Floor Statements

Mr. President, so the chairman knows, my planned time to introduce these amendments is 3:30. That is what they have given me time on. I did want to engage in some of the comments of the Senator from Vermont.

As someone who was on the deficit commission and looking at that, the first presumption was making Social Security solvent was our goal, making it solvent for 75 years. The flaw in the argument given by my colleague from Vermont is the assumption that the IOU at the Treasury for Social Security is good.

It is good as long as people will loan us money. It is not any good if they will not. So when people say, why fix Social Security? We can fix Social Security by taking the very haircut from the people the Senator from Vermont just described and markedly lessening the benefits, even though they continue to pay into Social Security, that they will receive, the billionaires and the millionaires. We can do that. But if, in fact, we do not send a signal to the international financial community that on the largest expenditure we have, that we are going to make it solvent, then we will not be in the market and available and have the ability to borrow the $2.8 trillion.

Now, one other thing on which I would disagree: The Social Security trust fund trustees say Social Security is running a net deficit this last year and will run one this year and for every year forward in terms of what comes in versus what goes out. There is no question I want to keep our commitments. Nobody is talking about eliminating benefits except to the very rich in this country in terms of Social Security. As a matter of fact, the deficit commission raised the benefits in Social Security for the poorest in this country. So we actually did the opposite of what the Senator claims that Republicans might want to do.

What we have to do is to make sure Social Security is viable for the future. And having looked at every aspect of Social Security, I can tell you if we are not able to borrow the $2.6 trillion, the benefits will not be there. The money has been stolen. There is no trust fund. There is no money there. If you read what the head of the OMB said in 1999, he said it is not there.

So what is really happening in Social Security? Congresses, under both Republican and Democratic control, both Republican and Democratic Presidencies, have stolen money from Social Security and spent it. The money is gone. It has been used for another purpose.

So there are two ways of solving this: One is to make Social Security the priority and not fund anything but that until we get it paid back or we can actually refund that $2.6 trillion by going to the debt market, to which we will go every year from now forward under the present plan on Social Security. The rate of taxes between now and 2035 that will be taxed will rise from $106,000 or, I think, $107,000 to $168,000 between now and then. That is a 60-percent increase in the taxes on the wealthy that is planned and programmed right now.

Even with that, Social Security will run a deficit every year, every year now forward. Even with the $2.8 trillion, it still is in a negative cashflow. So to deny the fact, if we do not want to fix Social Security, then what we are saying is we do not want to fix it for our children's children or our children.

I would like to finish my point. It is not about taking something away, except from the very wealthy, the fix from the deficit commission. That is what it did. We also added back. When you reach 80--and a lot of people may be running out of their combination of what their retirement was plus their Social Security--we give another little bump.

So what the deficit commission did was significantly increase the viability for Social Security for the next 75 years. The Social Security trustees know we have to do this. Everybody knows we have to do this. The question is, Does this Congress owe that $2.8 trillion back to Social Security? Yes. But where do we get the money to repay it?

Unless we can calm down the international financial markets, where we make major changes not just in Social Security but in discretionary spending--$50 billion out of the Pentagon, modifying Medicare, where we get the fraud waste and abuse out of Medicare--unless we do those things, we are not going to be able to borrow the money.

One final fact and then I will yield back to my chairman because I have a meeting to go to. So far, in the last 5 months, who do you think has bought our bonds to finance the deficit? We ran a $223 billion deficit in the month of February.

Who bought them? Was it the Chinese? Who was the biggest buyer? The Federal Reserve bought 70 percent of the bonds we put on the market. What are they doing? They are debasing our currency and creating future inflation which will hurt the very people who are going to be on Social Security because the cost of living index will never truly keep up with the real cost of inflation.

All of us have received letters from constituents wondering why there was no COLA. We know why there was no COLA. When we look at food and transportation costs and what they have done in the last 3 years, that is what is important to seniors--their health care costs, housing costs, food costs. Yet we have a COLA system that does not recognize that we may get into a period of hyperinflation because the Federal Reserve is buying the bonds because nobody else will buy them. Right now, 30 percent are bought in the market.

Final point. The largest bond trader in the world, PIMCO, last week sold every U.S. Government bond they had. They expect the price of the bonds to go down because they expect the interest rates to go up. What happens to us if we don't fix Social Security? If the interest rates are going to be a lot higher on our debt and if they are a lot higher and we owe $14 trillion for every 1 percent increase in the cost of borrowing that we have, it adds to our deficit $140 billion.

I am honored Senator Sanders is adamant about making sure we keep our commitments. But in terms of cashflow, it isn't there. We have to address that. That is the only way we create confidence for the international financial community to say: You have a solvent program for 75 years--the largest segment of our expenditures--and we are going to loan you money. If we don't do that, interest costs are going to be higher, and we are going to pay for it anyway. Right now, we are almost to the point where these decisions will not be controlled by us. I would rather us be in a situation of control.

This is not a partisan issue. There isn't one Senator who wants to take money away from needy seniors. This is about making changes far down the road that will affect people 30, 40, 50 years from now. It makes sense to do that.

I yield the floor.

I have to.

I thank the chairwoman for her kind words. It is necessary that we move this bill, I agree. I am thankful to Senator Landrieu and the ranking member for the movement on some of the commitments they made to me on programs that don't work within the small business area.

I have multiple amendments, but in due deference to the chairwoman, I will not call those up. I am going to call up two. I wish to explain both of them.

Amendment No. 184. Everybody was excited about the GAO report that looked at the first third of the Federal Government in terms of all the duplication. We don't know the extent of that duplication, and we are going to have to do some hard work to winnow out a lot of savings, but there are a lot of savings. People don't agree with me on my estimate, but nobody knows these programs better than I do. I have been studying them for 6 years. There is at least $100 billion where we can

save the American taxpayers and actually do a better job through redesigning the programs and eliminating the bureaucracies that make them less than effective.

So one of the things we need to do to help GAO is have the agencies report to OMB and to us on a yearly basis on their programs. There are at least 2,100 programs that we know of in the Federal Government. When GAO looks at this, it is very difficult for them to ferret it all out. We only have one agency that publishes a list of their programs every year, and that is the Department of Education. The book is very thick, and it lists all their programs. That will make it much easier for GAO to do the next third.

This is a simple amendment that requires every department of the Cabinet to fulfill to OMB, within a short period of time, all their programs and also report to us. When that happens that will make GAO much more effective in how it brings to us this next group of duplications. So it is a straightforward amendment. I hope it can be accepted.

Amendment No. 184

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 184 and make it pending.

The other amendment is No. 220.

Mr. President, I understand my first amendment is up and pending; is that correct?

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

Mr. President, I will discuss amendment No. 220 now. Is the chairman's intention that I defer calling up that amendment right now?

Amendment No. 220 is about making sure we don't send good money after bad. When you go to the pump today to buy gasoline that is blended with ethanol, you pay, as a taxpayer, $1.78. As a taxpayer, you pay that before you ever pay the $3.51 we are paying per gallon, through incentives, tax credits, and rebates for ethanol and blending.

This doesn't take away incentives on corn-based ethanol. It says that because we already have a mandate that says 15 billion gallons of ethanol must be available and put through the system this year, no longer is there a necessity to have a blender's credit to the tune of $6 billion a year. So what this does is two things: One, it takes away an incentive that is no longer needed because we have already mandated the ethanol will be there. But it saves us $6 billion that we are paying to firms that are going to do the business whether we pay it or not.

So it is silly to continue to spend $6 billion of American taxpayer money of which almost $3 billion of it will be borrowed money from either the Federal Reserve or from the Chinese to incentivize something that is already mandated to happen.

If we look at ethanol, it is two-thirds as efficient when blended as gasoline. It gets poorer mileage, and there is no savings in terms of carbon output or pollution. So we are incentivizing the use of a fuel that goes against what most people would like to do environmentally. It causes us to markedly increase the cost of food, which we are seeing in our country and around the world today, and we are incentivizing something that is going to happen anyway.

So it is a straightforward amendment. It says on the blender's tax credit we are no longer going to give a credit for something on which we already have a market--we are going to do without it. Some will say that is a tax increase. But when we send $6 billion to a small segment of American industry, and it is not going to impact their sales at all, what is the purpose for having tax credits? If we use tax credits or expenditures to expand the economy and it is not doing that, why would we continue to do it?

As part of the President's deficit commission, we looked at that and said it is a no-brainer. There is no reason we would incent something that is already mandated by law and has to happen. I know it is a controversial subject for a lot of my colleagues from farm States. But the fact is, worldwide sophistication and food preference has markedly increased. This is creating an enormous pressure in taking food stocks out of the human food chain and putting it into the energy chain. So we are not stopping that. There are still all the other credits available, incentives and mandates. But we are saying we should not spend $6 billion of American taxpayer money that we don't have--by the way, we do not have it--for something they are going to do anyway.

The other point I make is that we are now a net exporter of ethanol. A lot of people don't recognize that. Through November 2010, we exported 397 million gallons of ethanol. That is almost 1 billion gallons since 2005. Not counting the blender's credit but all the other credits, we are supporting that to the tune of $1.20 a gallon.

Now we are subsidizing the consumption of ethanol in Europe to the tune of $1.20 a gallon. That makes no sense when, in fact, we have significant energy needs ourselves.

My hope is that we will consider this amendment and that we will vote on it. I recognize it is going to be a close vote. My count is at 55, and I know we have to get 60. I want the other 45 Members of our body to go and explain to their constituents why we are sending $6 billion to something that is going to happen anyway. It is a gift. That is all it is. We don't have $6 billion to spend that way.

The other point I will make is that with the trouble we are in, we are not going to get out of it by cutting $200 billion at a time. We are going to get out of it $6 billion at a time. Senator Begich and I found $1 billion in the FAA bill from earmarks that are tied up. So if we do it $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion, $4 billion, $5 billion, or $6 billion at a time, pretty soon it will add up and we will take pressure off our country in terms of funding our debt.

The ultimate course has to be to convince the world that we get it, that we can't continue to borrow 40 percent of our expenditures in the world financial market and expect them to continue to loan us money. It is very straightforward.

My corn farmers in Oklahoma don't like it, and I understand that. It is about doing the right thing for our country. Now is the time to do it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, will you kindly advise me when I have 10 minutes left, please.

Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about where we find ourselves. Nobody has spent more time in the last 6\1/2\ years on this floor talking about the problem in front of us. Hopefully I can do that in a way that would never impugn the motives of my fellow Senators.

I enjoyed the speech of the Senator from Nebraska, because one of the things he stated is we have to come together. You are not going to get coming together when we have the speech we just heard, when you have a speech that impugns the motives of the people in the other body trying to solve some of our problems.

