Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I will try to speak fast. I have missed all of you in my couple years' absence.

Have you ever had a moment where you are heading towards the microphone and you are starting to wonder if some of the debate you have been just listening to is a little bit tongue-in-cheek?

Can we do a quick explanation of CLOs, these collateralized loans? It is commercial paper. That is what the vast majority of it is. It has been around for a very long time.

Now, here is the absurdity that is coming in. If I have commercial paper that is made up of marginal loans, 2 years from now the bank continues to get to own that. But if that paper, that collateralized managed debt actually has a covenant in it that, if something goes wrong, I get to reach in and grab some of the equity of the company, all of a sudden they can't hold that. So the more secure CLOs you don't get to own in 2 years; the more marginal you do get to keep on the banks' books.

This is, first, absurd. But it is perfectly rational to say: Look, why don't we take this part that expires in 2 years and push it out 2 more years so there can be an orderly unwinding of a fairly absurd rule? But the rule is the rule.

So a lot of this debate around the CLOs, I am sorry, it is great hyperbole, but it has almost nothing to do with what the actual product does. And understand, over the last 20 years, CLOs that were AA or higher, not a single instrument went bad.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 14 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, January 14, 2015, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Soul Sanctuary of the Desert and the Heart and Soul Luncheon. This month, the Sanctuary is celebrating ten years of helping at-risk families in the community break the cycle of substance abuse and domestic violence. The dedicated volunteers and sponsors who make rehabilitation possible will be honored at the Luncheon. I commend the Soul Sanctuary of the Desert and all those who have participated in this important work in the last ten years.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on H.R. 4012.

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith), chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Mr. Chairman, at the end of my opening remarks, I will enter into the Record an exchange of letters between the chairmen of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

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

I continue to be stunned at some of the hyperbolic language that seems to be moving around this piece of legislation.

Transparency, it is an incredibly powerful concept and a fairly simple one in this aspect: if you are going to make public policy, do it by public data and public data for the concept of refinement and creation of public policy.

Is there anyone in this body when we all ran for office that did not commit to transparency? Well, H.R. 4012 is part of that commitment. If you have faith in our higher learning institutions, if you have faith in the American people, this data belongs to them.

Partially, one side belief I have is, as the crowd has the opportunity to analyze and collect and look at data, whether they be from the right, the left, or just academic, we will end up with finer- crafted solutions.

How would any of us know if the EPA has set optimal rule sets? Well, one of the ways you discover this is by having lots of voices in the mix. This bill keeps that commitment, and I have no idea why my brothers and sisters on the left seem to be trying to shut down that commitment to transparency.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

House of Representatives,

Committee on Energy and Commerce,

Washington, DC, August 22, 2014.

Hon. Lamar Smith,

Chairman, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,

Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman Smith: I write concerning H.R. 4012, the

``Secret Science Reform Act of 2014.'' As you are aware, the

bill was referred to the Committee on Science, Space, and

Technology, but the Committee on Energy and Commerce has a

jurisdictional interest in the bill and has requested a

sequential referral.

Given the implications of H.R. 4012 for agencies within its

jurisdiction, the Committee on Energy and Commerce remains

committed to working on scientific transparency. However,

because of our mutual interest in having this important

legislation considered by the House before the end of the

113th Congress, I will not insist on a sequential referral of

H.R. 4012. I do so with the understanding that, by foregoing

such a referral, the Committee on Energy and Commerce does

not waive any jurisdictional claim on this or similar

matters, and the Committee reserves the right to seek the

appointment of conferees.

I would appreciate your response to this letter confirming

this understanding, and ask that a copy of our exchange of

letters on this matter be included in the Congressional

Record during consideration of H.R. 4012 on the House floor.

Sincerely,

Fred Upton,

Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hultgren).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Weber).

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire on the time remaining?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Roskam).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Massie), my buddy who actually went to MIT and knows something on the subject.

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire into the time remaining?

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Johnson).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Cramer).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Have you ever had a moment at which you are approaching the microphone--and you have got to accept that we are all passionate about our views--and you have heard some things that, shall we say, start to get your blood pressure moving a bit, but let me see if I can do this without being hyperbolic and then walk through some of the realities of the information that is laid out in front of me right here.

First, I do want to respond to something that Ranking Member Johnson said. I want to first caveat that she has always been very kind to me, but we have the confirmation from the EPA, itself--and we will put the documents into the Record--that they are perfectly capable of blinding anything that is confidential, anything that is personal. I mean, we have the comments from Administrator McCarthy on March 7 walking us through that they can do this, and they didn't see it as a real problem.

Let me walk through something else that I am finding sort of absurd, and I am having a little trouble finding the best way to articulate this. We spent about an hour in our office sort of just searching the Internet on this subject. If you go back about a decade ago, a number of our friends on the left were demanding something almost identical to this. So what is different? It wouldn't happen to be a different philosophy, a different President, a different party in the White House, would it?

Let me back up and say: Why do I embrace this Secret Science bill,

Mr. Chairman, I thank you for having two Members from Arizona up here.

I am prepared to accept the amendment as the sponsor of the bill.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, as I approach the mike here, I want to make it clear that my friend on the other side, who is speaking for this amendment, has been very kind to me and my office, but the amendment ultimately doesn't do what we just heard.

Let's walk through the sentence. ``Any peer-reviewed.'' It doesn't say ``highest and best.''

Okay. Let's walk through the next portion of this. Peer review, if you actually look at the methodology and the mechanics, is the study plausible, credible? They don't get the underlying data set.

Do we all remember our Statistics 101 class? The multiple parts of an equation that the sample sets are where so many of the difficulties actually are; yet we are going to rely on peer review, for peer reviewers that never see the underlying data.

The fact of the matter is if any of you have Web access right now, there is Web site after Web site after Web site right now talking about the retraction of peer-reviewed articles.

You are willing to hand hundreds of billions of dollars of potential costs and regulations, you are willing to hand the health of Americans over and not be willing to trust transparency where there is an egalitarian nature, where my university, your university, a researcher here, a researcher maybe on the other side of the world, someone that just happens to be darn good at math, and has some other data sets out there and matches it, but they are excluded because they don't meet the definition of the official science, official reviewers, and even the official reviewers never see the underlying data.

This amendment does not say the finest and the best and the most highest standard of review. It says, ``any peer-reviewed.''

With that, Mr. Chairman, I request my brothers and sisters here in this building to vote ``no'' on this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve a point of order.

Mr. Speaker, I wish to withdraw my reservation, and I rise in opposition to the motion.

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

On this particular occasion, on this motion to recommit, this MTR, it does win a point on creativity. But if we actually just heard part of it, you are telling me that the EPA, when they respond to a spill, they are showing up embracing secret information on how they are responding. It is absurd.

Maybe even the motion may be well-meaning, but when you start using definitions of ``emergency,'' ``community,'' ``including'' with a long dash, we all know where that leads, and it leads both to chaos, inefficiency, and actually doesn't make a lot of drafting sense. So let's actually move on to what we are really here about: the underlying bill.

I have been shocked at sort of the crazy hyperbole that we have heard today about the secret science bill. This bill is actually very simple. All it does is provide transparency substantially as President Obama campaigned on.

Walk through the mechanics. We were having a little debate in our office whether I should hold these up. This here is a stack of letters, memos, demands from folks on the left. It just happened to be there was a Republican President, and even some of these when they were in the majority here, demanding disclosure of the underlying data from the EPA. There is even part of here where the former then-chairman was demanding the data and saying if he didn't get it he was going after contempt.

So what has changed? Seriously, what has changed here with the left on transparency? Is it just the fact that we now have a Democrat in the White House?

So let's actually walk through what we have all campaigned on in here. Is there a Member here that, when you got in front of your constituents, did not promise more transparency in government? That is what this is about. If you are going to create rule sets that affect every American's life, their health, their economic future, don't they have the right to see the underlying data?

