Floor Statements

Mr. President, I have been listening in my office for the last several hours to the debate. I think there is one thing that has not been brought out in the debate. When Washington says it is going to cut spending, it is untruthful with the American public, because both the Boehner bill and the Reid bill increase discretionary spending over the next 10 years by--one of them $830 billion, and the other $832 billion.

How is it that we can, with a straight face in this body, talk about a cut when, in fact, CBO says we are going to actually increase the spending in the discretionary accounts over the next 10 years nearly $1 trillion.

You have heard the debate in the House, in the Senate, of a spending cut. And, of course, that goes to what the heart of the problem is in our country; words get twisted around to the advantage of the politicians but to the disadvantage of the American citizens. We are in trouble financially. Most people will agree with that. We have programs that are in difficult straits.

As a matter of fact, they are broke, they are not just in difficult straits.

Here are the ones that are broke. Medicare Part A trust fund. Worst- case scenario this year to 2016. That is the fund that solves and pays for hospitalizations for our seniors.

We have heard a lot of statements said about Medicare. The average Medicare recipient paid $130,000 into Medicare. The average Medicare recipient takes $350,000 out. How long do we think that can continue? How long can we continue to tell seniors that we can continue a program based on its utilization rates, based on its reimbursement rates, based on the tax rates, that has a $220,000 difference between what goes out in benefits versus what comes in? It is broke.

Medicaid is broke. The reason it is broke is because the States are broke trying to take care of it. We mandate what they must do, and yet the States are choking on Medicaid, and we are choking on matching the amount of dollars. Under the Affordable Care Act, it is now estimated 25 million more people will go into Medicaid. So it is broke.

The Census. It was broke before it started. It cost twice what it did 10 years ago, $8 billion more than what was estimated.

Fannie and Freddie. We know they are broke. They are $190 billion-- that you have now committed for, to pay to get them out of hock-- Congress created that $190 billion. That is where we are today. It is going to be $300 or $400 billion that we have to pay--we will be required to pay, citizens of this country.

Social Security. People say it is not broke. We have $2.5 trillion worth of IOUs. Well, the fact is, that money is gone. Congress stole it, spent it on other things. Now we lack the ability to go into international financial markets to borrow that money to put that trust fund whole.

So why do we need to reform Social Security? So we can make sure it is there in the future. What we do know is in 2032 now, according to the trustees, everybody on Social Security will only get 77 percent of what they are promised, and every year after that it will decline, so that when my kids are on Social Security, they will get about 40 percent of what the average Social Security recipient gets now. We know we can fix it. We know we can fix it and make it sustainable forever. But we will not do that because that is politically difficult.

The U.S. Post Office is bleeding every day. Yet we have not fixed it. We are going to do a gimmick to buy some time. But the fact is, we have set it up under a system when they negotiate labor contracts under the arbitration system. They cannot consider the financial health of the Post Office. That would be like paying somebody to mow your grass and saying, they will set the price on it and you cannot negotiate what the price is. Yet they are going to lose $8 to $10 billion this year and more every year going forward, and we have not fixed it, not done anything.

Cash for Clunkers. Absolute--when you look at the dollars--and the home buyer program, the new home buyer program--they actually had a negative effect on the economy. That is what the studies show now. So we blew through all of that money.

The highway trust fund--what is used to build highways and roads and bridges in our country--is broke. We are looking for $13 billion to try to make it whole, and all we did was transfer the last 3 years to that. Rather than reform it, we did not do anything about it.

The new government-run health care program. Here is what we know. The new studies show that over half of the employers in this country will drop their insurance for the people who presently have insurance at work. Hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxpayer money is going to be required to subsidize the exchanges those people are going to go into, because the penalty for dropping somebody's insurance is economically too low to keep employers from doing that.

We have all of these programs that are broke, and we have a discussion about the debt ceiling, but we are not talking about what is the real problem. This government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. Twice as big. It would be great if all of it were constitutional, it would be great if it were all effective, it would be great if it were all efficient, and it would be great if we could afford it. But the fact is, we are where we are today, with a $1.6 trillion deficit, because we cannot afford the government we have.

So we have not concentrated on the very areas where we can find mutual agreement. We have had three bipartisan bills in here where we have cut money, significant money, billion here, $5 billion here, $7 billion here, $3 billion here, go through the Senate with vast majority votes, only to go nowhere, because the allowance for the debate on the underlying bills was stopped. The bills were pulled.

So what do we do? Well, the first thing we do is we look at what the problems are. What are the problems? We have 100 different programs with 100 sets of bureaucracies for surface transportation alone. Why do we do that? Why have we not fixed it? That is a question the American people ought to be asking.

We have 82 programs to improve the quality of our teachers, run by the Federal Government across 7 different agencies. Only one of them is at the Department of Education. Why are we doing that? Where is the assessment of how well they work? Where are the metrics to say we should be spending this money in this way because we are getting a return? Not one of them has a metric on it. Not one of them has ever been measured on whether it is effective.

We have 88 economic development programs in 4 agencies, for which we spend $6.8 billion, and we have another 100 economic development programs in 6 other agencies, for which we spend another $4 billion, and not one of them has ever been measured to see if it improves economic activity. And if, in fact, it does, why do we have 188 separate agencies to stimulate economic development? I mean, this is not complicated stuff. It is common sense. Every American, other than the Congress, would fix that.

We have 56 programs to teach financial literacy to the American people. First of all, I question whether we ought to be teaching anybody financial literacy as a government when we run it so poorly. But if, in fact, we do, why do we have 56? And, oh, by the way, not one of them has ever been measured to see if it effectively teaches somebody financial literacy.

We have 47 job training programs which cost $18 billion a year, 9 different agencies, 9 different sets of bureaucracies, and all of them but three overlap with the other. That is according to the Government Accountability Office. Why? Why would we do that?

We have 18 programs for food for the hungry. That is something we all want to be involved in. Eighteen? Why 18 sets of bureaucracies? How well are they working? Are they effective? Could we do them better? The question has not even been asked by Congress.

We have homeless programs for both prevention and assistance--20, 6 different agencies. So you have 20 different sets of bureaucracies that are designed to do the same thing.

Disaster response and preparedness, inside FEMA alone. Inside FEMA alone, we have 17 different programs, inside that one agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

I ask the question: Why? Why hasn't it been a priority for us to work on this?

Yes.

Mr. President, Let me reclaim my time. There are absolutely no cuts in what either Senator Reid or Speaker Boehner proposed in discretionary spending. The spending will rise $832 billion over the next 10 years in the discretionary accounts.

Only in Washington is that a cut. Quite frankly, I am willing to work with my colleagues. I have been out there. I said we have to move and eliminate some of these loopholes; we have to reform the Tax Code. I am willing to take heat from my side on that.

What I am not willing to take anymore is a Senate that will not work on the details of the specific problems. What I am trying to do is outline where the problems are. Where is the leadership? We didn't do it when we were in charge either, I say to Senator Kerry. There has been a failure of leadership in this country, in this body, to attack these very problems. When we have 47 job training programs and none of them are working well--because that is what we do know, because the very few times they have been looked at, they don't work--and we are spending $18 billion a year and we are not fixing them, the American people have to say: What is wrong with you all?

What we have to do is evaluate the effectiveness of every program in the Federal Government. We have to limit the overhead cost to Federal programs. We have put ideas out there--and this is $9 trillion worth of cuts--not Washington cuts but American cuts--money we are not going to spend that is less than what we are spending today, not money we are not going to spend that we would have spent more the next year. These are real cuts. Each one of these is in here, backed by the facts, not biased. We could disagree with where we make cuts but not with the facts in here.

All the facts come from the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, the OMB, the President's budget, in terms of his recommendations and why, and the CBO. We will not go there.

My problem with the Senate is that we will not do our work. We are as guilty--and this is not partisan to me. Our country's future is at stake. When we have two bills--one last night and one today--that are literally lying to the American people when they say cuts, I think it is unconscionable.

Let me finish, if I may. I will yield to the Senator in a moment. The fact is, we will not tell the truth to the American people.

The first truth is, if we will be honest with them, they will understand the necessities that will have to be brought forward to be able to solve the problem. But denying what the problem is, we will never get consensus in this country and the embrace of the American people to do what everybody in this body knows is eventually going to have to be done.

In 5 years, we will not have a Medicare system that is similar to the Medicare system we have today. It is absolutely unsustainable. We will never be able to borrow the money to do it. We are going to get a debt downgrade no matter what we do. So rather than continue to be dishonest with the American people about the status of where we are, we ought to embrace them and call for the very things that made this country great--the sacrifice of the citizens to rebuild the potential for our future, recreate a renewal in our country that embraces the things that made us great--a true free enterprise system, with a limited government that will actually allow people to be rewarded for their hard work and their blood, sweat, and toil--get that back and have the government take a fair share of that. On the upside, it should be more; on the downside, it should be less. I agree.

The question is, Will we do it or will we continue a charade to the American people, continuing to tell them we are going to cut $900 billion out of the discretionary budget when, in fact, we are going to increase it 832?

There is only a $2 billion difference between Senator Reid's plan and Speaker Boehner's plan on discretionary spending. Both are untruthful to the American people. Both of them take the American people as a lap and say we can wink and nod at them and tell them something that is not true and walk out of here saying we spent less money. We are only going to spend less than we planned to spend, which was too much in the first place, which was unsustainable.

Our deal is that we don't have the courage to actually make the cuts listed in here. We don't have the courage to eliminate the waste, and we don't have the courage to eliminate the duplication. Why? Because every one of these programs has a political backing. We are politicians. Unfortunately, too often, we are that instead of statesmen. It is time for us--both sides--to lead this country, to lead the country in a vision of here is the real truth of our problem.

Now let's have a debate about what should be the No. 1 priority. How much should we spend on defense? Should we continue to allow contracts to go way overrun? Should we continue to allow requirement creep in contracts--not just in defense but in homeland security, HHS. The same problems we have in defense we have in all the other big agencies. We buy $64 billion worth of IT every year in this country, and $37 billion of it is wasted, totally blown. Why? What have we done about it? Not one thing. We don't look at the high risk for the GAO on IT. Every year that happens. The Census Bureau spent $600 million on a device that never worked. There was no penalty for the company that did it. We paid it anyway. It was a cost-plus contract, and the reason it never worked is because we had requirement creep all the way through.

We don't have any grownups making the purchases for this country-- nobody with experience. So we are doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. We need to be doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons, considering that we make sure we take care of those who need it and demand participation from everybody else.

We need to cap the total number of Federal employees--not because we want to but because we don't have any other choice. We don't have to let anybody go; just through attrition we can downsize the Federal Government.

We waste $15 billion every 5 years on managing properties in this country that we own that are vacant. Yet we are spending that money on them. We cannot get a real property bill through. How valuable to us is $15 billion? We have to start paying attention to the pennies, nickels, and dimes. We will not do it.

Unnecessary government printing--including us. I have been trying to get the elimination of this for 3 years. There are millions of dollars we can save by not printing the copies of this every day, which nobody looks at--except I did see my good friend from Illinois looking at a vote last night. But he could have gotten it online out of

his BlackBerry. We are tearing down trees to print paper we don't need.

Mr. President, how much time do I have?

Yes.

I don't disagree that those negotiations are going on as we speak. I am not a party to them. I don't know if the Senator from Massachusetts is. I suspect the Presiding Officer is. We are not going to decide that. That will come to us for a decision. Look, I worked for a long number of months with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. I put my name on a bill that doesn't fix it, but it was something to get us moving. It is better than where we are today. I agree with the Senator. But that is not good enough. We are not good enough yet to be where we need to be if we are actually going to solve the problem.

Let me finish going through this. We need to end no-bid contracts in this country. To give a specific example, before he left, Senator LeMieux got through on the business bill prescreening of payments on Medicare payments, so we don't just pay them and then go chase the fraud. We got through a bill that required the Centers for Medicaid Services to put in a program to look to see if they ought to pay the bill.

What they did is signed a cost-plus contract for $77 million with a firm that has never done that before and didn't take a fixed-price contract from firms that have already done it before. Tell me how we let that happen. Yet it happened. When we had testimony in the committee, they said it was a fixed-price contract, only to write back and say it was not a fixed-price contract. We need some common sense in our government.