The first point I wish to make is we are at a place where we are going to vote on two bills with no amendments. Since when did the Senate give up its ability to try to amend bills going forward? The reason we are not is because, had we not agreed to it, the tree would have been filled and we would have either voted for cloture or not to have cloture, but the fact is in this body we ought to be about amending what we do not like in the bills.

If the Senator from Oregon does not like what is in the bills, he ought to have a chance to try to change it. Yet we find ourselves with a very short period of time to debate what is the No. 1 risk for us as a nation today.

I have read all the economic studies that have been put out on H.R. 1. I have also read what the economists on the other side say in terms of the false assumptions that have been made in it. I don't know which ones are right, but the fact is we are not going to have an actual debate on advancing amendments.

Let me describe where we are today, so everybody knows. We are adding $4.507 billion to the deficit every day. We are borrowing in the international market $3 billion a day. By the time I finish this talk, we will have added $98 million to the deficit. Adding something to the deficit, what does that mean? That is the same thing as saying we are taking the opportunity away from the children and the generation that follows us by putting them in debtors prison. That is exactly what we have done.

I don't care where the blame lies. What we have to start doing is not spending money we do not have. We cannot continue to spend money we do not have. It is very interesting that a week ago this morning, this past Monday, the GAO issued a report. It covers one-third of the Federal Government and lists the duplications they found. We asked them to do that with the last debt limit extension in the Federal Government.

According to my calculations, there is at least $100 billion that is not touched by either of these bills that could be eliminated tomorrow and saved against our children's future. We do not have an opportunity to offer amendments to do that on this bill. Here is real data compiled by the Government Accountability Office where multitudes of Members from this body have called me and said how do we help you do that?

The first way you help me do that is make sure we have an open process on the floor where we can offer an amendment to do it. Let me highlight for a minute some of the things that were in this wonderful report put forward by the GAO.

We have 47 job training programs across 9 different agencies that we are spending $18 billion a year on. Not one of them has a metric on whether it is successful or actually is accomplishing what it is supposed to do. Why do we need so many different job training programs? Why do we need any job training program if we cannot show it is working? Why are we spending money on a job training program that is not working?

We have five departments, eight agencies, two dozen Presidential appointees who oversee our work on bioterrorism. We don't have one agency responsible for it, one group of people. We are spending $6.5 billion a year on bioterrorism and the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

We have 20 agencies and 56 programs dedicated to teaching America financial literacy. We have no moral authority to teach anybody financial literacy when we have a deficit that is going to be $1.65 trillion this year and we are $14.2 trillion in debt.

We have 80 economic development programs across 4 different agencies where we spend $6.5 billion a year. We don't know if they are working. Maybe they are but we ought to know it before we spend money we don't have on things when we do not know if they are working.

We have 15 different agencies covering 30 food safety laws--15 different agencies.

We have 18 nutrition programs, separate nutrition programs. We spend $62.5 billion a year, $30 billion of it is borrowed, and we do not know the results. Why shouldn't we have one? And why shouldn't we put a metric on it to know whether it is working?

We have 20 homeless programs. We heard mentioned the homeless programs. We are going to spend $2.9 billion at seven different agencies, and if you add up the money over the last 10 years that we spent on homeless programs we can buy every homeless person in this country a $200,000 home. Yet we continue to spend money. We don't know if the programs are working. They certainly would be better off if they had $200,000 for their care for the future rather than continue the programs we have no metrics on.

We have 82 teacher training quality programs--82 of them. They are across 10 different Federal Government agencies and we spend $4 billion a year on them and we have no idea whether they are successful. As a matter of fact, we do know if they are successful--we are not successful in our country today. Are we getting value for what we are spending? Remember, 40 cents of every dollar we spend on these programs we are borrowing from the Chinese.

We have 52 programs for entrepreneurial efforts. Since when is that a

role of the Federal Government? We have 35 programs to oversee infrastructure; 27 different programs for commercial buildings; 28 programs to oversee new markets outside of this country--28 programs; 20 programs for business incubators, and 17 different grant programs for disaster preparedness. We have 17 different grant programs for disaster preparedness; 34 areas where Federal agencies, offices, or programs have redundant objectives or are fragmented across several departments; 2,100 data centers for 24 agencies. Consolidating them could save $200 billion over a decade. We cannot even offer that amendment on this debate. That is $20 billion a year. That is a third of what the House wants to save.

We have the ability--there is the waste, there is the incompetency in what Congress has done through its duplication of efforts and its lack of oversight--to solve a great portion of our fiscal problems.

We can do it. But we cannot do it when the process does not allow for debate and votes on those specific issues. I want to talk for a minute about what is ahead of us as a nation because I think it is important. I am very sorry my friend, President Obama, has not led on this issue.

Let me tell you what is in front of us. What is in front of us is rising interest rates. What is in front of us is rising competition for capital to fund our deficits. The historic rate for us on our debt as a nation over the last 35 years has been greater than 6 percent. Last year we paid less than 2 percent for what we have on the books, less than 2 percent average.

Our historical timeframe on when that money is due is usually about 10-plus years. We are now financing that at 59 months. What is going to happen in the world next year? Well, the difference in terms of sovereign financing--that is, other countries that also need to borrow money, including us--and what is available to finance that next year is $7 trillion. In other words, there is a $7 trillion shortfall in terms of what is going to be available to finance.

If we are going to borrow $7 trillion in the world more than what is available, what do we think is going to happen to interest rates? What is going to happen? Well, they are going to rise. So we are going to be faced with one of the following two dilemmas unless Congress gets its act together. Here are the two dilemmas: The first is, our average interest cost goes back to its historical cost. If that happens, immediately we are going to see $640 billion more a year in interest costs--$640 billion. We only have less than $200 billion this year. We are going to see a $640 billion increase. That does not help any person who has a need. All that does is that is paid out to our debtors. That is a very real risk for us right now.

That goes to say that we do not have a lot of time because what we know is interest rates are going to rise. So it is mandatory that Congress do what the American people have known for a while we need to do; that is, live within our means.

Now, let me describe the second problem or second solution; that is, what the Federal Reserve will do. The Federal Reserve will just print more money. Well, if we print more money and we do not have any base for doing that, that creates what is called inflation. It is called debasing our currency.

What happens in America if we decide that the way we are going to get out of our problem is to debase our currency and print more money, like the Fed is doing right now, what is called quantitative easing 2?

They are printing $600 billion worth of money between now and June. Well, what happens is the value of everything we own in real terms declines, in nominal dollars goes up, but the purchasing power of the average middle-class family in this country declines tragically, and the safety net this country has been known for, for those who are far less fortunate than the average American, will be absolutely unaffordable, totally unaffordable. So we are talking about the destruction of the best of America, our middle class. We are talking about taking opportunities away.

So what is the answer? The answer is not to have more partisan statements by Senator Merkley impugning the motives of people who are trying to do what is right even though it is different from his opinion. The answer is for Congress to get together and recognize the threat to our future and give up long-held positions to solve the greater good. That means we have to move. That means we have to recognize that we cannot have it all our way.

How do we actually do that? Well, the one failure of Congress, in my time in Congress, both in the House in the mid-1990s and now in the Senate since 2004, is we do not do oversight. How did we end up with this report that shows $100 billion in duplications? The only way it could happen is we were not watching. We were not doing the oversight.

So one of the things that needs to happen is the chairman of every committee ought to spend 90 percent of their time in oversight on things we are already doing rather than working on creating new bills and new programs.

Second, what ought to happen is we ought to have a vigorous debate with amendments on the floor of the Senate to solve some of the very real problems. It is not all that hard to solve these problems. But what happens is in partisan bodies, people talk past one another. Nobody would decline the fact that we ought to get rid of unused property. We can save $8 billion a year if we get rid of unused Federal property. Does anybody disagree with that? But we have not done it. There is $8 billion. We are going to get out of this $1.6 trillion hole a couple billion dollars at a time. We ought to do that. We ought to get rid of the wasteful printing at the Government Printing Office, save several hundred million dollars over the next 10 years.

We ought to quit paying bonuses to contractors who do not do their job--and we have documented that multiple agencies are doing that-- performance bonuses when they do not meet the performance requirements.

We ought to collect the unpaid taxes from Federal employees; it is $3 billion. Those are the settled claims; these are not the unsettled claims.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cardin.) The Chair notifies the Senator he has 10 minutes remaining.

I thank the Chair. Here is a list of ideas that comes to $380 billion, of things that we would, as normal Americans sitting at our family table, say: You are in trouble. Forty percent of your budget you are spending you do not have the money for. Your credit cards are maxed out. You cannot do it. What can we spend? Here it is.

There were 72 amendments last year. Two of them passed the

Senate. I heard the Senator from Nebraska talking about some

pain that might occur in his district. I want to tell you,

there has to be shared pain all across the country if we are

going to get out of the problem we are in. We can no longer

kick the can down the road without spilling the soup all over

our kids. The time for action is now. The time for leadership

is now.

If we look at history, what we find is the average age of a republic is 207 years. All republics before us have failed. How have they failed? What is it that caused them to lose their economy and their freedom? Was it an invading army? Was it some natural disaster? None of those things. If we go back in history, every one that has failed has failed over fiscal issues, the very issues that confront us today.

I think it is time America cheats history. I think it is time we come together and solve these big problems. It is going to be painful for everyone.

It means some Senators are going to lose their seats if they do the best, right thing for America. There cannot be a greater calling than that, to do the best, right thing for our country. It means following a pattern of leadership that says personal sacrifice by me in a leadership position has to come first, demonstrating my ability to understand the problem.

So we are going to have a limited debate on two bills, both imperfect. But certainly one of them goes more toward the problem that we have than the other. We are going to spend $3.8 trillion this year through September 30. The deficit is going to be $1.6 trillion.

The savings from the House cut is this little, bitty green line down here. It is only $57 billion. The savings from Inouye is $4.7. You cannot even see a line. It does not begin to address the duplication, the waste, the fraud and abuse, the incompetence of what we have created in the Federal Government. It will not solve our problems.

It will be a nice starting point for partisan debate, but it takes us away from what we need to do. Here is the cut. Here is the deficit. This is a pie chart. It is showing--it is nothing--$57 billion is nothing. What we have to do to be able to compete in a world financial market is send a signal that we get what the problem is, that we are willing to make the difficult and tough sacrifices and choices to become viable and reliable and have people loan us money in the future. We have to extend the term and period of our debt where we buy the time to make these things possible so the least amount of pain--although very real--comes about.

For goodness' sake, we have to stop spending money we do not have on things we do not absolutely need.

I yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from Louisiana.

I wish to express my opposition to Reid amendment No. 143, as modified. I do not believe public institutions of higher education, or any entity, should be carved out of the definition of micro entity in the underlying legislation. Had a rollcall vote occurred, I would have voted no.

