Floor Statements

Mr. President, today I am joining with Senator Reid, Senator DeWine, and Senator Clinton to introduce a bill to authorize funding for the Teach for America program. Teach for America, TFA, calls upon our Nation's most promising future leaders, recent college graduates of all backgrounds and academic majors, to spend two years teaching in schools in lower income areas, usually inner cities or rural communities. Our legislation authorizes up to $25 million so that the highly successful program, which began as a privately funded, non- profit effort, can rapidly expand.

TFA was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, a young woman who had just graduated from Princeton. It served just six communities in that first year. Today it serves 22, and hopes to keep growing. TFA raises more than 75 percent of its operating budget through non-Federal sources, primarily through philanthropic gifts in the communities it serves.

The results of this program have been notable, as reported in a study last year by Mathematica Policy Research, an independent research firm: ``Even though Teach for America teachers generally lack any formal teacher training beyond that provided by Teach for America, they produce higher student test scores than the other teachers in their schools--not just other novice teachers or uncertified teachers, but also veterans and certified teachers.''

Probably more exciting than the success of the program in teaching students is the impact it has had on its ``corps members.'' Teach for America

isn't just for education majors, it's primarily there to attract highly successful college graduates who wouldn't otherwise go into education. Of its 9,000 alumni, 60 percent are still involved in education today. The 2005 National Teacher of the Year, Jason Kamras, a teacher here in Washington, DC, who was honored in a Rose Garden ceremony by President Bush, is an alumnus of Teach for America. And my own education policy advisor is also an alumna of the program.

So, in addition to providing better education for students in poorer school systems, this program is creating a new cadre of highly talented and highly motivated individuals who now understand what it's like to teach in a classroom and who are dedicated to improving our education system. That's probably the greatest benefit of the program.

And that's why I'm glad to join the Senator from Nevada in introducing this legislation to provide Federal funding to help TFA expand to new communities and recruit even more corps members.

Teach for America is aiming to grow from 3,000 to 8,000 corps members, from 22 to 35 regional sites, and from 250,000 to 700,000 students by 2010. To reach these growth goals, the program must recruit more than 4,000 new teachers each year by 2010, and it must grow its total annual budget from $40 million today to $100 million by 2010.

The legislation that Senator Reid and I offer today will not turn Teach for America into a Federal program, but it will supplement their privately raised funds to help TFA attain their worthy goals. The bill provides up to $25 million to that end. Interest by college graduates in TFA is very high--17,000 applied for the 2,100 teaching slots last year. Additional funding will allow more of those 17,000 to serve poorer children in classrooms across the country.

In the upcoming issue of U.S. News and World Report, there is an excellent article about Teach for America by David Gergen. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.

I hope other Senators will join with the Senator from Nevada and I in supporting this important legislation. Teach for America has helped more than 1 million students and is creating a highly talented pool of individuals to advance our education system into the next century. Providing Federal support to this non-profit program will help it expand not only to help more students, but also to create an even wider and stronger pool of talented individuals to advocate the best for our schools for decades to come.

Mr. President, the Senator from North Dakota was an important part of the work on clean energy that we finished work on last night and will vote on next Tuesday. I will make some remarks about that in a few minutes, but I acknowledge his contribution and that of the ranking Democrat, Jeff Bingaman, who worked with our chairman, Pete Domenici, and the Presiding Officer, who has experience in the House of Representatives on the Energy Committee.

These last 2 weeks have been extraordinarily good for the Senate. I think we got a good result.

Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar 120, S. 714, the junk fax bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the committee- reported amendments, as amended, be agreed to, the amendment at the desk be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read the third time and passed, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc, and any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar 126, S. 1181.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the bill be read the third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Are we in morning business?

I ask unanimous consent to speak for as much time as I may require on energy.

Mr. President, late last night the Senate finished work on what I call the Clean Energy Act of 2005. For Americans who watch the legislative process, this is not likely to have been the front-page news, but it is by far one of most important things we have done in this Senate because it affects millions of Americans. Our final vote is on Tuesday. I anticipate it will be a strong, bipartisan vote in support, just as the work that was done here was strong and bipartisan.

The first thing the bill will do, and most important, in my opinion, is to stabilize and lower natural gas prices. We hear a lot of talk about $60 a barrel oil. No one likes to pay high prices for gasoline at the pump. The bigger problem is the price of natural gas. In North Carolina and Tennessee, all across this country, there are millions of blue-collar workers who work in plants where the cost of natural gas is driving their jobs overseas. Natural gas used to be in this country the lowest price in the industrial world at a unit price of $2 or $3. Our economy was geared to it. Today it is at $7, and headed up.

If you are working at the Eastman plant in Tennessee, where 10,000 or 11,000 people work, and 40 percent of the cost of your product is natural gas--because they make chemicals there; and you can buy natural gas at $7 here, and you can buy it at $5, $4 overseas--those jobs are going to be headed overseas if that keeps up for very long.

If you are a farmer in North Carolina or Tennessee, the cost of fertilizer has gone up $200 to $500 per unit. That is a big pay cut for you if you are a farmer.

If you are a homeowner across this country and you rely on natural gas to heat and cool your home--and natural gas heats and cools more homes than any other kind of fuel--you might find your bill going up 50 percent recently.

So for blue-collar workers, for farmers, and for homeowners, this legislation we will be voting on Tuesday stabilizes and potentially lowers the price of natural gas. That is one of the single most important things we can do for our country.

The second thing, in my view, the bill does that is important is it recognizes that global warming is a problem. There is not a complete consensus about that in the Senate, but the bill has a different kind of consensus that makes more difference, in my opinion, than the mandates that we did not adopt because the bill changes the way we produce electricity toward ways that are low carbon and no carbon. If you produce less carbon, then you have less global warming, if you believe carbon makes a difference in global warming.

So there is a big difference in the conversation and debate in the Senate this year over last year, in my judgment. While the McCain- Lieberman amendment was rejected--I voted against it myself--there was adopted the Hagel amendment, which has significant new incentives for producers of carbon across this country to reduce the amount of carbon they emit.

We did pass the Bingaman sense-of-the-Senate resolution, which I voted for, which says we expect one day to have mandatory controls that lead us toward a lower carbon production economy. But I, for one, am not yet ready to impose mandatory controls on this big, complicated economy because I do not think we know enough about what it would do to the economy, and I do not think it is wise.

Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman have said they will begin, in July, to hold hearings about this complicated process and to assess how the incentives we may enact--or likely will enact--in this bill operate. Over the next year or two or three or four years, we may learn more.

We may learn enough where a majority of us are willing to have some system of mandatory caps, just as we have in other areas of clean air and acid rain, for example. But in my opinion, we are not there yet.

But the second most important thing in this legislation, in my view, is a shift in attitude toward global warming, a recognition by a majority of the Senators that it is a real problem and taking significant steps to change the way we make electricity so that we make it in a low-carbon or no-carbon way.

The third big change, I believe, is the technologies we use to meet those objectives of lowering natural gas prices and of producing low- carbon or no-carbon electricity. I would call it a new realism about energy in this country. This is a big country. We produce 33 percent of all the money. We use 25 percent of all the energy in the world. We are not some desert island. We use a lot of electricity for our computers and our jobs and our homes. If we have any disruption in that--whether it is a blackout or it is a price that is too high or a lack of supply--it has devastating consequences for us.

So there is a new realism, I would say, about exactly what is available to help us get where we want to go. First is aggressive conservation. That is new about this bill. It is twice the amount of conservation that was in the bill that we passed a year ago which never became law. By conservation, I mean new efficiency standards for appliances. The estimate of our committee is that these new efficiency standards for appliances will avoid the building of as many as 45 large gas electricity plants. That is significant conservation.

There is a provision in the bill that would give 300,000 Americans a $2,000 deduction to buy a hybrid or an advanced-diesel car. That reduces the use of oil. That is aggressive conservation.

There is an amendment in the bill that would have the President mandate a million-barrels-a-day reduction in the use of oil. That is aggressive conservation because that amount of oil equals about the entire production onshore of the State of Texas or the entire projected production from ANWR in Alaska. So we have aggressive conservation. We start there because that is the first thing we can do to save oil, increase supply, and reduce prices.

The second thing this bill does is recognize we need new supplies. We have taken steps to make it easier to bring liquefied natural gas into this country. Some may say: Oh, we don't want to go down that road. We are already bringing in too much oil.

We all agree with that. But if we do not bring the natural gas in, we are going to be sending the jobs out. And for the foreseeable future, for the short term, if we want to reduce the cost of natural gas, we need to bring a lot of it in from overseas. And having a few more terminals, as provided in the streamlined provisions in this bill-- which still give States and communities input into where it goes--is a very important provision.

This legislation basically relaunches the American interest in nuclear power. That is realistic, too. There is a growing interest in global warming. That is caused, many say, by carbon in the air. So we need energy that has less carbon. Seventy percent of the carbon-free electricity we produce in the United States today comes from nuclear power. So if we care about global warming, we better care about nuclear power. There is no other way around it.

There are incentives for advanced nuclear power, the kind of reactors that do not cost as much to build. We know how to operate them. Twenty percent of our electricity is already from that. We invented the technology. Dozens of our Navy vessels operate with nuclear reactors. They have, without incident, since the 1950s. France is now 80 percent nuclear power. They are the European country most likely to meet the Kyoto standards because they have adopted the technology that is likely to produce the largest amount of carbon-free electricity--nuclear power.

We also have come to a consensus within the last year--I think I am accurate on this--that waiting in the wings behind nuclear power is coal gasification and carbon sequestration. Long words, but it simply means we take this several-hundred-year supply of coal that we have and we find a clean way to burn it. The way we are encouraging that in this legislation is to turn the coal into gas and then burn the gas. That gets rid of the nitrogen and the mercury and the sulfur, but it leaves the carbon.

There are also provisions, incentives in this bill, and loan guarantees and authorization, then, to have large demonstrations of carbon sequestration, taking the remaining carbon dioxide--the major residue or pollutant from coal gasification--and putting it in the ground.

Now, this is the strategy that is preferred by several important environmental groups. That sounds like a surprise. They would prefer coal? Here is the reason. They have some concerns about nuclear--the proliferation problems, the storage of waste--but if coal can be burned in a clean way and the carbon can be recaptured and put in the ground, that is a solution to global warming without mandates.

That is a solution, and not just in the United States but around the world. Because we might clean up our air, but if China and India and the rest of the

world build hundreds of coal plants that are dirty, it will not matter what we do because the air just goes around the world, and we will be breathing it, too. So a very important way for us to help the world have clean air and an adequate supply of electricity is coal gasification.

So I call that the new realism: conservation; increased natural gas supplies, including from overseas; relaunching nuclear; and coal gasification and carbon sequestration. If we do that over the next 10 years, we will have an adequate supply of American-produced, reliable, low-carbon electricity. And the debate about global warming will be off our desks because we will not be producing enough carbon to affect global warming, and we can argue about something else.

Now, there is also generous support in this legislation for renewable energy. I am especially pleased that for the first time, we have support for solar energy in a useful way. Up to this time, we have had a renewable tax credit that solar could not take advantage of. But the Finance Committee changed that. Solar shows some promise, as does biomass, as does some geothermal, as does wind. I think my colleagues know I think wind is heavily oversubsidized and overestimated, but it is supported in here.

But there is a realism about that. We are not going to run the American economy on windmills and solar panels. They will provide a few percent of what we need by the year 2025. If we want carbon-free adequate supplies of American-produced energy, we are going to have to conserve, launch nuclear again, do coal gasification, and bring in supplies of natural gas. Renewables are fine, but they are a very small part of the answer. While we do not all agree on that here in the Senate, there is still a consensus.

There is also generous support for longer term technologies. I think we are realistic about that as well. There is a great deal of excitement about the hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle.

When I was in Yokohama a year ago, I visited a hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle filling station. There were seven SUVs parked, all of them from different manufacturers in the world, many of them American. I filled up the Nissan hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle. Carlos Ghosn is the chief executive of Nissan. He drives that vehicle around Tokyo every weekend. He is spending $700 million of Nissan money every year on hydrogen- fuel-cell research. And Toyota is doing the same. Others--Ford, General Motors--are all interested.

But the potential of hydrogen is down the road. It's several years away. We are going to be talking about it, working on it--and hopefully it will come to fruition. But it is several years down the road. When we produce enough hydrogen to run our automobiles, we will have to use nuclear power or natural gas or coal gasification to produce that hydrogen.

So I would say of special note--to reemphasize some of the points I made--is the serious interest in conservation. This is a bipartisan bill. You do not hear the word ``conservation'' come out of the mouths of every Senator first. You might not think Republican Senators would start out talking, first, about conservation. But we know if we want to reduce the cost of natural gas, if we want to reduce our reliance on oil, that the quickest and easiest way to do that is aggressive conservation.

Nuclear power--Senator Domenici, our chairman, mentioned to me we had something like 167 amendments offered to this bill at one time, and so far as we could tell, not a single amendment was antinuclear, not a single amendment was antinuclear. There is a growing awareness that if we want carbon-free electricity, we are going to have to have some nuclear powerplants to do that. That is a big change even just from last year.

Another big change, as I mentioned, is the emergence of coal gasification and carbon sequestration and support and research for that in a very serious way, both in industrial sites and in freestanding plants, and sequestration demonstrations. None of that was being discussed broadly by the Energy Committee last year. A few Senators understood that, but most of us, I think it is fair to say, did not really see the significance of this technology. Now we do, and we have strong support for it.