We need to disclose the text and cost of legislation prior to passage. We need to identify duplicative government programs. We have done that in here. There are hundreds of thousands of them throughout the Federal Government. We need to eliminate them. We need to mandate congressional oversight. That is where our leaders have failed on both sides. They have not mandated the committee chairmen to do the oversight required to solve this problem. We need to freeze the size of this government. We cannot afford the government we have. The debate is about what will happen in the future. What will be the revenue increases and the spending increases?

Nobody is talking about decreasing the size of the Federal Government. We can't afford this government. We can't afford to continue to spend the money we are spending.

I will close with this. If we continue to be less than straightforward with the American people about what we are doing, about the Reid bill--and the reason I wanted to debate the Boehner bill is I wanted to make this point on the Boehner bill--when we call something a cut of $900 billion, just because the CBO says we are going to spend $900 billion less than what we were planning to spend, but it's still $832 billion more than what we are spending now, that is not a cut anywhere except in Washington. We ought to admit it. If that is the best we can do, the American people need to know that is the best we can do. But we can't play the games anymore.

I have another colleague, I think, who would like to speak, and with the remaining time, I would yield to her.

Is the Senator from Alaska interested in speaking?

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

I ask to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, we have a lot in front of us as a nation. Our perception is that our country is anxious, and I think it has good reason to be anxious, but it doesn't have anything to do with the debt ceiling debate. It should be anxious because we are not listening. We are not paying attention to the anxiety and fear and worry that the country they know and the freedoms and liberties they have are slipping away from them. They are slipping away because we are putting America into debtor's prison. We are slowly losing our ability to make free choices about our future because we failed to be responsible in the past with the money the American people have given us.

We have had a lot of debates and a lot of statements over the last couple of weeks, but no one ever talks about what the real problem is. The real problem is we are spending money on things with good intentions that don't accomplish their purposes. We are spending money we don't have on things we don't absolutely need, and the programs we do have, we fail to oversee to see that they are running both efficiently and effectively. As a consequence, we find ourselves in the midst of an economic downturn with a $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion deficit, borrowing $4 billion a day. That means every day and a half, we borrow more money than the State of Oklahoma spends in a year. We hear all of the political speeches and all of the fingerpointing, but we don't hear the real solutions to our problem.

Let me explain what I mean. Everybody agrees we are going to have to make some cuts, but not everybody is honest about the numbers associated with those cuts. Everybody agrees we are going to have to tighten our belt, but nobody wants to offer specifically where to tighten our belt. What I wish to do today is offer specific places where the government today--right today, in this body and the one across the Capitol--could make a big difference in the outcome of our future by cutting specific programs this week and next week.

That is the one rare thing we never hear in Washington. Everybody says we need to cut, but when it gets down to talking about what to cut, nobody wants to come up with any cogent ideas because they don't want to take the political heat, because every program, no matter how well intended and how inefficient, has those people who are going to fight for that program because it has money coming into the coffers for something.

The other point I wish to make is the reason we are anxious and the reason we are worried is we have abandoned the very principles our Founders gave us that would keep us healthy, and that was the Constitution and its enumerated powers section, which spelled out very succinctly what was our responsibility and what was the States' responsibility.

So we have whole departments. One, for example, would be the Department of Education that Thomas Jefferson said if we ever have the Federal Government doing anything on education, we would have to change the Constitution. That is a direct quote of his. He was one of our Founders. He, as well as Madison and Monroe and others, wrote extensively about what their intentions were in the Federalist Papers. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be walked, like in a dream state, into the contention that the Constitution does not make any difference and that it would, in fact, if we paid attention to it, limit our opportunities for the mistakes we have made. The mistakes we have made--though well-intentioned--are that we can be the answer for every problem in America. We cannot.

What made our country great was self-reliance, individual freedom and initiative, personal responsibility and accountability. That is what built our country, in a system that said: If, in fact, you work hard, the opportunity is there for you to gain, for you and those you love. Now we have a government that at every place, for every decision that is for the economic benefit of those individuals who would grab that dream, they are confronted with layers upon layers of bureaucracy, with rules and regulations, to the point where no longer are they presumed innocent by the Federal Government, they are presumed guilty, and they have to prove themselves innocent to the bureaucracy to be able to accomplish that which would set them free, that which would put them ahead, that which would establish an opportunity to gain the wealth this country promised.

I put forward a week ago last Monday $9 trillion in potential cuts. Now, I know people are not all going to agree with me, but every one of these cuts is backed up with a government study that says what we are doing in these programs is not effective. Whether it is the Congressional Research Service, the inspector generals, the Government Accountability Office, OMB, or the Congressional Budget Office, there are over 3,000 footnotes to the 600 pages that are in here that explain very well why we should not be doing this $9 trillion worth of stuff.

I understand we can have a great debate on whether, one, it is our constitutional responsibility. Some of it certainly is when it comes to defense. No. 2, we can have a great debate on what we think are priorities, those things that fit within the Constitution that are our responsibility. But we cannot debate the facts of the outright waste, the outright fraud, the outright abuse, and the outright duplication of multiple sets of programs.

This is far from a complete list, as shown in this chart. But over the next 10 years, we could save $150 billion to $200 billion just by eliminating duplicative programs. We have over 100 programs on surface transportation. That is 100 sets of bureaucracies, 100 offices, 100 sets of regulations, 100 sets of rules. The question we ought to ask is, If we have responsibility on surface transportation, why in the world do we have 100 different programs?

We have 82 teacher improvement and training programs run by the Federal Government. Nobody will come down here and answer me why. It is indefensible we have it. Yet nobody will come down here and join me to eliminate it. We have to be asking the question: Do we have good reason to be anxious when we will not do the obvious?

We have over 180 economic development programs, but we have 88 economic development programs that we spend $6.8 billion a year on run by four separate agencies, and not one of them has a study that shows they are effective in developing economic activity--not one of them. So why would we continue to send money into programs with good intentions that are not working? Yet we have over 180 of them, 88 within four departments. We have not been able to find all the rest of them, but we know they exist.

That is 88 sets of bureaucrats, well-intentioned Federal Government workers doing what this Congress and Congresses before us have told them to do but not accomplishing the purpose for which that money-- almost $7 billion a year--is sent.

We have 80 other separate programs for transportation assistance. You see the little community vehicles, the ones to help those who have a disability. Why do we have 80 separate programs? Nobody can answer that. It is easy to figure out how they happen. They are well- intentioned. We ought to help people who cannot get around. The question that ought to be asked is, Is that a State responsibility or a Federal responsibility? If it is a Federal responsibility--that is debatable, but if it is, why would we have 80 separate programs?

We have 56 different programs run by seven different agencies to teach Americans financial literacy. We have to ask ourselves the question: How can a government that is running a $1.6 trillion deficit and has $14 trillion of debt--and our debt-to-GDP ratio is 100 percent--how do we have any authority to teach anybody about financial literacy? That is No. 1.

No. 2, where is it in the Constitution that we are responsible for teaching people financial literacy? That is both a State function, a city function, and a

family function. Yet we have 56 programs, and not one of them has a metric to study whether it is effective--not one of them.

Job training: We spent $18.8 billion on job training this last year. We have 47 different programs. The Government Accountability Office says, of those 47 programs, all of them overlap except 3. So based on the study of the people we pay to study this, the most we should have is 4 job training programs. And we are going to spend almost $19 billion on that? Here is what we know. The results cannot justify that we are spending the money because the results do not show performance. Yet we are spending $18 billion.

We have 20 different programs for homeless assistance and prevention. That is a great role. We all want to help the homeless. We want to do whatever we can to get them in a stable situation, to assist them. But 20 different programs? Why would we do that? Why wouldn't we have one? And why wouldn't only the one program be administered through a State if, in fact, it is our role? I happen to think that is the State of Oklahoma's role to take care of the homeless people in Oklahoma, not the Federal Government's. But if it is the Federal Government's role, why would we have 20 programs?

Food for the hungry: 18 separate programs, 5 different agencies. Again, I am all for helping those people who need to have food. Why would we have 18 sets of bureaucracies, 18 different sets of rules--18 different sets? And 2 of these actually work; 16 do not, but we have not eliminated them. We are still sending the money out the door.

Disaster response and preparedness inside FEMA: Just for disaster response and preparedness, there are 17 programs just inside FEMA. That does not count all the disaster response and preparedness programs in all the other government agencies. That is just inside FEMA. We have to ask the questions: What are we doing? One, what have we done in the past? And what are we going to do about the problems that are in front of us today?

So I would propose that we are off base, and we have a good reason to be anxious about us because we will not address these problems. When we bring amendments to the floor, they get routinely defeated. Why is that? Is it that we are being dishonest about the facts or is it we are protecting the politicians so they are not attacked by the very people who are benefiting indirectly--not directly, but indirectly--from these programs, the bureaucracies and the other quasi-governmental agencies that feed off these programs?

So where do we go to start fixing this $1.6 trillion deficit? I had some wonderful employees of the Social Security Administration come to me about a year and a half ago, and they said--and they wanted to remain anonymous; and I understand why--they said our disability program is broken. We are giving disability checks to thousands of people every year who are not disabled.

So we started looking at it in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and here is what we found. If we take veterans totally out of the mix--this does not apply to veterans--1 in 18 people in this country today is collecting a disability check.

As a physician, I have done all sorts of disability examinations. What we are finding is about 40 percent of the people who are on disability are not disabled because the law says to be disabled in this country, and to receive a check from the rest of us for that disability, there can be no job in the economy they can do.

Yet we have judges who never deny anybody when they come through the disability program. We have people on disability who are working full time at other jobs. Once they are eligible for a disability check, 2 years after that they are eligible for health care.

So now we have undermined the system that was designed to help the truly disabled by having thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people collecting a disability check, which means there is not going to be a check for somebody else.

The disability trust fund, which we pay into when we work--as well as SSI, which is a separate fund that comes just from our tax dollars--is belly up. Next year, the Social Security disability trust fund runs out of money. The reason it is running out of money is the Social Security system does not say: If you were disabled and now you are not, why are you still taking the money when you are back at work? They do not do their job because the leadership at Social Security does not demand that the job is being done.

So we have significant ways of improving that to make sure we are helping those people who are truly disabled. But we cannot get anybody to help us get that law passed. To say we want to clean up Social Security disability does not mean we do not care about the people who are disabled. It means we care about those who are going to be disabled in the future, so we will have a dollar to help them when that need arises for them.

So it is just one of those areas. It has not been looked at in 25 years. The Social Security system--once you are on, you are on. They rarely take anybody off. The fraud associated with collecting a disability check and working for cash in our economy--and working not for cash, even working full-blown jobs--we had three instances where we had the Government Accountability Office film people, two of whom actually worked as salaried employees for the Federal Government, who were collecting disability at the same time they were collecting checks from the Federal Government as a Federal employee. And it is not small; it is big.

So there is $60 billion over 10 years that we could save just by reforming the Social Security disability system. That does not say we do not want to help people who are disabled. It says we want to do the best for our country and help those people who are disabled. But we have undermined self-reliance. We have found people who want to take advantage of our charity and love and care. So, therefore, they cheat the system. We have an incompetent bureaucracy that does not take them off the system, and we have an incompetent system of jurisprudence within the Social Security Administration that puts people on who should never be on. But the attack comes that we do not care about people if, in fact, we want to fix this program.

Social Security: Everybody says do not touch Social Security. This Congress and the Congress before it has stolen $2.5 trillion from the money we put into Social Security. They have written a little, bitty IOU note and said: Well, when you need the money, we will pay it back.

What does that mean? That means the full faith and credit of this country has to be good enough that when we get ready to pay the $2.5 trillion back, we can borrow the money at an acceptable interest rate to be able to pay it back.

So what do the Social Security Administration trustees say we need to do? They say we have to make it sustainable. And, oh, by the way, wouldn't it be nice if the poorest people on Social Security could get a little bump so we could help those who are truly dependent on it and make it sustainable so we never have to discuss Social Security again? Even with the baby boomers, we ought to do that.

So what we have done is designed a solvent path over 75 years based on Social Security where we are likely to achieve it. We did not raise anybody's taxes. We help those the most who are in need the most, and for those who are the most well off, we said: You cannot have quite as much. In other words, we means tested it.