Mr. President, I want to thank all of the cosponsors who joined in support of my amendment, particularly Senators Boxer and Grassley, who recognized the importance of this amendment for the proper functioning of the PTO and for the underlying legislation. Furthermore, I want to thank Chairman Leahy and Ranking Member Grassley for including my amendment in the managers' amendment to the patent reform legislation.

Our Founding Fathers recognized the value that intellectual property provides to this country and sought to protect innovation as they did physical property. Article I, section 8 of our Constitution states ``The Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.''

It is necessary for the Federal Government to protect and enforce intellectual property rights domestically and internationally. Intellectual property is important to our country, businesses and individual rights holders, and I believe a strong patent system is one crucial element in maintaining our

country's leadership in innovation, invention and investments. While I do believe it is the goal of this patent reform legislation to strengthen and improve our patent system, I do not believe that such goals are possible without reform to the financial crisis facing the patent office.

My amendment would provide an immediate solution to this crisis. The amendment creates a lockbox--a new revolving fund at the Treasury-- where user fees that are paid to the PTO for a patent or a trademark go directly into the revolving fund for PTO to use to cover its operating expenses. Congress would not have the ability to take those fees and divert them to other general revenue purposes.

I do not think everyone in this body understands what it means for the PTO to be a wholly fee-supported agency. PTO does not receive any taxpayer funds. PTO receives fees through the payment of patent and trademark user fees--fees paid by small inventors, companies and universities to protect their ideas and technology. While those that pay these fees expect efficiency and quality from the PTO, they do not receive it. Because of the current PTO funding structure--where PTO user fees are deposited into the Treasury, but PTO is then required to ask for annual appropriations--Congress, who only has authority over taxpayer funds, maintains control over the user-funded PTO. When PTO's fee income is greater than what Congress provides via appropriations, we spend the ``excess'' on other general revenue purposes. As a result, those that pay to use the patent system are not receiving the quality service they deserve.

It is more than mere coincidence that the two major problems at the PTO, (1) the growing number of unexamined patent applications or ``backlog,'' and (2) the increased time it takes to have a patent application examined or ``pendency,'' are the result of a ``lack of connection between the monies flowing into the agency and those available for expenditure.'' In fact, the latest data from the PTO shows that the patent processing backlog is almost 26 months. That is, it takes 26 months for the patent examiner to even pick up the application to take his ``first action.'' Total overall pendency--from filing to final action--is approximately 35 months. The PTO also states the total number of patent applications pending is over 1.16 million, with over 718,000 of those waiting for a patent examiner to take his first action. One of the primary reasons for these incredibly long waiting periods is a lack of resources at the PTO. By providing a permanent end to fee diversion, Congress has the ability to contribute greatly to the enhanced efficiency of this agency.

This is not the first time Congress has been confronted with its diversion of PTO user fees. Since the early 1980s, Congress has addressed issues related to this issue. Beginning in the late 1990s, our own congressional reports have documented the problems with fee diversion from the PTO, and the domino effect it has on PTO's efficient operation.

In 1997, the House Report on the Patent and Trademark Office Modernization Act stated: ``Unfortunately, experience has shown us that user fees paid into the surcharge account have become a target of opportunity to fund other, unrelated, taxpayer-funded government programs. The temptation to use the surcharge, and thus a significant portion of the operating budget of the PTO, has proven increasingly irresistible, to the detriment and sound functioning of our nation's patent and trademark systems . . . this, of course, has had a debilitating impact on the [PTO].''

It is disturbing to me, and should be to all Members, that many of the same practices that this 1997 report notes as those that suffer from lack of consistent PTO funding still occur today--14 years later.

Yet Congress continued to grapple with PTO's funding problem into the early 2000s. In 2003, the House noted in its report on the Patent and Trademark Fee Modernization Act that ``by denying PTO the ability to spend fee revenue in the same fiscal year in which it collects the revenue, an equivalent amount may be appropriated to some other program without exceeding their budget caps. Although the money is technically available to PTO the following year, it has already been spent.'' In 2007, I offered a different version of my current amendment to patent reform legislation considered by the Judiciary Committee. My amendment passed without opposition. Last year, I offered this amendment in the Judiciary Committee, and it was tabled by a vote of 10-9. Yet, in 2008, this body adopted by unanimous consent an amendment by Senator Hatch to the fiscal year 2009 budget resolution that condemns the diversion of funds from the PTO.

Clearly, for more than a decade, both Houses of Congress have recognized that many of the efficiency and operational problems at the PTO could be remedied by giving the PTO authority over its own fee collections. However, we have yet to take the responsibility to relinquish the control over these user fees that we think we deserve. In fact, in the current arrangement, Congress cannot resist the temptation to take what is not ours and divert it to nonpatent related functions. This is especially tempting during bad economic times, which we have recently been experiencing. Such an arrangement flies in the face of logic, commonsense budgeting and overwhelming support from the entire patent industry for providing the PTO with a consistent source of funding. Ending fee diversion is one of the only areas of 100 percent agreement within an industry that has often been divided on other issues in this bill. My amendment is supported by: PTO; Intellectual Property Owners Association, IPO; American Intellectual Property Law Association, AIPLA; International Trademark Association, INTA; The 21st Century Coalition; Coalition for Patent Fairness, CPF; Innovation Alliance; American Bar Association, ABA; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, WARF; BIO; Intellectual Ventures; National Treasury Employees Union, NTEU; Intel; and IBM.

The PTO cannot effectively manage the changes made in this legislation without permanent access to its user fees. I agree that there are aspects of the patent system that need to be updated and modernized to better serve those that use the PTO, and this bill makes reforms to the current patent system. In fact, one of those changes involves giving the PTO fee setting authority. Section 9 of the bill states that the PTO shall have authority to set or adjust any fee established or charged by the office provided that the fee amounts are set to recover the estimated cost to the PTO for its activities. This is a great provision to put in the bill, but it is only one side of the funding story. In fact, providing the PTO with fee setting authority alone is at odds with the way Congress currently funds the PTO. If I were the PTO director, why would I take advantage of this provision by increasing fees to a point where I think they would cover my operational costs, when I know that Congress has the ability to take whatever it wants of those increased fees and spend it on something other than what I budgeted those fees to cover?

In fact, PTO Director Kappos has specifically commented on fee diversion at the PTO. During his confirmation hearing in 2009, Director Kappos stated in his testimony that the PTO faces many challenges and one of the most immediate is ``the need for a stable and sustainable funding model.'' In his private meeting with me prior to his hearing, he discussed his experience as a high-level manager, officer and counsel at IBM. He acknowledged that, despite the vast knowledge and experience that he can bring to the PTO, he could not run PTO efficiently without access to sustainable funding.

In March 2010, Director Kappos appeared before the House CJS Appropriations Subcommittee and stated the PTO was likely to collect at least $146 million more than its 2010 appropriation. He was right, and in July 2010, the PTO had to ask for more funds from Congress in separate legislation, but it was only given $129 million. As a result, PTO ended up collecting at least $53 million above that amount, which it could not access.

In April 2010, Director Kappos made similar comments at a meeting in Reno, NV. When discussing the pending Senate legislation, Director Kappos stated, ``I am going to make USPTO much better whether we get new legislation or not . . . There is more than

one way to solve our problems. Lack of funding is a real issue . . . It's very hard to cut down on a huge backlog with a lack of funding . . . Lack of funding hits you at every corner at the USPTO. Just do the math . . . We'll all be dead and gone by the time we get rid of the backlog of appeals at the current rate. It is so overwhelming and it all comes down to the resources you need. It comes down to money.''

In January 2011, Director Kappos appeared at a House Judiciary Committee PTO Oversight hearing. He stated, ``uncertainty about funding constrained our ability to hire or allow examiners to work overtime on pending applications during the last year.''

It baffles me that these comments have not been heeded by Congress. Director Kappos believes much progress can be made without legislation as long as there is a sustainable funding model.

Similar words appear in the House Report on the 2003 Patent and Trademark Fee Modernization Act: ``While the agency has demonstrated a commitment to embrace top-to-bottom reform consistent with congressional mandates, it is equally clear that PTO requires additional revenue to implement these changes.'' Yet, our PTO director, who has incredible plans for this agency, cannot accomplish those due to revenue shortfalls that have plagued the agency for decades--a problem Congress has the ability to permanently fix.

Congress has not ended its diversion of fees from the PTO.

On a regular basis, from 1992 to 2004, the amount Congress ``allowed'' the PTO to keep via appropriations was less than the fees PTO collected. At the height of this problem in 1998, Congress withheld $200 million from the PTO and diverted it to other general revenue purposes. As recently as 2004, Congress diverted $100 million from the PTO, in 2007, it was $12 million, and in 2010, it was $53 million. In total, since 1992, Congress has diverted more than $800 million that the PTO will never be able to recover.

Now, beyond the concern that appropriators have with relinquishing control over PTO funding, some might say that the practice of fee diversion has ended in recent years, making this amendment unnecessary. Under public pressure from numerous sectors of the American innovation industry, in 2005 and 2006 and 2008 and 2009, it is true Congress gave PTO all of the funds it estimated in its budget request. So, some argue that no permanent solution to PTO fee diversion is necessary because of Congress's proven restraint.

However, it is not entirely true that all fee diversion has ended. First, it is inaccurate to say there has been no fee diversion since 2004. According to the PTO, $12 million was diverted in 2007, and $53 million in 2010--a type of diversion slightly different from the past. From 1992-2004, PTO provided an estimate of its fees, but appropriators diverted funds by appropriating to the PTO less than its estimate and applying the difference to other purposes. In 2007 and 2010, PTO provided its estimate and, it is true, appropriators provided an amount equal to that estimate. But, PTO collected more than what appropriators gave them, and those fees were diverted to other purposes rather than being returned to PTO the following year. Without access to those funds, PTO lost $12 million in 2007 and $53 million 2010, for a total of $65 million.

Second, Congress has engaged in ``soft diversion'' of PTO funds through earmarking PTO fees. From 2005-2010, appropriators directed PTO to spend its user fees on specific, earmarked items in appropriations bills totaling over $29 million. Such items included: $20 million for ``initiatives to protect U.S. intellectual property overseas;'' $1.75 million for the National Intellectual Property Law Enforcement Coordination Council, NIPLECC; $8 million for PTO to participate in a cooperative with a nonprofit to conduct policy studies on the activities of the UN and other international organizations, as well as conferences. While we all agree it is important to protect intellectual property rights abroad, PTO should be able to have discretion to decide how much of its budget should be directed for those purposes.

Third, the PTO faces a huge backlog of unexamined patents, as well as an enormous patent pendency problem for those applications already being processed. Fee diversion from the PTO has exacerbated these waiting periods through a congressional Ponzi-scheme. Even if we were to accept that fee diversion stopped in 2005, CBO states that approximately $750 million was diverted from 1992-2007. With the addition of the $53 million diverted last year, the PTO has lost over $800 million due to fee diversion. Thus, PTO has been constantly trying to recover from years of a ``starvation funding diet.''