The importance of liquefied natural gas and the streamlining of siting--that may be the most important provision in the bill in terms of an immediate impact because there are large amounts of natural gas that can be brought in.

Another important development is the serious discussion of new supplies of natural gas here at home. Now, this is a very controversial subject. But last year we could not even get an inventory of what supplies of natural gas we have offshore. We have plenty of natural gas; we just have rules that say you cannot drill for it. There was no serious discussion of giving States the opportunity--other States, such as Virginia--the option of drilling in Federal waters offshore for natural gas, as Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana now do.

We couldn't get a vote on that because of the controversy, but I believe there were 51 votes in the Senate for giving States the option of deciding for themselves whether they wanted to allow natural gas drilling offshore, take a share of the money for the State, put a share of the money in a national fund for wildlife preservation, put the rest in the Federal Treasury, and put the gas into our system so we could lower the cost of natural gas. There is a lot of progress there.

Finally, I pay tribute to two parts of the Senate. One is to the Finance Committee for what it did with the tax title. The total amount of money of incentives is $14 to $16 billion. But rather than the amount of money, it is what it is for because it is completely consistent with clean energy objectives for low-carbon and no-carbon, new technologies. There is money for clean energy bonds for certified coal products, consumer incentives for hybrid and diesel vehicles, incentives for energy-efficient appliances and buildings, incentives for coal gasification powerplants, incentives for solar energy development in an important way for the first time in a long time, incentives for the deployment of advanced nuclear power, incentives for cogeneration projects. All of these will change the way we produce electricity.

I compliment Chairman Grassley and his staff for this. I hope very much that the Senate version of how we spend our tax dollars in support of research and development for clean energy is dominant in the conference rather than another version. That will be something we will have to work out with our friends in the House of Representatives.

I think a great deal of credit needs to go to Chairman Domenici and to Senator Bingaman, ranking Democrat on the committee. This bill came out 21 to 1 in favor from our committee. For those who are not in the Senate, this may sound like inside housekeeping. This body operates only by consensus. Nothing happens here--because of the unique nature of this body, where every Senator is an equal, every single one of us can stop anything at least for a while, unless there is a consensus. The consensus came because of the kind of leadership, beginning with Chairman Domenici, who personally visited all the members of the committee, including the Democratic members, in their offices, took their advice, incorporated their ideas, and we came to a consensus.

Senator Bingaman pointed out in our hearing that we had many votes, but he didn't remember a single party-line vote. We had close votes, but we voted our convictions and our regions of the country and our backgrounds and attitudes. We didn't line up and say: This is a Republican view and a Democratic view.

I am glad we have waited until next Tuesday morning to vote on the Clean Energy Act of 2005, until Chairman Domenici and Senator Bingaman can be here. They had to be in New Mexico yesterday for a BRAC hearing. They deserve to be here. I want the full Senate and our country to see the result that they have led. I believe their being here and the big vote we have will get us off to a big start.

I feel very good about what the Senate has done. I hope there is a big vote on Tuesday. For the American people, the result will be stabilized and lower natural gas prices for homeowners, for blue-collar workers, and for farmers; No. 2, a recognition that global warming is a problem, and the beginning of aggressive conservation and a variety

of technologies to deal with that by producing low-carbon and no-carbon electricity; and, finally, a realism about the base load that we need to encourage in this country to produce that kind of electricity, aggressive conservation, new supplies of natural gas, relaunching nuclear power, coal gasification, and carbon sequestration.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, I urge our colleagues to reject the Sununu-Wyden bill and support the Domenici-Bingaman bill. The provision the Senator seeks to strike is one of the most innovative and one of the crucially important parts of the legislation. As I will explain in a minute, it is not a free ride, and it costs the Government nothing. It scores at 0. It is constructed in conformance with the Federal Credit Reform Act.

Let me explain the amendment and, in doing so, I am doing it on behalf of the chairman of the committee, Senator Domenici. This is his idea. It is an idea to help us jump-start legislation which we have probably come to think of as a clean energy bill, as a bill which transforms the way we produce electricity in the United States, puts us on

a path toward low-carbon and no-carbon electricity, and involves, in doing so, using a number of new technologies, technologies that are not yet commercially proven.

For example, in our legislation, the Domenici-Bingham clean energy legislation, we talk about more efficient coal plants. We talk about carbon sequestration, a technology which has not yet been fully demonstrated. We talk about advanced nuclear plants, plants that are of the next generation of nuclear plants. We talk about new forms of solar. Solar has a very limited use in the United States, but there is some exciting new technology there. We talk about new biomass and hybrid cars, a technology which is just beginning to emerge.

One of the largest and most important of these new technologies is what we call IGCC, or clean coal gasification, the idea of using coal, of which we have hundreds of years supply, to turn it into gas. I will say more about that in a minute. We have higher efficiency natural gas turbines, a hydrogen economy. We are quite a bit away from there, and research and development is important for that.

We are excited about these incredible potential new technologies, and our goal here is to jump-start these technologies, get them into the marketplace--only new technologies, only technologies that are not commercially viable--and then we step back and get out of the way.

That is not just the idea of our Energy Committee, which voted 21 to 1 for a bill that contains this provision and heard a great amount of testimony, it is the idea, for example, of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, which pointed out that the energy challenges faced by the United States mean many new technologies and, unfortunately, ``both public and private investments in research and development, demonstration and early deployment of advanced energy technologies have been falling short of what is likely to be needed to make these technologies available in the time frames and on the scales required.''

We have since World War II invested in research and development. Half our new jobs since World War II, according to the National Academy of Sciences, have come from research and development. Our R&D, our scientific capacity, is our cutting edge advantage. If we do not, for example, help launch a handful of new clean coal gasification plants, if we do not, for example, invest in the next generation of nuclear plants, they either will not happen or they will happen so slowly that we do not get on the path we intend to be on.

In conclusion, let me point out exactly what we are talking about. This title is limited to technologies that are not commercial, that are not in general use. These technologies have to avoid reduced or sequestered air pollutants or manmade greenhouse gases, and the technology has to be new or significantly improved over what is available today in the marketplace.

In addition, this is not a free ride. The guarantees can only be for 80 percent of the cost of the project. The developers will share the risk.

More important, the program is constructed in accordance with the Federal Credit Reform Act and it costs the Government nothing. In every case, the cost of the guarantee has to be paid in advance. It could be done through appropriations, but that would have to be decided each time. But in most cases it will be done because the project sponsors will simply write a check to the Federal Treasury before the guarantee is issued. These payments are calculated based upon the risk that any one of the guaranteed loans might go into default--that always could happen--so that the amount collected will be sufficient to pay off that portion of the loans that do default.

In other words, it is in the form of an insurance premium that takes into account, actuarially, what the defaults might be should there be any.

This is not new. The Federal Credit Reform Act has been on the books since 1990. It applies across the Government, and I want to emphasize this key point: The provision scores at zero. Only if Congress later decides to appropriate money for the program will it cost anything.

Mr. President, if Chairman Domenici were here tonight, he would urge our colleagues to oppose the Sununu amendment because it is critical to this clean energy bill. If we want lower natural gas prices, we need new technologies for carbon sequestration, for advanced nuclear, for solar, for biomass, and for hybrid vehicles. We need to invest in these options and jump start them. We have done that throughout our history in America. That is our secret weapon, our science and technology, research and development. Chairman Domenici likes the existing provision because this is for new technology. It is not a free ride.

Chairman Domenici would urge Members, as I do, to vote no on Sununu- Wyden because his existing provision jumpstarts new technologies for a clean energy bill from coal plants to sequestration to advanced nuclear to solar, new technologies not in general use. It costs the Government nothing, according to the scoring of the Congressional Budget Office. It is like an insurance policy. The user of the guarantee pays the premium.

Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from New Mexico and also the Senator from California for her contribution to the debate.

Let me begin by saying what we are talking about here. Sometimes we jump into subjects assuming everybody knows what we are talking about and it is not altogether clear.

We are talking about bringing natural gas from other countries into the United States to put in our pipelines, which then would be transported to be used in our industries, which use it to make chemicals and cars and other things, such as our industry which makes fertilizers for our farmers, and to use it in our homes so we can heat and cool them.

We have a terrific problem with natural gas. There is a lot of talk about gasoline, a lot of speeches being made about the prices at the pump. That is by far not the biggest problem we have in the United States right now in terms of energy. Our biggest challenge is the price of natural gas.

Now, why is that? For example, down in Tennessee--I have used this example many times, but it sticks out vividly in my mind--there is a company called Eastman Chemical. They employ 10,000 or 12,000 people-- blue-collar workers, white-collar workers. They have for three generations. Forty percent of their cost is natural gas to make chemicals. There are 1 million blue-collar workers just like that across our country.

The price of natural gas in the United States is at a record level. It has gone from the lowest in the industrialized world to the highest in the industrialized world at $7 a unit. If it stays there, more and more of those jobs are going to be in Germany and other places where it is cheaper. So if we do not bring the gas in, the jobs are going out.

Now, how can we get a greater supply of gas? The Domenici-Bingaman bill has everything in it to help do that, but most of it is over the long term. New nuclear power would help, but it will be a few years. Coal gasification with carbon sequestration would help, but it will be a few years. Oil savings will help. It will take a little while, too.

The only thing that is going to help right now is new supplies--and it is pretty hard to get that in the United States--conservation--that is really where we ought to start--and the only thing left is liquefied natural gas.

The experts--the American Gas Foundation--say to us, if we bring in liquefied natural gas, the price of $7 a unit might go down. It might go down to $5 a unit. These jobs might stay here. These farmers might not have such a big pay cut, and the homeowners might get a break. But if we do not bring in natural gas, which is a very small part of our supply right now--2, 3, 4 percent--if we do not bring it in, the price of natural gas may be $13 a unit.

That will be a crisis for this country. It will not matter what the price of gasoline is in this country. If the price of natural gas is $13 a unit, we will not have anybody with enough money to buy gasoline because they won't have any money. They won't have a job. Their job will go overseas.

Why are we not bringing in more liquefied natural gas? Because we need terminals to store it in before we put it in our pipes. We only have four. We need a few more. We have 31 applications for those onshore and offshore. But we have a process that is broken. It is filled with uncertainty. It is in the courts. If we do not give it some certainty, the jobs will go overseas, the farmers will be taking a pay cut, and the homeowners are going to be paying bills they cannot afford to pay. So what the Domenici-Bingaman legislation does is give it some certainty.

Now, there is always the question of, What is the right balance of Federal authority--when you are dealing with foreign commerce and a national issue like this and security and safety--and local input? I find myself usually on the same side of the debates as the Senator from California. She was a mayor. I was a Governor. And I do not think we raise the principle of federalism high enough in our debates. But it does not always trump everything.

I happen to think the Domenici-Bingaman proposal is the right balance. First, what it does is it streamlines and makes more efficient the site process. In other words, if you want to file an application for a liquefied natural gas terminal, you go to one place. That would be the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It has the responsibility. Someone needs to have the sole responsibility for siting these plants.

Then, what do you do about State and local governments? Well, there were a lot of choices. One choice would have been to cut them out. That is not the proposal here. I would not have supported it if it were.

Here is what a Governor can do: A Governor has many rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act in terms of the location of an LNG terminal. If a Governor objects under the Coastal Zone Management Act, it is true the Secretary of Commerce might override them. But in a country that values federalism, if a Governor objects in a strong way, that is a very powerful decision.

But even if the Governor were overridden, the Governor has some other tools at his or her disposal, if the Governor objects. There is the clean water certificate, which the State issues. There is the clean air certificate, which the State issues. Nothing in this act changes that. The State still has to do it.

So there are three: the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.

Now, in addition to that, nothing in this legislation speaks of eminent domain. We do not grant eminent domain. There is no explicit grant of eminent domain in this legislation, and there are local zoning and land use planning rules in almost every community that would have to be respected.

So I believe if I were the Governor of a State and I really did not want an LNG terminal, I would have plenty of tools in my arsenal to make my case.

We have 31 applications around the country. We only need a few more LNG terminals. It will be better for the regions of the country if they are located in the proper place. I do not know why the people in New York City would want to pay super-high natural gas prices. If they do not, they need a terminal up there so the gas does not have to be shipped up from New Orleans.

So all these factors have to be taken into account. But my points are these: I believe the Domenici-Bingaman legislation has achieved the right balance on crisis issues. If there is one thing this legislation does--this whole bill does--that is important, that will affect the largest number of Americans, it is it will lower the price of natural gas. This may be the most important provision in the bill for that purpose because it will permit the bringing in of an immediate supply of natural gas. When the supply comes in, the price should stop going up and, hopefully, begin to go down, especially if all the other provisions in here--for conservation, alternative energy, oil savings-- are used.

So I commend the Senator for his proposal. It is the right balance. I believe it is the most crucial part of the legislation we are considering if what we want to do is bring down prices. It gives the Governor a good measure of authority and respects local zoning and land use issues sufficiently to permit us to go forward and find a few more places. My guess is there will not be a natural liquefied gas terminal unless there is some consensus within the community and the State that it should be there.

That is correct. I thank the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. President, I applaud the remarks of the Senator from Kansas and his focus on the clean energy aspects of the Domenici- Bingaman bill, which is making significant progress in producing low- carbon and carbon-free energy, transforming the way we produce electricity.

I also appreciate his cosponsorship of the environmentally responsible wind power amendment. Kansas, of course, has a lot of wind. There may be many places where people want it to be, but there are some places in the United States where we do not need to put gigantic towers between us and our children and our grandchildren; for example, the Statue of Liberty, and the Great Smoky Mountain Park, and Yosemite Park.