We said: If you are very wealthy, you will eventually get your money out, but not like everybody else will. The people who need it the most, we are going to help the most. It alters the retirement age just to go along with life expectancy. It does not alter life. It alters that 2 years over 60 years.

But the fact is, our life expectancy is far advanced from what it was when we first started Social Security.

When we first started, we had almost 50 people working for everybody who is on Social Security. Now we have less than five, and it is not going to be long where we are going to have less than three. It is not sustainable unless we change that. So the point is, I understand Social Security is important to people in this country. But if we do not change it, in 2035, we are going to get two-thirds of the benefits you put in. We are not going to get any more than that.

So do we fix it now and make it sustainable forever or do we just wait until it goes belly up, knowing we cannot borrow the $2.5 trillion that was

stolen from it and let it go belly up? The typical politician says: I do not want to do that because I do not want to take the heat to have to explain that to people on Social Security or coming on Social Security.

I do not have any problems trying to explain it. It is the right thing for us to do. We have to fix it, and we can fix it, if, in fact, we are going to save our country. That is one of the things we have to do to make sure the people who buy our bonds, loan us the money, recognize we have a salvageable situation. Ignoring Social Security--it is our second biggest issue now, other than health care--it is our second biggest issue. To ignore it and not fix it says we will not be able to borrow the money for it or anything else.

Let me spend a minute going through a couple things we can do next week that would save a lot of money--not hard, not controversial. The question America ought to ask is, Why have we not already done it? Let me give some examples. We ought to quit paying unemployment compensation to millionaires. Do you realize last year we paid $20 million out in unemployment compensation to people who were making $1 million that year. Is that nuts or what?

Unemployment is to help those people who are in need who are unemployed. It is not to give money to people who do not need it because they are unemployed. Yet we spent almost $20 million last year paying people unemployment compensation who made $1 million last year.

We could save $1 billion over 10 years if we quit making payments to dead people. You say: Oh well, you do not make payments to dead people. Yes, we do--$100 million a year that bureaucracies pay to people who are dead and a good portion of it we never get back. It is gone. We do not follow that up.

We know we can save $5 billion a year minimum--minimum--if we just eliminated some of the overlapping programs I talked about. That is a very conservative estimate. It is probably more akin to $25 billion a year. But let's say it is one-fifth of that--$5 billion a year. That is $50 billion. That would keep us from borrowing money for 14 days just by eliminating duplication in government programs.

We could eliminate $2 billion over 10 years by eliminating sweetheart contracts and bonuses to contractors who work for the Federal Government who do not earn their bonuses. Yes, we do that. We pay bonuses to people who both do not perform and do not perform on time. You would not do it. If someone came in to do something for you on a fixed price with a bonus based on quality and time and they did not meet it, you would not pay them the bonus. But your Federal Government does anyway.

We could save $1 billion over 10 years by collecting unpaid taxes owed to us by our own Federal employees. Taxes that are owed, they have been adjudicated, there is nothing else going on, it is final, it is set, but we do not take the money out of their pay. That number is growing every year, the amount of money they owe.

We could save $3.82 billion by reducing the amount of money Congress spends on itself by just 15 percent. Would it be too much to ask of the Congress to tighten its belt by 15 percent and save 1 day's borrowing? No. I turn back, on average, about $500,000 to $600,000 a year on what is allocated to my Senate office. I do not do that to be able to say I do it; I do it because I do not need it because I know how to run an office efficiently and pay people effectively. But the fact is, we have too big a budget, and we need to trim it. We need to lead by example.

We could save $480 million a year just by having HRSA, the Health Resources and Services Administration, pay the right prices for drugs in their programs versus paying too high prices--prices higher than what they contracted for. One-half billion dollars does not sound like much. But $\1/2\ billion over 10 years, that is $5 billion. That is one three-hundredths of what our problem is right now in terms of the deficit.

We could save $5 billion by eliminating unnecessary government printing. We could do that tomorrow--$5 billion.

We could get $15 billion back by getting rid of unnecessary government buildings we are not using, that are costing us $8 billion a year to maintain. I cannot remember the exact number. I think we have 63,000 facilities right now the Federal Government owns--63,000 that are underutilized or not utilized at all. That is 12,000 more than we had 2 years ago, and we are signing new leases for buildings all the time and abandoning the buildings the government owns.

The Federal Government should dispose of excess property within 5 years. According to President Obama's own administration, we could save, at a minimum, $15 billion. Every time we have tried to do this, somebody stops it in the Senate.

We can end subsidies for ethanol blending. We voted on it, had 74 Senators vote on it, but it did not happen. That is $2 billion we could save this year if we passed it tomorrow. We can decrease the number of limousines owned by the Federal Government, save $115 million. We could reduce the Federal vehicle fleet, $5.6 billion.

The Federal Government--you will not believe this number--the Federal Government owns 662,000 cars--662,000. The average mileage on them is less than 20,000 miles. The fleet has grown by 5 percent and the cost of maintaining and servicing the fleet has grown over 25 percent in the last 2 years--$4.6 billion a year just maintaining these 600,000-plus cars.

The amount of vehicles in our fleet could easily be decreased by 20 percent. We have all the capability of having GoToMeeting, of having Internet, of having live chats, of having telecommunications with visual conferencing. We have all those things available. We do not need the cars we have. Even the Obama administration agrees we can do that.

We could save $43 billion by decreasing travel by government agencies--same reason. We spend $15 billion a year on travel--$15 billion. Anything that is not mission critical and that could be done through teleconferencing ought to be done. We advertise. The advertising budget for the Federal Government, $5.6 billion a year. They do not pay for public service ads. These are ads outside of public service ads--$5.6 billion. We spend $1 billion a year hosting government conferences. The Federal Government now owns 685 million acres in the United States. The cost to maintain that, we are not funding. The land is falling in worse disrepair. We are adding land every year. There is lots of land we could give up that is not a precious resource, is not a heritage area, is not forest, is not a park. Yet we own it.

We could save a lot of money by not having so much land and put it back on the tax rolls. We could save $4.1 billion just on our last 2 years' average, in terms of slowing down and not buying additional land, unless there is a direct necessity for the Federal Government to have it.

We could save $19 billion over 10 years by combining the PXs and exchanges on our military bases--$19 billion just by putting them together. That is what we could save.

I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes.

No objection.

Let me end with this. It costs us, to educate a student on our military bases, an average of $51,000 a student. If we look at the locations where all those are located, the cost outside is one- fourth of that. We could easily do that and pay the community. But we will not.

I will end with this. We can solve our problems. There is $9 trillion worth of specific savings in this. We do not have to agree with all this. We do not even have to agree with half of it. If we agreed with one-third of them, we would be well on our way. The fact is, nobody wants to be specific. We need to be specific. Everybody wants to talk in generalities. Nobody wants to make the hard choices. Hard choices are what we are here for.

Our time has come to stop living the next 30 years on the backs of our kids. It would be my hope that as we go through this process the next 2 weeks,

we will see a renewal in the spirit of our country that says: We are going to live within our means, we are going to reward self-reliance, we are going to reward individual accountability, we are going to reward personal responsibility, and we are going to put the role of the government back where it should be both at the Federal and State level and have commensurate policies that will reflect that, that will renew our country, that will create jobs, that will create opportunity for the future of our country.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wanted to spend some time talking about what is coming forth Saturday morning. As a member of the Gang of 6, I am wanting us to solve our problem. But the best way to solve that problem would be the bill that is going to be voted on Saturday morning. Why is

that? We are borrowing $4 billion a day, and I have enough gray hair to know that regardless of all the good intention and regardless of all the statements of the Members on the floor that we will never live within our means in Washington until we are forced to live within our means, and just because a constitutional amendment would take probably 4 years to pass--given what the American people think about it--isn't a reason not to go on and do it no matter what we do about our short-term problem coming up August 2. So the very fact people would say we are not going to pass the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act because it won't happen in a period of time is exactly the same approach that got us $14.3 trillion in debt, that has our credit rating at risk and puts us in the kind of problems we have today.

I have offered a plan I think is even better. I know not many of my colleagues will, but here is a plan to cut $9 trillion over the next 10 years. It is the only plan that specifically states what you would cut, where you would cut it, and why you would cut it. It is backed up with the facts. Nobody else can claim it. You don't have to like all of them, but what we do know is if something doesn't come out of this body between now and August 2 that cuts at least $4 trillion, this country is going to see significantly increased interest rates as a cost of that. What so often happens is you hear wonderful words and wonderful speeches on the Senate floor but nobody putting their name on where you would cut. Well, I put my name on $9 trillion worth of cuts. It pinches everybody in this country. Everybody. But you know what. We are all in this. We have lived for the last 30 years on the backs of those who are going to pay the taxes for the next 30 years. It is time we start paying back. It is time we start giving back.

The Senate is a different place today than when I came to the Senate. When I came to the Senate, the idea was not to block legislation but to discuss legislation, to have the courage and the backbone to vote against something and go home and tell your constituents why you voted against it, to offer amendments you thought would improve legislation and defend those amendments, and to vote for a bill you thought was in the best interest of the country and be able to defend that. What has happened in the last 3\1/2\ years in the Senate is we don't vote because the politicians of the Senate don't want to go home and explain their positions. So if you are not voting, you are not accountable and you are not responsible.

That type of behavior is exactly the opposite behavior we need to have. So Saturday morning, when Members of the Senate vote against proceeding to cut, cap, and balance, they will display either courage or cowardice. I am not talking about simple words. There is only one plan that has passed the House of Representatives that raises the debt limit and addresses what is said to be needed by the rating agencies, and that is cut, cap, and balance. And to not allow proceeding to that debate whether you agree with it or not--you can change it through amendments. You have the votes to change it through amendments. But to not allow it to proceed so the American people can see their elected Senators and their real positions and what they know has to be done-- you know, what happens around here is we say things so we can protect our political careers. You know what that does? We are not only bankrupting financially, we are bankrupting our country's history and heritage. The heritage of this country was sacrifice, and that means even sacrifice of political careers to do the right thing right now for the country.

I believe if you were to pass something like this, we would lower our debt by at least $2 trillion over the next 10 years, the economy would absolutely boom, and we would quit undermining self-reliance and enforcing dependency. We would hold accountable a Pentagon that is wasteful, we would eliminate duplication of hundreds of programs that all do the same thing with multiple layers of redundancy and administrative bureaucracy. If we were to do that, this proposal will never come to a vote in the Senate nor any of the aspects of it because Senators don't want to make those hard choices, and that is what the debate about cut, cap, and balance is all about. It forces Senators to go back to embrace the heritage of this country and make the hard choices. If you don't pass a balanced budget amendment and you don't force the discipline, the political expediency of this country will continue to run and the problems will not be solved.

I would also say raising the debt limit doesn't have anything to do with our real problems. That is just the symptom of the problem. The problem is not living within our means. Somehow thinking the U.S. Government is different than all the State governments, all the city and county governments, every family in this country, every business in this country, and every other organization in this country that has to live within its means, I refuse to believe the American people will not hold Members of the Senate accountable for not giving them a chance to put those fixed parameters on us and their government for the future.

We are going to hear all sorts of reasons why we can't do that, why we won't do that, or we may not hear many at all. What we will see is voting against the procedure with no comment whatsoever. My plan is if that happens, to be all over this country to make sure every citizen of every State of every Senator who does not allow them to proceed is aware of that. I want to personally make them aware of that. Because what you are doing is denying the liberty and the freedom of this country to hold you accountable to do the right thing. So we are going to see.

I wanted to spend a few minutes saying that the only thing that is possible right now to solve the problems in front of us--even though I have endorsed a $9 trillion plan and $3.7 trillion plan--the only thing is this $6 trillion plan. It has passed the House of Representatives. They voted to increase the debt limit and they put significant cuts into our budget for next year. They put significant caps as we go forward and they said we have to vote to pass a balanced budget amendment. Right now that is the only thing that will get us out of a jam. You know what. That is not hard to do. The first point, we are going to cut another $111 billion at least next year, no matter whether that passes. We are going to cap spending in the years that go forward whether or not that bill passes. But the difference is as soon as we get our balance again, the politicians who don't want to make hard choices will be back to not making hard choices and we will get in trouble again. That is why it is absolutely critical that this country's citizens have the ability to hold us accountable within the parameters of living within our means.