And think of the arrogance that is going on right here. If you believe that the EPA is the sole keeper of all great knowledge, that their cabal is the only one qualified to be creative, to understand is there a better way, a more efficient way, a healthier way, then vote against the bill. But if you believe in the American people, if you believe in our institution, if you believe there is amazing knowledge all over this country and all over this world, this is the transparency that makes us healthier, that makes us more efficient, that makes decisionmaking coming out of the EPA much more rational. This is what we all campaigned on. This is what we promised. Let's go vote for it.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 756, I call up the bill (H.R. 1422) to amend the Environmental Research, Development, and Demonstration Authorization Act of 1978 to provide for Scientific Advisory Board member qualifications, public participation, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

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 materials on the bill, H.R. 1422.

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

Members of Congress have been asking for greater transparency from the EPA's Science Advisory Board for years, and the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act, we believe, addresses those concerns.

Currently, the board is made up of 52 members appointed by the Administrator of the EPA to serve 3-year terms. The large majority of these members are affiliated with academic institutions, while private industry and other interested parties are unrepresented.

The only State governments represented are California and Vermont, while tribal and local governments have no representation on the board. Under H.R. 1422, at least 10 percent of the board members will be from States, local governments, or tribal entities.

The bill reinforces peer-review requirements and reduces conflicts of interest while providing opportunity for disinterested panelists to make their views known.

The EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act promises fairness, transparency, and independence to ensure unbiased advice is given to the EPA.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Stewart), and I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to control the time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Nunes for doing this. Thank you for the bipartisan support from everyone, and particularly in the Ways and Means Committee.

This is one of those sort of semijoyous moments where we actually get to do something that is good legislation and good policy, and sometimes you desperately wish around here we had more of this.

Being from Arizona, I have 22 tribes in my State. As a much younger man in the legislature, I actually chaired the Indian Affairs Committee in my State legislature, and we spent years working with our communities to become self-sufficient, to maximum their sovereignty and respect it. So many of my tribes in Arizona now are actually engaging in activities to bolster their population, to provide them the basic benefits that you and I would receive from our city council, from our county, from our State. The clarification this provides just puts them on equal footings with what happens in our other communities and for those who live off reservation. That is why this is such good legislation. It is rational, it makes sense, and continues to incentivize the right direction, the right sovereignty, the right approach for our Native American people in this country.

With that, Mr. Nunes, thank you for doing this.

Mr. Speaker, one of my reasons for coming and taking some of this time this evening was around a frustration I have had, and I think this may be for a lot of us who are from a border State, who have been watching both the press and a lot of our brothers and sisters around this place speechify about immigration, about the border crisis, and what is happening. If you are actually from Arizona, this isn't a new issue for us. We have been bathing and living this for decades now.

I had that moment this last week, Mr. Speaker, where I realized maybe the awareness in this body is starting to change to understand the impact of a porous border and what it means to communities.

When I had one of my friends here from the Midwest come up to me and ask me a number of questions because he had held a townhall--and it was the first time he had had to face barrages of questions about immigration, about the unaccompanied minors, about the populations coming across the border, what were the potential threats, the disease, the drugs--then I realized maybe I have partially had a misunderstanding because, when I go home, the border is one of the key questions we talk about because of the effects it has had on my home State, in regards to education, incarceration, health care, and the amount of the burden that my citizens in Arizona, my taxpayers, have had to take on that ultimately were the responsibility of this Federal Government.

I wanted to go through just a handful things, a couple of numbers that we have found, talk about some of the mechanics that may be coming at us tomorrow. I know many of us are going to have some different views on legislation, where it takes us, but I want to get some of the record straight here.

Do you remember, over the last 3, 4 years, particularly before the 2012 Presidential race, we kept hearing how secure the border was? I remember my former Governor, Janet Napolitano, giving a speech telling us that the border is more secure today than ever before.

Do you remember the rhetoric that the President was bathing in, in early 2012, allowing himself to be called the ``deporter in chief''?

Well, Mr. Speaker, as we later found out--and we found out sort of when many of the Democrat base activists started believing it and started protesting the President, saying: How can our Democratic President be the deporter in chief?

All of a sudden, the truth came out, and we found out that the Obama administration had manipulated the way they calculate the numbers.

The previous administration, if you were a Mexican national--and this is for the southern border--if you had been arrested within a couple miles of the border, you were captured, taken back, and released back over the border, then that did not count in the deportation numbers. This President very conveniently apparently allowed them to redefine the math.

There becomes one of our great frustrations. We have debates here on this floor, and we realized how manipulated so much of the math is, some of the underlying statistics that we will come down here and quote, and we are holding the data, and we realize that we have we got conned. We got played.

Mr. Speaker, if you are going to build public policy, and I don't care if you are on the left or the right, you have to have an administration that is willing to play the data straight. If you are going to make public policy on public data, give us honest data.

That becomes one of our great frustrations, Mr. Speaker, because I will even have my hometown newspaper quote numbers that we found out months ago weren't correct, were manipulated. They redefined the math. So just keep that in mind.

Just something that came across my desk just before I was walking over

here, one of my county sheriffs--and you have to understand, in Arizona, we have only 15 counties--our counties are big, but Arizona is a small State relative to the rest of the country.

We are also the most urbanized State in the country, something that most people don't understand. Most of our population lives in Maricopa County and then the Tucson area.

So think, Arizona is the most urbanized State because the Federal Government controls the vast majority of our land. It is also why you have these incredible opportunities of a porous border because you have distances where there is no civilization.

Our Pinal County sheriff was on the radio, apparently, today and had a quote that we have had 123,000 illegals arrested in the Tucson sector. I am assuming that is over this last calendar year.

I haven't been able to get a response on that one, but think about that. Right now, so much of the national attention is the discussion of what is happening along the Rio Grande, in Texas. Don't forget Arizona. Don't forget what is going on in our State for so many years.

I had an economics professor years ago, that we had actually had this discussion of if you were ever to try to truly understand the math and how porous a border is, how would you build an economic model to truly understand it?

He had this brilliant idea, and it still rings in the back of my head because, multiple times, we have had this discussion of if we were going to build a border enforcement bill before allowing anything else to move in this body, do you have the border State Governors be the ones to declare the border secure?

Well, do you really want to put that type of political pressure on my Governor in Arizona, the Governor of New Mexico, small States where, let's face it, some of the activist groups with their budgets could manipulate our Governor's races, our elections? So what would be an honest economic method?

My old professor had this one thing: look at the price of drugs on the street, look at the price of certain types of labor; but he liked the drug calculation because if illegal drugs that are being sourced in other parts of the world and the price stays stable or is actually going down on the streets across the country, particularly in communities like Phoenix, which is often a distribution center, you actually have an economic model to understand if the border is truly secure.

Mr. Speaker, in conversations I have had with some law enforcement over the last year, apparently, a lot of the illegal drug prices on the streets in my community are stable or going down; but, yet, I had a President who is willing to stand behind microphones--I had the head of Homeland Security willing to stand behind microphones and declare the border more secure than ever, but the underlying fact is, now, we know we weren't being told the truth.

On occasion, we will go home, and we will hold townhall meetings and discussion groups in the chambers, and some of the activist groups will come and sit down with us and say: Why won't you do this? Why won't you do that? Why won't you accept the Gang of Eight bill? Why won't you do this?

You turn and say: How would you hand that type of policy, that type of legislation to this administration? Do you really trust them? Do you really trust the Obama administration to keep its word? Do you really trust the Obama administration not to play games with the math? Because we already have multiple occasions here where I can demonstrate to you the math has been played you with.

So then I wanted to chase after something else that we came across. How many speeches here, how many discussions, how many press conferences, how many talking heads on evening cable have we seen over the last month saying, oh, the unaccompanied minor issue, well, was a surprise to all of us, we never expected this, if we had just known-- which is an amazing thing because I have a few documents here, and they are budget documents, and we all know what goes into starting to model and build budgets.