So, when the PTO presents a budget of what it needs to process applications in the next 1-year period, that money is actually going towards processing applications sitting in the backlog. As a result, Congress is really not providing PTO with what it needs for the year in which it receives appropriations. Rather, it is giving short-shrift to the current year's needs because PTO must apply its fees not to the inventor who submitted his application this year, but to those who paid and submitted applications years ago.

Lack of funding is exacerbated under a continuing resolution. In fact, PTO's lack of access to its user fees is further amplified in a year with a continuing resolution, such as this fiscal year. Under this CR, the PTO can only spend at the level given to it by the Appropriations Committee in 2010, which is approximately $1.5 million per day less than the President's fiscal year 2011 budget request.

PTO already has to wait on year-to-year funding that may not materialize, and under a CR the problem is worse since PTO cannot get access to their fees until the CR is lifted. In January, the PTO Director noted at the House Judiciary PTO oversight hearing, ``our spending authority under the continuing funding resolutions and the lack of a surcharge assessment through early March, however, represent foregone revenue of approximately $115 million as compared to what was proposed in the President's fiscal year 2011 budget request.''

Thus, under the House-proposed CR, without a specific provision inserted to allow the PTO to collect all of the fees it collects, PTO will not be able to access its future fee collections. My amendment would solve this problem of constantly using time and resources at both the PTO and Congress to ensure the PTO receives the funding it deserves and does not suffer from Congress's inability to properly fund the government.

As the above problems show, even without direct diversion, PTO still faces the possibility of having its fees diverted by other means. Thus, while I recognize that some effort has been made by Congress, it is no consolation to me or to the PTO Director that, in recent years, appropriators have ``restrained'' themselves and provided the PTO with all of the fees that it collected. ``But, such recent restraint does not guard against future diversion.''

In 2007, the American Intellectual Property Law Association stated in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, ``there is nothing to prevent the devastating practice of fee diversion from returning . . . While everyone wishes for a more rapid recovery by the Office, it must be remembered that the current situation is the result of a 12 year starvation funding diet. It will take permanent, continued full funding of the USPTO . . . to overcome these challenges.''

An amendment to permanently end fee diversion is the only effective remedy. The only true solution to the problem of PTO fee diversion that will give solace to those in the patent community and to the PTO Director is a permanent end to fee diversion so the PTO can effectively and efficiently budget for its future operational needs.

The President's fiscal year 2012 Budget also supports a sustainable funding model for the PTO. It states, ``another immediate priority is to implement a sustainable funding model that will allow the agency to manage fluctuations in filings and revenues while sustaining operations on a multi-year basis. A sustainable funding model includes: (1) ensuring access to fee collections to support the agency's objectives; [and] (2) instituting an interim patent fee increase. . . .''

In fact, as I stated earlier, in 2008, this body approved, by unanimous consent, an amendment to the 2009 budget resolution by Senator Hatch that condemns the diversion of funds from the

PTO. My amendment is in the same vein--if we will vote to condemn fee diversion, we should also vote to remedy the problem.

I believe we cannot have true patent reform without ending fee diversion and providing the PTO with a permanent, consistent source of funding, which is why I believe very strongly that this amendment should be adopted. As my colleague Senator Hatch so effectively stated in Judiciary Committee markup this year, ``fee diversion is nothing less than a tax on innovation.''

Finally, I would like to point out that nothing in this amendment allows the PTO to escape congressional oversight and accountability. You have all heard me talk about the need for more transparency in all areas of our government, and this is no exception. Enacting this amendment will not put the PTO on ``auto-pilot'' or reduce oversight of PTO operations. In fact, the amendment requires extensive transparency and accountability from the PTO, giving Congress plenty of opportunities to conduct vigorous oversight.

My amendment provides four different methods by which Congress will hold PTO accountable: (1) an annual report, (2) an annual spending plan to be submitted to the Appropriations Committees of both Houses, (3) an independent audit, and (4) an annual budget to be submitted to the President each year during the budget cycle. Furthermore, nothing in this amendment changes the current jurisdiction of any congressional committee, Appropriations or Judiciary, to call PTO before it to demand information, answers and accountability. In fact, it has the potential to yield more information to Congress via the four reporting requirements than provided by other agencies.

This amendment is not about authorizers versus appropriators, but rather it is about giving the PTO and its very capable and experienced director the opportunity to improve the agency and provided top-notch service to PTO applicants. It is also about making oversight of the PTO a priority for all committees of jurisdiction. It is about stimulating our economy because when the PTO is fully funded, patents are actually granted, which creates jobs in new companies and in the development and marketing of innovative new products. It is about fulfilling our responsibility to ensure efficiency, accountability and transparency in our government so that we reduce our deficit and provide our grandchildren relief from the immense financial burden they currently bear.

Thus, to truly reform the patent system in this country, more than any legislation, it is necessary for the PTO to be able to permanently and consistently access the user fees--not taxpayer funds--it collects. Therefore, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 20 minutes.

I also ask the Chair to advise me when I have consumed 15 minutes.

Madam President, I thank the majority leader and the minority leader both for their comments on this report. It is important for the American people to know that this is the first of three reports we are going to receive. This report just covers what the GAO has looked at in the last 4 to 5 years. It truly only covers about one- third of the Federal Government, and I am talking discretionary programs, not mandatory programs such as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.

The GAO report shows at least $100 billion in savings if we could do our job. We are going to have a large debate over the next 2 weeks focused on funding the government for the next 6 months of this fiscal year and what the funding is going to be like in the next year. If I were sitting at home as a regular American looking at Congress, having read this report, the question I would ask is, Why will there be any debate at all? The GAO has given us a roadmap. They have said: Here is where $100 billion--those are my numbers, not theirs--of savings can come on an annualized basis on the first third of the discretionary side of the Federal Government. The discretionary programs of this government are 24 percent greater now than they were 2 years ago.

The challenge we face before us as a nation is a far greater challenge than anything we have ever faced. That sounds like a gigantic overstatement, but when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is head of all of our military, reporting to our civilian officials, says the greatest threat to this country is our debt, we ought to wake up and pay attention to it. The average American--75 percent of Americans--across this land wants the size of the Federal Government and its spending reduced, and that includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. What is lacking today is the leadership to define the problem for the American people so that we can come together as a nation and solve this greatest of all challenges before us.

Let me spend a minute talking about what is going to happen if we don't solve it. We heard the minority leader, the Senator from Kentucky, talk about the $1.65 trillion deficit this year. Today, the United States is borrowing money, on average, for everything we have borrowed, for about 2 percent. The historical average at which we borrow money is around 6 percent. Over the next 2 years, we are going to add, if we don't change things drastically--and I am talking drastically--another $3.5 trillion to the debt, to bring us to almost $18 trillion worth of debt. If we apply our historical interest rate to the debt--which we will be at in 2 or 3 years, there is no question about that--of 6 percent to $18 trillion, what we get is $1.08 trillion a year in interest costs. Think about that. We spent $127 billion this last year on interest, and we are going to take $1 trillion.

What happens if that happens? What that means is there is no discretionary budget. That means there is no money for the military; there is no money for education; there is no money for any or all of the programs other than Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That is the only thing that is left. And if that happens, our ability to borrow money in the international market will markedly decline, and the likelihood is that interest rates will go even higher than our historical average of 6 percent.

So the time to call us together, the time for shared sacrifice--not for sacrifice's sake but so we can restore the hope of prosperity for our Nation--is now. It is not tomorrow, it is now.

We are going to have a small bill on the floor that over the next 2 weeks will eliminate $4 billion by advancing terminations of programs both President Bush and President Obama want to terminate and eliminate $2.7 billion worth of earmarks that are inappropriate. So that is $4 billion over 2 weeks. Our interest cost today and what we are borrowing is $3 billion. That is what we are borrowing a day that we don't have. Every day, we go into the markets and borrow $3 billion. So over these 2 weeks, 14 days--14 days--we are going to borrow $42 billion, and we are only going to save $4 billion. Do my colleagues see the magnitude of the problem? We cannot continue to go in this direction.

The bill the House sent us is a step in the right direction but far less than what is needed based on the reality of what is in front of us. Every dollar this government spends, we borrow 40 cents of it--40 cents. What do we think a 20-year-old individual out there is going to see 20 years from now as a consequence of us going down the drain in

terms of the interest costs and the debt?

Necessity is the mother of invention. We have a need now as a nation--not as Republicans and Democrats but as a Nation--to come together and make the decisions that will put us on a course that guarantees the future for our kids and grandkids. The easiest way I know right now to take some of the sting out of the parochialism and partisanship is for every Member of this body and those in the House to become acutely aware of what this report says.

The minority leader listed a few of the programs. Let me go through these. Sitting at home or sitting in your office, think about if any of this makes sense.

There are 82 separate teacher training programs run by the Federal Government--82 separate sets of bureaucracies and sets of Federal employees. None of these teacher training programs, by the way, have a metric on them to evaluate whether they are successful. So when we are not successful--and I question whether it is even the role of the Federal Government to be involved in teacher training. I couldn't find it in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson couldn't find it in the Constitution. Roosevelt couldn't find it in the Constitution. Johnson couldn't find it in the Constitution. They all said so. We have quotes on that. Yet we have 82 programs, none of which do we know whether they are working.

We have 47 job training programs, 44 of which overlap one another-- some to the degree of 100 percent, some 60 percent. We spend $18 billion a year on it, and not one of them has a measurement of whether it is effective. We have a great need in our country today to retrain people to available jobs. Yet we don't have any idea whether these will work. If you are trying to figure out how to get through these programs, you need another government program to help you figure out how to get through them.

We have 20 offices with programs for homeless people--20 different programs--at the Federal level. Again, if you read the Constitution and the enumerated powers, you find a real difficulty in saying whether that is a Federal responsibility versus a State responsibility. Yet we have 20 separate programs for homeless people. How about one that works--if, in fact, it is a responsibility of the Federal Government.

We run 80 separate economic development programs--80 of them. That is in four different Cabinet agencies. We spend $6.5 billion a year, and what the GAO says is you cannot say whether there is any economic development that has come out of this $6.5 billion.

The Department of Transportation spends $58 billion on 100 separate programs run by 5 different agencies with 6,000 employees, with no idea whether that is the most efficient or effective way to do it because nobody has ever put a metric on it.

We have 30 separate programs on food safety, run by 15 different Federal agencies. We just added a whole bunch more with the last food safety bill--none of which had a metric on it, none of which perfected the food safety in terms of interstate transport, which is undoubtedly a Federal responsibility. How about an efficient and effective way to do that. How about 1 agency being responsible for food safety instead of 15.

We have 18 domestic food and nutrition programs--we spend $62.5 billion--11 of which we have no idea whether they are performing effectively.