We will hear all sorts of reasons why we can't do that, that it might hurt the poor. Nobody here wants to in any way intend anything other than support for those who cannot help themselves. That is their excuse, we can't do that. Well, let me tell you what is going to happen in our country. The very programs that help the poor are going to be diminished in the future through fiscal necessity when we are mandated to make cuts to be able to borrow more money. So it is a false statement because by not voting for a balanced budget amendment, what you are saying is I want to plan one thing but I know something else is going to happen.

I paraphrase a statement by Martin Luther King that I think describes this place more than anything I have ever known and it was this: Vanity asks the question: Is something popular? Cowardice asks the question: Is it expedient? Character asks the question: Is it true and right? We have tons of vanity. We have tons of cowardice. We limit ourselves on courage and character.

As we listen to the debate over the next 2 days on this motion to proceed on the only thing that will solve the problem in front of us today, I want my colleagues to listen for political expediency, I want my colleagues to listen for vanity, and then I want them to search hard for courage and character because we will see an absence of it from those who oppose this. They know this will solve the problem. They know this is one of the few things that can pass the House of Representatives. Yet we are not going to have it come to the floor for an amendment process, for a full debate, and for a vote. We are not going to allow it to have a vote because

we are political cowards. We do not want to truly address the problem because it might affect our political careers. That is a sad commentary on the heritage of this country--a sad commentary--but it is a commentary to be expected; otherwise, we would never have gotten into the position we are in today.

Let me talk about some details of what we can do. We are going to hear all sorts of reasons why we can't do things and all sorts of reasons why we couldn't come up with $9 trillion. But when the American people truly know what is going on--if they go and read about it in ``Back in Black''--when they find out about the background of all the waste, all the duplication, all the stupidity that goes on in our government, all the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility in bureaucratic agencies, all the silly decisions that get made that spend billions of dollars and don't help anything--the Tax Code. Tax earmarks and tax credit and tax expenditures are nothing but, most of the time, corporate welfare or socialism. The greatest tax in the world comes when we allow the Federal Reserve to print money which devalues our assets through inflation and the earnings on those assets. So the greatest tax in the world that is coming in America is we are going to devalue the dollar and inflation is going to go up and what we can earn on our assets is going to be limited by the interest rates, and the differential is that which we actually lose in real value of what we own every day.

The other thing I would point out is, through the tax earmarks and tax credits in our Tax Code, anybody who doesn't get one of those is actually paying for it. So if a person doesn't have an ``in'' up here, if a person doesn't have a lobbyist, if a person doesn't have some special interest looking out for them and they are not getting one of those, they are paying for them through the increased taxes. It is inherently unfair.

Let's look at duplication for a minute. It is interesting to look, as we have gone through the government programs in a detailed fashion, at the GAO report. We have 100 different programs with 100 sets of bureaucracies for surface transportation. Why do we have that? Because Congress has mismanaged. That is why. Because of expediency, because of vanity, because of wanting to get reelected, we create another program, another program, another program. It looks good and sounds good, but nobody ever does the research to see where they overlap. Nobody ever requires us to ask if this program is effective, and nobody ever looks at the Constitution to see if it fits with article I, section 8 of the Constitution--the enumerated powers we are supposed to live by and which we blow by all the time doing things.

Today, the Judiciary Committee passed a bill for State prisons called the Second Chance Act. When we passed it the first time, I finally let it go because it was supposed to be a demonstration and a limited program. It is now going to get reauthorized for 5 more years. It legitimately has zero role for the Federal Government, and we are going to spend $600 million which we don't have. We will borrow. It is well intended, but it is not our role. It is the States' role. We have hundreds of thousands of examples such as that, where we have ignored what the Constitution says so we can look good politically.

We have teacher quality programs. Teacher quality programs--82 different programs by the Federal Government to improve the quality of our teachers. Thomas Jefferson was truly the father of education in our country. He worked for years to establish the University of Virginia. He was committed to the fact that a great education will produce great benefits, not only for the individual with the education but for their family and our country as a whole. Here is what he said: For the Federal Government to become involved in education would require a change to the U.S. Constitution, and he happened to be one of the people who wrote it.

What have we done since the beginning of the Department of Education? We have spent $2.6 trillion on education in this country at the Federal level and every parameter measuring a metric on the progression of our kids in school is worse or the same after that $2.6 trillion. Hey, it is not working. The reason it is not working is a person can be a teacher at home and the Federal Government looks at that person and they don't know what to do, but we can hire that person to do the work in Washington and all of a sudden that person knows what they need to do. So we have this massive bureaucracy that has ruined our education because we spend all our money filling out forms and requirements and meeting mandates and we have taken the power and control of education away from the parents and teachers, the very people who care most about the success of the kids. So $2.6 trillion with nothing to show for it, other than for the politicians to feel good about themselves and to say we were doing something.

We have 88 different economic development programs, with $6 billion just in four of them. Not for 1 of those 88 programs is there a metric anywhere that says it is money well spent that gets a positive result for the country. There is anecdotal evidence that says it worked here or it worked there, but we don't know what we are doing. We are throwing money we don't have at things we don't know are working and when we go to vote for them to eliminate them, the Senate votes against it because it might bother their political position. It might bother their next election. We don't do it. We don't address it and do our job.

I will never forget in one of the committees I was on last year, two separate times bills were brought up in committee that were doing identical things that we were already doing in the agencies. The Senators and their staffs didn't know it. Had I not raised objections, we would have created more agencies.

Eighty programs for transportation assistance--80. If it is our role, why do we need 80? Oh, by the way, has anybody measured to see if any of the 80 actually work? The answer is no. We have none that have a report on whether they are effective to the goals of what they were set out to do because there is no oversight carried out by Congress. We were so busy earmarking for so many years, everybody forgot to check to see if what we intended to do is working, and we still aren't doing it.

We have 56 different programs to teach the American people to become financially literate--56. The Federal Government is teaching financial literacy when we can't balance our budget. We have multiple programs. We don't live within a confined budget. The first principle of financial literacy is living within your means. Yet we have this many programs--56--to teach American citizens to be financially literate.

Job training. Here is one of the best. This is great. We have 47 job training programs that cost $16 billion a year. All but three overlap one another. That is what the GAO says, and there is not a metric on one of them to see if they are working. When we talk to the people who go through the program, half of them say it is a waste, it is a joke. I have actually talked to them. Yet we are spending that kind of money, in excess of $15 billion a year, on job training programs. There is no question we need job training programs, but we need job training programs that work. Why would we need 47? So when somebody tells you we can't balance our budget, you ought to blow a hole right through them with your thought that says you obviously don't know what is going on in the Federal Government.

Homeless prevention/assistance, 20 different Federal programs. We should be helping people who need our help. I am not denying that. But how we help and the mechanisms of the way we help ought to be frugal, efficient, and effective.

I have served in Congress--I am in my 13th year, 6 years as a Congressman, 4 years out of here to get a breath of fresh air, and now my seventh year in the Senate. What I know is, we don't know what we are doing, and it is obvious looking at our budget. It is also obvious looking at the dysfunction of the Senate and the leadership in the Senate, that we--we haven't had a budget in 2 years. The one thing any financial counselor will tell you is the first thing you have to know is where you are and set up a plan. We have had no attempt to bring a budget to this body in well over 2\1/2\ years--no attempt. What does that tell us? It goes back to vanity. It goes back to cowardice. It goes back to

us not doing what we are intended to do because we care more about our position than we care about the country.

There are 18 programs to feed the hungry. We have 17 disaster response/preparedness, just in FEMA--17 different programs, of which 11 overlap. FEMA didn't set those up. The bureaucracy didn't create those; we did. Every one of these programs was created by a Member of Congress. So we can't blame administrations and we can't blame Presidents. What we have to do is blame Congress.

We have 130 overlapping programs in the Department of Agriculture; 18 overlapping programs in the Department of Commerce; 230 overlapping programs in the Department of Education; 17 in the Department of Energy; 36 in the Department of Human Services; 32 in the Department of Homeland Security; 60 in the Department of Housing and Urban Development; 40 in the Department of the Interior; 53 in the Department of Justice; 35 in the Department of Labor; 6 in the Department of State; and 180 governmentwide if we look at all economic development programs. We just listed the 88 that run through 4 of the agencies.

Is it any wonder we are going belly up? The problem is us. The problem is we have a solution now that has come to us from the House and we are not going to let that solution go forward because politically--politically--it is uncomfortable. Politically, we don't want to allow the people of this country to decide whether we ought to live within our means and put a bridle with a bit in our mouth that says, whoa, you are not going to continue to destroy the future of this country and the prospects for our children anymore.

When I came to the Senate, I came after having read a book called ``Running On Empty.'' It was written by a man by the name of Pete Peterson. He was bipartisan in his criticism of both parties, and he was absolutely accurate. We are in trouble because parties matter more than the country, because control matters more than the country, because political careers matter more than our children or our grandchildren.

So I go back to talk about what is possible. A lot of people would disagree with what is in here; this $9 trillion of what the House has sent us would take about 60 percent of it. But here is what I say to my colleagues who don't want to vote on a balanced budget amendment, don't want to vote on cut, cap, and balance. Where is your plan? I have listed 625 pages of specific cuts, elimination of duplication, elimination of waste, elimination of fraud, and 3,000 footnotes that looked at every program throughout the Federal programs--looked at every CRS report, looked at every OIG report, looked at every GAO report, looked at every OMB report, and looked at every other outside report we could find.

The fact is, we could solve our problems tomorrow, America. We could solve them tomorrow, with good old-fashioned common sense that the vast majority of Americans have and is sorely lacking here.

We do not have a fiscal crisis. We have a commonsense crisis in this body and in the leadership in Congress. We lack common sense, we lack sound judgment, and we need the hard bit of a bridle put on us through a balanced budget amendment to control us. Because human nature is human nature in whatever we do today, we will be back to our bad habits tomorrow. Even if we pass cuts, even if we cap spending, if we do not have a balanced budget amendment that forces us to live within the constraints of our revenue, we will be back here again.

What does that mean? That means the future of America is suspect. It does not have to be. We do not have to go the way of every other republic. We do not have to fail over fiscal issues. We can cheat history. The American people are the greatest people in the world because they are a blend of all the people in the world and they desire freedom and opportunity and that is limited because we have limited it.

We, through our profligate spending, our inattention to detail, our failure to do oversight, have undercut the potential of our country. Let's restore it. Let's restore it Saturday morning by moving on to this bill and allowing ourselves to have a debate, offer amendments, and truly debate--have what the Senate has not had in a year and a half: a real debate about the issues of our day and the reasons behind it.

But I would caution the American people. Remember what Martin Luther King said as you hear that debate: Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? But conscience and right and good asks, is it right?

I tell you, it is not right to have multiple programs doing the same thing, wasting our kids' future. It is not right for the Congress not to do oversight and eliminate programs. It is not right for us to spend money we do not have on things we do not absolutely need. It is not right for us to take the control of our children's education from the parents and teachers who have their best interests at heart and place it in a bureaucracy that has no compassion whatsoever, even though it feigns that it does. It is not right. It may be politically expedient, it may be popular to some people, but it does not make it right.

As you look at this, here is how you get $9 trillion, and you can pick any part of that to meet this cut, cap, and balance or you can come up with your own. But the fact is, nobody wants to lay on the table what they think. I have already been roundly criticized in the press for certain aspects of this by people who disagree. That is fine. I am planning on defending everything I put in here. With the best of my knowledge and a great staff that spent thousands upon thousands of hours on this, we came up with a way to solve America's problems, and we can do it.

America can be bright, can be growing, can be developing jobs, if we get the government out of the way and limit the role of the Federal Government.

I see my colleague from Delaware, one of my great friends. We hear that said a lot here, but he is a great friend. It is not the conventional, common greeting. I believe I am over my time. I will be back to the floor to finish this conversation.

But America needs to know we do not have any problem we cannot fix. What we lack are leaders who will fix it. That is our deficit. It is a deficit of courage. It is a deficit of will.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from Arizona. We want to make sure any veteran who has a positive causation factor from any aspect that would lead to any disability, that we meet that need. That is not what this is about.