Here is one. It is a newsletter from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and it was talking about some of the Catholic services. They do wonderful work. They do it at some great prices. But this was a newsletter from last November, so November 2013. On that one, the Department of Homeland Security estimates more than 60,000 unaccompanied minors could enter the United States in 2014. It was out there in writing.

Then we came across some other things that we found very interesting. Here is actually from 4-13, so over a year ago, a number of budget line items for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services in regards to unaccompanied minors. The original 2014 budget request they had been working on earlier was going to be $494 million, and somehow on 4-13, so well over a year ago, they knew something was wrong and they added another $373 million to that budget line item. Yet earlier today, I watched a Member of the other side get behind a microphone and tell me how surprised they were.

So let me pull what we voted for last January. Unaccompanied alien children, line item, and this was woven into the continuing resolution we did last January, so you know the numbers were worked up months before that. We went from the 2013 estimate, $376 million, to $868 million. That is what we pushed out of here in January.

So back to that whole trust conversation, as we put forward policy in dealing with our crisis on our border, don't forget States like Arizona that have had to take this on for years and had to carry the burden of the cost as those here in the Federal Government, here in this bubble that is Washington, D.C., looked at a small State like Arizona and said: Stop making so much noise; you are bothering us. Stop telling us one thing in your speeches, but we can find documents that show your staff knew something very different.

Tomorrow we will have a piece of legislation to step up and deal with parts of the border crisis. It is not a half a loaf. It is not a quarter of a loaf. It is not an eighth of a loaf. It is sort of the heel of the loaf. But for those of us in Arizona, I believe it does a handful of things that we have been demanding.

I have a piece of legislation to put 10,000 National Guard troops on the border, and I had a little fun with a couple of Members who have been here for a long time. I had one Member who has been here for a long time, and she was just outraged that we would want to put that many troops on the border. So I said: But you supported this in 2006 and 2008 when we had Operation Jump Start, and I think at that time we put 7,000 National Guard troops on the border as auxiliary services to the Border Patrol.

So think of that, 2006 to 2008, who controlled this body? It was the Democrats. We had a Republican President, and Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker here. And it is fascinating, now we are a few years later, that formula has flipped. We are proposing it, and the very people who supported it a few years ago now are just appalled. The duplicity around this place sometimes is stunning.

One of the things that I support that will be voted on tomorrow, it is not just putting National Guard troops, if our Governor so will; there will be money behind it, the ability to pay for it. One more time asking States like Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, that if you are going to step up and take these responsibilities that belong to the Federal Government, you need to cover our costs. I don't think it is enough money that is in the bill, but remember, this is short term. What is going to run tomorrow is actually only between now and the end of the fiscal year, which is the end of September.

Updating the 2008 language, we have heard a lot of discussion about this. The reality of it is we have a White House, Department of Homeland Security, I believe, that has already been manipulating the actual language. If you sit down and read it, it had to do with those who were being exploited and being brought across the border, trafficked. This is a little different mechanically than someone who goes out and hires a coyote or a family who takes their children and hires the services.

But nevertheless, we have been told over and over, if we don't update the 2008 law, our hands are tied by so many of our law enforcement on the border. So we are going to do that.

There are a couple of other mechanics here, but I want to make it perfectly clear for many of us--and hopefully I am speaking for many of my supporters and friends and family and my State--this isn't enough. It may be just the beginning.

I do hope we get the chance to discuss the one issue here that continues to be a bit of friction. The President's deferred action, many of our friends on the left keep trying to tell us that that had nothing to do with what we are seeing at the border, but as we have already just walked through the documents, once the deferred action, referred to as DACA, had gone into effect, they knew the numbers were coming. They were calculating. We now have some charts that much of this crisis was being watched for months. It finally just became overwhelming.

Illegal immigration--and legal immigration--work on incentives and disincentives. We have created incentives. This President has created incentives to break our laws, and until we step up with a number of policies that change those incentives, I believe we are partially chasing our tail here. We will do some good things. We need to step up the quality of our law enforcement and our border enforcement, but we also need an administration that we can trust, an administration that will tell us the truth, and an administration that will actually follow our laws.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus), I believe it is southeast Illinois.

Celebrating the Lives of Alan Dixon and Kenny Gray

Thank you, Mr. Shimkus.

Mr. Speaker, a couple of weeks ago, I came to the floor and did a bit of a presentation of some of the numbers we were seeing on what was actually happening in our debt, in our future economic growth, why we were so stagnant in today's economy, and the overhang that was, I believe, the very thing that was slowing down future economic growth.

I had a number of phone calls and a number of emails and a few comments on Facebook asking for a little more definition, a little more presentation. So I thought I would come to the floor this evening, take some of this leadership hour, and walk through some of the numbers.

I have to apologize to everyone right now, I am going to throw out a lot of math, a lot of numbers, but you are going to see a theme here of what is coming at us, and it is coming at us very, very fast.

After we do this, I want to do a little talking about a piece of legislation that I have that has made it through committee, and I am hoping, over the next couple of months, we will come to the floor and what that piece of legislation, I believe, means to sort of transparency here in our government with the EPA and hopefully as just sort of the future of how we deal with data in this Federal Government.

The chart alongside me--and I know there are lots of lines in it and it is hard to read, but it has a very, very, very simple theme--I am going to show variations of this on a couple of different boards.

The red you see down at the bottom is what we call discretionary spending. That is what we substantially get to come down and vote on.

That discretionary spending, if you look at the next decade on this chart, basically stays the same. So the military, the Park Service, the FBI, education, and these things that are programatic that we come down and vote for on the discretionary side of the budget are pretty much staying even for the next 10 years.

Do you see the blue lines? They are just slightly shy of doubling. They basically double over the next 10 years. That is mandatory spending. That is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, and now ObamaCare, things that are built in by formula. And they grow and grow and grow and grow, and they consume everything in their path.

That is what is going on here.

When I do meetings back home in Arizona, in the district, you often get this question: Why do you all fight with each other? Why do you all fuss with each other? And my answer is: It is about the money. And you get this look.

You must understand, we come to this floor and we are fighting over, fussing over, in many ways, a shrinking pot of resources, even though today we have actually the highest revenues this Federal Government has ever received.

So where is the money going? It is going to that mandatory spending. We need to deal with the reality that the mandatory spending--the entitlements--are consuming our future. So that is what this chart is basically saying.

We are going to the next chart. The reason I am going to put this one up is this is from 2013. So we actually know it has happened. It is a closed book.

If you look at the blue areas, that is mandatory spending. You will see Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. You will see other income. You have supplemental programs like food stamps, WIC, and some of those types of programs. You will see veterans' benefits down here. And about 6 percent of our budget last year--our money, our spending--went to interest. Thirty-two percent last year is what we, as Members of Congress, got to come down here and do policy on.

Understand that in 9 budget years--and I am going to show you that pie chart in a moment. That is 32 percent. In 9 budget years, that goes from 32 percent of our spending and collapses down to 22 percent. That 22 percent has your military, the FBI, the education, health research. All those types of things are in that remaining portion of the pie.

This was something that I picked up several months ago, and I was shocked it did not get more discussion here on the floor of the House or around here in Washington. Last September, we had the Chief of Staff of the United States Army in discussion before Congress talking about the future of the Army and what was actually going on. In his quote, he basically says that 46 percent of the Army spending today is personnel costs, like salaries, pensions, health care. By 2023, 9 years from now, it is going to be 80 percent.

So get your head around this: 80 percent of the Army's spending in 9 years will be personnel costs. It will not be equipment. It will not be things that fly fast and go kaboom or make our soldiers safer. It will be personnel costs. In 9 years, 80 percent of that Army's budget will be personnel costs.