This legislation is a very limited amendment that would deny Federal subsidies for that area, give communities 6 months' notice before they are to be built there but otherwise would not interfere with private property rights, prohibit the building of any wind project, affect any project now underway, and would not give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission any new power.

I hope it is the kind of amendment all Senators can easily support. Whether they are strong supporters of wind power or have reservations about wind power, at least we do not want to see gigantic towers in the buffer zones between our national treasures, the highly scenic areas, and ourselves and our children and grandchildren.

I thank the Senator from Kansas for his support.

Reserving the right to object.

Could I ask the Senator from New Mexico, how do I get in the queue?

I want to voice my support for the sense of the Senate resolution on climate change offered by Senators Domenici, Bingaman, and myself. I believe that there is a problem with global warming. And I believe that there will be a mandatory national program to reduce carbon emissions sooner or later. I will be prepared to vote for controls on this when it is clear how they will be implemented. For now, I support the market-based incentives approach to reducing carbon emissions proposed by Senator Hagel and passed by the Senate yesterday. I do not expect us to be able in this Congress to put together a mandatory carbon reduction program, but I do expect to be working in hearings as soon as next month on this important issue.

Mr. President, would you advise me when I have consumed 7 minutes?

Do I understand I have 15 minutes?

Mr. President, today I am offering an amendment to protect our most scenic areas from unintended impacts by oversized wind turbines or windmills. I offer an amendment that is sponsored also by a number of other Senators, including Senators Warner, Landrieu, McCain, Allen, Voinovich, Brownback, Byrd, and Bunning, and that is also supported by the National Parks Conservation Association.

Let me begin by saying exactly what the amendment does and what it does not do.

No. 1, what the amendment says is no Federal subsidies for wind projects within 20 miles of most national parks, national military parks, national seashores, national lakeshores, or certain other highly scenic sites. We are talking about the Redwood National Parks in California, the Sequoia National Park, Yosemite National Park. We are talking about Mesa Verde in Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park, Biscayne National Park in Florida, Yellowstone in Idaho, Acadia in Maine, Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Yellowstone in Montana, and Glacier. These are our national treasures. What we are saying is the taxpayers will not subsidize the building of these giant windmills within the view of those parks.

Second, there will be an environmental impact statement for any wind project within 20 miles of those sites.

Third, any community will have six months' notice before a wind project can be permitted.

Here is what the amendment does not do. It does not prohibit the building of any wind project. It does not affect any wind project already receiving subsidies. It does not give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission any new authority. And it does not interfere with any private property right.

Why is this a concern? Here is the reason in a nutshell. The Federal Government, over the next 5 years, will spend $2 billion and, if we follow the recommendations of the Finance Committee, $3.5 billion subsidizing the building of giant windmills. These are not your grandmother's windmills. They are very large. There is one picture of it. Here is another one. This is just off Denmark, stretches over 2 miles. Here is an example. These are people up here on this turbine housing. One way we think of them in Tennessee in describing them is that you can fit just one into the University of Tennessee football stadium. It is the third largest stadium in the country. It would rise more than twice as high as the skyboxes, and its rotor blades would go from the 10-yard line to the 10-yard line.

My concern is not that there should not be any of these. It is just that we are, through Federal policy, changing our landscape, and we need to think about it now while we still can. All of the estimates are that the billions of dollars in subsidies we are spending will increase the number of these gigantic wind turbines from 6,700 today to 40-, 50- , or 60,000 over the next 10 or 15 years.

Here is what the National Parks Conservation Association has to say: Wind power is an important alternative energy. It deserves to be encouraged and promoted in areas where appropriate. At the same time, the principle that some of America's most special places could be adversely impacted by associated development is important to acknowledge and address.

The Environmentally Responsible Wind Power Act of 2005 helps elevate the importance of this principle and ensures the protection of these places.

What subsidies are we talking about? I just mentioned the $2 billion, the $1.5 billion more that is coming. We passed a renewable portfolio standard in the Senate. That is an additional subsidy. This is a brand new matter for most local governments to consider. It is causing consternation in cities from Kansas to Wisconsin to Vermont to Virginia where rural areas, many of them without land use planning, many of them without any expectation of this, suddenly find that in the most scenic areas we have in America, up go these massive, gigantic towers, and they are hard to take down.

Twenty years ago, when I was Governor of Tennessee, I passed a scenic parkway program. We took 10,000 miles of scenic parkways and we banned new billboards, new junkyards. No one thought much about it then. Everybody is enormously grateful today because these things will never come down unless they blow down, and when they blow down, there are often not people to pick them up. So if we fail to do something now, to put some sort of disincentive to damage the viewscape of our most scenic areas, we will never be able to change that. In the State of Tennessee, we only have 29 of these now put up by the Tennessee Valley Authority, but they are there for 20 years, and you can see the red flashing lights from 20 miles away on a clear night.

At other times in our debate on energy, I will be talking about the relative value of wind power. I am a skeptic, I will admit. You could string a swath of these gigantic windmills from

Los Angeles to San Francisco, and you would produce about the same amount of power that one or two powerplants would, and you would still need the powerplant because most people like to have their electricity even when the wind is not blowing and you can't store the electricity. And the amount of money that we are spending--$2 billion, $3 billion--is an enormous amount, and I think most colleagues are not aware of what we are doing with it. Once you put these windmills up, you have to build transmission lines through neighborhoods and back yards to carry it to some distant place. That is a debate for another day.

The fact of the matter is that we are spending billions of new dollars for gigantic windmills. What I would like for us to do in the Senate is recognize our responsibility to the American landscape and say at least we are not going to subsidize putting these windmills in between us, our grandchildren, and children, and the view of the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty or the Smoky Mountain National Park or Cape Cod. I would think windmill advocates would want to do that.

This is a big country, a place where people can find plenty of places to put up gigantic windmills other than between us and our magnificent views. I don't think I need to spend much time. I will take 1 more minute, and I will go to the Senator from Virginia for 3 minutes.

Teddy Roosevelt said:

There can be nothing in this world more beautiful than the

Yosemite National Park's groves of the sequoias and redwoods,

the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone,

and the Canyon of the Three Tetons.

We don't drive down to the Smokies, out to the Tetons or to see the Grand Canyon to see a view like that. Put them where they belong. Let's not subsidize putting them in between us and the most magnificent views we have. Egypt has its pyramids, Italy has its art, England has its history, and we have the great American outdoors. It is a distinctive part of our national character, and we ought to protect it while we can.

That is why we have introduced this legislation, along with several other Senators who care. I hope my colleagues, whether they support wind power or whether they are a skeptic of wind power, will agree that we should not put these gigantic steel towers in between us and our most scenic treasures.

I yield 3 minutes to the Senator from Virginia.

I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Kansas.

Mr. President, I ask the Senator from New Mexico if I may reserve my remaining time for just before the vote, and he also has a minute at that time. I ask unanimous consent to do that.

Yes, and before the vote we would each have a minute.

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time until just before the vote.

I have no objection, Mr. President.

Mr. President, this gives me a chance to clear up a couple of points.

I say to my friend from New Mexico, the United Nations isn't picking any of these sites. We picked 20 of these sites in the United States that we recommended to the world be designated as heritage sites.

Here is what we are talking about. We are taking billions of tax dollars--that is a debate for another amendment--billions of tax dollars, $200,000 per windmill. We should all resign the Senate and get in the windmill business. My friends on the other side say we are subsidizing the building of these windmills between us and the Grand Canyon, between us and Cape Cod, between us and the Smoky Mountains, between us and the Glacier National Park.

Ansel Adams and John Muir would be rolling over at the idea of our destroying the American landscape in this wholesale fashion. If we had a level playing field and we had no Federal Government involvement, that would

be another thing, but we are putting billions of dollars out there to do this. In the Eastern United States, they only fit in areas where there are scenic ridges. That is the Tennessee Gorge, the Shenandoah Valley, the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, and it is being said we should use taxpayer dollars to encourage that. This says no in the most highly treasured areas we have. It is sponsored by the National Parks Conservation Association. I would think every conservation group in America would be for this. I would think every wind developer would say, of course, we are not going to put wind there.

It prohibits nothing. It interferes with no private property right. It just says we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars putting gigantic steel towers between us and our view of the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon. I would think that ought to be a vote of 100 to 0.

The answer to the Senator is the reason we are doing this is that he is advocating a national windmill policy instead of a national energy policy, which has spent billions on windmills. We ought not subsidize the destruction of our national treasures, such as the Grand Canyon, the Great Smokies, and we ought to tell people first.

This bill doesn't prohibit the building of any wind project, affect anything already going on, or give FERC any new

authority. The reason Senators Alexander, Warner, Landrieu, McCain, Allen, Voinovich, Brownback, Burr, and Bunning all support it is because it says and the National Parks Conservation Association says no subsidies to destroy our views of our national treasures and more local controls.

Please vote yes.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Virginia. I am glad we have had this opportunity to discuss this issue tonight. I believe, if we had an opportunity to come to a vote, we would likely have a majority vote, more than 50 votes for the idea of giving more individual States the right to drill for natural gas offshore, the same right that four States already have.

Why would we do that? It is because the single most important thing that this Energy bill, which is a superb bill as it has been developed, can do for the American people is to lower the price of natural gas.

We talk a lot about gasoline at the pump, but by far the bigger problem for millions of American blue-collar workers, for millions of American farmers, and for millions of American homeowners is the high price of natural gas. To lower the price of natural gas, we have a number of provisions in our legislation.

One is conservation. We have very strong conservation. One is make electricity in new and different ways. We would like to encourage nuclear power, but new reactors are a few years away. We would like to encourage coal gasification and carbon sequestration, but that is a few more years away. We would like to bring in more natural gas from overseas, but that leads us down the same road on natural gas as on oil.

Part of our solution is to increase our supply at home, and we have a lot of it. But here is the price. If we think American jobs are going to stay in the United States when the price is $7 and headed up, when the price in Canada is $5.50, in the United Kingdom it is $5.15, and in Turkey it is $2.65, we are kidding ourselves. We are saying let's don't look for natural gas at home.

The Senators from Florida do not want natural gas from Florida, and neither do I, if they don't. And the Senators from North Carolina do not want it off the coast of North Carolina, and neither do I, if the Senators and the people of North Carolina don't. But what we have suggested in the amendments I have proposed, with Senator Tim Johnson in the national gas price reduction bill, and it would be before this legislation, and what the Senator from Virginia has said, is let them do it.

That would mean the Governor of Virginia could put a gas rig more than 20 miles out to sea. One gas rig would equal 46 square miles of these windmills that everybody seems to love. One gas rig, that you could not see, out to sea would bring you enough revenue to create in Virginia a terrific reserve fund for the university system and to lower the taxes, and it would bring to us in the United States a supply of gas to lower the price of natural gas so the workers at Tennessee Eastman can work in Kingsport, instead of flying to Germany to go to work, which is what they will have to do, and the farmers will not have to be taking a pay cut, and the homeowners can afford to pay their bills.

So we need to have, as part of our solution, an increased supply of natural gas. I believe there are 51 votes in this Chamber for that. We cannot get to a vote tonight, but I think we have made great progress. A year ago, we could not even get this body to agree to take an inventory of the natural gas we have offshore, and we have lots of it. This year we passed that inventory. A year ago, nobody would even speak about the idea of giving a State, such as Virginia or South Carolina or North Carolina, the option of deciding for itself that out on the water, where it cannot be seen, it bring in this resource and use it instead of raising taxes. I think that is an option a lot of Governors and legislatures are going to want.

We are contributing to the debate and moving in the right direction. Florida may want to not do it, but I predict there will be a day in Florida, 5 or 10 years from now, when somebody is going to say: We are going to have to have a State income tax. And somebody else will say: Well, maybe we can go 50 miles offshore, where nobody can see gas rigs, and drill for gas and avoid a State income tax and also contribute to the supply of natural gas in a way that would keep jobs in America, lower the cost for farmers, lower the cost for the auto companies, and lower the cost for homeowners.

Lowering the price of natural gas is the single most important thing this energy legislation can do right now for the American blue-collar worker, American homeowner, and American farmer. Having some new supplies of natural gas is a part of the solution, and giving States the option would be a good way to do it, in my opinion.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a listing of companies and associations supporting expanded offshore development.

Mr. President, I have been yielded 4 minutes of Senator Bingaman's time.

Mr. President, we are talking today about whether to find out how much natural gas we have offshore. Let me try to put that in personal terms. In the mountains of east Tennessee, we have a company, Tennessee Eastman. Mr. President, 10,000, 12,000 jobs are there. They have been good-paying jobs for several generations. They make chemicals at Eastman Chemical. Their raw material is natural gas. The cost of that gas has gone from the lowest in the world to the highest in the world. If it stays that way, those jobs will not be in Tennessee; they will be moving overseas.

There are 1 million blue-collar manufacturing jobs in America in the chemical industry that depend on natural gas for a raw material. We must lower the price of natural gas. We can do it by conservation. That is in the Domenici-Bingaman bill we are considering. We can do it by nuclear power, which we need to accelerate. Support for that is in the Domenici bill. We can do it someday, we hope, by coal gasification.

But right now we have $7 gas, the highest in the industrial world, we are building all our new powerplants for natural gas, and we are refusing to find out how much natural gas we have offshore to supply more and reduce the price. So we have farmers who are taking a pay cut, homeowners who cannot heat and cool their homes, we have blue-collar workers across this country who are going to have their jobs shifted overseas, and what we are saying is we do not even want to know how much gas we have.