The first question you might ask is, How in the world did we get all these programs? We got all these programs because somebody saw a need and thought that would solve that need. They did so without the benefit of one of the No. 1 obligations of Congress, which is the oversight of the bureaucracy. We have all these complaints by those who favor the earmarking process that if we don't earmark it, then the Federal agencies will spend the money where they are. They forget one little clue in terms of the Congress. We have absolute power to oversee every branch of the Federal Government in terms of their effectiveness and their efficiency.

Yet we have not done it. The Congress has that. Whether it is run by Republicans or Democrats, it is not done. It is not a partisan issue. It is laziness on our part. It is far easier to write a new bill that solves the same problem and not oversee the others. Consequently, we answer the humanitarian, compassionate call to fix something we have done by treating symptoms rather than the disease.

We have a real disease in our country today. The disease is a cancer that will take away our freedom. If you look back in history, all republics have fallen. The average age of a republic is 206 years. How did they fail? What caused them to fail? If you read the history books and look at all of them, you will find that even though they might have been overrun by an enemy, the key factor that caused them to fail was fiscal every time. They lived beyond their means. Look at what is happening to us in the world today. The scope of our power militarily is being limited by our economic power because we are extremely far in debt. When you go to the lead economists, such as Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart--the book they have written is ``This Time is Different.'' The economists tell us our debt right now--not what is coming this next year but right now--with the interest costs we have today, is costing 1 percent of GDP. We are only going to grow about 3.5 percent this year. If we didn't have the debt, it would be 4.5 percent. That means 1 million more people would have great-paying jobs this year if we didn't have this debt. So there is a clarion call out there coming from America--not inside Washington--to fix the real problems.

As a physician, what I know is this: If I treat the symptoms of a disease and do not treat the real disease, I ultimately make the disease much worse. I cover up the signs and symptoms of the disease. The disease we have is a disease of not recognizing the very critical nature that you cannot--never--you can never live above and beyond your means without ultimately paying a greater price. The difference between the Federal Government, most of the State governments, and every family is when you have maxed out the credit card, it is maxed. You are not going to get another credit card company to give you more. You will either have to start paying or you will default on it.

The question comes, Will we honor our true commitments? Will we make the hard decisions that are required to put us on a path for renewed prosperity? Will we take real information--and I have offered 70 amendments on this over the past 6 years, which have been voted down-- and will we start paying attention now because, ultimately, if we don't make decisions today that will control and set us on a path of prosperity, we are going to be in a position where our debtholders will make our decisions for us. That is when liberty declines. That is when American exceptionalism dies. That is when our destiny is taken from our hands. It should not be that way.

I, again, call on the President to lead this Nation to define the problem, the real threat to our freedom, and come forward and pull us together and let's solve this problem, with everyone recognizing that everyone is going to sacrifice, but the sacrifice will create a future benefit that will be rewarded in the lives of our children and grandchildren.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise to voice my concerns regarding S. 388, a bill to prohibit Members of Congress and the President from receiving pay during government shutdowns. While I believe it is important we in Congress lead by example, I am concerned this bill does not go far enough. Every bill that Senate moves this Congress should send a clear message to the American taxpayer that we are serious about our Nation's finances, the economic struggles being faced by our fellow citizens across the country, and the future of this great country.

If we are going to prohibit pay for Members of Congress and the President, we must also include members of the President's Cabinet, for example.

The bill prohibits retroactive pay for Members of Congress and the President who would not be paid during a government shutdown. This prohibition on retroactive pay should also apply to nonessential Federal Government employees who would be furloughed during a government shutdown. It is unfair to force hard-working Americans to pay the salaries of politicians who have failed to do their jobs or government employees who did not have to report to work because they are nonessential.

It is also my opinion that this legislation encourages Members of Congress to raise the debt ceiling. Clearly Congress does not need any more incentive to borrow and spend money or raise the debt ceiling. Since March of 1996 Congress has raised the debt limit 12 times. In 1995, the gross Federal debt was $4.92 trillion. Today, the national debt exceeds $14 trillion. We should not be passing legislation incentivizing more borrowing and debt. If anything, this bill should reduce Members' pay if they increase the debt limit, not the other way around.

I am also concerned with the timing and need for this bill. Prior to the Presidents Day recess, the House of Representatives passed a bill funding the operations of the Federal Government through the remainder of the fiscal year that included over $60 billion in spending reductions. Unfortunately, the Senate, which has not passed a single appropriations bill for fiscal year 2011, once again failed to act on this bill. And just today, the House passed a 2-week continuing resolution that the Senate will pass. It is about time for the Senate to do its most basic job--ensuring the continued operations of the Federal Government in a fiscally responsible manner.

With government spending at unsustainable levels, it is imperative that every Member of Congress make hard choices regarding Federal spending and cut waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication at every level of government.

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

Madam President, I wish to thank the chairman of the committee for his work on this patent bill. I still have a few small problems with it, but I am extremely grateful for his consideration of our amendment. Most people don't understand there are no tax dollars taken from the general fund for the Patent Office. It is all fees paid when you file a patent or a trademark or a copyright. Unfortunately, over the last 10, 15 years, $800 million of those fees have not been left at the Patent Office. They have been taken and used somewhere else. So when you pay a fee for a patent, that money isn't going to pay for the examination of the patent.

Right now, we find ourselves with 718,000 patents waiting for first action. If I file a patent today, what we will see is that 26 months from now my patent will have first action--the first reading by an examiner.

If we want to create jobs and stay on top of the world in terms of innovation, we cannot allow that process to continue. So what the amendment does is say we are not going to take the money people use to pay for a patent application and spend it somewhere else; we are actually going to spend it on patent applications. That is what it was set up for.

Quite frankly, it is immoral to take money for a specific purpose for advantaging an American company or inventor or a university and not apply that money for the intended purpose under the statute. Although this is controversial, most Americans would think, if you are paying $10 on a toll road, the money is going to keep the toll road up. Yet we haven't been doing that with the Patent Office.

We are in trouble not because of our Patent Office but because we have not enforced intellectual property rights owned by Americans around the world. So as we work on getting a patent bill and blending it with whatever the House passes, it is as important--again, I thank the chairman because he was kind enough to have a hearing on the intellectual property for us, in terms of its enforcement.

There are two key points for American innovation to bring jobs to America. One is when you get a good idea and have an ability to get it patented and can defend the patent. The other side of that is to enforce that patent throughout the world with our own Justice Department, in terms of our State Department and in terms of the intellectual property rights.

It is amazing how much of our intellectual property is being stolen by China today. I wish to relate a conversation I had with their Secretary of Commerce--their equivalent to ours--in China 3 years ago. I asked him about intellectual property rights. He was bold in his statement to say: We are not going to honor them. We are a developing nation and you would not have honored them either--even though they are a signatory to the World Trade Organization. It is important we understand whom we are dealing with--people who will cheat and steal intellectual property from America. Fixing the patent apparatus will help us get there, but it is just as important to have tough laws on our books that create sanctions on nations that do not honor intellectual property.

Again, this is a simple, straightforward, moral response to an immoral act: collecting fees for something and not spending it on that, which has put us behind the curve. This will bring us back. We have a wonderful new Director, over the last 18 months, in the Patent Office. It is being run better than ever. They are catching up. But last year we took $53 million of the fees that were for patents and spent it elsewhere. What this amendment does is stop that.

It may come to a time in this bill that we allow the Patent Office to set their fees. It will come to a time when we have to say: Wait a minute. You are charging too much. You have to be more efficient.

We don't do anything with oversight. We still have the oversight capability of all the Appropriations Committees. We have the ability to change this in the future in terms of their fee setting. If we do the proper oversight, we will spring forward with tremendous new technology that is protected and enable that capital expenditure that was spent to get that technology to flourish in terms of American jobs.

Again, I thank the chairman. He worked with me judiciously. It has been a pleasure to work with him. I thank him for his efforts on my behalf and that of the American inventors in this country.

Mr. President, on February 17, 2011, I introduced a bill that will provide assurance to taxpayers that Federal employees are on equal footing with the American people and are held accountable to the same rules they enforce.

In 2009, the Internal Revenue Service, IRS, found nearly 100,000 civilian Federal employees were delinquent on their Federal income taxes, owing over $1 billion in unpaid Federal income taxes. When considering retirees and military, more than 282,000 Federal employees owed $3.3 billion in taxes.

This legislation will save taxpayers at least $1 billion by requiring the Internal Revenue Service to collect unpaid Federal income taxes from civilian Federal employees.

Federal employees have a clear obligation to pay their Federal income taxes. The very nature of Federal employment and the concept inherent to ``public service'' demands those being paid by taxpayers to also pay their fair share of taxes. Federal workers should not be exempt from the laws they enforce. In fact, they should lead by example. Failure to do so is an affront to taxpayers and to the rule of law.

Unfortunately, Congress has allowed this abuse of taxpayer dollars to occur throughout the Federal Government and failed to implement the proper safeguards to hold culprits accountable. Considering our national debt recently surpassed $14 trillion, it is critical Congress quickly pass this legislation. Surely this milestone is a wake-up call for Congress to find ways to get control of the Federal budget and help get our country back on the right track towards fiscal responsibility.

The bill I recently introduced requires all Federal employees to be current on their Federal income taxes or be fired from their jobs. This is a commonsense bill that most Americans would believe is reasonable, necessary, and likely surprised that it is not already the standard throughout the Federal Government.

It is not the intention of this legislation to single out the majority of Federal employees who work hard and pay their taxes. Instead, the bill would carefully reach only those who have willfully neglected to pay their income taxes and would direct the IRS to only collect money already owed under the Federal Tax Code.

This legislation excludes Federal employees who make oversights in their personal taxes but willfully agree to pay them or are challenging the delinquency in court or through the IRS.

Specifically, it excludes Federal employees from termination if (1) the individual is currently paying the taxes, interest, and penalties owed to IRS under an installment plan; (2) the individual and the IRS have worked out a compromise on the amount of taxes, interest and penalties owed, and the compromise amount agreed upon is being repaid to IRS; (3) the individual has not exhausted his or her right to due process under the law; or (4) the individual filed a joint return and successfully contends he or she should not be fully liable for the taxes, interest, and/or penalties owed because of something the other party to the return did or did not do.

I recently introduced this bipartisan legislation, because Congress has failed to responsibly manage taxpayer dollars and serve in the best interests of the American people. This legislation will provide a solution to level the playing field between Federal employees and the American people when it comes to paying Federal income taxes.

It should be a priority of this Congress to pass this solution as a way to provide equal treatment under the law and to seek out commonsense opportunities that will reduce our national debt. Now is the time for Congress to get a grip on the federal budget and find responsible ways to save in order to preserve the heritage of service and sacrifice that made our country great.