You have got to understand the demographic bubble our country is in. The fact of the matter is these costs are consuming us. We can have a debate of, well, it's uncomfortable to talk about, it's not politically correct, when you talk about Medicare and Social Security you can get yourself unelected, but if you care about these programs, if you care about the social contract we as Members of Congress have with our constituents, you need to step up and understand the underlying math so you can save them--because it is math.

Think about if I came to you and told you that 9 years from now, for a branch of our service, 80 percent of their money is not equipment, is not things that keep the soldiers safe, but it is just going to be salaries, health care, and retirement. You need to understand that the very thing we are discussing on our overall Federal budget is now also hitting Federal employees and our military.

I am going to rotate to the next board. Remember, this one shows 32 percent of all of our spending was discretionary.

This is 9 budget years from now, so it is 2024. Nine budget years from now, that discretionary portion falls to 22 percent of our spending. And this is still the military; this is still the FBI; it is still health research; it is still education.

So what is happening here? Well, on the previous pie chart, interest was 6 percent of our budget, 6 percent of our spending. In 9 years, we predict it to be around 14 percent. That is assuming that we stay with historic norms on interest rates. If interest rates spike, if we have 1979, 1980, 1981, or 1982 all over again, our interest exposure consumes huge portions of what is left in the discretionary budget.

You must understand what we have done with the explosion of our deficits

in this country. We have actually made this country rather fragile to interest rate exposure, and something you need to understand is we now become more and more subject to the world's interest rate markets and our ability to constantly sell more and more of our debt.

There was something I found sort of amusing, and I didn't bring the actual numbers with me, but 2 days ago this administration was announcing how happy they were with that the deficit numbers and where they were at. The problem was the deficit numbers weren't that different from last year, and they were substantially higher than they were predicting last September, one more time demonstrating here in Washington you can spin almost anything. And if you have a compliant press, complicit press--whatever you want to use--you can make it sound like happy talk.

The numbers are not getting better.

So in 9 budget years, 24 percent of our spending is going to be Social Security.

On occasion, I will have someone on the left who will show up at one of our discussion groups, our working groups, or our town halls and demand a discussion about Social Security, saying Social Security is fully funded. They have all those IOUs in it.

Here is the basic math on Social Security.

Social Security is holding about $2.3 trillion of special Treasury notes from the Treasury Department. Obviously, the Treasury Department, if they were to pay those back--which they will--they have to go borrow the money, because they have already spent the money. That is the asset in Social Security. Understand, Social Security is sitting on about a $24 trillion unfunded liability. So they are holding about $2.3 trillion in special Treasury notes, and they have $24 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

And this is where it ties in. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago.

At the very beginning of the year, George Mason University did a study and put together some data of what would happen if you took the U.S. debt, the U.S. liabilities, and put them on GAAP accounting, just like your business, my business, just like everyone else where you are doing a large public statement and you would have to put them on GAAP accounting--what are your liabilities, what are your assets, and if you offset them.

What would you guess the United States shortfall is? On occasion, I will hear many of my brothers and sisters even here in this body sort of quote the number that you can see at the bottom of the U.S. debt clock on the Web site as it is spinning, and they will say things like: Oh, it's a $120 trillion shortfall.

The study at George Mason University came in at $205 trillion, which is our honest debt, our honest unfunded liabilities, if you actually use GAAP accounting.

Go to the Internet now and take a look at what many predict, estimate, guess is the entire wealth of the world. You are going to find out what we owe, what we are going to owe, what we have promised is greater than the current wealth of the entire world--every asset in the world.

I will make you the argument that even with the chaos we have right now through so many things in this country and so many things I actually hold this administration responsible for, the President's failure to step up and say, This is the systemic risk to my country, to your country, to our country, not dealing with the explosion of the future entitlements consumes our future. And it is in front of us.

We knew baby boomers were going to turn 65 for how long? I remember sitting in a statistics class in 1981 where the professor was putting things up on the board and talking about how much money we would have to have set aside in assets as we started to move into the baby boom retirements.

We are now into year three, and my understanding is a typical baby boomer will have put in around $100,000, $120,000 into Medicare in their lifetime, and they are going to take out $330,000. So they will put in about $110,000 and take out about $330,000. Now, multiply that shortfall times 76 million brothers and sisters. And we are into year three of it now.

We have known this was coming. We have known this was coming for 65 years, but it was politically dangerous to talk about. It was uncomfortable. It is easier, as you watch the debates here on the floor, to talk about today's chaos, today's spending.

Being able to cover these promises, these social entitlements, these social contracts into our future, if you love your kids, if you love your grandkids, if you love your great-grandkids that may not even be here yet, this is the question I beg of you to ask candidates who are running around this country: What are your plans to deal with the crushing future debt, the crushing future promises that we have made that there is no money for?

There is this almost pathologic attitude around here of: We will get to it one day when we have a Senate that is willing to step up and do work. We will get to it one day when we have a President that is willing to be honest about the math. We will get to it one day.

The problem is that every single day that ticks away, the math gets worse. A good example of that is 2 days ago, the Congressional Budget Office came out with their annual data.

Remember, you have heard over and over on the media that things are getting better, the job situation is better, our numbers are getting better. Well, if they are getting better, how did the fiscal scenarios get worse?

Go pull the Congressional Budget Office's numbers that they just put out. Our Congressional Budget Office does two scenarios. One is the standard and one is called an alternative.

The standard is basically based on the concept of: this is the law as it is today. Here are the numbers that it projects. Of course, you have got to understand that the law as it is today has things in it like the common vernacular ``doc fix.'' We refer to it as the SGR. It is this concept that, in a dozen or so years, doctors are going to take 73 percent less money--73 percent less compensation--to see a Medicare patient. It is implausible. It is not going to happen. Yet here is how the scam works here in Washington.

It is the current law that doctors are going to be compensated this much less over the next dozen years, so we are going to calculate that as savings all up and down our future budget projections, our future debt projections. We have things that are woven into those numbers that are fantasy. Go read the last three pages of the Medicare-Social Security actuarial report. The head actuary, whom I have never met but who I hear is just a standup person, basically says, ``Oh, by the way, these numbers are implausible,'' but they are based on current law. You will hear debates here on the floor, saying, ``No, the number is this. The number is this.'' The number often, if they are using the standard projections, is a fraud.

Then there is the alternative scenario, which may overshoot a number on the negative side because it basically makes a projection of: What if GDP isn't what we hope it to be? which, as it has turned out over the last couple of years, is true. We will be blessed if we can break through that 2 percent this year because of what happened in the first quarter.

The alternative scenario is that we hit 100 percent of debt to GDP in 14 years. How many of you remember what you were doing 14 years ago? To help you put it in sort of a perspective, when you get ready to take out that 30-year mortgage, understand that less than halfway through it your government, your country, is going to be at 100 percent debt to GDP. Theoretically, that is when your sovereign debt becomes much more risky, and this net interest figure potentially starts to explode on you because getting sovereign nations, getting individuals and getting investors from around the world to buy our sovereign debt becomes harder and harder because we start to look riskier and riskier. If you say, ``David, I don't want you to use the alternative number. I want you to use the standard number,'' okay. Add 8 years. Add 8 years so that, in 2036, we hit 100 percent of debt to GDP.

We can fix this, and we can fix it in a way that is not terrifying. It will be a little uncomfortable, but you will save the future. If you are a person of the left and if there are programs you

care so deeply about, those programs are on the discretionary side of this budget. If you are a person of the right or a person who cares a lot about the military, that is in this discretionary budget. Every time you talk about those programs, you need to stand behind that microphone and talk about mandatory spending--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, veterans' benefits, and now ObamaCare--because they are all on autopilot, and they are consuming everything in their path.

That is, hopefully, a little more detail of some of the numbers I put up a couple of weeks ago. We traditionally will put these slides up on our Facebook page and on our Web site so that you can analyze them. If you want all of this data and a lot more--I mean, a presentation could go on for hours--it is on the Congressional Budget Office's data sets. This is the issue of our time. It is that we have made as a government, as a people, lots and lots of promises, and we haven't built the mechanisms to pay for them.

