Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded. I ask I be allowed to speak in morning business for 30 minutes. Mr. President, I want to speak about the bill which we had hoped to have taken up by now,…
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
I ask I be allowed to speak in morning business for 30 minutes.
Mr. President, I want to speak about the bill which we had hoped to have taken up by now, the PEPFAR Reauthorization Act. Because of some procedural questions, we are not on the bill right now, but I thought I would utilize this time to make some remarks about the bill which I hope we will be able to begin dealing with in the not too distant future.
This bill is called PEPFAR, as I said, but that stands for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. It is a program that President Bush brought to the Congress in 2003 and was enacted. It authorized $15 billion over a 5-year period for the purpose primarily of supporting the treatment of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere.
Between 2004 and 2008, according to the Bush administration, PEPFAR has supported a cure for about 10 million people infected by HIV/AIDS, including children orphaned by AIDS. It prevented 7 million new HIV infections. It supported efforts to provide support to another 2 million HIV-infected people.
As a result, I think when the President indicated in his State of the Union speech that he wanted to reauthorize the program, most of us in the Congress, in the House and in the Senate, were supportive of that. I supported the initial legislation and fully intended to support the reauthorization.
There is one little catch. When the President made his announcement, he offered to double the amount of the authorization from $15 billion to $30 billion. I swallowed rather hard because doubling the amount is a big change in the amount of money available, but I assumed I would be able to support the reauthorization of the bill. However, when the bill was written in the House of Representatives and then sent over to the Senate, two things happened. First, one of the things that made the legislation effective in the first place was that we had several conditions attached to it as to how the money would be spent. We were very careful to ensure that the money was spent appropriately. That is one of the reasons it has been effective.
And, secondly, when the bill was written in the House of Representatives, lo and behold, it was not doubled from $15 to $30 billion, it was more than tripled to $50 billion.
Now, there was not anything magical about $50 billion; it seemed like a nice, round, symbolic number. As a result, several of us at that point said: Wait a minute. That is a lot of money. In Washington when a program doubles, that is something. When it more than triples, it bears some looking into.
Because of many of the problems with the substance of the bill, as well as this tripling of the amount from $15 to $50 billion, several of us began to take a harder look at it. Then, as the gas crisis hit, the housing crisis hit, and we find that more and more Americans are feeling the real pinch of a downturn in our economy, the question began to solidify: Should America be committing to spend $50 billion on this program, which at $15 billion was quite successful, without at least considering whether we can reduce the amount and certainly taking a look at the substantive provisions of it to see if it can get back to the original purpose rather
than some of the expanded purposes under the House bill.
That is why several of us said, when the bill came through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: We object to simply passing the bill out of the Senate without any opportunity to amend it, certainly without any opportunity to reduce the amount of it and without an opportunity to fix it. I know some of us were criticized. But I would hope that when we talk about some of the changes that have already been agreed to, those who were critical of us who said: No, we are not going to automatically pass it, would at least acknowledge there have been numerous improvements in the bill because of the negotiation process which ensued.
I wish to particularly thank Senators Coburn, Burr, and Enzi for working on several provisions of the bill and, frankly, restoring the original purpose of PEPFAR in the process. They did a good job. Let me note two or three of the areas with which I think they did a good job. One key to PEPFAR working in the first place was that at least 55 percent of the funding had to go directly to the treatment of AIDS patients. That was a good thing. Once the House said: No, we can spend this money on other things, too, you could see the same kind of problems with some other foreign aid bills, where money is going to governments or NGOs and you never see it again.
As a result, what Senators Coburn, Burr, and Enzi did was say: Look, we need to get back to the proposition that at least half the bilateral AIDS funding is spent on treatment, for treatment for HIV/AIDS. That, in fact, was agreed to. But I would note, again, that the original House and Senate bills proposed simply eliminating that treatment floor.
Another thing they negotiated was to strengthen the protection of funding for abstinence and fidelity programs, clarifying that 50 percent of any funding had to go to those kinds of programs. I would note, again, that the original House and Senate bills eliminated the requirement in the previous law that a third of the prevention funds would go to abstinence education.