I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to speak in support of this legislation. I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their support.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 64.

Amendment No. 64 is an amendment by myself and Senator Begich from Alaska. It is an orphan earmark amendment where we instruct the agencies to eliminate moneys that have been sitting for 9 years or longer and have not expended it. That is close to $500 million that we could count so far, probably $1 billion. It helps the agencies. It is money we have already allocated that will never be spent, that is unaccounted for. I believe we are going to have a voice vote on it and I appreciate everybody's support of that amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 80, as modified.

Mr. President, this is an amendment regarding Essential Air Service. The amendment of Senator McCain is to eliminate Essential Air Service, which is basically a subsidy for people who have to drive short distances--not long distances--to the airport. But we have selectively said certain people in this country can be advantaged by driving certain distances.

What this amendment as modified says is, provided the Secretary doesn't see extraneous circumstances otherwise, you have to be at 90 miles or greater to qualify for Essential Air Service. We started out with 100 and we saw there were significant difficulties that people actually had with that requirement. What we have done is taken this amendment and moved it to 90 miles. It does not affect a large number of airports but there are several within this that have minimal enplanements.

Remember, the average American drives over an hour to get to the airport now. We are saying we are not going to do it if you are driving an hour and a half, 90 miles, unless there is a circumstance where the Secretary of Transportation says otherwise, such as some particular places in West Virginia where it is tremendously mountainous and the time and distance does not meet with the average. All it does is lessen it.

Remember, in this bill we are increasing the amount of funds at a time we are going bankrupt. We are increasing the amount of funds for Essential Air Service. What we have done is a compromise to extend it to those who actually need it but also not subsidize something we should not. It affects less than 26 airports, and now less than that, now that we have modified it. I appreciate my colleagues' support on that. I think we will have actual votes on that in a minute.

Amendment No. 81

I call up amendment No. 81.

Mr. President, this is another amendment on Essential Air Service. This amendment eliminates Essential Air Service when the average enplanements are less than 10 a day. There is no way we can afford, given our financial situation, to subsidize Essential Air Service for the airports that have less than 10 a day.

I know that is a disagreement amongst us, especially for those who are having the benefit, that have subsidy today. By the way, the subsidy is supposed to be limited to $200, but if you take what happens on many of these, it is over $400; one of them is $482 per person per subsidy on airports that have less than 10 enplanements a day. It is common sense, given the realities of where we are today, realities of a $1.68 trillion deficit projected by the White House for this year. It makes common sense we would do this.

Amendment No. 91

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 91.

Mr. President, the Airport Improvement Program is a needed program but what we do regularly in the Airport Improvement Program is we are incentivizing the expenditure of moneys in a way that does not recognize the priorities of this country. The way we do that is we have a cost sharing in which the Federal Government pays for 95 percent of all these programs.

What has happened, and even in my own State, we have spent money in airports that have very few landings every day. There is no commercial service but very few private planes landing. All this amendment does is it says if you are going to qualify for the AIP for airport improvement, that over the next 3 years we would take that from 95 percent down to 75 percent, which is well above the average of every other grant program that we have in the Federal Government.

It is not about trying to eliminate, it is trying to say if we are going to set priorities, what we should do is lower the amount of Federal funds so that the State or the community that wants to utilize these funds will recognize, by their having to pony up a little bit more of the money, in fact it is a legitimate thing. At 95 percent we are having all sorts of money wasted on things that are not a priority for our country given the financial situation we are in.

With that, I think I have responded in less than the time allocated to me, and I yield the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I have no problem at all with my senior Senator's modification to the amendment. I am going to ask to have a voice vote on this to accommodate everybody, recognizing the late hour, but I want to make a point. What Senator Leahy wants to do is great to help people. But the one question we have not asked is--and we are going to be asked to ask it all the time from here forward given where we are--is it a Federal responsibility to supply these benefits? You can't find it in the Constitution. You can't find it anywhere.

When we look at the hard decisions we are going to have to make over the next 2 years in terms of trimming both mandatory programs and discretionary programs, where we set an example that we are going to expand something that is not in our constitutional role, we are making a mistake and we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to waive the 60- vote threshold on this vote and have a voice vote.

Mr. President, is there a pending amendment?

Thank you. Let me confine my remarks for a few minutes to how I see where we are from my perspective. My hope is that I can offer some amendments, at least get them pending, and then discuss with the chairman--I just discussed them with the ranking member--the disposition of those. I wonder whether the chairman has any comments on that.

I told them I would be happy----

I told Senator Leahy last night that I would be happy to lift my objection once my amendments were pending, and we can have a debate on his nongermane amendment.

Well, if the chairman will assure me I will have the opportunity to, No. 1, debate Senator Leahy's amendment----

Then I will continue with my objection.

It is interesting. We have a nongermane amendment that is outside the bounds of the Constitution, doing something that is not the role of the Federal Government, that we are going to expand the cost at a time when we are bankrupt, and five germane amendments that actually lower the cost of the airport improvement fund, actually help NextGen in terms of money, help preserve the airport trust fund, and we are not going to be allowed to bring them up? If that is the way we are going to operate, then you can count on me, knowing procedure around here, that we will have a very difficult time moving ever to a Leahy amendment.

Mr. President, I came to the floor to discuss what we are trying to do and to be helpful in moving that along. I have now heard that I will not be allowed to offer these amendments or at least bring them up. I am going to discuss each one of them, and I will object to any unanimous consent moving forward on any area until we have an opportunity, as is the Senate tradition, to have a debate and bring up amendments. If we are not allowed to do that, then I am sure we are going to start going backward again.

Passing an FAA authorization bill, as the chairman and ranking member have tried to do, is a significant priority for Congress. We have a system of air traffic control that needs to be modernized. We have monies that we are putting forward to do that. We have not had the oversight, according to the inspector general, that is necessary for those programs.

In this bill, we have authorizations for moneys that are not priorities for this country at a time that we are facing a $1.6 trillion deficit, we have an unemployment rate in excess of 9 percent, and interest rates that are going to rise in the future.

My amendments, which I am happy to have voted on and voted down, lead us to a path that secures and enhances the airport improvement fund and the trust fund, makes common sense that 99 percent of the American people would agree with, excludes Alaska because it is a totally different animal when it comes to the Essential Air Service requirements, and will, in fact, enhance the trust fund. So I am very sorry the chairman refuses to allow my amendments to come up, but I will offer them and have him object in total.

What has to happen with every program in this country is that wasteful spending, low-priority spending, and duplicative spending has to be eliminated. Although I think the chairman and ranking member did a fairly good job on this bill, there are areas where we can eliminate wasteful spending, there are areas where we can eliminate duplicative spending, and there are areas where we can say: This can't be a priority now given the financial fix in which we find ourselves.

During our current budget deficit, the revenues coming into the airport trust fund are lower than expected, and we have this very real need on NextGen development. Congress has to limit somewhere and make a priority next year, and I think they have tried to go in that direction, and these amendments will do such a thing.

The first amendment I would like to talk about is the airport improvement Federal cost share reduction amendment. Across this country, we now have money being spent on low-priority projects in airports that have very little traffic or minimal traffic, and we are not spending money on the airports for safety and for the airports in which we have the vast majority of traffic. We have seen one program in particular where billions of dollars for low-priority projects have been spent.

I would just tell you, if we are ever going to get out of the jam we are in, some common sense has to be applied in that we cannot do everything everybody wants, and there is going to have to be some sacrifice in these areas.

The whole goal of this first amendment is to discourage low-priority, wasteful aviation projects that would not be funded by increasing the non-Federal cost share to just 25 percent over 3 years. In other words, it is 5 percent now, and so it is 95 percent of the government's money, and all we do is, over 3 years, move it to where you have to pay 25 percent. It is going to discourage a lot of low-priority projects because the communities or the States have to have a greater participation.

There is no program in the Federal Government that has a grant process and a funding process where the Federal Government pays 95 percent other than this program--not one. So we are encouraging money to be wasted on low-priority projects by maintaining 95 percent Federal funding. This gives us 3 years to adjust to 75 percent, which probably should be 50 percent but 75 percent given our fiscal issues.

Nonprimary airports could initially have up to 90 percent of their airport improvement projects covered by the Federal Government. In recent years, we raised that, under Public Law 108-176, to 95 percent. This is 20 percent higher than the same cost share for other airports qualifying for this $4 billion program. It is $4 billion a year.

Lest you think I am too critical, let me give you some examples. Two flights a day--two flights a day, noncommercial flights, just two private flights a day--is the average for Kentucky's Williamsburg- Whitley County Airport. We spent $11 million there to build an airport with a 5,500-foot lighted runway, a colonial-style terminal, and hundreds of acres for growth even though it does not have one airline passenger and averages two flights a day. Now, tell me, if you ask the average American: Should we spend $11 million there or should we make sure we can take care of the kids who do not have what they need in this country, should we spend $11 million there or not borrow another $11 million from the Chinese, should we spend $11 million there or should we, in fact, make sure the airport trust fund has the money to do high-priority projects, such as large airports or NextGen, which one would the average American think we should do?

Lest you think I am picking on Kentucky, Halliburton Field in Duncan, OK, got $700,000 for a pilot room and a reception room. We are building for private aviation with taxpayer money--a low priority. We are building a nice pilot room and a reception room for the private pilots who fly there. Now, tell me how that is a priority in our country today. That is my own State.

We are sending money down a hole because we refuse to make tough choices. All this amendment does is say: Let's move it from 95 percent, over 3 years, to 75 percent so we do not get the lower priority projects funded, because we are too generous with what

the Federal Government contributes. The chairman may not like it, but I will bet you the average American thinks it is a pretty smart thing to do given the state we are in.

All bets are off on the politics of this. I have never been accustomed to playing the politics of it at all, but there are just as many people on the left who think we ought to cut spending as there are on the right. America gets it. The only place that does not get it is here. And this does not do anything except enhance what can be done for higher priority issues within our aviation community. That is all it does. It is a small, simple step. And by rejecting or not allowing an amendment such as this to come forward, what we are saying is that we are going to keep kicking the can down the road; we are not going to pay attention to the American public. We are going to hide from the reality that is coming very soon for this country. We will not have any money to put into airport improvement programs. We will not have the money to fund a NextGen program. It will become a low-priority program unless we wake up and start doing what the rest of America recognizes we have to do; that is, start living within our means.

The next amendment is an amendment that is a bipartisan amendment between the Senator from Alaska and myself.

It is an earmark rescission amendment. All it says is the earmarks that have been out there, that the money hasn't been spent for over 9 years, giving 1 year for the agencies to decide whether they think that is so, should be rescinded. It puts $500 million, a half a billion dollars at a minimum, back in the public Treasury. Why would we not want to do that? We have $2.6 million sitting in Atlanta that can't be spent on anything except the 1996 Olympics. Why wouldn't we take back that $2.6 million? It was earmarked. It didn't get spent. But it is sitting out there in a hole. We can reverse that. Estimates are we will save a billion dollars. The conservative estimate at a minimum is $500 million. Yet we are not going to allow this amendment to be considered? It makes no sense.