With that, I want to move on to one other little thing. Let's take these boards down.

Now, as we get ready to talk about the ``Secret Science'' piece of legislation, I show you all of these debt projections and unfunded liability numbers, and I am actually more optimistic today than I have been at any time in my 3 years here in Congress. Why? If I had gone to anyone out there 10, 12 years ago and had said, ``Hey, in 2015, the United States is going to become a natural gas exporting country,'' you would have laughed at me. Ten or 12 years ago, you couldn't pick up the newspaper--you couldn't pick up The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, financial news--and not hear discussions here on the floor about this thing called ``peak oil.'' The world was running out of energy, do you remember? It wasn't that long ago. The world is running out of energy. Tomorrow, the next incremental barrel of oil and the next incremental unit of fossil fuels that we extract will be less than the day before. You all know the problem with that. It was absolutely wrong. As of today, we have more known fossil fuel supplies than any time in human history, and if we use this the right way, that is one of the legs on the stool that is going to support us as we stand up and start to meet these obligations that we have made.

The second thing is much more ethereal, a little more difficult to talk about, and that is what is happening all around us. There is this hyperefficient economy that is breaking out. How many of you have ever ridden Uber? How many of you have ever done SideCar? How many of you have ever used that handheld computer you call a phone to buy something, to sell something, and to use it in a fashion to do something that is so hyperefficient that you couldn't have done it a couple of years ago? Please understand. The incumbents, as they are often referred to--and it is not competitive businesses. It is competitive businesses and incumbent tax systems. If you have a Web site that allows you to rent someone's townhouse for the week, that becomes a great transaction for you and for that person who owns the townhouse, but the municipality and the hotel are not happy. The municipality is not getting its bed tax, and the hotel with its capital expenditures is not happy, but the fact of the matter is that this is an economic transaction that is efficient.

Over the next couple of years, I believe, in State legislatures, city councils, county councils, and here in Congress, we are going to see the fight over: Do we regulate the new alternatives you have as a citizen to engage in this hyperefficient economy? Do we regulate them out of existence? Do we create some concept of, well, we need them to have additional tort liability shields or we need to have them engage in this part of the tax scheme? A bit of economic chaos is normal. That is how you renew yourself. That is how you create the next generation of economic growth. We need to embrace it because, if we cannot reach escape velocity in the energy renaissance and in the economic renaissance, I do not know, mathematically, how we keep our promises to so many people in this country.

A few months ago, I introduced a piece of legislation, and it has been through the Science Committee. We gave it the title of ``Secret Science.'' I am not sure if I am thrilled with the title, but it is a very, very simple concept. The concept underlying it is: Do you make public policy and not make the underlying public data available? It is a simple concept--public data for public policy. Should your government be keeping the data--the underlying data--secret and then create a bunch of rules and regulations on top of you?

It is almost absurd to think we have to create a piece of legislation to get the EPA to take its data sets and make them public. There is this intense arrogance out there in the world right now, particularly at our agencies, of saying, ``David, you have got to understand. Only real scientists, researchers who we deem qualified should ever see this data. Well, you don't want the unwashed masses to have an opportunity to see how we are developing our science and our regulations.'' It is absurd. It almost borders on Orwellian as to what is going on in our bureaucracies today. They are going to create rule sets that cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and that are going to affect how we live in future decades. Yet there is the arrogance of saying the young man who is a statistics major, the left-wing group, the right-wing research group, the industry group, the activist group-- just someone who is nutty enough to have a great stats package on his home computer, who wants to take the data sets and play with them and model them and see what is out in the tails and maybe match them up to other data sets that someone hadn't thought about--is not worthy. They are not worthy?

Now, it is a personal fixation, but I actually believe that transparency is the ultimate regulator in our society. Could you imagine if we had gone into 2008 and if we had had transparency on that MBS, the mortgage-secured bonds, and had known what the impairment was and had known what was actually going on? Would you have had an implosion on a single day, or would you have had a couple of years of, hey, these are having trouble, these are having trouble; we need to mark down the prices? Transparency is the ultimate regulator, the ultimate vetter, but it is also the ultimate exposure to bad acts.

This hit my desk last week. It is a TIME magazine. On the cover it says, ``Eat Butter. Scientists Labeled Fat the New Enemy. Why They Were Wrong.''

Now, how many times have you heard the people at your gym, your wife, or others saying, ``David, you need to be eating less saturated fats. You can't eat that butter. We need to go buy some of that artificial stuff''? Now I am looking at TIME magazine's saying, ``Hey, we screwed up on the data.'' How many times in our lives do we come here and say, ``We knew it except for the small problem that we got it wrong''? Remember, we all knew the world was running out of energy. ``Well, we got that wrong.'' We all knew eating butter was bad for you until we knew the data was different. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of examples like this around us, but we were so arrogant that we thought we understood the data. We thought we understood the methodology. We were so brilliant except for the fact that we weren't. We got it wrong over and over and over.

The fact of the matter is--and go back to my energy example of a dozen years ago and beyond that--our military policy, our foreign policy, our environmental policy, our tax policy was all based on this concept that the world was running out of energy, except we weren't. How much of our health policy is based on things like this: ``David, you can't eat butter''?

I saw a presentation a few years ago that the government was spending this astronomical amount of money to try to keep people from using salt. The researcher was presenting salt as only a problem for you if you have hypertension, but that is different than the folklore out there. How many things have we developed in our folklore that we make policy?

That is why H.R. 4012--it is called the ``Secret Science'' bill--is, I believe, so needed. When the EPA takes data, whether it be from industry, whether it be from a research group, an activist group, a right, a left, an internal--any group--and when they use that data to

make a policy, to make a rule, that underlying data belongs to all of us. It is public policy by public data, and we all as Americans deserve the right, if you are so inclined, if you so choose, to sit there, see it, touch it, calculate it, crunch it, compare it, understand it. Who knows? You may be the researcher who comes out, looks at the data, matches it up against other things, and tells me I can eat butter.

I promise that in a couple of weeks, maybe a month, I am going to come back to this microphone, because I have collected an entire binder of example after example of what we were absolutely positive about-- what we absolutely knew--and we got wrong, and how so many of those things we made public policy on, and we got it wrong.

My good friend from Iowa (Mr. King) has a couple of other things in sort of that same vein that he wants to share, and he may be the best person I have ever seen behind these microphones.

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

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Arizona who actually has an amazing district and was actually an amazing leader when we lost 19 of our firefighters this time last year, I appreciate him putting that into the Record for all of those in Arizona.

I wanted to do something a little different tonight. A few months ago, we came to the floor here and sort of walked through what was really going on in the math. One of the things that sort of enrages me is so much of the debate we have here in Congress is the noise. We talk about this issue or that issue when we have the 10,000 pound gorilla in front of us, and that is what is happening to us fiscally.

Right now, and I am going to be using a lot of numbers tonight, and we

are going to try to put up as many of these on our Facebook page and on our Web site so folks can actually see these charts. First off, if this were 1 year ago, we were having discussions of what was the fiscal year 2014 deficit going to be, and we had some folks making these optimistic projections that we were only going to be in the $400-some billion shortfall that year.

It is still a stunning amount of money. It has only gotten worse though. Remember, we were supposed to be on the way out. Employment was getting better; income was getting better. Taxes are up dramatically in this country. Remember, we have just hit the alltime high revenues ever for the United States.

So what could possibly be wrong? Because then, this last April, the projection of the deficit for this fiscal year was $492 billion, then in May, it was $648 billion; and with today's news that the first quarter GDP was down--was negative, went down--our growth and our economy went down 2.9 percent, that is a stunning amount of GDP to lose.

We were going to be giddy if we were over 2 percent, and we had a negative GDP in the first quarter of 2.9 percent.

