers to Federal Agencies conducting personnel inquiries; as an example, people like Elaine Mittleman. Elaine worked at the Treasury Department. She went to the Office of Special Counsel alleging reprisal against her whistleblowing. When her case was rejected, she learned that the Office of Special Counsel had leaked negative information about her to the Office of Personnel Management to do her damage. The old Office of Special Counsel effectively ensured that Elaine was blacklisted from any other Federal employment.

Thankfully, the Whistleblower Protection Act stopped that practice and stopped it cold. The act prohibited the Office of Special Counsel from responding to Agency personnel inquiries about Federal employees except in the most limited of circumstances. It also expanded the definition of a protected disclosure and made it easier for employees to show reprisal. Of course, the 1989 law wasn't perfect, and in the time since it was passed, Congress expanded it and strengthened the Whistleblower Protection Act in very important ways.

In 2012, I was proud to serve as one of the original cosponsors of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act. That legislation plugged several holes in the original law and made it clear that the executive branch can't use nondisclosure agreements to prevent whistleblowers from making protected disclosures. If Federal employees are required to sign a nondisclosure agreement, specific language has to be included in that agreement making it clear that whistleblowers can still report waste, fraud, and abuse. Wouldn't the taxpayers expect a Federal employee who knows about waste, fraud, and abuse to report that as a responsibility to their office and then not to be reprised against because they did?

It is safe to say that, taken together, the Whistleblower Protection Act and the 2012 amendments have had a transformative effect on our Federal Agencies. Things are still hard for our whistleblowers in too many instances, and we still have a long way to go, but we have come a very long way since I first started working on these issues. By the numbers, more whistleblowers now report waste, fraud, and abuse, and they have the ability to fight retaliation. I hate to say this, but too often whistleblowers are retaliated against, even with respect or even in consideration of the Whistleblower Protection Act.

In fiscal year 2017, to show progress and to show that the bill has made a difference, the Office of Special Counsel obtained 323 favorable actions, including stays, corrective actions, disciplinary actions, and systemic changes to Agency practices. That is an Agency record and a 16-percent increase over the previous year. Of those, 241 involved instances of whistleblower retaliation, and 44 involved stays with Agencies to protect employees from premature or improper personnel actions against them.

One of those retaliation cases involved a Federal worker who reported an Agency official to her management and to the Office of Inspector General for suspected theft. In exchange for disclosure, the official who was reported demoted the worker to the lowest possible position she could.

That is just one example to show you how patriotic people in the Federal employment who are whistleblowers--who just want government to do what the law requires or spend the money accordingly--get shafted as a result of just doing what you ought to do as a Federal employee: report waste, fraud, and abuse and stealing.

This person had some help because, as I said, she was demoted to the lowest possible position that she could; that is, until the worker filed a complaint and the Office of Special Counsel investigated. Following the investigation of the Office of Special Counsel, the complainant was not only reinstated but given backpay and compensatory damages. Faced with punitive actions, including temporary suspension and a reassignment, the Agency official who had engaged in the retaliation decided to resign. That is just one example of how the Whistleblower Protection Act has made a difference. I could, of course, list many others.

The Whistleblower Protection Act and its amendments have also had an important effect on congressional oversight. Whistleblowers are the eyes and ears inside the executive branch. In fact, when people come to my office explaining why they ought to be confirmed by the Senate, there are a couple of things I always tell them: No. 1, either you run your Department or it runs you; No. 2, you ought to listen to the whistleblower. Whether you are a little Agency with a couple of thousand employees or whether you are the Veterans' Administration with 350,000-some employees, you can't know what is going on down underneath you. When people tell you something is wrong, you ought to listen. Like I said, I have found it very helpful with congressional oversight.

My own oversight efforts would not be possible without the courageous action taken by whistleblowers. For example, whistleblowers contacted my office during the Obama administration about criminals who should be ineligible for DACA but, due to an oversight by the Department, were still receiving benefits like work authorization. Scrutiny of the program led to more thorough recurrent vetting of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

I worked with a number of whistleblowers at the Department of Veterans Affairs who had the courage--and it takes courage--to stand up and do what is right.

More recently, my office worked with Brandon Coleman after he was put on administrative leave for more than a

year and kept from running an addiction treatment program for veterans. It happens that Brandon's only ``mistake'' was to point out poor treatment of suicidal veterans. Eventually, after a concerted effort by my office, Senator Johnson's office, and the Office of Special Counsel, Brandon was provided a new position within the VA's Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection. That is how it should be done.

Without the protections established by the Whistleblower Protection Act, Brandon's story might have turned out very differently. Without these protections, who knows how many other instances of waste, fraud, and abuse that we have been able to find and repair thanks to whistleblowers would be continuing now unabated?

Now, make no mistake, we still have a ways to go to ensure that whistleblowers are valued as they should be valued and supported as they should be supported. I still hear from far too many whistleblowers who have done the right thing only to experience retaliation from their Agencies as a result.

We in Congress, including this Senator, shouldn't be hearing those things at all. That is why continued oversight by Congress is so very important. Whistleblowers depend on us--you and me. All of our colleagues in this body ought to be listening to them. We ought to be supporting them and honoring them by following up on their concerns and taking action to fix serious problems when they bring them to our attention.

I thank the whistleblowers who worked with my office over the years. They are truly patriots willing to put their job on the line, willing to put their profession on the line. We have come a long way since the Whistleblower Protection Act first passed in 1989. We owe it to them to build on the progress we made and to continue to improve upon our whistleblower laws for years to come.

You can rest assured that I will be part of those ongoing efforts on this important anniversary of the Whistleblower Protection Act. I encourage my colleagues to reflect on the important role whistleblowers play in our government and to renew their commitment to the same.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.