This has been looked at two times by the Institute of Medicine. The first time there was no study--none of the studies they cited showed even positive association. The last time we had two that showed some positive association but absolutely no causation. There is a big difference in science. Something can be associated with something and doesn't mean it causes it. On that basis, the Secretary committed this country to make payments to people for disabilities that are not associated with their service. The point is, in a limited budget going forward, if we are paying for disabilities that are not associated with service, that means we are going to have less money available for those veterans who do have a disability.

We have heard, No. 1, this will reverse all that has come before. It will not. It is prospective only. It will not change the presumption that if someone was in or above Vietnam they have the presumption of being exposed to Agent Orange. That will not change at all. The previous scientific diseases that were based on causation will not be eliminated at all. But, in fact, those that are not associated with causality will be eliminated.

Will they be eliminated in the future? If the science at some point in time shows us that there is a causal relationship between that exposure and disease, then we can do something about it. But now we are throwing money at disabilities that are not associated and not caused by veterans' exposure to this herbicide.

I ask, given where we are in this country and the fact that we are going to have a tough time funding veterans

programs in the future anyway, that we ought not spend a dollar on something that is not directly caused by a veteran's exposure to Agent Orange so that we have that dollar to pay for those who truly were exposed and truly have a disability.

I yield back to the Senator from Arizona.

They are eligible, and there are some reasons for that. But that is not what this debate is about. We are not questioning it. We are just saying on this basis we are not using science how we have used it in every other aspect of veterans' disability. Now we are going beyond science.

When we look at the total number of studies, rarely 3 percent or so show any association, and association does not imply any causation. So we have the Secretary who has made a decision to commit this country to $42 billion of additional expenditures not based on sound science but the fact that he can do that, and that is what I think is wrong. If the veterans committee thinks there is the science to do that, they should bring a bill to the floor and do that. But the science is not there. I have looked at it. I have read it. It is not there.

The Institute of Medicine says it is not there, and they say disability ought to be based on causation, not on association.

This is a commonsense amendment that will secure this for veterans and make sure we are not paying for disabilities for those who are not truly service connected, that are not based on science or causation. I know it is a tough vote, but in the environment we face today we ought to be using science to positively connect causality with any disability we grant.

With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.

I wish to make one point. The Institute of Medicine did not recommend this. As a matter of fact, their recommendation was that causality ought to be the only way in which we would do this.

I would ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.

Mr. President, let me update my colleague. I do plan to call up this amendment, and I do plan to ask for a vote on it because it is important. I will call up the amendment in a moment.

What has happened--the Senator from Arizona has had the disease melanoma, cancer melanoma at his age. We kind of know somebody at his age, if they have large amounts of Sun exposure over prolonged periods of time on nevuses or birthmarks, can develop melanoma. There is causation related to that. I have also had melanoma, but I had it as a very young man. What science also knows is that one can develop melanoma without any Sun exposure to a birthmark or a nevus or a mole.

What has happened within the VA, we have taken and gone away from causation and gone to any association that could ever be made.

I am a survivor of colon cancer. What we know is, our risk for colon cancer goes way up if we eat a highly refined diet, with very few vegetables, and have that kind of a diet associated also with high levels of sugar. I did not have any of those things, but yet I had colon cancer. Because there is an association, we cannot infer causation.

So what is happening now?

The Secretary of Veterans Affairs has put us on the hook for people who have no causation but do have association. This amendment, which I will call up, does not change our ability to do that in the future when we, in fact, would see causation. But the presumption that association with the Sun caused my melanoma is wrong. The assumption that my diet caused my colon cancer is wrong. It does cause colon cancers, but we cannot show causation.

Nobody can speak for veterans better than John McCain, having served the amount of time he did in Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He has the body image that shows his sacrifice. Let me tell you what has happened.

We are transferring $\1/2\ million to veterans under this decision by Secretary Shinseki for people who weigh 350 pounds, smoke three packs of cigarettes a day, and have hyperchol-

esterolemia because they will not take their medicine. We are saying the reason they have heart disease is because, at some point in time they were in Vietnam, because they moved from causation to association.

I can think of nothing unfairer to those who are truly needing to benefit from this than to give the benefit to somebody whose lifestyle absolutely caused their heart disease, and there is no association with dioxin or Agent Orange, the active ingredient that causes disease, which we know several of them actually did have. But now we have moved to a whole new level where we are saying if someone was exposed, both above or in Vietnam, and they have any of these other diseases which he has listed, that there can be an association.

Let me remind you that an association doesn't prove anything about cause. It just says there is a statistic out here, and it may be right or may not in fact be right. All of the evidence is the other way. The Secretary has chosen to spend $42 billion--counting last year and this year--on this program for diseases that are not caused by Agent Orange. How is that fair? How is it fair to the people who are administering this? I found out about it because VA workers called me and said: This cannot be right. What are you all doing? Why are you giving money to people who have no association with the disease caused by that? Yet you are paying them out of money that should be reserved for those who have a disease really caused by Agent Orange. Consequently, we are going to spend $42 billion that we don't have to pay people.

Another interesting fact is, I have a brother who has idiopathic pancreatitis. The VA told him that under this new guideline he can be eligible for Agent Orange compensation. He served in Korea, but because he has a chronic disease now, they are lining him up to get a payment from the VA because he has idiopathic pancreatitis. He is going to get approved. There is absolutely no association or causation with that. Yet that is what is happening.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 564 be called up, and the pending amendment be set aside.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Yes, I will.

Mr. President, the answer is that the Senator is absolutely correct. We have a lot of science that shows causation with this herbicide and disease. We have made the assumption that any other association should fall into that same category, such as hairy cell leukemia, and we know lots of things about this group to which there is only an association, statistical association, and no correlation, no causation, such as if someone has Parkinson's, they are compensated from Agent Orange. Yet there is not one scientific study that will show there is any causal relationship between those two diseases.

I will answer that I want every veteran to get the compensation due them when they have a disease related to this chemical. If we find in the future more science that would say so, then we will go on the science.

Now, we have had a Secretary who doesn't understand the difference between association and causation, and we are going to spend $42 billion that we don't have, giving it to people whose diseases were not caused by Agent Orange. That is my problem.

As a physician, I could never defend myself in a court of law using this logic on anything I would do in practicing medicine. As I stated while the Senator was talking with the chairman, we have both had melanoma. The Senator's came from something that we know is associated with it and also a cause--it is called the Sun, ultraviolet radiation. Mine didn't come from that because I didn't have that kind of exposure, and I experienced it at a very young age. Under the guidance of the Secretary, we both would be compensated as if ultraviolet light was the cause of both of our melanomas--the Senator from Arizona, appropriately; me, inappropriately.

So the fact is, no one ever wants to move back, but this is a mistake the Secretary made. My intent is not to harm any veteran who has a disease that is truly caused by Agent Orange. My intent is to make sure we can have the ability to take care of our veterans in the future by spending money wisely to compensate those who are truly injured, truly inhibited and limited by their exposure to that as a result of their service to this country.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

I call up amendment No. 553.

I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

I note the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I have been listening to the debate this morning. It is concerning to me because as a physician, I am trained to diagnose disease. Disease, if you break that word up, is ``dis'' and ``ease.'' We are not at ease, and I hear us talking all around. I listened to the senior Senator from New York very carefully and what he had to say, and I wanted to spend a few minutes actually disputing what he had to say. Because the premise he said was if we don't raise taxes, the vital things that are legitimate roles for the Federal Government would have to be eliminated, and I find that very curious because what is lacking in the Senate body today is an actual knowledge of all that we are doing.

I go back to March when the GAO report came out on the levels of duplication within the Federal Government, and that report was eye opening to many Senators. The fact is that report only covered the first third of the Federal Government. I have long said during the past 7 years in the Senate one of our problems is the government is so big, we don't know everything it does. What came out of the report was a tremendous list of duplication, programs that do exactly the same thing in multiple different agencies. For example, we have 124 different programs to encourage students in math, science, engineering, and technology. Why would we do that? Why would we pay for 124 sets of administration? Why would we have the first program for science, technology, engineering, and math that doesn't have a metric on it to see if it works? Well, you know what the report said. None of them have a metric on it to measure whether they are effective.

We have 47 different job training programs. The report said all but three of them overlapped one another and none of those have any metric to see if they are effective or work. They cost $18 billion a year.

We have 42 different programs to teach Americans how to be creditworthy and financially sound. Mr. President, 42 across 6 different agencies? The fact is the Senate doesn't know what it is talking about. When we make statements that say if, in fact, we make major cuts in the discretionary portion of our budget, the things we count on will have to be sacrificed, it is not true, for there is at a minimum $350 billion a year spent on duplication within the Federal Government, and waste. It doesn't count fraud, which is at least $100 billion a year in Medicare. It doesn't count the Pentagon, where we have the Pentagon having duplicate weapons systems, noncompetitive contracts, cost-plus contracts where we have requirement creep so they end up costing much more than they ever should because we don't have the responsible person over there saying, no, you can't have everything you want. What you want is to have the things you need.

This whole idea that the sacrifices that need to be made are going to be highly paid for is not true because that is how much waste there is in the Federal Government--at least $350 billion a year, and that doesn't count the $100 billion in Medicare that is defrauded and wasted and wrongly paid. Their improper payment rate, which is 97 percent overpayments, is in excess of $10 billion a year. So if you have $100 billion worth of fraud, and then an improper payment rate that is around 10 percent, we could easily solve our budget problems by eliminating duplication and eliminating fraud, but it requires a lot of hard work to do the oversight. It requires a lot of legislative work to eliminate duplication. It requires us to stand and do what is necessary for our country. We don't have a problem, in general, with revenues. What we have a problem with is the Federal Government is taking 26 percent of our GDP to operate itself and 40 percent of that is borrowed.

As a physician, what my training would tell me to do is go directly to the disease. Don't treat the symptoms of the disease, go directly to where the disease is, and the disease is we have a magnitude, orders of magnitude, of duplication, all well meaning, all well intentioned, that we won't sit down and work on eliminating.

I thought I would spend a few minutes going through by department. The Department of Agriculture has 130 duplicative programs--130. I will submit for the record a few of these because I don't want the record to have too many. For example, biomass programs at the Department of Agriculture. We have the Biomass Crop Assistance Program, the Biorefinery Program for Advanced Fuels Program, the Biobased Products and Bioenergy Program, the Biorefinery Repowering Assistance Program, the New Era Rural Technology Competitive Grants Program for biomass.

Those could all be combined into one at one-third the cost with exactly the same results. But we do not have the energy, the time or the motivation to go solve these problems. So the problem is not the debt and deficit, the problem is the Congress, the lack of a work ethic to roll up our sleeves and dig into it.

We have 16 export assistance programs just for the Department of Agriculture; the Department of Commerce, 18 different duplicative programs; the Department of Education, 230 identical, duplicative programs in different branches. The only reason we know that is because the Department of Education is the only Department in the Federal Government that actually knows all their programs. There is not one other agency that actually knows all their programs. That is why it was important to get the GAO report, and we have just seen the first third of it. When we get the other two-thirds--the next third will come in February of next year, and we will have two-thirds of the Federal Government.

Do you know what it is going to show? Over $400 billion worth of duplication. The problem is not that we do not have enough revenue, the problem is we are wasteful in almost everything we do because Congress will not do the appropriate oversight for the things that are legitimate roles for the Federal Government--the first person who does not have to have any risk of no food safety, the first person who does not have to have any risk of not having Medicare or not having their Social Security, the first person who does not have to have any risk if the Congress will actually do its job. Yet we refuse to do our job because each one of these little programs has a little political body in itself that is taking and sucking off the Federal Government, many times not a legitimate role under the enumerated powers of the Constitution that is a role for the Federal Government.

I get letters all the time in my office: Please fund this. Please fund this. My answer back is: Show me in the enumerated powers where it is the role of the Federal Government to do that. If it is truly our role, I am for us doing it. But if, in fact, the enumerated powers--as originally written and as evidenced by the Federalist Papers--say it is not a role for the Federal Government, then the States ought to be doing it. Better yet, we as citizens ought to be helping other citizens who have a need.