Another thing that they did to make the bill better was to protect faith-based groups and others from discrimination in all funding. Again, the House and Senate bills had very weak conscience clauses, so- called conscience clause provisions. This was, again, an improvement of the bill which would not have occurred if we had simply agreed to the unanimous consent that we pass the bill that had been posed earlier and that some of us had objected to.
To some extent, it strengthens the Global Fund transparency and accountability. This is an area that needs additional strengthening. But there is a part of this bill that is not the bilateral U.S. money, it goes into this big Global Fund. And the Global Fund is not well monitored. It is very possible for our funding to be wasted as a part of that.
Again, there was nothing in the original House and Senate bills on this and they at least got some strengthening of the Global Fund transparency and accountability provisions.
Another provision was to protect AIDS patients from substandard medicine, which again was not in the original language. There were other things. My point is that when those of us objected originally to passing the bill as it came out of the House, we were criticized: Well, this is a perfect bill, we were told. It turns out it was not so perfect after all.
That is point No. 1. Point No. 2, there are some additional things which should be done to the substance of the bill. Point No. 3 deals with the amount of money that is being spent.
Here are some of the remaining areas that are problematic: The bill would not prohibit funding for countries such as China, Russia, and India, countries that are quite wealthy, that have their own nuclear weapons and space exploration programs. Russia is awash in petrodollars. China has hundreds of billions of dollars in its foreign currency reserve, has an exploding military budget, and so on. So, certainly, we ought to limit the funding of the bill to countries that actually need the money.
Secondly, it adds a variety of lower priority programs to spend the extra money above the $15 billion, including--well, I am not going to mention all of these, but educating males about the dangers of visiting prostitutes. That is a fine thing, but is that a priority that we need to spend this money on? Addressing the inheritance rights of women and orphans. There is money in here for legal aid and the like, legal aid services.
There is mission creep in the new legislation. It calls for PEPFAR dollars to support nutrition programs, drinking water and sanitation and income-generation activities and livelihood activities--legal services, as I said.
All of these might be fine, but this is not the PEPFAR program, this is foreign aid. There are not any kind of constraints on this mission creep that ought to be in existence if we are going to authorize this kind of money for it.
The bill diverts funding from AIDS treatment for other purposes. I mentioned legal services and substance abuse and so on. It doubles the funding for the U.N.-affiliated Global Fund, which disregards U.S. policies on positions such as abortion and needle exchange and has been linked to funding for corrupt and criminal regimes.
It strikes current law regarding the inadmissibility into the United States of HIV-positive aliens. It calls for a strategy and objective over the next 5 years with these funds to train and hire 140,000 new nurses and other health care professionals in these countries.
This at a time when the United States is drastically in need of health care professionals and nurses. We are wealthy and can afford to be a very generous country, but we also have needs in this country. I mentioned the water development projects and so on. I happen to be familiar, and Senator Thune has offered an amendment on this, with the needs in the United States of America for water development in our Native American communities, on Indian reservations.
There is a study out right now that demonstrates the need that many, thousands of our Native Americans have to rely on water being hauled to their communities, which they then take to their individual hogans or residences. We need water development right here in the United States for American citizens, and I might add to whom we have a trust responsibility, at least as a priority before we send money abroad for folks who do not fall into that same category.
The final point I wished to make is that this legislation, at $50 billion of authorization, is more than we can afford. The Congressional Budget Office, in fact, says that if it is authorized at $50 billion, we cannot efficaciously spend more than about $34 billion. In other words, it is very hard to spend that much money, at least to do so without a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse.
As a result, even the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan entity that we ask for advice on such things, said we could not spend more than $34 billion in that event. As I said, $50 billion is the amount of the authorization here.
To put it in perspective, what is $50 billion? What could we spend $50 billion on? We passed a new GI bill. It could pay for the GI bill twice. It could pay for the Apollo Program to land a man on the Moon twice. It could pay for about half the entire interstate defense highway system. It could pay the pensions of our military veterans for over a year. Now, $50 billion is a lot of money. As I said, I do not know of anybody who would not be willing, especially if we are able to clean up some of the other language in the bill, to authorize it at $15 billion, maybe to even double it to $30 billion, but $50 billion?