We can have a later debate about whether to give more States the option, as Texas does, as Louisiana does, as Alabama does, to drill for oil and gas. You can do it today 20 miles offshore. You will never see it. It is environmentally clean. That is not the debate here today.

The debate today--and the Presiding Officer brought it up last year-- if we are in a crisis on natural gas, if we have jobs moving overseas, why don't we want to know how much natural gas we have?

So I hope we will oppose this amendment and support the Domenici- Bingaman legislation, which puts us on a path toward a low-carbon production of energy plan for our future. It is an essential part of that. I hope we defeat the amendment and support the Domenici-Bingaman legislation.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his good example and his leadership in this legislation. I especially salute the Senator from Nebraska for having the unerring good judgment to suggest to us the right next step.

This Energy bill we have been debating in the last 2 weeks and working on for the last several months is really a no-carbon, low- carbon energy bill. Since carbon in the air is the principal contributor to the worry about global climate change, this bill is the solution to that problem.

There is still a lot of work to do, and there are a lot of minds that are changing, studying, assessing the science, and trying to make certain we make good policy judgments here. But anyone who watches this debate or reads it closely should understand that, in my view, the Senate is developing a clean energy bill. The Senator from Idaho said it was a climate change energy bill. But it represents, to me, a recognition that it is time to take a more significant step toward putting us on a path of transforming the way we create electricity in this country and use energy so that we can produce less carbon. A big part of that is the concern we have about what we might be doing as human beings to cause global climate change.

So the Senate is like a big train: it is hard to get started, but once it gets going, it moves steadily down the track. We are moving steadily down the track toward a completely different emphasis on the production of

electricity and the use of energy, and the whole focus is no-carbon and low-carbon.

Sometimes we elected officials have a way of saying things like that, and they just turn into little programs that don't amount to much. That is not the case here. This is the whole core of this piece of legislation. If you are really trying to create a way to produce electricity in a country that uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world--and that is what we do--you have to start with conservation.

This legislation, the Domenici-Bingaman legislation that is before us, begins with provisions about efficiency, and it has in it provisions that will shave off between 20 and 40 percent of the anticipated growth of energy demand by 2015.

It would save the equivalent of building 170 300-megawatt plants. So we begin with conservation and we begin with efficiency.

No. 2, the bill--before we get to the Hagel amendment of which I am glad to be a cosponsor--puts a focus on the one way today that we create carbon-free electricity far and above everything else, and that is nuclear power. If we are worried about global warming, the solution is nuclear power. Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity. We know how to do it, we invented it. We have never had a single reactor accident in the dozens of Navy vessels that are powered by nuclear reactors that we have used since the 1950s. We have shipped this technology to France which now is nearly 80 percent in terms of supplying its electricity from nuclear power. Japan builds new nuclear powerplants every year.

If we care about low-carbon, no-carbon electricity, after we have aggressive conservation, we should make it easier to produce nuclear power, and in a variety of ways this legislation does that.

Waiting in the wings, if we care about low-carbon, no-carbon power, is an example of what the Senator from Georgia talked about. We call that coal gasification with carbon sequestration. That is such a long- sounding title that nobody could possibly imagine what it is. But what it does is it simply takes this hundreds and hundreds of years' supply of coal that we have and turns it, by burning it, into gas, and then we burn the gas. That gets rid of the sulfur, the nitrogen, and the mercury, but it leaves the carbon.

The technology of carbon sequestration is to take that carbon and store it in the ground or do something else with it.

As the Senator from Nebraska has said, if through his initiative, his incentive program, we are able to encourage the science and technology capacity of the United States and the world to advance through demonstration coal gasification, reduce its costs somewhat, and then to solve the problem of carbon sequestration, that is the single best way, after nuclear power, to create clean air in the world. Many in the environmental community prefer it to nuclear power because of their concerns about storage of spent fuel and about proliferation.

So conservation, nuclear power, and coal gasification with carbon sequestration are the ways to solve any concerns we might have about global warming because, especially with the Hagel-Pryor provisions, we are able to accelerate that technology not just for ourselves but for the world.

We also have in this legislation important support for solar power which has basically been left out of our renewable production tax credit. It has not gotten any of the money--almost any of the money. Biomass, which is becoming more important, wind power--many of my colleagues know I think we have gone overboard on wind power, but there are substantial generous provisions in here.

Add up all those renewable fuels and they are a few percent. They are important, but we have to put them in their proper perspective.

There is an oil savings amendment in this bill that reduces the amount of carbon in the air. And then there is the tax title to the Energy bill that we will be considering later this week which Senator Grassley, Senator Baucus, and their committee have produced which--with a couple of exceptions, which I will talk about at another time--I think is a great step forward. It would have to be considered a low- carbon, no-carbon tax title with clean energy bonds for certified coal property, with consumer incentives for hybrid and diesel vehicles.

There is an amendment being discussed, of which I hope to be a part, that would add incentives to retooling automobile plants so that we can see that those hybrid cars and advanced diesel vehicles are built in the United States and not in Yokohama.

There is in the tax title energy-efficient proposals to support energy-efficient appliances and buildings. There is in the tax title support for investment tax credits for the coal gasification plants I mentioned.

There is in the Energy and Natural Resources bill a new financing procedure that Senator Domenici has envisioned which would be loan guarantees for all of these forms of clean energy.

There is support for solar deployment, and then there is support for advanced nuclear power facilities so that we can build smaller, less expensive nuclear power facilities.

All this adds up to a clean Energy bill that puts its focus on low- carbon and no-carbon electricity. What Senator Hagel has done is say that is a good direction, but let's accelerate it by encouraging technology. It is not a top-down idea. It is to say to someone in Tennessee or Minnesota who might be producing carbon in their business or a utility: Bring us your baseline. Tell us how much carbon you have been producing. Tell us how much less you plan to produce. Then this board would create the incentives for that, and we would see where we go with that.

There are other important steps, and we are about to debate one of them. Senators McCain and Lieberman have worked hard to take us to what I would call the next generation or the next step, which would be mandatory caps on carbon.

I have supported one version of legislation that has a mandatory cap on carbon. It was the bill introduced by Senator Carper last year. I did it primarily because I care about clean air, and I wanted less sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury in the air, and it had more aggressive standards than the President's proposals. But it also included a carbon cap and that fitted my understanding of where the technology is.

The more I have studied this I think the Hagel approach is the better approach because it fits with the low-carbon legislation which we have. It accelerates it, gives it some juice. Then I like what Senator Domenici said last night in his statement about the discussions we have been having with Senator Bingaman about his proposal for the possibility of caps.

Senator Domenici said we should begin immediately, in July, holding hearings on the Hagel legislation and on whatever the next steps might be. In other words, this is not just passing an energy bill and then wait 10 to 15 years and pass another one. This is recognizing we have created a completely different direction for production of energy and electricity in the United States; that we are adding to it with the Hagel amendment; that we have serious proposals from Senators McCain and Lieberman, and Senator Bingaman has made some. The National Commission on Energy Policy, many of whose suggestions are a part of this bill, have made some.

So my hope is that Chairman Domenici and Senator Bingaman, if we should adopt the Hagel amendment, will take us to the next step in July and August and let us see how we might implement it and where we might go.

Speaking as one Senator, this is a significant shift of direction. I am not willing to go further with mandates at this point. I like the concepts, but I am leery of applying such a complex, detailed set of mandates as some have proposed to such a big complex economy as we have today.

I prefer the Hagel approach. It is the right next step. It fits easily into this no-carbon, low-carbon Energy bill. I salute the Senator from Nebraska and the Senator from Arkansas for their leadership. I look forward to voting for it.

Mr. President, I will ask the Senator from Ohio a question. I walked in about two-thirds of the way through his remarks.

Do I understand that this is legislation that helps reduce sulfur in the air by retrofitting diesel engines so they comply with the new EPA requirements for low sulfur?

Mr. President, I commend the Senator from Ohio. He has spent a long time in this session working on clean air legislation.

As one Senator, I am extremely interested in that for our country. The Great Smoky Mountains--2 miles from where I live, and on the other side is the Senator from North Carolina, the Presiding Officer--is the most polluted National Park in America.

Many of our counties are not in attainment. Our biggest problem is sulfur. But NOX is also a major problem. Of course, a major contributor is the big diesel trucks on the road.

One of the President's greatest accomplishments in terms of sulfur is tighter restrictions on the fuel that will be used in these trucks. They also are major contributors to NOX, nitrogen oxide. My understanding from my visits and discussions with people who know about the big trucks is that the retrofitting of these older engines is not as good as a new engine, but it is a very substantial--70 or 80 percent as good as having a new engine.

I look forward to reading the legislation. The Clean Energy Act that we are working on is not the Clean Air Act that the Senator spent so much time on, but clean energy is the solution to the clean air problem. I am glad the Senator is bringing this to our attention. I look forward to reading it. It looks like a welcome contribution.

Mr. President, I salute today the students who participated in the National History Day national contest that was held last week at the University of Maryland. More than 700,000 students in grades 6 through 12 from all over the country chose topics, researched, and presented their projects at State and local competitions this year. I am proud that 52 students from Tennessee made it to Washington. I especially want to recognize two of those students, Daniel Jordan and Tyler Sexton, eighth graders at St. John Neumann School in Knoxville.

Their National History Day project is a documentary on Sequoyah's Syllabary, which they presented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Sequoyah was a Cherokee warrior who was born in east Tennessee and created a syllabary, which is often called the Cherokee alphabet. He was born in 1776 in the village of Tuskeegee, which was very near Vonore, TN, where the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is located.

Daniel and Tyler say the seed for their documentary was planted during a visit to the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum. The two boys got tired and decided to sit on several bales of hay in the center of a field. After a few minutes, two Cherokee approached the boys and explained that they were sitting on a holy prayer circle. The boys apologized profusely and removed themselves, but not before they learned

more from Star Medicine Woman and Elk Dreamer about the Cherokee Indians, especially Sequoyah and the relation to present-day culture. The boys were fascinated and appreciated the kindness shown to them.

Along with congratulating these outstanding students, I also recognize their teacher, Judy Buscetta, who is the winner of the National History Day in Tennessee's Teacher of the Year award. Daniel said it best in a letter he wrote to me to let me know he was going to be in Washington. He said: Without good teachers, we do not have a chance.

I am proud of Judy and Daniel and Tyler. Students and teachers like them are who I had in mind when I introduced legislation along with the distinguished minority leader to put the teaching of American history and civics back into our classrooms, so our children grow up learning what it means to be an American. I am proud that the Presidential academies for teachers and congressional academies for students in American history and civics through the Department of Education are beginning this summer as a result of Congress passing and the President signing that bill into law.

I have also introduced legislation with Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to create a 10-State pilot study to provide State-by- State comparisons of U.S. history and civics test data for 8th and 12th grades administered through the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, to assess and improve knowledge of American history.

I appreciate National History Day and its commitment to improving the teaching and learning of American history in our schools. I also appreciate Daniel, Tyler and Judy, fellow Tennesseans, who are working to keep history alive.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. While both Senators from New Mexico are in the Chamber, all of us appreciate the way they have brought this extremely important bill together. We know there are a handful of tough issues about which we disagree. Through their leadership, we have a consensus on what is well on its way to being an American Clean Energy Act for 2005, something that will dramatically transform the way we conserve energy, produce energy, and will help us keep our jobs and be more competitive in the world marketplace. That is our goal.

I also believe it will lower natural gas prices. And I thank the chairman and ranking member for their contributions.

At the end of our committee markup, during which the vote was 21 to 1, there were compliments thrown all around. Senator Bingaman said he couldn't remember a party-line vote in all the votes that we had, that we were voting based upon our own individual views and our regional differences. Senator Cantwell said it was not only a clean energy bill, but it was a clean process. But that doesn't mean that when we disagree, we shouldn't disagree. And we have differences of opinion. That is what the Senate is for.

While I respect the other side for what is a high-sounding idea, the idea of a renewable portfolio standard, I believe there is a better way to spend these billions of dollars than the way

suggested by Senator Bingaman, if our real goal is to create an adequate supply of low-cost, reliable American-produced energy.

It is always important to start from the proposition that this is a big country and a massive economy. We use 25 percent of all the energy in the world, and we spend about $2,500 a year per person to produce that. So when we put up a windmill that only blows 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the time, it doesn't matter much in terms of what we do. When we build a new nuclear power plant, which we haven't done since the 1970s, it matters a lot. A windmill would be one of 6,700, but that power plant would be only 1 of 1,300 or 1,400 power plants we have in the country. So it takes quite a bit to affect our energy policy.

There are three reasons I hope my colleagues will vote against the renewable portfolio standard. The first reason is that it is an $18 billion tax. It is a new $18 billion rate increase on the electric ratepayers of America. The second reason is it is an increase in subsidy for a number of people, especially wind developers who already include a huge subsidy of a couple billion dollars over the next 5 years, which the Finance Committee has recommended we increase to $3.3 billion over the next 5 years just for giant windmills. Three, if not technically, it is at least in the spirit of an unfunded Federal mandate, the kind of thing that a lot of us were elected to stop, the idea of coming up with a big idea here in Washington and imposing it on the rest of the country and then sending them the bill.

I was thinking about this: We are all going to be going home in a couple of weeks, having debated the Energy bill and hopefully having passed it, feeling good about it. Our constituents are going to ask: What did you do about high gasoline prices? What did you do about high natural gas prices? What did you do about the possibility of blackouts so my computer wouldn't work and so I wouldn't be safe in my home? What did you do about the fact that China and India and other parts of the world are buying up oil reserves and growing their economies and creating constant pressure on the price of oil? What did you do about that, Senator, while you were in Washington over the last couple of weeks?