I am going to make you a projection and a prediction that, when we end the 2014 fiscal year, we are not going to be much different than we were last year. So all these discussions of, well, it is getting better, and the spending and with all these new taxes, the future fiscal burden we are about to dump on our kids and our grandkids is going to get better--it is not in the math. It is not showing up.

This is important. I wanted to actually walk through a little reality check here and to show you how disappointed I am on so much of the discussion that you will hear here in Washington.

You see the chart next to me. If I came to you right now and said: tell me what you think the debt and unfunded liabilities are for the country--now, we can all go to these Web sites where it is the debt clock, and if you look at it right now, it is going to say: well, the unfunded liabilities and the debt for the United States are about $127 trillion.

Well, there was a study done--it was done over at George Mason's Mercatus Center, and it was done at the beginning of the year. The number is $205 trillion that we are about to dump on the heads of our kids and our grandkids.

What should terrify you about this number--well, let's find a way to talk about this. If I said our unfunded liabilities--our debt and the promises we have made in this government--are at $205 trillion, go on a search engine right now and search for: What is the entire wealth of the world?

Mr. Speaker, you are going to pull up estimates that it could be $167 trillion. I saw one that was $180 trillion.

So process this: what we have promised in benefits, promised in spending, what we have already borrowed is greater than the wealth of the world today. Process that. If you, right now, grabbed every penny of the wealth of the world, it would not put enough money in the bank to cover the promises we have already made as a government.

You have got to understand this. This should be the discussion of our times, and yet it is uncomfortable. Look, I am in my second term, and let's have a moment of brutal honesty here: What do most elected officials--what do we often focus on? Being reelected.

When you stand up in front of a room, the pollsters and the political consultants often tell us: well, happy talk or talk about something that is easy because big numbers scare people and, besides that, they are so negative, you would lose votes.

If you talk about what is happening in the entitlements, if you talk about $205 trillion being the debt and unfunded liabilities of your country, Schweikert, you are likely to get unelected.

We have got to step up and start telling the public, telling our voters, telling our constituents the truth: the single biggest issue facing your government is the debt and the explosion of the entitlements.

I am going to spend a little time here talking about what is really driving this. Just how do you get to this? Part of this is this is what it would look like if you used honest GAAP accounting.

Now, what is GAAP accounting? So let's put this in perspective. If I came to you right now, today, and said: all right, the country, we already know if you go on the debt clocks on the Web, you will see we are about $17.5 trillion of borrowed money.

About $4 trillion to $5 trillion of that, we borrowed from ourselves, which we steal out of Social Security, we steal it out of Medicare, but the $17.5 trillion--but then I come to you, and let's do something that is simple math.

The Social Security trust fund, with the benefits we have promised right now, is about $23 trillion underfunded. Okay. So my $17.5 trillion of hard debt right now and the $23 trillion we owe--and if we were doing GAAP accounting, if we were doing honest mathematical accounting--like we all learned in, hopefully, accounting classes--you are looking at $40 trillion that you would put onto this number because that would be honest.

That $23 trillion that we owe to Social Security beneficiaries, that we do not have the money, we just pretend, yeah, we owe it, but we are not going to tell the public about it because it will make them nervous.

That is the GAAP accounting, so when we start doing the honest accounting--like every business, every charity would have to do--that is how you get to real numbers and understand the real situation that the government, that the people, the beneficiaries, and those in Congress should be dealing with today.

Mr. Speaker, why is this not working? Why the problem? Let's actually go to the next chart, and maybe this will sort of help because we have had so many discussions.

Do you remember all the rhetoric that was around this place before the 2012 Presidential race and the election, the discussion of how much better everything was getting, how much better the job situation was about to get, these debts and deficits will start becoming under control?

Well, it just wasn't true. The political class, probably for reelection--heaven knows the President did--we misled the people. We didn't tell them the truth about basic math.

So what is wrong here? We are going to walk through what is really going on in these charts, but think about just the last year or two. What has happened out there when even we have succeeded at getting good legislation--bipartisan legislation--passed through the House, getting our brothers and sisters in the Senate to actually work with us, and getting the President's signature? Something like the JOBS Act, passed it 3 years ago.

Think about this: little things that were going to help the individual entrepreneur, like crowdfunding, the reg A, some of the mechanics in there where we were just trying to help capital formation for the little guys, for the startup businesses--what happened? They got lost in the bureaucracy.

Some activists on the left said: oh, we are scared of this, and we took away the optionality for everyone out there to grow that business out of their house, out of their garage.

It breaks my heart--something as simple as crowdfunding has now had so many rules and regs, and it still is in reg writing, even though we were supposed to have the rules 2 years ago.

Think about it. Even when Congress has gotten it right, this President and the bureaucracies he controls--he is appointed to-- continue to destroy the optionality that we were trying to give to the American people to get this government out of their way and start growing this economy.

Let's take a quick look at this chart--and I am sorry, I know how hard it is for those folks who might be watching on television or sitting in the back row or galleries, these are hard to read--but what is important about this is the blue line here was our projection a year ago.

We were actually projecting that the deficits and debt were actually going to get better. Then when we actually had to start doing our recalculations and realizing the economy is not growing, it is not producing the economic expansion, the economic wealth that we need in this country to cover the promises we have made, that became the red line.

Now, we need to do the next part of the discussion of what really goes on in government math. You do realize that government math, the budget projections, the debt projections that are put out--I am going to be fairly harsh here--border on fraud.

Here is simply why: this red line is based on current law. Well, you do realize in current law--something we call the SGR, you will often hear it as the doc fix--that in about 10-12 years, we expect doctors to accept 73 percent less to see a Medicare patient. That is the current law, so that is why this line goes this direction--because we have these things in law where we expect these fantasies to take place.

Now, the reality of it is: How many of you think a doctor is going to see a Medicare patient for 73 percent less? It is just not happening.

So we will run here to the floor and say: oh, heavens, we have got to make sure that our seniors have access to their doctors, we have got to make sure doctors are at least covering their costs, and we will come in here, and we will raise that doc fix, that SGR, another year.

One of the reasons it does not happen around this place for the 10 years out or the 20 years--our permanent fix--is because, all of a sudden, the math changes again, so we get the benefit of fake math. We know we made the promise that there is going to be this health care within Medicare.

We put out these fancy charts, and I see some of my brothers and sisters speechifying with the numbers they are handed. When you start to grind into what is underlying underneath those numbers we are often given by the Congressional Budget Office, you start to realize: well, they say this is based on current law.

You have got to understand, inside that current law are things that are implausible. Actually, go look at the Medicare actuaries report and go to the very last 2 or 3 pages, and even the head Medicare actuary makes it very clear that the projections in the report--because the projections in the report are based on current law--are implausible.

The head actuary actually uses the word--year after year, when they do their Medicare actuary report--that it is ``implausible.'' Why is that not the headline? Is it because it comes with big numbers?

Here is what happens. There is something also that our Congressional Budget Office does, which is referred to as the alternative scenario, when you actually take out the things that are in current law and put them into what actually is more likely to happen: we will do doc fix and other things that are current law that hit the wall that are unfunded in the future, and we will step up because of the political pressure and adjust them and raise that spending.

Well, what happens when we do that? You get a curve, this green line. I know it is hard to see, but just understand that what this means is, if we hit this alternative scenario, in about 14 years--actually, slightly less--your country hits 100 percent of debt to GDP.

Okay. That is debt to GDP where, actually, that is just what we are booking. Remember, we started the conversation with we tell everyone here is the money we are borrowing, so here is our debt to GDP.

This would not even have--that 100 percent to GDP in 14 years would not actually have GAAP accounting. It would not have the real numbers because you do understand, that number we did before, saying if you just take Social Security and our current debt, add those together, it is approaching $40 trillion, you do realize that is double your country's GDP right now.