But the fact is, we have created this monster, an out-of-control Federal Government. I am talking out of control because nobody is in control of it. Nobody has the information, which is the power to do it, which is why knowing all this stuff is so frustrating. We will not eliminate the easy things that will have no impact on 99 percent of Americans. The only people impacted are the people who are benefiting directly from administering or gaming the programs.

The Department of Energy. When the Department of Energy was created, it was to eliminate our dependence on foreign energy. Our dependence at that time was 30 percent. It reached a peak of 67 percent. Thankfully, due to horizontal drilling and environmentally sound fracking, we now are at 47 percent. We have gone down 16 points since the technology was developed to go after resources that are here.

The Congressional Research Service says--and this is a report published this year--that America has energy resources greater than the combined energy resources of China, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. We are the only country in the world where the citizens own the resources and their own government will not let them have it. We deny our own resources to our own people. Consequently, we see $4 gasoline, not because it has to be there--and we blame speculators and we blame the large oil companies. The reason gas is $4 is because the Federal Government will not let us utilize the very resources we have.

Mr. President, 92 percent of the 650 million acres the Federal Government owns is unavailable for resource production that can be done in a clean, environmentally friendly way, with no impact whatsoever. Yet supply us with valuable energy that does not make us dependent on countries that are not supportive of our liberties and our freedom.

So you are going to hear a lot of speeches today talking about those who have actually lived the American dream, people who have made it. I am not saying there is not excesses. I am one of the very few people on my side who thinks we ought to change the Tax Code, we ought to eliminate all the

brackets, we ought to flatten the Tax Code, that it will be clearer, it will create confidence, it will create certainty, and we will see the money--the $2 trillion that is sitting on the sidelines that could be creating jobs in this country--actually come in and create jobs.

But our problem is not the people who have been successful. Our problem is we, the Members of Congress, are not successful in accomplishing the task we were sent to do.

The Department of Homeland Security. More unregulated grants, 32 duplicative programs, no followup on the grants, no checking to see if a grant that was given actually performed the purpose. There is a significant amount of fraud, a significant amount of improper payments, significant layers of duplication. Not even the Department of Homeland Security knows what is going on, let alone Congress, because we will not do oversight.

There are 40 duplicative programs inside the Department of the Interior. Then we have all the duplicative programs across agencies. I did not list all of them here. There are 35 duplicative programs in the Department of Labor, 53 in the Department of Justice, 6 in the Department of State, 19 at the Department of Transportation. Who knows how many there are at the Defense Department because the Defense Department does not even know.

The problem we need to address is our lack of aggressiveness in reviewing and oversighting the Federal Government and eliminating the duplication.

It is frustrating to me as a physician to see us continue to treat the symptoms and never go after the disease. This disease will eventually kill us. It is bleeding us now, like it is bleeding us as we borrow $5 billion a day--$5 billion. That is the entire budget of the State of Oklahoma every day we are borrowing. Now we have political games being played, finger-pointing, putting our finger in the eyes of those across political lines rather than getting down to work and solving the real problems America faces.

We do not have one problem in front of us that we cannot solve as a nation. We can balance our budget. We can accomplish what we are called upon to accomplish if, in fact, we will. But the one little thing that creeps in, that is nauseating, is the vast majority of the Members of Congress are not thinking about the problems that are in front of us right now. They are thinking about the next election: How do I advantage?

When you see that happen, what you see and what you should question is, what is the motivation of the Members of Congress? Is it just to get reelected or is it to fix the very real and urgent problems in front of us? I think too often it is about us and not our country, it is about us secure in the next election rather than our children and grandchildren secure in the next generation.

I would put forward, as you hear the debate over the class warfare and the unfairness that is propagated--that somebody has become successful and that 20 percent of Americans now pay 74 percent of all the taxes paid, that we want to tax those people more--I believe everybody in this country ought to pay taxes. I do not care who you are. I do not care what program you are on, if you get a benefit from the Federal Government that is rightly under the enumerated powers, something the Federal Government should be doing, you ought to pay a tax on it. Then you are participating. Then we would not have 55 percent of the eligible population voting; we would have 75 or 85 percent because they would have an involvement.

We have an earned-income tax credit program which we pay people who are working. We actually pay them every year. But fully 25 percent of that is fraud. That is $17 billion a year paid out to people who are not working who are defrauding the IRS. We have not done anything about it. Mr. President, $17 billion over 10 years is $170 billion. That goes a long way toward reducing our structural deficit and debt. But we will not do that. The same thing on the child tax credit. That is a fraudulent program. Fully 20 percent of it is fraud. Yet we have not done anything about it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to continue, since nobody is on the floor.

I am sorry. I will finish in just a short period of time.

The question then comes over why we would not allow the States to decide whether they think we ought to have a balanced budget. It is true, it will take 5 to 7 years for it to be fully effectuated. But the sooner we start down that road and give the States the option of saying: We think you ought to live under the same rules we live under-- we have all sorts of reasons why we should not have a balanced budget amendment but not one of them makes sense, not one of them fits with common sense, not one of them does anything except continue down the road we are on today.

Again I would say, as you hear the debate, think about the real disease we have rather than listening to the symptoms. The disease is we are outside the enumerated powers of the Congress. We have $350 billion worth of waste and duplication every year that Congress will not address. We have a Tax Code that costs one-quarter of a trillion dollars a year just to comply with and then still is not fair. Yet we will not address the real disease.

The way you address the real disease is identify the real disease and then give it the treatment it needs. The treatment it needs is discipline forced on Congress by a balanced budget amendment. I guarantee you, if we were to pass it out of here, the States would pass it and send it back to us and our children and grandchildren would be much better off with it.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, may I inquire of the Chair what the status is on the bill? Are there pending amendments?

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 521.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, about 3 months ago, one of the results of the last time we raised the debt limit was a report by the Government Accountability Office. Ninety-seven Senators in this body voted to put that in the last debt limit extension. What was that? That was a requirement for the Government Accountability Office over the next 3 years to list every program for us in every area so that we knew what we were doing.

The purpose for that amendment was--and that happened to have been my amendment. I went to the CRS and the Government Accountability Office and I said I want to know every program in defense, education, et cetera. They told me: It is impossible; we cannot do it. So collectively, as colleagues, we said that you will do this. It has been a big job. They have done a fantastic job on it thus far. I cannot wait until we get the second and third part.

One of the results in the first report the GAO gave to us showed close to $200 billion worth of duplication. Those are my numbers, not theirs, in terms of looking at it. Let's say I am twice wrong, and say it is $100 billion. The fact is, what we found in just the first third of looking at the Federal Government is that we have multiple duplicative programs that do exactly the same thing; they are just in different agencies or across agencies. In a moment, I will talk about what those are.

The response to that report was the greatest response GAO has ever had to any report they have ever listed. The curious thing about that is that 95 percent of what they reported was a culmination of reports I had asked for over the last 6 years put together, which means we had the information, as Members of Congress; we just would not use it. In other words, it didn't get up to the level of being recognized. When we saw it together, we all of a sudden started seeing the magnitude of the problem of duplication.

The purpose of this amendment--it is very straightforward--is that on average the Senate considers, in a session of Congress, in a Congress over 2 years, about 700 pieces of legislation. The Congressional Research Service now writes a report on each one of those and advises us about the legislation, what it does, what it doesn't do, and what is out there. But the one thing they don't do is tell us where it duplicates.

The purpose of this amendment is that with each of those bills, we would have the knowledge the GAO has put out there, which the CRS will then go and get and say: Here is what is out there, and you need to consider that as you consider, why do we need another program to do something we are already doing? What is wrong with the programs we have now that are not accomplishing this?

This great transparency is not just for us but for the American people. We add duplicative programs every year. It raises the question, where is the oversight?

The motivations here are wonderful. The motivations are to try to solve problems. Too often, we lack the information and the knowledge with which to make a great decision. The reason we lack that is because we fail in our duty to do oversight. So this information which would be provided becomes powerful. More importantly, it creates tremendous transparency for the American public in saying, for example, if we are going to create another job-training program--we have 47 of them right now that are funded by the Federal Government across 9 different government agencies. None of them are coordinated and all but three overlap each other. If we create another job-training program, maybe we ought to know what all these others are and why we need to create another one rather than make the ones we have now work. I would actually question why we have 47 job-training programs. But the problem is big.

Let me spend a moment and put some highlights into the Record. These are just highlights. This represents less than 10 percent of what the findings were of the last GAO report.

We have 101 programs for surface transportation. They are run across four different agencies.

We have 82 teacher quality improvement programs--82 separate programs across 10 different agencies, and they are not in the Department of Education. There are 10 different agencies--9 of which are outside of the Department of Education--that have teacher training programs.

We have 88 economic development programs run by 4 agencies costing $6.5 billion a year--88 separate economic development programs.

We have 80 programs to provide transportation for the disadvantaged, across 8 different agencies. We spend $314 million on it. That is a good cause, and it is something we can do, but 80 different programs?

We don't know what we are doing. So the purpose of this amendment-- and it will require a rules change to have it--is to ask CRS to show what we are doing and what is there already, just as they analyze every other aspect of a bill before it comes to the floor. This won't be required on emergency legislation or required on committee reports or required on the filing of bills; it will only be mandated if a bill comes to the floor for consideration by my colleagues.

Let me finish.

We have 56 programs for financial literacy from 21 different agencies. Based on the talk we just heard from the last two Senators, we are the last people who ought to be teaching anybody about financial literacy when we are running the kind of deficit and debt we have and have the kind of duplication we have. Nobody who knows financial literacy would run 88 separate economic development programs and pay for the overhead of all of those through all these different agencies; rather, they would have 2 or 3 and have a concentrated program and direct the emphasis of that economic development program.

We have 21 programs for homeless assistance.

We spend $62 billion on 18 different food and nutrition assistance programs. We only need 2 or 3, not 18. We need to have metrics measuring whether we are effective in helping people with food and nutrition.

We have bureaucracy after bureaucracy, and each of them doesn't know what the other agencies are doing. There is no coordination, and there is no measurement of the effectiveness of what we are doing.

CRS claims they don't have the manpower to do this. They have 350 analysts who do nothing but analyze legislation. This would require one analyst, one time a year, to look at the duplication on a bill coming to the floor--one analyst, over a period of a year, one time, looking at it.

CRS is a great resource for me, and I want them to have the resources they need because the only way we get out of the bigger problems the Senator from Nebraska was talking about is having the knowledge of what we are doing today.

I hope my colleagues will consider this not as a partisan amendment but one to give us the information that gives us the power to make the best decisions for our country. We need to be making better decisions.

The final thing this will do is help us not create duplication again. It will let us know what we need to do; that is, before we pass it into legislation. I am so concerned as I look at bringing forward some options for my colleagues to look at in terms of solving our financial problems because everywhere I go, as we dig deeper into this, we see the duplication and inefficiency, the lack of direction, and the lack of pointed purpose to get an end result in program after program in the Federal Government. Some of those truly aren't our role, but on those that are our role, that we are responsible for constitutionally, it is the responsibility of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Government--we ought to know what we are doing, and we ought to know what is being done out there already. We operate in a vacuum when we don't have this information.

It is my hope that my colleagues will support this in a way to give us information. There is nothing political about it. It is, how do we make better decisions and how do we do this in a way that will cause us not to create more duplication in the future, and it will cause us to ask the smart questions about legislation. You see, those questions don't get asked unless somebody goes and does the digging now.

My hope is that we would all be empowered by having greater knowledge over what we are doing. It is very simple and straightforward. It is my hope that we can accomplish that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I failed to mention the cosponsors of this amendment, and they are Senator Udall of Colorado, Senators Collins, McCaskill, Burr, Paul, Brown of Massachusetts, and Senator McCain.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I advise the senior Senator from New York that I will ask unanimous consent, if it is agreeable to him, that when I finish my few words, we go directly to the vote.

Fine. You do not want to move it up?

OK. Great. I will withdraw my unanimous consent request.

Amendment No. 521

Mr. President, this is a very straightforward amendment. The people who vote against this rule change, what they are going to be telling you is they do not want you to know what is going on in the Senate, and they do not want us to know what is going on in the Senate. Because all this rule does is make it a force of habit of the Senate that before we look at legislation, we ought to determine whether it duplicates what is already out there in the government, and we ought to determine if it is overlapping to other programs.