I wonder if what we really want to say to our friends who elected us when we go back to Tennessee or Nevada or New Mexico is:

I raised your taxes $18 billion. I put a new $18 billion charge on your electric bill. That is the first thing I did. The second thing I did was I gave an increased subsidy to people who were already getting a lot of money. Windmill developers are making $2 billion over the next 5 years just to put up these giant windmills. We gave them another subsidy on top of that. And then the third thing I did was, since we all get smarter when we go to Washington on the airplanes, we decided that despite the fact that 17 or 18 States are already defining renewable energy sources in their own ways and already trying to meet them and already giving them incentives, we decided we would decide that better. We would decide that from Washington, DC.

While I am not sure about this, at least in earlier versions of the proposal, in a number of cases the credit you got for what you were doing according to your State renewable portfolio standard doesn't count towards your national renewable portfolio standard.

I don't think I want to go home and say to the people of Tennessee that what I did about the growth of China and India and the threat to their jobs and what I did about high gasoline prices and natural gas prices, what I did about blackouts was to add $18 billion to their electric rates, to give a big subsidy to windmill developers, and to put an unfunded mandate on top of what States ought to be doing for themselves.

There are better ways, if our goal is to produce low-carbon or carbon-free electricity, which is what this debate is really all about. This debate is motivated by those who feel most strongly about global warming and about low-carbon and carbon-free electricity. There is a better way to do that, particularly if we have $18 billion. I want to talk about that a little more as we go along.

The Senator from New Mexico, as he always does, gave a very careful and well-reasoned explanation of his points of view. His proposal is a little different from his proposal made in 2003. I want to go through why I said what I said and make sure my point of view is understood.

Let me begin with the idea of the $18 billion. I didn't just pull that out of the air. This is a letter from the Department of Energy in Washington dated June 15, 2005, to Senator Bingaman. He quoted some of it. It talks about a number of things. It does talk about some places where in the whole economy there might be some reductions in expenditures as a result of the RPS based on their monitoring. But it also says the following:

From 2005 to 2025, the RPS has a cumulative total cost to

the electric power sector of about $18 billion. . . . This

cost includes $700 million in payments to the Government for

compliance credits once the price cap is reached and $10.7

billion in payments to owners of customer-sited photovoltaics

that are eligible for triple credits.

In other words, we are going to spend $11 billion in payments for solar power.

Let me start by talking about what we mean when we say renewable energy. Some people get confused about ethanol, renewable fuel, and renewable energy. We are not talking about ethanol. We are only talking about renewable energy, making electricity. There are only a handful of ways to do that that make much difference. Senator Bingaman has defined those very narrowly. Wind is one, giant windmills. Geothermal is another. That is hot water coming out of the ground to heat your home. Hydropower is one, but we exclude hydropower except for very limited new hydropower in this bill. Solar is another, using the sun. And biomass, putting grass and/or other things into coal plants and burning them is yet another.

Today, all of those renewable fuels produce a little over 2 percent of the electricity. Since the 1970s and 1980s, we tried very hard to encourage more. I can remember President Carter 20 years ago setting a goal of 20 percent of solar energy. In 1992, the wind developers said: We can make wind electricity out of wind, just give us a little bit of money to help get started, and then we will be off on our own. That was 1992.

Billions and billions of dollars later, wind is still not very much because that is not the best way to produce carbon-free electricity for an economy of this size, to compound the problem by putting new taxes and new subsidies on the American people at a time when we are supposed to be talking about lower prices. I haven't heard anybody say: I want higher natural gas prices. I want to pay a higher electric bill.

We are talking about higher prices, 18 billion new dollars on your electric rates. And for what? To build tens of thousands of windmills and to spend nearly $11 billion producing what will end up being one- fifth of 1 percent of all of the electricity that we will produce. That would be the solar electricity.

I am all for solar power. I have an amendment for solar power with Senator Johnson that we introduced as part of the Natural Gas Price Reduction Act. It would spend $380 million over the next 5 years for businesses and homeowners who want to use solar power. It would help that industry get started and see if it could go on its own without huge higher costs. But this is nearly $11 billion for solar power to produce one-fifth of 1 percent of all the electricity in the United States.

After solar, tens of thousands of these windmills is the other major expenditure along with biomass. So what we are talking about to begin with is wind and biomass and solar and landfill gas and geothermal, and trying to take that from 2 percent up to 10 percent. To do that, we are going to put an $18 billion tax increase on.

Now, let's go to the second objection I have. That is the size of the subsidy and the people to whom the subsidy is going. I have been doing a little investigating. It is hard to get these numbers down, to try to see how much money we are spending for this kind of fuel, so I could see if we could better spend it some other way. I have noticed that we are spending about 1 percent of our--we have something called the renewable electricity production tax credit. So far, it has been really a tax credit for windmills because solar

hasn't had the chance to take advantage of it. It pays you 1.8 cents for every kilowatt hour of wind power that you produce.

Now, wind has become--according to many of the utilities who buy and sell wind power--a fairly competitive product where the wind blows. Of course, where it doesn't blow, no amount of subsidy will help it. So we have already committed $2 billion in our Tax Code over the next 5 years to subsidize wind producers. And the Finance Committee, yesterday, said they want to add a billion to that. The Finance Committee also said they not only want to subsidize the production of the kilowatt hours of power, they want to loan money so developers can build these giant windmills.

Some people may think I am talking about your grandmother's windmill out by the well somewhere pumping the water.

I will have to make one correction in trying to describe these. I have said only one will fit into the second largest football stadium in America in Tennessee. The Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum, reminded me that Penn State is larger than the University of Tennessee, and I stand corrected on that. But even at Penn State, and even at the University of Michigan, which is the largest, or the University of Tennessee, which is third largest, just one of these windmills will fit in the stadium. The rotor blades extend from the 10-yard line to the 10-yard line, and it rises twice as high as the skyboxes, and you can see the red lights from 20 miles away on a clear night. These usually come in groups of 10, 20, or 30 windmills.

This proposal would have the effect of increasing the number of these gigantic windmills from about 6,700, which we have in America today, to 45,000. That is the estimate of the Energy Information Administration. Each of these produces about 1 megawatt of power--or to be accurate, is rated to produce about 1 megawatt of power. The wind only blows 20 to 40 percent of the time, so it only produces about a third of a megawatt of power. Also, you have to take into account the fact that since these often are built in remote places or on top of scenic ridges, then you would build large transmission lines through backyards to carry the electricity to places. And you have to take into account the fact that you cannot close down your coal plant and nuclear plant and your natural gas plant when you put up windmills because people don't want to shut off their computers, stop working, or turn off their lights. They have to have their electricity all of the time, and you don't store power from wind in these amounts to use later.

So the idea that the United States of America would look to the future to keep its jobs and competition with Japan, with China, and with India--our country that uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world--by taxing its ratepayers $18 billion to build tens of thousands of windmills and, as good as solar power is, to spend $11 billion on solar power, which will produce one-fifth of 1 percent of all of the electricity we need in this country--I don't believe, respectfully, it is the best way to spend our money.

The third point is this about the States, and the Senator from New Mexico mentioned about what the States are doing. Someone said, ``Senator Alexander hasn't gotten over being Governor.'' Maybe, in a way, I hope I never do because I don't think you automatically get smarter when you fly to Washington, DC. I know the Presiding Officer goes home almost every weekend. You gain a lot of wisdom while you are at home, and not here. To the extent that it is a good idea for electric utilities to begin to use a variety of different renewable sources, I submit that they are already doing it. They are working hard on it. The Governor of California made a major address the other day about the use of solar power in California.

There are 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, that have some form of RPS today. They have all sorts of different approaches to this. Iowa met its standard in 1999. Connecticut increased its standard in 2003. Texas has a well-regarded standard.

They use different definitions of renewable sources of energy. Maine defines renewable to include pulp and paper waste and black liquor. Pennsylvania has a clean energy portfolio standard that includes waste coal. Connecticut includes fuel cells. The Western Governors Association includes clean coal.

I have a number of examples of how, under Senator Bingaman's 2003 proposal, which I have studied since his new proposal came just today, which I have not studied as closely, but there were a number of cases where the credits at the local utilities would be received under their State plans, but they would not be allowed under the Federal plan. So we would be saying in Washington, DC, we see that in 19 States you have this idea of more renewable energy, but we are going to do that ourselves. We are going to preempt the field, we are going to set the rules, we are going to define it, and we are going to spend $18 billion our way instead of your way. I think that is unwise, Mr. President.

So the three arguments that I make against the Senator's amendment are these:

One, it is an $18 billion new tax on ratepayers to build tens of thousands of windmills and to spend $11 billion on solar power, which would produce one-fifth of 1 percent of all of the electricity we need by 2025. That is not the wisest use of money, and I don't think that is what we want to say to our constituents when we go home.

Second, it adds an unneeded subsidy, especially to wind developers, who we are giving $2 billion already over the next 5 years to build these gigantic windmills, which mars the landscape and only work 20 or 40 percent of the time. The only reason they are being built is because of these huge subsidized incentives.

I predict that if legislation like this passes and we go from 6,700 to 45,000 of these big windmills, you are going to have an uprising in every State of people who don't want to see them and wonder why we are taking $18 billion away from their electric bills and subsidizing things like this.

Third, I trust the States. Nineteen of the States have an RPS, plus the District of Columbia. These are the green ones on the chart, where you see more capacity for renewable fuel. If you put a 10-percent standard on Louisiana or Arkansas or Florida or Tennessee or Virginia, and we cannot meet that standard, what do we do? Our utility just writes a check to the Government under the RPS. It is a new tax, it is a new rate increase, and that is not the kind of thing we ought to be doing.

What should we be doing? Let me go back to my first chart, and then I will conclude my remarks. I like the direction of our bill as it is. You see, I think what our bill, as written, does--and it hasn't been widely noted, and the Senator mentioned this a while ago--it would transform the way we produce electricity in the United States. If we really want carbon-free air, if we want to meet the Kyoto standards, stop the global warming that people are concerned about, you are not going to do it by building tens of thousands of windmills and spending $11 billion on solar panels.

Here is how you will do it: conservation and efficiency. The Domenici-Bingaman bill that is here already would save us from building 45 500-megawatt gas plants just because of appliance standards. The hybrid car incentives coming from the Finance Committee will encourage the buying of 300,000 hybrid cars, resulting in more efficiency, less carbon in the air, and encouraging our auto industry to transform, as many of us hope they will do. If we do that, we should spend another $750 million, not on windmills, but on giving tax incentives to auto plants in the United States that retool to be able to produce hybrid cars. If we give incentives to buy those cars, we want them to be built in Tennessee, Michigan, or elsewhere in this country, not in Yokohama. If we spend a new $750 million for that purpose, which is a recommendation of the National Commission on Energy Policy, it will help to create 39,000 new automobile jobs in the United States.

Senator Feinstein and Senator Snowe have a proposal for energy- efficient appliances and buildings. The cost, over 5 years, is $2 billion. Some of that is in the legislation. But more could be spent on it to great effect. Coal gasification powerplants. We have talked about nuclear, so I will go to nuclear; $2 billion for deployment of

advanced nuclear power plants. Mr. President, if we want carbon-free air, we know how to get it. We get it from nuclear power. Twenty percent of all of our electricity in this massive economy of ours that uses 25 percent of the energy in the world is from nuclear power today.

So why would we subsidize windmills and solar panels instead of spending $2 billion on advanced nuclear power plants? France does it. They are 80 percent nuclear. Japan has one new nuclear plant a year. We have not started one since the 1970s, although we have dozens of Navy ships docking at our ports around the country with nuclear reactors that have never had a problem. So $2 billion for advanced deployment of nuclear power.

Right behind that, waiting in line--and I know both Senators from New Mexico agree with this--is coal gasification in powerplants, along with carbon recapture and sequestration technologies. If this could work, this would back up nuclear power and produce the large amounts of low- carbon or carbon-free energy that not only we need in the United States but that the world needs. If we do it here, they will do it there. If we don't do it, they will not, and they will produce so much pollution and junk in the air that it won't matter what we do because the air will blow around on top of us.

I mentioned solar energy development. I think there should be a substantial increase for solar energy development. The production tax credit, since 1992, has done nothing for solar power. It virtually all goes to wind. But an appropriate amount of money would be, over 5 years, $380 million. That is even more than the Finance Committee recommended. Under the RPS, we are talking about $11 billion collected from increased rates and spent to produce one-fifth of 1 percent of the electricity we need in 2025.

Mr. President, I want low-carbon air. I want to transform the way we produce electricity. But I also want lower electric rates. The Tennessee Valley Authority just raised our rates 7 percent. That is a high rate increase. That means there are some manufacturing plants in Tennessee that are going to think twice about whether the jobs stay here or the jobs go somewhere else. If we start putting new taxes and new rate increases on homeowners and manufacturing plants in Tennessee and around this country in order to build tens of thousands of windmills and this extent of solar power, we will not be taking the wisest course.

I suggest we support the bill as it is written, and to the extent we have dollars, let's spend it on hybrid vehicles, auto jobs, energy efficiency, coal gasification, modest, reasonable solar energy, carbon recapture research, advanced nuclear, and cogeneration projects.

I yield the floor.

Yes, that is correct.

That is my understanding.

That is true. In the case of wind power, it was suggested to the Senators in the early nineties, give us a wind power production credit for a few years and then it goes away. If it goes away and it costs more, the ratepayers will end up paying for that higher cost power.

That is my understanding.