We are already not at 100 percent of GDP. If we actually had honest accounting--just those two are 200 percent of GDP, yet how often do you hear us talk about it?

This is the issue of our time. If we don't step up and start dealing with it, I have no idea, I have no idea what happens in the future when we hit the wall--and we will hit the wall.

Oh, by the way, understand, if you just add up the debt we have and the unfunded liability in Social Security, we are far beyond where Greece is. I think Greece was $1.7 trillion, so 100 percent debt to GDP. If you just add up those, we are at 200.

We need to have some folks actually start to learn some calculus, and that was actually one of my running jokes for my first year here. I started to realize many of my constituents thought the problem in D.C. was Republicans versus Democrats, and I have grown to believe it is those that own calculators and those that don't.

A question I will actually give--and we have had this discussion with a lot of Members both on the right and the left--is: Why do we seem to fight so much? Seriously. Why do we seem to fuss with each other so much? And I am going to make you the argument it is about the money.

In the next couple of charts, I am going to try to walk through what is really happening with the money so you understand if you are tired with Congress fighting with each other about the money, it isn't going away. It is about to get--and will continue to get--dramatically worse.

Another chart, probably almost unreadable from a distance, but understand here is what you are looking at. Do you see the red lines there? The red lines are what we call discretionary. That is what I get to come to the floor and debate over and work on these appropriations bills where we are trying to move money here, take it away from here, try to save here. That red line is discretionary. That red line is your military. It is your parks. It is the FBI. It is things that are not mandatory spending, things that are not entitlements.

Here is where we are right now. We used 2013.

In 9 fiscal years--2024--do you notice something in the pattern on this chart? Do you notice that what we vote on here in Congress, the discretionary, is pretty much the same? Nine years from now, 10 years from now, it is basically the same.

But what we call mandatory, which is mostly entitlements--and I will get phone calls tomorrow from folks that are enraged that I used the word ``entitlements.'' That is what it is. It is an earned entitlement, but it is still a promise. It is a social contract we made as a government with our people. We just forgot to tell them we didn't have the money to pay it.

So understand from here, from 2013 to 2014, that increase, we will now be sitting at a $2.29 trillion increase on mandatory spending--and that is in 9 fiscal years. They are huge numbers, but you have just got to follow the chart.

Let's say you are someone who is passionate about drug research, passionate about the national parks, passionate about securing our borders, passionate about the military. That is in this red line. It is being consumed by mandatory spending.

So understand, the simplest way I can phrase this is your government is very quickly becoming a health insurer and an entitlement provider with a shrinking army.

Process that for a moment. That is where we are at. That is what is going on around us in our lives.

We will have these charts up hopefully in the next couple of days on our Facebook page and our Web site so you can vet them yourselves. It is important. If you want to understand public policy in the United States, if you want to understand public policy that is happening here in Congress, everything is about the mandatory spending.

Do you remember the first board we put up where I was showing you the $205 trillion of unfunded liability and debt? It is important to understand that half that is Medicare. Medicare right now represents close to $100 trillion of promises we as a government have made, and there isn't money to pay for it. And those are in today's dollars.

We are going to come back and forth to a couple of these so that we better understand them.

This is actually the 2013. You will notice the red. That is what we all come here and we debate over and we fight over and work through and come up with ideas. That is the discretionary. It is 32 percent of all of our spending.

We have Social Security and Medicare. We don't have the Obama subsidies in here yet, but that is one of our newest entitlements. Remember, we were almost promised that this ultimately was going to be a savings. It wasn't the truth.

Medicare, income security. These are food stamps and other types of programs that are entitlements because of where you sit income-wise-- veterans' benefits, other mandatory certain pensions, certain other requirements we have to meet, mostly on the retirement side, and interest on the debt.

I want you to pay attention if you can see this. Six percent of what we spent in 2013 was interest.

I am going to be rotating back and forth so this is going to get a little awkward with these boards, but it is important to see.

So where will we be in 9 fiscal years? Now, this is important. Remember, you just saw discretionary spending. This is your military. This is your drug research. This is the FBI. This is the border. It is 32 percent of all our spending. In 9 fiscal years, it is 22 percent of all of our fiscal spending. Social Security becomes 24 percent of all of our spending. Medicare becomes 17 percent of our spending. Best guess--and this becomes a moving target right now--the ObamaCare subsidies in about 9 years will be about 2 percent of our Federal spending. A little different than we were told a couple of years ago; right? Medicaid, 9 percent of your entire Federal budget; income security, 8 percent; veterans, 3 percent; other mandatory, 1 percent.

And this is the most dangerous part of this chart. Do you see interest?

Remember, in the previous chart we were saying interest is 6 percent in 2013. How many of you believe today's interest rates are normal, are real? What happens when we go back to normal interest rates? Well, this projection is that 9 years from now we will be back in normal interest rates. At that point, 14 percent of your entire Federal Government spending is interest.

Understand how fragile that makes all future discretionary spending if we had an interest rate spike. What happens if we were in the early eighties, late seventies type of interest rates? This number explodes, and it would consume what is sitting in the discretionary budget. As we continue to borrow, as we continue to add to programs and make promises and not set aside money for them, we are squandering our future.

On occasion, I get to sit down with an audience where I will see parents and grandparents and the grandkids and you will turn to them and say to the parents, ``How many of you love your kids?'' and most of the hands go up. And then you will turn to the grandparents and say, ``How many of you love your grandkids?'' and all the hands go up. Then you start to show them these charts, and you turn to the parents and the grandparents and say, ``Do you understand what you have done to your children, what we have done to our grandchildren, and what we have done to a generation that is not even born yet?''

The math right now, just to cover the promises that are already done--this is baked in the cake; this is done--your kids, your grandkids, your unborn children are going to have a 60 percent mean tax rate. And that is not for those with a high income; that is everyone. Sixty percent of your income will have to go just to cover this spending. And that is not your State, your local, and your FICA; that is just 60 percent of your income. You will have a of 60 percent income tax just to cover the promises that are already made. And that doesn't pay anything off. That just maintains where we are, because you start to have externalities like the net interest that you have got to pay. And what happens when interest rates move again?

So for those of you, once again, who care a lot about the military, care a lot about protecting the border, care about drug research, care about education, care about all these things, if you really do care, every time you speak to an elected official, every time you speak to someone with election ambitions, every time you speak to a policymaker, every time you speak to someone from the press, please ask the question: What are you willing to do about mandatory spending, because the mandatory spending, the entitlements, are consuming us as a people. And they are consuming your Republic's future.

One more time. Basically, this is 9 fiscal years from now. So take a look. Here is what actual was for 2013. These are the actual numbers. We had 32 percent of our budget go to discretionary. That means not Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare. Those are the mandatories. This actually crashes to 22 percent. This is in 9 fiscal years.

So what is the solution? The solution actually is pretty obvious, and it is really tough. We need the American people to understand maybe not the math but what it means.

It is hard to get in front of an audience and say a trillion this and trillion that. How many folks even understand what a trillion is, the thousand billion and a million. So many of our brothers and sisters do not understand what these numbers mean, but they need to understand what it means to their future and that what we are doing today isn't working.

These numbers continue to get worse and worse month by month because we have policy from this administration and we have policy coming from the U.S. Senate where they won't take the pieces of legislation that we put out of this House that would actually help us to start to grow the

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I am doing this, actually, to try to be efficient because we are moving on a bit.

May I request that the gentleman from Texas enter into a quick colloquy with me.

We attached the Rothfus amendment earlier, and I believe the amendment I was going to be offering in a couple of moments would have probably been a little duplicative, but I want to make a specific point.

We have had a series of amendments here and discussions in regards to bonuses for VA leadership. There are frustrations and concerns particularly when we look at previous GAO reports which say the matrix--some of the data, some of the collection--on wait times and other things that substantially the bonuses are based on, as this GAO report says, may actually be very inaccurate.