Had this amendment been in effect, a third of what we passed in the past would not have passed because we would then have seen--which we are ignorant of today--all the other programs that were available and out there that accomplished the same purpose for which we passed another new program.

In one of my committees last year colleagues offered amendments--well intentioned, with good motives--to accomplish a good purpose. But they lacked knowledge. What they did not know was--and both amendments were ultimately withdrawn when it was explained to them--that, in fact, we already had programs that did exactly the same thing.

So what we have is, we have over $200 billion worth of duplication now within the Federal Government. This is a simple, straightforward amendment that says before we consider things on the floor--it is less than 700 bills over 2 years--that the CRS would, in fact, tell us: Here is what you are doing, here is what the government is already doing in these areas, so we do not end up with duplication, so we do not end up with overlapping, and that we actually get results from what we are doing.

I remind my colleagues that we have, just in the last GAO report, multitudes of duplicative programs, and I will repeat them so people will know. I also would state, this is a bipartisan amendment in the spirit of what the Senator from New York and the Senator from Tennessee have done. This amendment has Senator Udall, Senator McCaskill, Senator Burr, and Senator McCain, as well as Senator Collins, Senator Paul, and Senator Scott Brown. So this is not a partisan move. This is a move about information and knowledge so we make informed decisions.

But for the record, what the GAO told us, less than 5 months ago, is that we have 101 programs across four different agencies for surface transportation. That is 101 sets of bureaucracies. Nobody has ever gone and said: Which ones work and which ones do not? Which ones do exactly the same thing versus what somebody else does?

We have 82 teacher programs for teacher quality across 10 different agencies, 9 of which are not in the Department of Education. We have 88 economic development programs spending $6.5 billion a year across 4 different agencies. We have 47 job training programs across 9 different agencies, and we are spending $18 billion a year, and the GAO said every one of them overlaps, with the exception of 3. Yet we have not had the first move in the Senate this year in spite of all of our problems economically to streamline, eliminate duplication, eliminate overlap, and put metrics on what we are doing.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this list of duplicative programs identified by GAO.

Again, I will state, if you are against this amendment, you are against eliminating the very cause of our problems in this country, which is duplication, redundancy, overlap, and you are against doing the proper oversight so we make informed decisions.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, because our minority views were not included in the Senate Judiciary Committee's report on S. 1103, I ask unanimous consent to have them printed in the Record. We hope these views will be of use to Members of the Senate if this legislation is considered on the Senate floor.

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

Madam President, in a few minutes, I will offer an amendment, but first I wish to speak about a bill that myself and 26 other Senators have introduced today, and it is called The Enumerated Powers Act. Our Founding Fathers understood the only way to preserve our freedom for future generations was to limit Federal authority. They understood the tendency of government to seize increasing power, and thus they created protections in our Constitution for posterity.

Earlier this year, newly elected and returning Members of the Senate took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. In my case, that oath never mentioned the State of Oklahoma or any other State an individual Senator might represent. Rather, the oath each of us took was to uphold the Constitution for the betterment of the country as a whole.

Yet every day, Members of Congress ignore their oath and the protective principles embodied in the Constitution, trampling both the freedom and the prosperity of the American people. This has never been as evident as in the congressional spending spree we have seen over the last 3\1/2\ to 4 years.

At the beginning of the 111th Congress, our national debt stood at $10.6 trillion. Today it is over $14.4 trillion, an increase of nearly $4 trillion in the last 3-plus years. How did we get there? How did we get into such deep debt? How did we shackle our children and grandchildren to an increasing deficit and an inevitable decreased standard of living? It doesn't lie with any President having done that. Where it lies is with the Congress of the United States.

Today, along with the Senator from Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul, and 23 other cosponsors, I am introducing the Enumerated Powers Act. This legislation ensures Members of Congress truly follow article I, section 8 of the Constitution. That section plainly lists the enumerated powers given to Congress, of which there are 18, and they are very well defined.

One of the major reasons why we are facing such tough economic times and such tough fiscal challenges is because Congress routinely in the recent past has ignored this aspect of the Constitution. Until we reconnect Congress with its limited and enumerated powers, we will never put our Nation back on a sustainable basis.

James Madison stated in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If

angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal

controls on government would be necessary. In framing a

government which is to be administered by men over men, the

great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the

government to control the governed; and in the next place,

oblige it to control itself.

Clearly, we have a government administered by men over men, and the government has failed to control itself. The best way for the Federal Government to appropriately restrain itself is for Congress to abide by the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court noted at the beginning of the 21st century:

Every law enacted by Congress must be based on one or more

of its powers enumerated in the Constitution. ``The powers of

the legislature are defined and limited; and that those

limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the constitution is

written.''

In an 1831 letter, James Madison also stated:

With respect to the words ``general welfare''--

Which is what is so often used to justify new government programs--

I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of

[enumerated] powers connected with them. To take them in a

literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the

Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs

was not contemplated by its creators.

Moreover, the 10th amendment states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the

Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are

reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, everything outside of those 18 enumerated powers are reserved for the States and the people. They are not ours to deal with.

Our Founding Fathers intended for the Federal Government to be one of limited powers that cannot encroach on the powers reserved to the States or to the people. What this bill does is highlight the importance of those principles embodied in our Constitution and gives Members of Congress a new procedural tool to stop unconstitutional legislation.

A former Representative from Arizona, Congressman John Shadegg, took the lead on this issue starting in 1994, and introduced it every year up until he left Congress this last year. I joined Representative Shadegg in offering this bill, starting in the 110th Congress, and again in the 111th. Today I am delighted, along with these 24 cosponsors--and many other Republicans joining me--to reintroduce an updated version of this important legislation.

The Enumerated Powers Act requires each act of Congress, bill, and resolution to contain a concise explanation of the specific authority in the Constitution under which the measure would be enacted. It also states Members cannot merely mindlessly invoke subsections of article I, section 8, such as the Commerce, General Welfare, or Necessary and Proper Clauses to meet that test.

The goal of this legislation is to ensure Congress is accountable to the American people for its actions. The very least we can do--if we are going to violate article I, section 8--is explain our constitutional basis to the American people for that.

With a sufficient two-thirds vote of the Senate, a point of order raised against a bill for failure to cite specific constitutional authority for the legislation can still be overcome. However, the Enumerated Powers Act requires both Houses of Congress to debate that point of order. The American people need to see the transparency when we violate the Constitution and what our basis is for doing that.

As I mentioned earlier, as Members of the Senate, we have each taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, not to put our individual States first. If each of us abides by that oath, we will improve our country as a whole. For Oklahoma, Kentucky, Maine, or any other State to fare well in our country, they cannot do so if the country as a whole is not faring well.

Amendment No. 500

Madam President, let me take a moment and use as an example one of the reasons I would like the Enumerated Powers Act passed, but also why I am going to discuss the amendment I have at the desk.

Here is what we know right now from the first third of the Federal Government that was studied by the Government Accountability Office. They just looked at the first third of the Federal Government. We asked them in the last debt limit increase to give us the list of duplications of programs that do essentially the same thing across that first third. We will get the next third about 6 months from now, and the final third a year from then.

But what you see and what they came up with is we have more than 100 different Federal programs for surface transportation. That is 100 sets of agencies. That is 100 sets of bureaucracies. That is mindless and thousands upon hundreds of thousands of rules and regulations just on surface transportation. Nobody in Congress knew we had 100 agencies.

Teacher quality. We have 82 separate teacher quality programs across 6 different government agencies. One question is whether that is a responsibility of the Federal Government under the Enumerated Powers Act. But to have 82?

Or how about economic development. Eighty-eight programs, eighty of which are under four different agencies. We just had a bill on the floor, the Economic Development Act, and it is one of 80 programs run by those four agencies. None of them have metrics to see if they are effective. They have anecdotal evidence, but there are no metrics to see if they are. Again, 88 sets of bureaucracies within all these agencies--duplication after duplication after duplication.

Transportation assistance. Eighty different programs.

Financial literacy. A government that is $14 trillion in debt, running a $1.6 trillion deficit, has no business telling anybody about financial literacy. Yet we have 56 programs across multiple agencies teaching the American people about financial literacy. I think the source of that wisdom is somewhat questionable.

We have 47 different job training programs that cost $18 billion a year, run across 9 different agencies. Not one of them has a metric, and all but 3 duplicate what the other 44 are doing. Why would we do that? Why would we have all that?

Homeless prevention and assistance. We have 20 programs out of the Federal Government for homeless prevention and assistance.

Food for the hungry. We have 18 separate programs.

Disaster response and preparedness through FEMA. We have 17 different programs.

So the point is, we got there for two reasons. No. 1, we did not look at the enumerated powers; and, No. 2, too often we are trying to fix a problem with great intent, with the right heart, even when it is constitutional and would meet the demands of article I, section 8, and we have no idea what else is out there, so when we see a problem, rather than go see what we are doing now, we create a new program.

I would ask consideration of my amendment, which is amendment No. 500, which is an amendment to change the Standing Rules of the Senate. What it does is it mandates a rule in the Senate that every report that comes to the Senate on every bill or joint resolution shall contain ``an analysis by the Congressional Research Service to determine if the bill or joint resolution creates any new Federal program, office, or initiative that would duplicate or overlap any existing Federal program, office, or initiative with similar mission, purpose, goals, or activities along with a listing of all of the overlapping or [duplication]. . . . '' and ``an explanation provided by the committee as to why the creation of each new program, office, or initiative is necessary if a similar program or programs, office or offices, or initiative or initiatives already exist.''

So it is a rule change. The reason I bring it to this bill is because this is a bill for rule changes. It requires 67 votes for this to pass. I understand we have heard some concerns from the Congressional Research Service. But with the work the Government Accountability Office has done, and will do, it will be very easy for them to look at the results of the Government Accountability Office and their list of duplications. It is very straightforward. It is less than 100 pages. They can see, and then they can advise the Congress on what we have.

If we cannot depend on the Congressional Research Service to tell us where we have multiple programs when that is available from the Government Accountability Office, and list what their intentions and what their budgets are, then we need to relook at the congressional office and what it does.

They do great work for me. We ask them for things all the time, and they do great. This is something they can accomplish. It is going to get easier as we go forward. But without this knowledge of what we are already doing, we will never solve our problems.

I know my chairman has some concerns with this initiative in terms of how it might affect this bill, but I plan on going right back to the Congressional Research Service to have a discussion with them after I have been on the floor. But if we cannot do this, we cannot do anything. If we cannot change the rules so we actually know what we are doing, so we can actually know if a new bill duplicates something that is already operating, when we have this tremendous list--and this shown on the chart is just a small set of the list. I picked some of the obvious

ones. There are hundreds of thousands of duplicate programs in the Federal Government, wasting billions if not trillions of dollars every year. So if we cannot do something like this, then what can we do to solve our problems?

Knowledge is power. Not knowing what programs are intended to do now before we create another new program to me is the height of insanity. We should be aggressively asking for as much information as we can get, so we know what we are doing when we pass new pieces of legislation.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I will call up my amendment No. 500. I also tell the Senator from Maine, I will very much consider her recommendation in terms of trying to put it on the second half of this. But I wish to call it up now, and then maybe ask that we withdraw it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

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

Mr. President, I have spoken on this earlier in the week. I will not spend a great deal of time today. Thanks to the majority leader, we will have two votes this afternoon on items that I think are representative of critical problems in our country.

The first is a vote on an amendment by Senator Feinstein and myself that eliminates payment to the largest refining and oil companies in this country to blend ethanol, which they have honestly admitted--and they sent us a letter saying it--they don't want.

The second is on whether we will subsidize, with Federal tax dollars, additional pumps to use ethanol.

The reason the votes are important is because the way we get out of trouble as a nation is a couple of billion dollars at a time. We have a Federal mandate that says X amount of fuel has to be blended with ethanol every year. That will rise to 22 billion gallons in 2015. So there is no reason for us to pay somebody to blend it when they already have to, and we have seen the shift in the industry from small entities to the very large. When this program started, it was about less than a billion dollars in cost. It will now be, on an annualized basis, around $6 billion. While we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit, we need every penny we can get. So I am thankful this has been brought up. But it begs the larger question--actually there are two. One, can we trust markets--real markets--to work more effectively than Washington mandating and dictating policies?