I note President Bush has, at least in more recent months, begun to focus on the wasteful Washington spending, the programs he believes spend too much money, and to put some fiscal discipline on the Congress. In fact, since the Democratic Party takeover of the Congress, the President has threatened to veto more than 25 authorization and appropriations bills. This amounts to about $188 billion in spending because of his view that this is excessive beyond what the American taxpayer can be burdened with.
I will note a couple of those. But it illustrates where the President has been willing to say: I am going to veto a bill. That is his ultimate authority here. In the case of the Labor-HHS 2008 Appropriations Act, the President
would have vetoed the bill by exceeding his request by $9 billion. Now, this is $35 billion more than the previous funding, $20 billion more than the President announced in his State of the Union speech that he would be willing to reauthorize the bill at.
He would have vetoed $2.3 billion beyond the budget in the Commerce State and Justice Appropriations Act in 2008; $2.2 billion in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act.
Then, for some authorizations--because this is an authorization, not an appropriation--the Water Quality Financing Act, H.R. 720, which authorizes Federal spending for State clean water revolving funds, that bill would have been vetoed for providing $14 billion in excess above the current $5.6 billion authorization.
I know many of my colleagues have said a $50 billion authorization for PEPFAR is not a big deal because it is only an authorization, not an appropriation. But that certainly was not the position of the administration when it threatened to veto this bill that was over $14 billion more than what the President wanted, or H.R. 1495, the Water Resources Development Act, which authorized water infrastructure projects. That bill was vetoed for going about $7 billion over what the President had authorized or had budgeted.
So it is kind of difficult to understand how the administration or my colleagues can support more than tripling a foreign aid program by spending $50 billion on PEPFAR when the administration was so keen, and I believe correctly so, to finally put the stake down in the ground and say: I am going to veto legislation that is $2 billion or $3 billion or $7 billion over what it should be, including authorizations.
As I said before, we are very wealthy and therefore should be and can be a very generous country. But we also have to establish our priorities. Changing this legislation and tripling the money is not necessarily going to make it triply effective. In fact, if anything, as I said, I think it is going to make it less effective.
I make this point: We have now an American economy which is struggling and American families who are struggling with their budgets. They do not need additional liabilities, either in terms of taxes or more debt, which they and their children and grandchildren are going to have to pay. Someone has to pay for the $50 billion. I do not know where the money is going to come from. Are we going to take it from other spending? Not likely. Are we going to increase taxes to pay for it? Quite conceivably. Or are we going to add it to the deficit? That is the only other choice.
So $50 billion does not grow on trees. It is very easy to be generous with other people's money. But we are talking about the taxpayers' money. I think, when we are taking about taxpayer money, we need to be good stewards of it. More than tripling a program to get it up to $50 billion in foreign aid is more than I think most Americans--if you put the question to them and said: Is this what you want to do with $50 billion of your money, I would bet you the vast majority of Americans would say: Look, we are willing to be generous, provide something for that program but not $50 billion.
That brings me to my final point. In prioritizing, and that is what Congress needs to do, prioritizing what we spend our money on, we have to look at our domestic needs as well. I have supported some increases in funding for years on programs that I think are very important. The answer has always been: Well, there is not enough money. We would love to help you out, Senator Kyl, but there is not enough money. OK. Now we have gone from $15 billion to $50 billion that we are ready to spend on
Will the assistant minority leader yield for one quick point?
Having mentioned my name and alluded to the fact that we had a hard time getting the Indian health bill to the floor, I hope my colleague would acknowledge the fact that one of the people central in getting that bill to the floor and getting it passed was the Senator from Arizona. It was because of my strong commitment to get that done. I will work with anybody, not only to deal with the Indian health matter but also local law enforcement and the water development problems that we talked about with Native Americans. I know my colleague understands that is my position.