Mr. President, I am tempted to ask why we should have to raise electric rates in Tennessee to build windmills in North Dakota, even as much as they like them. I would prefer to send every single one of these gigantic public nuisances to North Dakota if they want them. What I object to is raising our electric rates to build them. That is what we are doing. I want to go back over carefully what Senator Bingaman said earlier about the letter, describing his proposal.

The one thing we can be sure about, regarding the Bingaman proposal, is it is a multibillion dollar increase in electric rates on the bills of most Americans. Surely in Tennessee it will be, because here we are, referring to this map. Senator Domenici pointed out the white area on the map. The prior Presiding Officer is from South Carolina and the present Presiding Officer is from Florida. They find themselves here in the white area. There is no wind down there. Now, it is true that under the Bingaman amendment, they might try to make enough electricity from solar or from geothermal or from biomass. But what the letter says is two things. The letter from the Energy Department describing the proposal of the Senator from New Mexico says it will cost an $18 billion increase in electric rates between now and 2025 in order to start making our electricity out of this limited number of ways that we call renewable energy, instead of the way we normally would do it. And if we are not able to do it--if in Tennessee, Florida, or South Carolina we cannot meet the 10 percent with big windmills or solar or biomass or landfill gas or geothermal, then we write a check to the Government. So we pay a tax or we raise our rates or we do both.

Now, the Senator from New Mexico did correctly go back to the letter of June 15 and point out I had said that the letter from the Department of Energy says that, over 20 years, the cumulative total cost of the electric power sector is about $18 billion for this amendment.

We have been having a big argument down here about the Clean Air Act, whether to take the President's version or, say, the Carper version, which I cosponsored. According to the Environmental Protection Agency analysis, the difference is a $5 billion effect on the economy, and everybody was shooting off rockets about that. This is $18 billion.

But the Senator from New Mexico said keep reading the letter. It says:

. . . cumulative expenditures for natural gas and

electricity by all end-use sectors taken together decrease by

$22 billion.

That would look like the net increase was almost nothing.

The problem with that is that assumes the price of natural gas is $5. That also looks at the year 2020. If you go out to 2025 with no RPS, according to the Energy Information Administration, the cost of natural gas is $4.79 and the cost with RPS is $4.79.

What I am saying is, I do not believe we can count on a reduction in the price of natural gas to $5 to offset this $18 billion increase in our electric rates that this amendment will produce.

The Senator from New Mexico is perfectly entitled to say: If you do not believe their estimates about natural gas, why do you believe their estimates about the increase in the cost of electricity? And he would have a point. But I think the one thing we can be sure of about the new mandate of the Senator from New Mexico is that it is a multibillion- dollar rate increase of some number.

We do know in the area where the Senator from Florida lives and where

Mr. President, when I go home on the Fourth of July and my constituents ask what I did about high natural gas prices, high gasoline prices, about our competition with China and Japan and India to keep our jobs, I am going to tell them I voted no on the Bingaman amendment to order utilities to make 10 percent of their energy from a limited number of renewable fuels, because it is an $18 billion electric rate increase over 20 years. At a time of high natural gas prices, high gasoline prices, the last thing we should do is an $18 billion electric rate increase over 20 years.

The distinguished Senator from New Mexico will tell us that it will be offset by natural gas reductions, but that is only if there is a $5 natural gas rate in 2025. One thing we know is, it is a big electric rate increase when we should be reducing prices.

Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado for his remarks on energy and for his work on the Energy Committee this year.

The Senator from Colorado is new to the Senate. I have not been here that long myself, but it is refreshing to see him here. I loved it when someone asked, How long have you have been in the United States--12 generations or 13?

So he has the longest lineage--his family does, I believe--of anyone in the territory we now call the United States of America. He has made a terrific contribution on energy. I appreciate his remarks.

We have come a long way in our work on energy over the last couple of years, and while we still have some important differences of opinion-- we saw some of those expressed today--they are differences of emphasis, important differences of emphasis. I don't want to minimize that. For my part, I see us moving toward a different way of thinking about how we produce energy in this country. We have gone from having the lowest natural gas prices in the world to the highest. Gasoline prices are too high. We see that despite all of our efforts to reduce our use of oil, we are still importing more oil than we should. So we need to do things differently.

My formula for doing that is largely representative of the bill that was reported 21 to 1. First, conservation and efficiency. I heard the Senator talk about that. Second, new supplies of natural gas, as well as oil try to get the price of natural gas down for farmers, for homeowners, and for businesses. To do that, unfortunately, we will have to import liquefied natural gas for the next few years. Otherwise, we will be exporting jobs. We can either import some gas or export the jobs, one or the other--that is going to be our choice--so we have an adequate and substantial supply of low-cost American-produced clean energy. We then need to aggressively move on nuclear power, and we aggressively need to--and I believe there is a consensus on this--we aggressively need to explore the best technology for clean coal gasification and to make that work best to see if we can find a way to capture the carbon that is produced and put it in the ground. If we are able to do that, we then will have enough clean energy to run this economy and keep our jobs here as well as set an environmentally good example for the rest of the world. I hope that is the path we are on.

I salute the Senator for his contributions.

Of course.

I ask unanimous consent that there now be a period for morning business with Senators permitted after I speak for up to 10 minutes each.

I also ask unanimous consent that I may bring in a few boxes of regulations about which I am going to speak on higher education.

Mr. President, in case the President may be wondering, and I asked consent about this, these are 7,000 regulations. We have 6,000 autonomous institutions of higher education in the United States, colleges and universities.

The Presiding Officer comes from the State that has some of the finest colleges and universities anywhere in America. I will not begin to name them because there are so many of them I might leave one out. Every single college or university, public or private, in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Colorado which has students with Federal grants or loans gets all of these boxes this year. These are the Federal regulations under title IV of the Higher Education Act that somebody at the smallest college or the biggest university must wade through in order to help students have Federal grants and Federal loans. The Federal grant and Federal loans are one of the great success stories of the United States of America. I will talk more about that.

Mr. President, 60 percent of our college students and university students at those 6,000 public and private and profit and nonprofit institutes of higher education, 60 percent of them have a Federal grant or loan to help pay for college. That has increased over the last 4 or 5 years about 10 times faster--9 times faster--than State funding for higher education.

But my goal today, in my remarks and in the bill I am introducing, is to make it easier for boys and girls and men and women who attend our colleges and universities--and many of them are mature, older students--to make it easier for them to go through these documents. And then, on the other hand, to make it easier for our colleges and universities to comply with all these rules and regulations. I would like for them to be spending their time and their money helping our students learn instead of spending their time and their money reporting to us what they are doing.

That is the purpose of what I want to do today. I am introducing the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005, a bill that does what I just described. It will help students get access to available financial resources. Second, it will reduce the burden on colleges and universities imposed by Federal regulations so they can devote more of their time doing what they are meant to do: provide the highest quality postsecondary education in the world. And third, it will ensure that the autonomy and independence of our 6,000 institutions of higher education are preserved.

I am delighted I am able to interrupt the energy debate to talk about higher education because I think while it sounds like we are shifting gears, they really go together. If I am looking at our country today, and I had to take an exam this minute about the two greatest issues facing the United States of America, I would say, No. 1, terrorism, and, No. 2, competitiveness. ``Competitiveness'' a big word, meaning: How are we going to keep our jobs? How are we going to keep our standard of living in this country when we have 5 or 6 percent of the people in the world, and yet we produce a third of all the money, consume 25 percent of all the energy? And China and India and Singapore and Malaysia, not to mention Japan and Europe, are saying: Wait a minute. Our brains are as good as those American brains. A lot of our students have been going to the United States, creating jobs for those Americans. In fact, 572,000 foreign students are in this country today, basically improving our standard of living by their work here.

So we are in a very competitive time. Just as we have been saying in energy, here comes China, here comes Malaysia, here comes India buying up the oil reserves, driving up the price. Here comes Germany and other parts of the world with lower natural gas prices than we have. And our jobs are going toward them.

The other thing we could do to ensure our good jobs and to keep our higher standard of living is to focus on our brainpower. The great advantages the United States of America has had since World War II have been our low cost, reliable supply and access to energy, our science and technology edge, and our educational institutions. There are so many examples of that.

Mrs. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior Senator from Texas, and our majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, had a little session in the leader's office last year. They invited the former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He was concluding his residency at the Library of Congress. I remember after he had said what he had to say, we asked our questions.

Senator Hutchison asked of President Cardoso: Mr. President, what is the one thing you are going to remember about the United States from your stay here at the Library of Congress that you will take with you back to your country of Brazil? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: The American university, the greatness and the autonomy of the American university.

I will tell you another story. A few years ago, I was asked to be the president of the University of Tennessee. It was 1988. I was glad to do it. I had been chairman of the board of the university for 8 years as Governor, and I appointed a lot of the trustees, but I was not a skilled university president. So I sought out David Gardner, the president of the University of California, which I regard, with all respect to North Carolina, at least at that time, to be the outstanding public university in America and perhaps one of the best in the world.

I said to David Gardner: Why is the University of California so good? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: First, autonomy. When California created the university--they created four branches of government, really: legislative, executive, judicial, and then the University of California. He said: Fundamentally, they give us the money, and then our board and we decide how to spend it. Our autonomy has permitted us to do the second thing, set very high standards. And then he said the third thing was the large amount of Federal dollars that follows students to the educational institution of their choice.

So autonomy, excellence, and choice--Federal dollars following students to the schools of their choice. That is how David Gardner explained the California model for excellence in higher education.

That model has worked for our country since the GI bill for veterans was enacted in 1944. I have wondered many times how we were fortunate enough to have decided to do it in the way they did it. This was for the veterans. It was the end of World War II. There were college presidents who were very upset about the idea of giving the veterans money and just telling them to go wherever they wanted to go to college.

The president of the University of Chicago said it would make the University of Chicago a hobo's jungle. But we know what it did. We had veterans coming back and taking their GI bill. Many of them took it to Catholic high schools and other high schools because they had not finished high school. But they went wherever they wanted, to any accredited institution. They went to Yeshiva. They went to Vanderbilt. They went to the historically Black colleges and universities across America--Harvard. It did not matter. If it was accredited, they chose the institution.

The same formula was applied when the Pell grants were created by this Congress in honor of Senator Pell, who was a former Member of this body; as is true with Senator Stafford and the Stafford loans. Instead of giving those grants and loans to the University of North Carolina and the University of Tennessee, they went to the student. The student then said: Well, I will decide where I want to go. I may want to go to Rhodes College, or I may want to go to Lenore Rhyne or I may want to go to the University of Florida or Yeshiva or Howard. They go where they want to go.

Because of that, we now have 6,000 autonomous institutions around the country. Many of them are nonprofit. Many of them are for profit. Eighty percent of our students go to public institutions, but 20 percent go to private institutions. Because it is a marketplace of 6,000 institutions, and some are, of course, better than others, because it is a marketplace, we have been able to adapt to a changing world that now has different subjects, different standards, a more global environment, and students who are, by and large, much older and have different needs than they did before.

If we had not had that kind of marketplace of colleges and universities, we would be stuck in the mud, and we would not have former President Cardoso of Brazil talking so well about our colleges and universities.

We do not just have some of the best colleges and universities in the world; we have almost all of them. And the rest of the world knows that. We do not have 572,000 foreign students studying in our country this year because we made them come, or even because we give them scholarships. They pay to come for the most part. They are the brightest students in most of these countries. And 60 percent of our postdoctoral students are from overseas. Half our students in computer and engineering graduate programs are from overseas. They are here for that reason. So we attract these students. The Federal Government has continued to be generous.

So there are two things I am introducing today with this bill. Number one, this legislation would simplify the financial aid process and expand access for students. We do it in these ways: (a) streamline the forms for Federal grants and loans, making access to student financial aid easier; (b) provide students who want to expedite their education and study year-round the Federal support to do so; (c) provide students with financial information about colleges and universities in a clear and concise manner that does not require additional reporting from institutions.

The second purpose of the bill is to protect that autonomy, that one word, that independence, that autonomy of these 6,000 institutions. That is, in my view, a critical element of why we have the best colleges and universities in the world.

What I mean by that is we did not order them to be good from Washington. That is not how they got to be great. They were autonomous and independent. We allowed them to be, and then we gave them students, followed by money, who created a competitive marketplace. And they became the best in the world.

So this legislation eliminates, streamlines, and evaluates regulations currently imposed on institutions of higher education with the goal of lessening the burden on schools. That way, universities can focus more on teaching and researching and less on maintaining reporting requirements for the Federal Government.

The bill, No. 1, appoints an expert panel to review Department of Education regulations and to recommend how those regulations might be streamlined or eliminated. Two, it accelerates the ``negotiated rulemaking process'' whereby universities negotiate new rules with the Department so that an end result can be reached without costly delays. And three, it develops a compliance calendar so that universities know what requirements they have to meet and when they to have meet them.

What I mean by that is, it will be up to us in the Federal Government to send to the University of North Carolina or Maryville College in Tennessee a list of the rules they have to comply with so they don't have to hire a whole team of people to try to wade through and read everything.

This is just one title of the Higher Education Act. It has several titles. So a compliance calendar would help deregulate.

These changes build on the successful model for American higher education. By making the financial aid process more user friendly and more accessible, more students will have Federal funds following them to the college or university of their choice. And by relieving some of the Federal regulatory burden, we are restoring university autonomy so they can spend more time teaching and researching and less time filling out paperwork.

I have two major purposes. The first is to simplify and expand access to financial aid, to make it easier for the 60 percent of our college students who fill out a form to get a Federal grant or loan; and second, to reduce the burdensome paperwork on the colleges and universities.