The next amendment calls on us to sacrifice a little bit. The Essential Air Service Program has multiple subsidies where people can easily drive 1 hour and 20 minutes and get to a regional airport that doesn't require any subsidies. All this amendment does is move it to 100 miles from where it is today, which is 70. It moves it to 100 miles and says if you are less than 100 miles, you ought not be eligible, sometimes to the tune of $4 or $500 per person per flight, to have a subsidized flight when you could drive 70 minutes, 80 minutes, and have access to a ton of flights.

Again, it is priority. Is it priority for us to continue to spend money on a small group of airports, 36, that in no way pay for themselves, that are readily accessible throughout the country to major airports, and spend the kind of money we are spending?

Another amendment says if you have less than 10 emplanements a day, we ought to think about whether we are subsidizing Essential Air Service.

All these amendments are saying is, will we make the tough decisions. We can't do everything we want to do. Is it nice that we have an Essential Air Service Program so some people don't have to drive an hour? I guess so. What are we willing to sacrifice to get our house in order? These are little bitty amendments that will send a wonderful signal to the American public that we get it, we absolutely get it. And because we get it, we are going to make choices about priorities. We are going to enhance the airport trust fund. We are going to enhance the airport improvement program because we are going to take lower priorities off the board, which is exactly what they want us to do. They want us to focus on the big things, the important things, and they want us to cut the spending that is not absolutely necessary.

I can tell my colleagues, it is not absolutely necessary that we subsidize some of these smaller airports that are very close to regional airports or have less than 10 passengers a day. It is not absolutely essential. Would we ask some Americans to sacrifice? Yes. But do you know what will happen? We will all have to sacrifice before we get through this. The problem is the resistance in this Chamber and in this city. We don't want to make the hard choices. It is disappointing that we have not done that. We will have to do that. And we are either going to do it or somebody from the outside is going to tell us what we are going to do.

Then a fifth amendment--and I know the chairman will be against this amendment because it is his program that I am trying to eliminate--in the year 2000, we created another program called the Small Community Air Services Program. This is an amendment to repeal that. It was geared to help smaller communities enhance their air service in addition to Essential Air Service; in other words, make it more effective, to try to promote utilization, which is a good idea except it is not working. When we see the funds from this program, after the grant is over, do you know what happens? The airlines leave. They don't stay. They leave. So we are kind of spending money in a market that won't sustain what we are trying to put there, and then we are putting more money on top of it to try to promote it. When it doesn't work, what happens? We lose the Essential Air Service anyhow. It has happened in Oklahoma.

In this day and time that we live, we have to have an FAA bill. We can't continue to not have an FAA bill. Even if my amendments are voted down, considering that they are going to get a vote, I will probably support this bill. But it should be noted that we haven't gone far enough. We haven't made all the tough choices we need to make. I am highly disturbed that we take amendments that are absolutely germane and say they can't be offered because a time agreement, even though it has been agreed to, isn't disagreed to yet because the Senator from Vermont isn't on the floor.

I am going to offer the amendment and let the chairman object. Then I will utilize the procedures that are available to me as a Member of the Senate.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 91.

I thank the chairman. I will go on and allow him to object to further amendments I have so it will be in the Record that I did attempt to offer them.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 80.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 81.

I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 82 and set the pending amendment aside.

I thank the chairman for his words. I will take him at his word and work with him and allow him to look at some of these. There are only two airports in West Virginia that this would have an impact on. Both of them are less than 75 miles from the regional airport. They both have minimal emplanements daily. They are

over 10 but not far over that. The point is, we ought to help who we can help, and it ought to make economic sense. They are not targeted because there are 36 airports in here, actually, where the average American would say, this is nuts to spend the kind of money we are.

I thank him for the time.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering the following amendment no. 64 on S. 223.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering the following amendment no. 80 on S. 223.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering the following amendment no. 81 on S. 223.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering the following amendment no. 82 on S. 223.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering the following amendment no. 91 on S. 223.

First of all, let me thank my colleague from Alaska. As somebody who has been working on areas of fiscal management in our Federal Government for the last 6-plus years, this is one small step. Whether it saves $500 million or whether it saves $1 billion, it is important that America knows we need to do this 1,500 more times.

We hear a lot in the press now from the Republican appropriators, the Republican budgeteers, about the battle of how much to cut. It is the wrong language. The deficit is $1.5 trillion this year. It was $1.4 trillion last year. We have tons of areas, as my colleague knows full well, as does our former colleague, the Senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold, where we don't effectively utilize the money that has been given to us or that we are borrowing against our kids' future.

So this is a great start. We need to do this every day on every bill that comes before us. We can find it. We have identified 50 sets of duplication within the Federal Government, and they are not small duplications. There are 49 job-training programs across 9 different agencies. There are 105 science, technology, engineering, and math programs--something the President, in his State of the Union Address, said he wanted to enhance. We don't have a metric on any of them. We already have 105 programs. We are spending $18 billion on job training, and we don't know if it is working, and we don't know if the people we have trained have gotten jobs in the areas in which they were trained. So I am excited about my colleague joining with me. The hope is that we can set a trend so that with every bill that comes out, we will start looking.

By the way, we do have coming from the Government Accountability Office the first third of all of the government programs. When we inquired 2 years ago to the Congressional Research Service and to the Office of Management and Budget and the GAO, we said: Give us a list of all the programs. Do my colleagues realize that nowhere in the Federal Government do we have a list of all of the programs where we spend money? We are highly critical of the Defense Department because it can't pass an audit, and we rightly should be, but we can't pass an audit because we don't even know what we are doing.

So this should not be controversial at all. It should save us close to $1 billion when it is all said and done, and that is $1 billion we won't borrow from the Chinese. All we have to do is do that 1,500 more times. The fact is, we can. We are like that little engine. We can. We can get up that hill. But what it is going to take is reaching across the aisle, as the Senator from Alaska and I have done, and saying: Here is an area of common ground, it is based in common sense, and it is something that should be done and should be done now.

Just to show how silly this is, the data shows that in Atlanta there is still money for the 1996 Olympics. Fourteen years ago, there was $2.7 million sitting in a bank account. They can't spend it because the Olympics has already occurred, but we still have that money out there. That is the kind of silly stuff that happens when the Federal Government reaches into areas where it shouldn't be reaching.

What we can do--not to lay blame, not to say it is about earmarks or not about earmarks, but here is a commonsense solution that says: Here is a way to free up $1 billion or $500 million. If it is $500 million, great, but here is a way to do that.

I wish to also take some time on the floor now to elucidate that the President's fiscal commission outlined $4 trillion over the next 10 years we could eliminate that would go a long way toward starting to solve some of our problems.

So my hope is that with this amendment, we will start a trend where we can grab hold of and capture the things that make sense, that most Americans will never miss, and if they do miss it, it is because they are going to get something better instead and more efficient instead, and we start down this road. This is a great start.

I congratulate my colleague for his initiative in bringing this back up. What we need to do now is get on the phone and get our colleagues in the House to do the same thing and make sure, when this bill goes through and this amendment is adopted, it actually happens. Don't forget that the Bush administration wanted this to happen, and so does the Obama administration. Think about the amount of labor we are spending taking care of details on things that can't get spent or won't be spent and the amount of man-hours that goes into that.

I just thought I would finish with one of the recommendations of the fiscal commission, which is on the Federal workforce. There is a wonderful article that was published by Iain Murray on February 3 about how many Federal employees we have. It is easy for us to think about the fact that when we count true--just true--Federal employees, it is 2.8 million. But that doesn't come close to the actual number of employees the Federal Government has. When you add up what is actually there and you add in postal employees, you add in military, you add in contractors, we are at 11 million Federal employees.

We have a great Federal workforce. There are a lot of areas where we can be efficient and downsize. We don't have to lay anybody off; we can just not add. What we can do is, through attrition, markedly decrease the number of Federal employees we have, which will be that second, third, and fourth billion dollars.

The other thing the Commission recommended, which the Obama administration embraced, was a freeze on salaries, but most of us don't recognize that we have $3 billion owed right now to the IRS in back taxes by Federal employees that has already been adjudicated.

So there are all sorts of things we can do. We have lots of ideas. My pledge is to work across the aisle with our colleagues to try to find one of these every day or one of these every other day. If we do that together, we don't have to borrow 40 cents out of every dollar we spend in this country. We can take it down to 20 or 15 or down to zero so that we can, in fact, ensure the future for our children.

Again, I thank my colleague, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Federal Government has $950 billion worth of property it is not using right now. We are spending $9 billion a year taking care of it, and we have a budget gimmick that says an agency that needs a new building, because we are going to account for the cost of that building in the year in which they buy it and charge it all to the agency--what are we doing? We are leasing buildings. I guarantee we could own them much more cheaply than we could lease them. What we should be doing is changing that and getting rid of the excess property, lowering our cost to maintain it--there is 9 out of the 1,500 we have to do, right there, if we would just do that--and then change the way we purchase buildings for the Federal Government so the agency can own it instead of leasing it because it costs, over the life of the building, about twice the lease.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to talk about the amendment Senator McConnell brought forward in terms of repealing the health care bill. I am probably going to approach this differently than a lot of my colleagues have. I do not doubt that the intent of what was passed a year ago last December was well intentioned, with the thought of solving health care problems in this country.

My experiences, as a physician for 25 years, and as a manufacturer in the medical device field for the 10 years before that, gives me a little bit different take on what the consequences are associated with this bill.

During that hardy debate we all had, I made some claims that people doubted in this Chamber which have become absolutely apparent and true. Costs are going through the roof, faster than we thought; portions of people cannot tolerate the plans, so we are giving them exemptions because it will not work in the business model to keep people covered but, most importantly, what is getting ready to happen is what happens between a patient and their access and their care and their provider. As well meaning as the bill was, the destruction of that aspect of health care will cause us to rue the day we put into motion what we are putting into motion.

Let me explain. Most of the doctors in this country became very interested in this health care bill, and rightly so. They are the ones who are going to be impacted, along with their patients, because they are the ones delivering the care. When you poll those doctors, what do you find, now that they actually know what this bill is going to do?

Well, some pretty significant statistics have come out--one by Thomson Reuters--where two-thirds of the doctors in this country absolutely believe the care of their patients is going to suffer as a consequence of this legislation.

Think for a minute if you are an individual needing to access care and we are in 2014, 2015, and the Advisory Payment Board of Medicare is intact. We also know what the Medicare trustees have said about that, that when this is fully impacted, the payment under Medicare--this is a very important point--the payment under Medicare will be less than the reimbursement for Medicaid.