Throughout our history--if you look at it in total--no government can ever do any allocation of scarce resources as well as the market can. The markets are not perfect. There is no question, they make mistakes and cause occasional shortages. But overall, in the long run, markets work much better than a bureaucratic Soviet-style mandate of what we will do and what price we will pay for it.

The second question it begs is, what is our country's energy policy? We send a quarter of a trillion dollars a year outside this country for oil and gas, liquids and natural gas. That is a quarter of a trillion dollars that we could invest here and pay for our own resources.

We are the only nation in the world where our resources are owned by the citizens and our own government limits our ability to utilize it.

The CRS just finished a study that shows that the oil and gas reserves in the United States are greater than that of Saudi Arabia, China, and Canada combined. So the question is, why aren't we using ours, rather than sending money overseas and undermining our own economy and not creating jobs?

The projections are that if we would truly utilize our resources, we could create close to 190,000 jobs a year in the exploration and energy business--without subsidies, without tax credits; that is what would be the result. With oil near $100 a barrel, and we continue to send the money out of the country instead of going after our own resources, which are plentiful, we have to ask the question, what are we doing?

The final point I will make is, when you buy ethanol-blended gasoline and you look at the price and you see, here is regular that has no ethanol in it, and here is ethanol-blended gasoline that is about 20 or 25 cents cheaper, it is important that the American people understand that you need to add $1.72 to that to get the real price you are paying for that blended gasoline, because that is what your government has put into the pipeline in the way of loans,

grants, subsidies, blenders credits, and taxes on imported ethanol. So even though it looks cheaper, it is not. It is about $1.40 more, when you look at all the costs taken from you as a taxpayer and put into the pipeline and given to the special interests, in terms of what we will have, and where we will have it, and when we will have it.

I support ethanol alternative fuel, especially now that it has 7\1/2\ percent of our market. But the best way for ethanol to survive is for it to stand on its own two feet, without subsidies, without us spending dollars we don't have to get something that we are going to get anyway.

I am extremely pleased with my discussions with Senator Reid. I am thankful to Senator Cardin, as well as Senator Feinstein. She has been working on this for a long time. She opposed this when it started. She recognizes that what we have actually done is not help ourselves that much. We have markedly increased the cost of food. We can say 40 percent of the corn crop this last year went for ethanol, and corn is at historic highs. When you look at a poultry producer or beef producer or pork producer or lamb producer or turkey producer or milk producer or egg producer, their largest cost has doubled because of this policy.

Quite frankly, America is lucky because the worldwide demand for grains--given our wonderful farm community and their ability to produce--is extremely high and our farmers are extremely efficient. So this policy will not affect farm prices significantly right now. But, hopefully, in the future it will bring them down to a more moderate level.

Two-and-a-half years ago, corn was at $3 a bushel and most corn farmers made money. It is now above $7, even though their input costs have risen somewhat with the increase of oil prices. The farms in our country that raise grains have never been in better shape--if they can get a crop in. I know we have areas in the country where that hasn't happened.

So I think overall we are starting to address some of the misdirected capital formation in this country by backing off on government picking of winners and losers, and I am thankful for the opportunity to speak on that.

I yield the floor, as I see the Senator from Iowa is here.

Madam President, may I make an inquiry of the Chair?

How much time remains for the Republicans in morning business?

I thank the Chair.

These are interesting days in our country. We find ourselves in a very deep hole, and it is not the fault of the people; it is the fault of the Congress. We continue to spend money we do not have on things we do not need. When we do that personally, we end up filing bankruptcy. Pretty soon, we run out of new credit cards to take on, and we get to the point where we can't pay our debts. That is a question that is in front of our country today as our economy is struggling and we have this massive debt. We ought to be about every small, medium, and large step we can take to solve the problem, not to solve the problem by saying we can't pay our bills but to solve the problem so we create a prosperous future for our kids and those who follow us.

There is a lot of controversy over the amendment I offered, and it is inaccurately claimed by the majority leader that this amendment was rule XIV'd. It was not rule XIV'd. According to the procedures of the Senate, you can file cloture on any amendment at any time. That is a privilege every Senator has. Why would somebody file cloture on an amendment? It is because, over the first 5\1/2\ months of this year, through the leadership of the Senate, we have been unable to have a free and open debate and free and open offering of amendments. Because the procedure is rarely used does not mean it is not ethical and not accurate. As a matter of fact, the reason the procedure was put there was in case at a point in time your rights as a Senator to offer amendments are being limited by the majority. That is why we have this rule. Because you can take 16 of your colleagues and file a cloture petition and, therefore, have a vote on your amendment.

So what we are hearing going on in the background today is, the reason you shouldn't vote for this amendment, even though you agree we should get rid of and save $3 billion, much as the Senator from California outlined, $3 billion that the very people who are blending and receiving the $3 billion don't want, the argument is, it is because they don't like the way the amendment came to the floor. Explain to the people at home, you have an opportunity to save this country $3 billion and you know it is the right policy, but you are not going to vote for it because you don't like the way the amendment came to the floor. I would remind my colleagues that of the $3 billion we are going to save, 1.2 billion of it we are going to borrow from China, if we go on and spend it, and we are going to charge that 1.2 billion to our kids and grandkids. The interesting point is, we have grown, over 20-some years, to rely on ethanol for 7 percent of our fuel, and it has been a very expensive process. It is expensive directly because when you go to buy gasoline today, it is not the price you pay at the pump that you are actually paying. Take all the subsidies and all the tax credits and all the low-interest loans and all the nonrepayment of all the grants and all the moneys that have been put into this program, and when you buy that tank of gas, every gallon that you put into your car after you pay for it, you already paid $1.72 through your taxes to have that gallon there.

So we are not getting rid of the mandate on ethanol. It is 7\1/2\ percent. It has helped us in some ways. It is a very inefficient fuel that causes us to consume more fuel, produce more CO2. But the fact is, we have an amendment in the Chamber that is designed to take away a subsidy, and the only reason we are taking away the subsidy is because in law we are saying you have to do it anyway.

I would introduce, for the record, a letter from the refiners that states--this is the National Petroleum Refiners Association, representing 97 percent of the people who get this tax credit--97 percent of the $3 billion. They say they don't want the $3 billion. The vote is going to come down to something very clear. We are going to give $3 billion to some of the most profitable companies in America or we are not. The interesting fact is, they are saying: Please don't give it to us. Please don't give us this money.

Think of the time when we are borrowing the money to give to them and they are saying don't give it to us. We are going to have a vote in the Chamber and very likely not win because of a procedure or because of parochial interests. The fact is, every gallon of ethanol that is blended to gasoline, whoever does the blending, gets 45 cents a gallon, and they don't need it because they are going to blend it anyway. So the real question is, Will we continue to be ignorant in Washington of the common sense the American people want us to have? The common sense is, if you are paying somebody to do something and by law they have to do it anyway and then they write you a letter and say: Please don't pay me anymore to do this, I am going to do it anyway, why would we continue to send them the money? Why would we continue to do that, especially when 40 percent of it we have to borrow from the Chinese to be able to pay it to the American oil company? It makes no sense. There is no logic you can come up with. The calculations out of Iowa State University on this $3 billion is that the amount of jobs that have come out of this in the past cost $14 million a year per job--14 million a year per job created out of this subsidy.

No wonder we are broke. No wonder we are failing financially. No wonder we are failing our children and our grandchildren, because we continue to do things that don't have any correlation with logic or common sense. I know the arguments. I know the argument is that, well, we passed this last year as part of the extension. Well, as a Republican, I was one of the few Republicans who did not vote for that extension. Because not only did we pass additional tax cuts and additional unpaid programs, we cut no spending to be able to pay for it. So what we did was borrow a whole bunch more money and not solve any of the critical issues that lie in front of our country.

Forty percent of last year's corn crop went to ethanol. As a matter of fact, there is so much ethanol production, last year we shipped 400 million gallons overseas. That is great, except when you take the time to think about that with that 400 million gallons, we sent $500 million worth of subsidy. So now we are subsidizing the ethanol that goes to Europe with your tax dollars so they can have cheaper gasoline than we have, because they are taking $1.72 per gallon and getting the benefit of our tax dollars to have cheaper ethanol in Europe than they can get from other places.

So there is nothing about this that makes sense, other than if you are a wonk and study the politics and the procedures and the parochialism that goes on inside the political body. That is what has gotten us into trouble. We are more interested in power and position and party. I am sick of both parties. We better start focusing on the real problems in front of our country. We are going to have a $1.7 trillion deficit this year, and the way you get rid of that is 1 billion or 2 billion or 3 billion at a time.

Here is something that makes absolutely no sense. Here is something that has no true demand for it. Here is something that is $3 billion that the people we are paying it to say they don't want, and we are not going to take them up on it? What part of stupid are we? This is like a Ferrell movie. It doesn't make sense. It is comedic.

We have had a lot of debate. Let me just talk for a minute about what is going on in the agricultural community throughout this country if you are a poultry, milk or livestock producer.

You can't bring your cattle to feedlots right now because corn is too expensive--$7.65 a bushel yesterday. You can't afford to fatten your cattle, so they are not bringing them in from the range. We are slaughtering dairy cows all across this country because 70 percent of the cost of dairy cattle is the corn you feed them. We are going to get all sorts of untoward interruptions and price increases in our food if we continue this policy. Seventy percent of the cost for chickens is feed. We are having chicken processors close and go into bankruptcy. We are having chicken raisers, the actual chicken farms--a lot in Oklahoma, a lot in Arkansas, a lot throughout the South, even over in Delaware and in Virginia--can't afford to feed the chickens. So what is going to happen because we have this false subsidy? The fact is, right now, 15 percent of the food increases in this country that you have seen in the last year are directly associated with this policy-- directly associated with this policy. That doesn't have any effect on the fact that what could we do by sending $7 corn out of this country to our balance of payments, which would help our trade imbalance? Instead, we are burning it, and it is a highly inefficient fuel. It is a highly inefficient fuel. Everybody knows that when they fill up with 15 percent or 10 percent ethanol, they get much poorer gas mileage. Everybody knows that. In Oklahoma, we have all these stations where it says ``ethanol free.'' Why do people pay 10 or 15 cents more a gallon? Because they win on mileage. They actually get better performance when they don't have ethanol in their fuel. We all know that. It is just in some States you don't have that option. We are fortunate. We can still buy real gas.

I understand we have about 3 minutes remaining. I will close with the following statement. This is going to be a historic vote, not about ethanol, not about subsidies. It is going to be a historic vote that sends a signal to the American people. Either the people in Washington get it and are going to stop wasting money on programs they don't need to waste money on and they are going to start acting in the best long- term interests of the country, they are either going to do that or they are not. So when we see the results of this vote, you are going to have a hard time explaining: I voted against that because I didn't like the way the amendment came up. The fact is, here is $3 billion we don't have to spend over the next 6 months. If we don't spend it, that is $3 billion we are not going to have to borrow from our children and that they are not going to be paying interest on for the next 30 years.

This comes down to the point in time, does this Senate recognize the amount of trouble we are in, and are Senators willing to give up parochial interests, procedural interests, are they willing to do what is necessary to put this country back on course? My hope and prayer is they are.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, we have introduced into the Record the industry that gets this tax credit--they represent 97 percent of all of the ethanol that is blended--does not want the $3 billion. They say it is not a disruption to them, and, in fact, it is $3 billion that we cannot afford to pay.

It is something that already has accomplished its purpose through a government mandate. I would yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein.

I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes.

Mr. President, the reason this amendment ended up the way it is, is because we don't have an open amendment process in the Senate anymore. Rule XXII gives every Senator the right to offer an amendment. We

have no Senate unless we have the right to offer an amendment.

There is no usurpation of the power of the majority leader. He gets to set what bills are on the floor. Every Senator has the right to file cloture on their amendments--every Senator. They also have every right to offer amendments.

We would not be in this position if we did not have a closed amendment process instead of an open amendment process. I would like to solve this problem. I recognize that this is going to be blue-slipped anyway. I thank the majority leader for his offer. I do not think it accomplishes what we want. I think we end up losing what we can get and what we should get.

I think the American people deserve to have us take this $3 billion out of the hands of the large oil companies now, not to the benefit of any American except to their detriment and their children.

cloture motion