If the performance bonuses continue to exist, Mr. Chairman, would you be willing to work with someone like me and my office to try to find a better way? My fear is that right now, in the way it is designed, we incentivize playing games with the wait times. The world works on incentives and disincentives.

Can we work together to come up with a better methodology of how we incentivize good acts so that we are all comfortable that we are moving towards, shall we say, a proper analysis of the outcomes, and, therefore, we reward those?

I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

That is all I wanted to accomplish here.

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

Amendment Offered by Mr. Takano

Mr. Speaker, last evening, I had a couple of articles sitting on my desk and had the opportunity to read through them. I was somewhat--what's the term--oh, yeah, outraged at some of the comments in there, so that is the reason I am standing here on the floor today.

I want to walk through a concept and then try to ferret out why is the agency so terrified of this concept, something very simple. If you are going to make public policy, shouldn't it be based on data that is available to the public?

That public data, properly vetted, is used to make public policy, sort of this concept of almost the crowdsourcing of information.

So if there is a rule set made by an agency, we can all believe in it. We all know it has been properly looked at. It wasn't produced by a small silo of very smart elitists who may be ideologically set one way or another; but the data, the information that creates the rules that we all live under, belongs to all of us.

So how would you feel if you pull up a piece of paper and on that piece of paper is an article about a speech that Administrator McCarthy gave on Monday morning? And I do hope she is misquoted because we have treated her very kindly from the Science Committee and my subcommittee.

But if I came to you and read a line that McCarthy told the audience, on Monday morning, that she intends to go after a--one more time--go after a small but vocal group of critics, in light of what the IRS has done, doesn't that send chills down someone's back when you hear that an agency intends to go after its critics?

And then there is this arrogance that was, I hope, misquoted that only qualified scientists should be allowed to see, real scientists.

So you are telling me that a grad student or a leftwing group or a conservative group or just someone that has an interest in data shouldn't be allowed to see the datasets that are making public policy that literally cost trillions of dollars?

The concept of having a government that runs substantially on secret information is outrageous. So that is why I am trying to push forward on a bill--and maybe the title of the bill is a little inflammatory. It is called the Secret Science bill, a very simple concept that you make public policy with public data and that public data that we all have the right to vet and look at.

Look, the vast majority of Americans will never look at it, but shouldn't you have the right to access it?

Then there is this outlier that the agency is using that is complete obfuscation of the truth: well, there is personal data out there, and we don't know how to protect it.

Every single day, whether it be the Census Bureau, the CFPB, the Commerce Department, they collect personal data. There are standards out there where you blind data. As a matter of fact, there are actually protocols for the protocols on blinding data that we all get to use. It is done every single day.

Somehow, the EPA doesn't want to have that conversation because, somehow, they don't want you, the American public, and the academic community of all ideological stints to have the right to access it.

Mr. Speaker, Administrator McCarthy was quoted as saying:

You just can't claim the science isn't real when it doesn't

align with your politics.

She is absolutely right. I am not asking for ideological data. I am just asking for data to belong to the public and

so everyone has the opportunity to study it and understand it.

Who knows, maybe that studying of that data will find better ways, smarter ways, more efficient ways to protect the environment, more rational ways; but we will never know until the EPA finally steps up and makes that data available to every American.

I thank the chairman.

Mr. Chairman, one of the reasons I ran over here right now is that I have been listening to some of the speakers on the left.

As the gentlewoman just spoke, in referring to the budget as a moral document, I actually somewhat agree with that, but let's actually discuss what is moral for the next generation and the generation after that and the generation after that.

For the fun of it, as I was running out the door, I grabbed this little poster which had been dropped off to me last week. It is a little poster from over at the Mercatus Center, which has been doing some calculations of what the United States' debt would look like if you took the debt in the unfunded liabilities of this country and put it on GAAP accounting, so if you actually treated it honestly.

What is the real number, the typical actuarial 75-year window, attached with regular debt?

Process in your mind what you have been told year after year of our unfunded liabilities, and I need you to wipe that number clean. The number they came up with recently has hit $205 trillion of debt in unfunded liabilities.

You do realize, if you go right now to Google and look up the best estimates of the wealth of the world, our unfunded liabilities are now exceeding many of the estimates of the wealth of the entire world.

This is what so many Members are willing to hand to our children, to our great-grandchildren, and to the future generations?

If you want to make a moral argument, that debt--those unfunded liabilities--is the moral argument.

I thank Chairman Smith, Ranking Member Bonamici, and the sponsor of our bill.

Mr. Speaker, this is actually one of those moments where you are going over a piece of legislation--and I am very proud of everyone who has worked on it, and maybe this language is a little too strong, but in many ways, it sort of removes, whether it be excuses or statutory straitjackets, away from NOAA, away from OAR. And the optionality of, how do you design data sets, how do you reach out to the cloud, to the world around you, and gather their technology, and how they are doing weather forecasting.

You have just heard Chairman Bridenstine speak of big weather events, whether they be tornadoes that affect his district--but think of the Members who have had input into this piece of legislation. I am from the desert Southwest. We have someone from the wet and rainy Northwest. We have had people from around the country that represent very, very different types of climates in their districts, and that is, actually, something that is really special about this piece of legislation.

I have a level of enthusiasm. Last month was my birthday, and my wife bought me this weather station that sits on the side of the house, and it talks to the WiFi, which talks to the cloud. And their goal is to set up hundreds of thousands of data points that are collected by enthusiasts, like myself, across the country and put that data together.

Can you imagine a world where NOAA actually becomes the hub of so many data sets? Then it has the optionality of reaching out and finding what technology, what mechanics are out there to put it together and help us, from our little microclimates that I may have in my neighborhood to the terrible storm that may be threatening the Florida coast.

This is the future, and this bill actually moves us towards that future.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, congratulations on yesterday.

Sort of a one step off, I lost the ranking member. I was going to congratulate him on his years of service now that his decision is to leave the body.

I am obviously standing here with two separate points I want to make. One is, I actually believe the underlying bill has been substantially misrepresented.

If you take the totality of the Clean Air Act, NOX, and all the other pollutants that are regulated, that is not what this piece of legislation touches and does.

Be that as it may, I am here to stand up and advocate for amendment No. 1, which is very simple in its elegance. It does a very simple thing. It says, this bill is not only a discussion about coal, but it is actually a discussion about all fossil fuels.

If we are going to have a regime mechanic that says this technology, once it is properly demonstrated is appropriate to adopt, should not that demonstration be on other forms of fossil fuels that may be generating power?

In many ways it is that concept of sort of optionality. If we are going to create a silo that says hey, these mechanics are only about coal, that is unfair. It should be about all forms of energy, because you would hate to find out, a year or two from now, that the bright, shiny object that I believe the EPA is often chasing has moved to something else, and we have allowed a hole here in our amendment process.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas, though at this moment I feel like I am surrounded by Texans in this particular discussion.

I am from Arizona. I am actually from the desert part of Arizona in the desert Southwest. So why is a bill such as H.R. 2431 so important to us?

The data collection and the management of the data models for those of us

who are in an arid region of the country is really, really important to us. We have come so far in the last couple of decades. The ability for my water management authorities in our reservoirs to know what is happening in the snowpacks all the way up into Colorado and on this side of the Continental Divide and learning whether we are moving into a ``La Nina'' or ``El Nino'' year--which actually makes huge differences to the expected rainfall, particularly in the winter months, in the desert Southwest--is important to us because we are getting better and better at forecasting even a year out in our expectations.

And so I have great appreciation for the gentlewoman from Texas, the chairman emeritus, and the other chairman from Texas, one more time-- remember, as Texans, you are easterners to those of us in Arizona-- because this bill is appreciated.

I know there is always a discussion about funding. But one of my great interests in this is the continued movement of the data-sharing as our universities across the country, particularly in the Southwest, build better and better and healthier and more robust models and the ability for that data to help States like mine manage our water resources into the future.