In terms of simplifying access, we need to remember that the faces and needs of our college students have changed. More typically these days, when I go to a graduation--this has been true for a number of years--the cry you hear from the audience is: Way to go, mom. It is the mom who is getting her degree, or the dad, going back to school, college, community college, trade school, university to get the skills they need to get a better job or another job in a rapidly changing world.

In 1970, we had 7.4 million students, 28 percent of whom were enrolled part time and 38 percent at two-year colleges. Only 28 percent were 25 or older. By 1999, enrollment had grown to 12.7 million, a 7.2- percent increase with 39 percent enrolled part time and 44 percent in two-year colleges. Nearly half our students in 1999 were in two-year colleges. Our financial aid system needs to catch up.

The first thing we can do is to simplify what we call the Free Application Federal Student Aid. As one might expect, it is known around here as FAFSA. Imagine that. You go out and try to talk to a family of someone who might be going to college for the first time and that family says let me talk to you about FAFSA.

I think we ought to change the name. I think we ought to make it easy for people to understand what we are talking about. I recently met a chief financial officer of a company who said she found the form challenging when helping her high school daughter fill out a form for financial aid. I can only imagine the challenge to a high school student, or a working mother, when trying to answer over 100 confusing questions, the vast majority of which are only applicable for the State of California.

So a second thing we can do is make sure students can use the Federal aid for education they need year round. Flexibility for year-round Pell grants is a part of this legislation so students can have the flexibility they need to go and continue their education in the summer. There is a disincentive for that. Not only is that inconvenient for students and working students, it tends to encourage institutions to waste the resources in the summertime, which they should be putting to better use.

The third thing we can do is make sure there is more information. That is why I suggest the ``best buy'' list--a list of the 100 schools with the lowest tuition and required fees, with the greatest availability of scholarships and grants. In other words, this would help parents and students decide where they could get the biggest bang for their buck.

Many of the ideas that are in our legislation came from the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. Senator Gregg, when he was chairman, and I invited them to work on this. They did a terrific job and they came up with 10 recommendations, 8 of which are in this bill, and I believe they have no cost to the budget.

The other area and my final comments have to do with the other side of the ledger. While we are making it easier for students to have access to financial aid, we should work to relieve the regulatory burden on colleges and universities represented by these boxes of 7,000 regulations that contain all the forms any college or university in Florida or Tennessee or North Carolina would receive this year to fill out. Thanks to the last two rounds of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act,

there are today more than 7,000 regulations associated with the title IV student aid program. With the exception of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, every Federal agency is involved in regulating some aspect of higher education. That is incredible and it is absolutely ridiculous.

In 1997, Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University, said Stanford spends 7 cents out of every tuition dollar on compliance with Government regulations. This has only gotten worse in the last 9 years. We need to ease the burden. For example, under the Higher Education Act, universities are required to report how many full-time employees have dental insurance, whether the university is a member of a national athletic association, and the number of meals that are in a ``board'' charge. Colleges are required to hand every student a paper in-State voter registration form and cannot use modern technology such as Web registrations, which would actually reach more students. We are giving university staff busy work to do when they ought to be helping students.

Here is another example. When a major chemical company such as DuPont produces 55-gallon containers of a potentially hazardous waste, we require Dupont to report on how all that waste is disposed and ensure that it is done in a certain manner. This is a good regulation and idea. Right now, we are applying the same regulation and paperwork to a chemistry class at a college that might produce half a test tube of the same substance.

Mr. President, I don't know about the presiding officer, the Senator from Florida, and I now see the Senator from Virginia; I suspect that when we all go back to our States and speak to our Lincoln Day dinners, or when the Democrats go to the Jefferson Day dinners, we all say the thing we need to do once we pass these laws is to have more oversight and ease the burden of regulation. When I say that, I get a big round of applause, because at home people don't think we get any smarter when we fly to Washington, DC, each week. They think it would be absurd to know there are 7,000 regulations governing college grants and loans, and that Stanford University spends 7 cents out of--and this is a private university--every tuition dollar paying for the cost of Government regulations.

One reason we have an increased interest in regulating is because there are a great many Members of Congress, as well as people in the country, who worry about rising tuition costs. I worry about those, too. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we used to have a deal with the students. The State will pay 70 percent of the cost, and you pay 30 percent, and if we raise your tuition, we will raise the State contribution. That has changed, I am afraid, and I think it is important for us to know that. Tuition is not going up because the Federal Government is failing to do its job. Over the last 4 years, Pell grants, work-study, scholarships all gone up about 30 percent. At the same time, over the last 4 years, State spending for higher education is up 3.6 percent. I will say that again. This is according to various educational institutions, including the Center for Study of Education Policy, Illinois State University. In fiscal year 2001, there was a 3.4 percent increase in State funding for higher education. In 2002, there was a 1.2-percent decrease; in the next year, a 2.4-percent decrease. This is State funding for higher education. Last year, there was a 3.8-percent increase--3.6 over the 4 years.

So what our colleges and universities are feeling, and what our students are feeling, is decreased State support for higher education. One reason they are feeling that is because we have not given States the tools to control the growth in Medicaid spending. So in Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, our colleges and universities are hurting because the Governors and legislatures are spending the dollars that ought to be going for excellence in universities. They are spending it on huge increases in Medicaid costs. That is part of our responsibility, too.

So I come to the floor today to introduce the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005. I invite my colleagues to join me in it. We will be marking up a Higher Education Authorization Act next month. It affects 60 percent of the college students in the United States. I am sure we are going to continue to fund those grants and loans, as we have from here, but we also need to do two other things. One of them is in here, and that is not to get busy regulating more colleges and universities. We should be deregulating. The other thing we should do, which is not a part of this bill, is to keep our commitment to the Governors that, by about the fall of this year, we should give them the legislative tools they need--and I believe also relief from Federal court consent decrees, which are outdated--so they can manage the growth of Medicaid spending, so that in turn we can continue to support higher education.

Our energy bill and our higher education bill are at the forefront of our policies to keep our jobs and our competitiveness.

Here's one more example: If you grab a pint bottle of rubbing alcohol from your bathroom and take it to a university laboratory, it will immediately fall under the regulation and scrutiny of six different regulatory agencies:

(1) the air quality management district,

(2) the sewer district,

(3) OSHA,

(4) the local fire department,

(5) the county environmental health department, and

(6) the state hazardous waste agency.

While all of these are not directly governed by federal regulations, many are responding to them, and we should do our part to reduce this type of burden. In one instance, a prestigious institution in the Midwest was visited by the EPA and a bottle of dishwashing soap was found in a lab near a sink. The institution was fined for improper management of hazardous waste because the label was not still attached to the bottle. Even worse, the institution had to pay to have the soap analyzed to document that it was not hazardous.

Colleges are in the business of teaching students, not sending meaningless paperwork to the federal government. To fix this problem, my legislation would establish an expert panel to review federal regulations applicable to colleges and universities and make recommendations to the Secretary of Education and the Congress on how some of these regulations could be streamlined or eliminated. The bill also would assist institutions in complying with all these requirements by requiring the Department to develop a compliance calendar outlining specific deadlines for paperwork submissions.

In those cases where there is already clarity about how to deal with regulations, the bill takes action. The bill will accelerate the ``negotiated rulemaking process,'' a process whereby university representatives negotiate new regulations with the Department. Today this process can drag on for years, imposing unnecessary costs along the way due to uncertainty over a final outcome for the rule. Under my bill, that process would have a one year deadline. To give schools a chance to adjust to newly agreed regulations, institutions of higher education would be provided with a minimum of at least 270 days between the publication of any final regulations or guidance and the initiation of data collection related to new disclosure requirements.

The bill also reinstates provisions to allow schools with a low ``cohort default rate,'' meaning that less than 10 percent of their students fail to pay all their loans back on time, the option of distributing loan money to students right at the beginning of the year rather than waiting a month or spacing the money out over the period of a year. This is important since students incur many expenses up front during their education and need the flexibility to pay for fees, books, and other costs.

Mr. President, since the end of World War II, our system of higher education has been unmatched around the globe. According to the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai University, more than half the world's top 100 universities are in the United States.

But our lead is slipping. During a trip to Europe, I discovered that Chancellor Schroeder of Germany is putting a strong emphasis on reforming his country's university system to mirror--and perhaps even eclipse--our own. British prime minister Tony Blair is overhauling his nation's system because he sees a growing gap between the quality

of American and British universities. Authorities in India and especially China are working harder than ever to improve the quality of education in their own countries and keep their brightest minds from leaving their countries. Australia and Canada are making strides as well. And, for the first time, we have witnessed a decline in graduate student enrollment. The Council on Graduate Schools estimated that foreign applications to graduate programs in the U.S. were down this year by five percent.

This greater competition means that not only do we find it harder than ever to attract foreign students, but our graduates will find it harder to compete for top-paying jobs in the global economy since they will be competing against talented, well-educated individuals from around the world.

Now is the time to fine-tune our own system of higher education and restore its greatest strengths: generous financial assistance for students, autonomy, and high standards. Generous support is most effective when students can access it with a minimum of hassle and with maximum flexibility to apply it to their accredited program. Freedom from over-regulation or control by government allows colleges and universities to quickly adjust to the needs of their students and focus on teaching and research. High standards are the natural result of a competitive system where schools compete among each other for dollars and students.

My bill restores the pillars of our higher education system and gives us the ability to move forward with confidence in the twenty-first century. I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary of the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005.

Mr. President, in case the President may be wondering, and I asked consent about this, these are 7,000 regulations. We have 6,000 autonomous institutions of higher education in the United States, colleges and universities.

The Presiding Officer comes from the State that has some of the finest colleges and universities anywhere in America. I will not begin to name them because there are so many of them I might leave one out. Every single college or university, public or private, in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Colorado which has students with Federal grants or loans gets all of these boxes this year. These are the Federal regulations under title IV of the Higher Education Act that somebody at the smallest college or the biggest university must wade through in order to help students have Federal grants and Federal loans. The Federal grant and Federal loans are one of the great success stories of the United States of America. I will talk more about that.

Mr. President, 60 percent of our college students and university students at those 6,000 public and private and profit and nonprofit institutes of higher education, 60 percent of them have a Federal grant or loan to help pay for college. That has increased over the last 4 or 5 years about 10 times faster--9 times faster--than State funding for higher education.

But my goal today, in my remarks and in the bill I am introducing, is to make it easier for boys and girls and men and women who attend our colleges and universities--and many of them are mature, older students--to make it easier for them to go through these documents. And then, on the other hand, to make it easier for our colleges and universities to comply with all these rules and regulations. I would like for them to be spending their time and their money helping our students learn instead of spending their time and their money reporting to us what they are doing.

That is the purpose of what I want to do today. I am introducing the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005, a bill that does what I just described. It will help students get access to available financial resources. Second, it will reduce the burden on colleges and universities imposed by Federal regulations so they can devote more of their time doing what they are meant to do: provide the highest quality postsecondary education in the world. And third, it will ensure that the autonomy and independence of our 6,000 institutions of higher education are preserved.

I am delighted I am able to interrupt the energy debate to talk about higher education because I think while it sounds like we are shifting gears, they really go together. If I am looking at our country today, and I had to take an exam this minute about the two greatest issues facing the United States of America, I would say, No. 1, terrorism, and, No. 2, competitiveness. ``Competitiveness'' a big word, meaning: How are we going to keep our jobs? How are we going to keep our standard of living in this country when we have 5 or 6 percent of the people in the world, and yet we produce a third of all the money, consume 25 percent of all the energy? And China and India and Singapore and Malaysia, not to mention Japan and Europe, are saying: Wait a minute. Our brains are as good as those American brains. A lot of our students have been going to the United States, creating jobs for those Americans. In fact, 572,000 foreign students are in this country today, basically improving our standard of living by their work here.

So we are in a very competitive time. Just as we have been saying in energy, here comes China, here comes Malaysia, here comes India buying up the oil reserves, driving up the price. Here comes Germany and other parts of the world with lower natural gas prices than we have. And our jobs are going toward them.

The other thing we could do to ensure our good jobs and to keep our higher standard of living is to focus on our brainpower. The great advantages the United States of America has had since World War II have been our low cost, reliable supply and access to energy, our science and technology edge, and our educational institutions. There are so many examples of that.

Mrs. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior Senator from Texas, and our majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, had a little session in the leader's office last year. They invited the former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He was concluding his residency at the Library of Congress. I remember after he had said what he had to say, we asked our questions.

Senator Hutchison asked of President Cardoso: Mr. President, what is the one thing you are going to remember about the United States from your stay here at the Library of Congress that you will take with you back to your country of Brazil? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: The American university, the greatness and the autonomy of the American university.

I will tell you another story. A few years ago, I was asked to be the president of the University of Tennessee. It was 1988. I was glad to do it. I had been chairman of the board of the university for 8 years as Governor, and I appointed a lot of the trustees, but I was not a skilled university president. So I sought out David Gardner, the president of the University of California, which I regard, with all respect to North Carolina, at least at that time, to be the outstanding public university in America and perhaps one of the best in the world.

I said to David Gardner: Why is the University of California so good? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: First, autonomy. When California created the university--they created four branches of government, really: legislative, executive, judicial, and then the University of California. He said: Fundamentally, they give us the money, and then our board and we decide how to spend it. Our autonomy has permitted us to do the second thing, set very high standards. And then he said the third thing was the large amount of Federal dollars that follows students to the educational institution of their choice.

So autonomy, excellence, and choice--Federal dollars following students to the schools of their choice. That is how David Gardner explained the California model for excellence in higher education.

That model has worked for our country since the GI bill for veterans was enacted in 1944. I have wondered many times how we were fortunate enough to have decided to do it in the way they did it. This was for the veterans. It was the end of World War II. There were college presidents who were very upset about the idea of giving the veterans money and just telling them to go wherever they wanted to go to college.

The president of the University of Chicago said it would make the University of Chicago a hobo's jungle. But we know what it did. We had veterans coming back and taking their GI bill. Many of them took it to Catholic high schools and other high schools because they had not finished high school. But they went wherever they wanted, to any accredited institution. They went to Yeshiva. They went to Vanderbilt. They went to the historically Black colleges and universities across America--Harvard. It did not matter. If it was accredited, they chose the institution.

The same formula was applied when the Pell grants were created by this Congress in honor of Senator Pell, who was a former Member of this body; as is true with Senator Stafford and the Stafford loans. Instead of giving those grants and loans to the University of North Carolina and the University of Tennessee, they went to the student. The student then said: Well, I will decide where I want to go. I may want to go to Rhodes College, or I may want to go to Lenore Rhyne or I may want to go to the University of Florida or Yeshiva or Howard. They go where they want to go.

Because of that, we now have 6,000 autonomous institutions around the country. Many of them are nonprofit. Many of them are for profit. Eighty percent of our students go to public institutions, but 20 percent go to private institutions. Because it is a marketplace of 6,000 institutions, and some are, of course, better than others, because it is a marketplace, we have been able to adapt to a changing world that now has different subjects, different standards, a more global environment, and students who are, by and large, much older and have different needs than they did before.

If we had not had that kind of marketplace of colleges and universities, we would be stuck in the mud, and we would not have former President Cardoso of Brazil talking so well about our colleges and universities.

We do not just have some of the best colleges and universities in the world; we have almost all of them. And the rest of the world knows that. We do not have 572,000 foreign students studying in our country this year because we made them come, or even because we give them scholarships. They pay to come for the most part. They are the brightest students in most of these countries. And 60 percent of our postdoctoral students are from overseas. Half our students in computer and engineering graduate programs are from overseas. They are here for that reason. So we attract these students. The Federal Government has continued to be generous.

So there are two things I am introducing today with this bill. Number one, this legislation would simplify the financial aid process and expand access for students. We do it in these ways: (a) streamline the forms for Federal grants and loans, making access to student financial aid easier; (b) provide students who want to expedite their education and study year-round the Federal support to do so; (c) provide students with financial information about colleges and universities in a clear and concise manner that does not require additional reporting from institutions.

The second purpose of the bill is to protect that autonomy, that one word, that independence, that autonomy of these 6,000 institutions. That is, in my view, a critical element of why we have the best colleges and universities in the world.

What I mean by that is we did not order them to be good from Washington. That is not how they got to be great. They were autonomous and independent. We allowed them to be, and then we gave them students, followed by money, who created a competitive marketplace. And they became the best in the world.

So this legislation eliminates, streamlines, and evaluates regulations currently imposed on institutions of higher education with the goal of lessening the burden on schools. That way, universities can focus more on teaching and researching and less on maintaining reporting requirements for the Federal Government.

The bill, No. 1, appoints an expert panel to review Department of Education regulations and to recommend how those regulations might be streamlined or eliminated. Two, it accelerates the ``negotiated rulemaking process'' whereby universities negotiate new rules with the Department so that an end result can be reached without costly delays. And three, it develops a compliance calendar so that universities know what requirements they have to meet and when they to have meet them.

What I mean by that is, it will be up to us in the Federal Government to send to the University of North Carolina or Maryville College in Tennessee a list of the rules they have to comply with so they don't have to hire a whole team of people to try to wade through and read everything.

This is just one title of the Higher Education Act. It has several titles. So a compliance calendar would help deregulate.

These changes build on the successful model for American higher education. By making the financial aid process more user friendly and more accessible, more students will have Federal funds following them to the college or university of their choice. And by relieving some of the Federal regulatory burden, we are restoring university autonomy so they can spend more time teaching and researching and less time filling out paperwork.

I have two major purposes. The first is to simplify and expand access to financial aid, to make it easier for the 60 percent of our college students who fill out a form to get a Federal grant or loan; and second, to reduce the burdensome paperwork on the colleges and universities.

In terms of simplifying access, we need to remember that the faces and needs of our college students have changed. More typically these days, when I go to a graduation--this has been true for a number of years--the cry you hear from the audience is: Way to go, mom. It is the mom who is getting her degree, or the dad, going back to school, college, community college, trade school, university to get the skills they need to get a better job or another job in a rapidly changing world.

In 1970, we had 7.4 million students, 28 percent of whom were enrolled part time and 38 percent at two-year colleges. Only 28 percent were 25 or older. By 1999, enrollment had grown to 12.7 million, a 7.2- percent increase with 39 percent enrolled part time and 44 percent in two-year colleges. Nearly half our students in 1999 were in two-year colleges. Our financial aid system needs to catch up.

The first thing we can do is to simplify what we call the Free Application Federal Student Aid. As one might expect, it is known around here as FAFSA. Imagine that. You go out and try to talk to a family of someone who might be going to college for the first time and that family says let me talk to you about FAFSA.

I think we ought to change the name. I think we ought to make it easy for people to understand what we are talking about. I recently met a chief financial officer of a company who said she found the form challenging when helping her high school daughter fill out a form for financial aid. I can only imagine the challenge to a high school student, or a working mother, when trying to answer over 100 confusing questions, the vast majority of which are only applicable for the State of California.

So a second thing we can do is make sure students can use the Federal aid for education they need year round. Flexibility for year-round Pell grants is a part of this legislation so students can have the flexibility they need to go and continue their education in the summer. There is a disincentive for that. Not only is that inconvenient for students and working students, it tends to encourage institutions to waste the resources in the summertime, which they should be putting to better use.

The third thing we can do is make sure there is more information. That is why I suggest the ``best buy'' list--a list of the 100 schools with the lowest tuition and required fees, with the greatest availability of scholarships and grants. In other words, this would help parents and students decide where they could get the biggest bang for their buck.

Many of the ideas that are in our legislation came from the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. Senator Gregg, when he was chairman, and I invited them to work on this. They did a terrific job and they came up with 10 recommendations, 8 of which are in this bill, and I believe they have no cost to the budget.

The other area and my final comments have to do with the other side of the ledger. While we are making it easier for students to have access to financial aid, we should work to relieve the regulatory burden on colleges and universities represented by these boxes of 7,000 regulations that contain all the forms any college or university in Florida or Tennessee or North Carolina would receive this year to fill out. Thanks to the last two rounds of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act,

there are today more than 7,000 regulations associated with the title IV student aid program. With the exception of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, every Federal agency is involved in regulating some aspect of higher education. That is incredible and it is absolutely ridiculous.

In 1997, Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University, said Stanford spends 7 cents out of every tuition dollar on compliance with Government regulations. This has only gotten worse in the last 9 years. We need to ease the burden. For example, under the Higher Education Act, universities are required to report how many full-time employees have dental insurance, whether the university is a member of a national athletic association, and the number of meals that are in a ``board'' charge. Colleges are required to hand every student a paper in-State voter registration form and cannot use modern technology such as Web registrations, which would actually reach more students. We are giving university staff busy work to do when they ought to be helping students.

Here is another example. When a major chemical company such as DuPont produces 55-gallon containers of a potentially hazardous waste, we require Dupont to report on how all that waste is disposed and ensure that it is done in a certain manner. This is a good regulation and idea. Right now, we are applying the same regulation and paperwork to a chemistry class at a college that might produce half a test tube of the same substance.

Mr. President, I don't know about the presiding officer, the Senator from Florida, and I now see the Senator from Virginia; I suspect that when we all go back to our States and speak to our Lincoln Day dinners, or when the Democrats go to the Jefferson Day dinners, we all say the thing we need to do once we pass these laws is to have more oversight and ease the burden of regulation. When I say that, I get a big round of applause, because at home people don't think we get any smarter when we fly to Washington, DC, each week. They think it would be absurd to know there are 7,000 regulations governing college grants and loans, and that Stanford University spends 7 cents out of--and this is a private university--every tuition dollar paying for the cost of Government regulations.

One reason we have an increased interest in regulating is because there are a great many Members of Congress, as well as people in the country, who worry about rising tuition costs. I worry about those, too. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we used to have a deal with the students. The State will pay 70 percent of the cost, and you pay 30 percent, and if we raise your tuition, we will raise the State contribution. That has changed, I am afraid, and I think it is important for us to know that. Tuition is not going up because the Federal Government is failing to do its job. Over the last 4 years, Pell grants, work-study, scholarships all gone up about 30 percent. At the same time, over the last 4 years, State spending for higher education is up 3.6 percent. I will say that again. This is according to various educational institutions, including the Center for Study of Education Policy, Illinois State University. In fiscal year 2001, there was a 3.4 percent increase in State funding for higher education. In 2002, there was a 1.2-percent decrease; in the next year, a 2.4-percent decrease. This is State funding for higher education. Last year, there was a 3.8-percent increase--3.6 over the 4 years.

So what our colleges and universities are feeling, and what our students are feeling, is decreased State support for higher education. One reason they are feeling that is because we have not given States the tools to control the growth in Medicaid spending. So in Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, our colleges and universities are hurting because the Governors and legislatures are spending the dollars that ought to be going for excellence in universities. They are spending it on huge increases in Medicaid costs. That is part of our responsibility, too.

So I come to the floor today to introduce the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005. I invite my colleagues to join me in it. We will be marking up a Higher Education Authorization Act next month. It affects 60 percent of the college students in the United States. I am sure we are going to continue to fund those grants and loans, as we have from here, but we also need to do two other things. One of them is in here, and that is not to get busy regulating more colleges and universities. We should be deregulating. The other thing we should do, which is not a part of this bill, is to keep our commitment to the Governors that, by about the fall of this year, we should give them the legislative tools they need--and I believe also relief from Federal court consent decrees, which are outdated--so they can manage the growth of Medicaid spending, so that in turn we can continue to support higher education.

Our energy bill and our higher education bill are at the forefront of our policies to keep our jobs and our competitiveness.

Here's one more example: If you grab a pint bottle of rubbing alcohol from your bathroom and take it to a university laboratory, it will immediately fall under the regulation and scrutiny of six different regulatory agencies:

(1) the air quality management district,

(2) the sewer district,

(3) OSHA,

(4) the local fire department,

(5) the county environmental health department, and

(6) the state hazardous waste agency.

While all of these are not directly governed by federal regulations, many are responding to them, and we should do our part to reduce this type of burden. In one instance, a prestigious institution in the Midwest was visited by the EPA and a bottle of dishwashing soap was found in a lab near a sink. The institution was fined for improper management of hazardous waste because the label was not still attached to the bottle. Even worse, the institution had to pay to have the soap analyzed to document that it was not hazardous.

Colleges are in the business of teaching students, not sending meaningless paperwork to the federal government. To fix this problem, my legislation would establish an expert panel to review federal regulations applicable to colleges and universities and make recommendations to the Secretary of Education and the Congress on how some of these regulations could be streamlined or eliminated. The bill also would assist institutions in complying with all these requirements by requiring the Department to develop a compliance calendar outlining specific deadlines for paperwork submissions.

In those cases where there is already clarity about how to deal with regulations, the bill takes action. The bill will accelerate the ``negotiated rulemaking process,'' a process whereby university representatives negotiate new regulations with the Department. Today this process can drag on for years, imposing unnecessary costs along the way due to uncertainty over a final outcome for the rule. Under my bill, that process would have a one year deadline. To give schools a chance to adjust to newly agreed regulations, institutions of higher education would be provided with a minimum of at least 270 days between the publication of any final regulations or guidance and the initiation of data collection related to new disclosure requirements.

The bill also reinstates provisions to allow schools with a low ``cohort default rate,'' meaning that less than 10 percent of their students fail to pay all their loans back on time, the option of distributing loan money to students right at the beginning of the year rather than waiting a month or spacing the money out over the period of a year. This is important since students incur many expenses up front during their education and need the flexibility to pay for fees, books, and other costs.

Mr. President, since the end of World War II, our system of higher education has been unmatched around the globe. According to the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai University, more than half the world's top 100 universities are in the United States.

But our lead is slipping. During a trip to Europe, I discovered that Chancellor Schroeder of Germany is putting a strong emphasis on reforming his country's university system to mirror--and perhaps even eclipse--our own. British prime minister Tony Blair is overhauling his nation's system because he sees a growing gap between the quality

of American and British universities. Authorities in India and especially China are working harder than ever to improve the quality of education in their own countries and keep their brightest minds from leaving their countries. Australia and Canada are making strides as well. And, for the first time, we have witnessed a decline in graduate student enrollment. The Council on Graduate Schools estimated that foreign applications to graduate programs in the U.S. were down this year by five percent.

This greater competition means that not only do we find it harder than ever to attract foreign students, but our graduates will find it harder to compete for top-paying jobs in the global economy since they will be competing against talented, well-educated individuals from around the world.

Now is the time to fine-tune our own system of higher education and restore its greatest strengths: generous financial assistance for students, autonomy, and high standards. Generous support is most effective when students can access it with a minimum of hassle and with maximum flexibility to apply it to their accredited program. Freedom from over-regulation or control by government allows colleges and universities to quickly adjust to the needs of their students and focus on teaching and research. High standards are the natural result of a competitive system where schools compete among each other for dollars and students.

My bill restores the pillars of our higher education system and gives us the ability to move forward with confidence in the twenty-first century. I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary of the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005.