So all of a sudden who was your family physician or who was your surgeon is no longer there. You see, this bill is about whether you can walk in and have the attention and care of somebody dedicated to you, who has your best interests at heart in terms of your health. What we are moving to is somebody who is going to have their best interests of survival at heart and your interests second.

That is the real tragedy of what is happening with this bill and the implementation of it. Not only are we going to have payments reduced in Medicare--that is the only way the bill works, by the way; it is the only way we can ever get out of the jam until we address fixing Medicare--but 55 percent of the specialists in this country today will not see Medicaid patients at the reimbursement rate we have, and we are going to have a reimbursement rate for Medicare lower than Medicaid.

Let me give you another example. What we know on Medicaid is, if you have no insurance and you go to an emergency room with a significant illness versus if you have Medicaid and you go to an emergency room with the same illness, the outcome for you with no insurance is better than the outcome for you with Medicaid. That has been repeated in four different studies now, and we are putting 18 million people into a system who are not going to have access to the best doctors because the payment is so low that there is a loss every time you see a patient.

So describe to yourself for a minute what happens to the mother who has three young children and has their 4-year-old all of a sudden sick with a fever, and there is no primary care doctor available under the 18 million new people who are going into Medicaid, and this child does not get seen for 72 hours. The mother thinks: Well, I will wait the fever out. I don't have a doctor I can call. I will wait the fever out.

When the child gets to the emergency room, because there was not a primary care doctor for that Medicaid patient to call, what do they find? They find the 4-year-old not with otitis media any longer, but with the early stages of meningitis. What was a simple, treatable disease--because access, even though guaranteed, was denied because there are not the available resources to care for that child--the child ends up with a very complicated hospital stay and potentially the loss of hearing or brain damage. Those are the real consequences of what we are talking about as we put 18 million people into a Medicaid system.

We have had several Senators today talk about the cost and the gimmicks. I am not going to do that. But I want to talk about the real issues. The one place we failed in health care is we did not fix the real problem. The real problem is, everybody's health care costs too much. We did not ask the right question: How do you drive costs down? Even when you go through all the numbers that have been given by CBO, Medicare trustees, Medicaid trustees, and outside studies, what we know is, what we did not do is drive any costs down. In fact, in the short term we have actually driven costs up.

So how do we do that? The way we do that is put some responsibility on both the physician and the purchaser of health care for the cost. It is human nature. If I gave you an insurance card for your groceries, and once your deductible was met all you had to pay was 20 percent of that cost from then

on out, your diet would significantly improve in terms of the quality and price of the products you buy. That is all in our human nature.

What we have failed to do is to address the real cost drivers. That cost driver is: There is no connection with my purchasing of health care with the actual payment of health care. How do we know if we connect it, it works?

Go to any place in the country that has Amish folks. They do not have health insurance--none of them. They do not buy health insurance. What do they do? They are grand consumers and very discretionary consumers of health care because they come forward and they want to know what they are getting and what it costs before they buy it, every time. I have delivered over 500 Amish babies, and there was not one time I wasn't asked at the time the patient came to see me: What is the price for this? Will you take a cash payment up front so I can buy for cheaper? Are there some other places where I can get the tests done? Every test I ordered, I would be questioned on whether they absolutely needed the test. They were discretionary purchasers and very sharp in their discretion on how they wanted to pay for health care. Consequently, their cost for the same thing was 40 percent less than anybody who walked in with insurance.

So we have totally missed this connection of market forces allocating scarce resources by making discerning consumers out of the purchasers of health care. We have gone exactly the other way. We have taken people who are at 133 percent of poverty and said: You are going into Medicaid, and by the way, you can't buy private insurance even if you want to. You have to be in Medicaid--a far substandard health care system. All the studies show the outcomes are poor, even after you equate for social disparities. We are going to put 18 million into that program, and we are going to have a shortage of over 100,000 primary care doctors in this country in the next 10 years. So who is going to see them?

Let me give another example. It happened this weekend. A patient--90 years of age--severely bent over from kyphoscoliosis, bad aging and kyphoscoliosis, is running a fever and can't breathe well. She goes to the ER. She had seen a physician on Friday. She had a chest x ray, and no pneumonia showed. She goes to the ER that night. She has a pulse ox of 81 percent. Normal is 93, 94 percent. They put her on oxygen, change her antibiotics, and send her home.

Well, what happened? Had we not interceded--I personally as a physician making a call to another physician--she would be dead by now because what she had was a full-blown, raging pneumonia and restrictive lung disease, but she was sent home from the ER because a physician-- not a doctor--a physician did not see her. So consequently she goes back to the ER the same night and is admitted to the hospital. They take a chest x ray, and all of a sudden they see this full-blown pneumonia. She had all the symptoms, but the person seeing her in the ER didn't have the experience to make the judgment. So is that really what we want? We want substandard care, so somebody can go home and die versus coming to the hospital? Today, she is 200 percent better. She is eating. Her pulse ox, now on room air, is 91 percent.

We actually saved her life because a real physician put hands on a patient and made the right diagnosis. But we are going to put people into a system where that doesn't happen because we are going to use physician extenders. That doesn't mean they are bad; they just don't have the same experience, and people die when they don't have the same experience. But we are going to inflate the utilization of less than a physician to care for the vast majority of these people who are going into Medicaid.

These are real examples of what the consequences are of what we have done.

As I started, I said I don't doubt the intent of my colleagues in terms of what they were trying to get to, but the biggest disease Washington has is fixing the wrong problem. We have expanded health care access under this bill, but access doesn't mean you are going to get care. And when you add 18 million people to the Medicaid rolls, let alone what is going to happen to the States, ultimately, with the cost on the maintenance of effort where they have Medicaid now and we are going to go to 133 percent, what you have done is put the States in a pinch, and they are in a pinch already.

So my question to my colleagues is, Where are the things that drive the costs down? Where is the discerning consumerism that allocates scarce resources in the most effective way? In this bill, it is not there. Nowhere is it there.

Now, what is there? What is there is a tremendous amount of new taxes. There is $52 billion over 10 years on employers who fail to comply with the insurance mandate; 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health plans, $32 billion; ban on purchase of over-the-counter drugs from somebody's health savings account, $5 billion; increased Medicare tax on wages of small businesses, nine-tenths of 1 percent; a 3.8- percent surtax on investment income, and that is $210 billion; increase from 7.5 percent to 10 percent of income the threshold after which you can make a medical deduction; $2,500 annual cap on flexible spending account contributions--and I could go through this and through this. The point is, we are increasing spending on health care by $2.6 trillion after this is truly in play. Also, the gimmickry in terms of accounting and the problems associated with that have been discussed on the floor.

One of the things that is there that concerns me as a physician, getting back to talking about patients, is cost comparative effectiveness. It was really cheap to send that 90-year-old person home. There was an ER visit, a little bit of oxygen, a change in antibiotics. That was really cheap. Comparative effectiveness would have said: Oh, that is OK--except she would have been dead in 24 hours.

Every physician who is maintaining their license or their specialty certification studies comparative effectiveness every day. They read it in the journals. They do it to get recertified. They know the comparative effectiveness. What they don't know is that we are going to mandate what they will do, what is the cheapest--not what is the best, what is the cheapest.

Well, I will tell my colleagues, if you look at heart disease in our country, if you look at cancer cure rates in our country, if you look at recovery rates from massively serious illnesses in our country from both trauma and otherwise, what you will see is the highest rate of recovery in the world. We have the highest 5-year survival rate on almost every cancer by 20 or 30 percent over every other system in the world. Do we really want to take that away?

In 2003, I was diagnosed with colon cancer. I had metastatic colon cancer. I am so thankful for the health care system we had that generated new devices, that incentivized great care, and after a major surgery where half of my colon was taken out, radical lymphadenectomy was carried out, and 6 months of chemotherapy, I stand before you today, 7 years after that. I want to tell you, had I been in England or Canada, my cure rate would have been about 35 percent. Do we know what it is in this country for somebody with metastatic colon cancer? It is nearly 70 percent. Now, what created that? What gave us the technology to do that? It is because we looked at the best clinical effectiveness, not the best price. We said: How do we best and most effectively get an outcome of cure?

This bill goes the other way. This bill is going to be a mandate from Washington on what your doctor can do for you, and it is also going to mandate from Washington what price should be paid. There is no question that, according to the trustees for Medicare, for us to maintain what has been put in this bill, Medicare reimbursement rates will fall below Medicaid rates. Do we really want that to happen? I will tell my colleagues, for those in my condition, those people who are diagnosed today with colon cancer, you don't want that to happen.

Now, how do we get the cost down? There is no question that there is tons of waste in our health care system. We have not attacked in the way we should attack--and I can say as a practicing physician that I wasted money caring for people because I didn't concentrate on that individual because that individual wasn't paying the bill. Some nebulous insurance company was paying the bill. Some government program was paying the bill. But when

somebody such as an Amish patient looks you in the face and you know that what you spend of their hard-earned money is going to come directly out of their pocket, all of a sudden the other obligation of a physician jumps up: How do I do this in the most efficient and effective way that still gives the best outcome? And we have totally missed that.

The most personal of all interchanges between humans besides those within a family are between patients and their physicians, and we are going to interrupt that. We are going to undermine it, and we are going to undermine it because somebody from Washington is going to be looking and saying: Did you do it the way we said to do it, Doctor?

Now, what is the doctor's oath? Is it to do what Medicare says or is it to do what is in the best interests of the patient? So that is the rub. That is where we are going with this program. So what we are going to have is, first of all, we are going to have tens of thousands of physicians retire over age 55--our best, most experienced physicians. They are leaving. They are not going to play this game. And then we are going to give physician extenders the role as primary care. They are very good in what their limited knowledge will give them but not anywhere compared to a full 8 years of medical training, including residency. They have 2 years. And then we are going to treat all of these people. What do we think the cost of that is going to be in terms of lost lives, in terms of delayed diagnosis? Delayed care is denied care. What good is it if I have Medicaid and I can't see a doctor?

So the problems are very real with this bill, and I don't say that as a fiscal hawk. I want to fix health care, and I want to drive the costs down. And we can drive the costs down $300 billion or $400 billion a year.

Thomson Reuters did a study. I talked about it in our debate last year. The fact is, we know that over $580 billion a year is blown in health care. That is enough to cut everybody's health care costs 20 percent. But we didn't address any of those issues. Not one of the issues that Thomson Reuters has brought up that said, here is what is wrong, here is why health care is more expensive--we didn't address those in the health care bill that was passed. Yet we wonder why we are out here wanting to change this bill. It is not so we can say: You did it wrong; it is because we really care, as you do, that we have to fix the real problem, and this bill didn't fix the real problem.

So I hope my colleagues will take in the spirit that it is intended-- that we don't believe we have done anything except expand coverage under a very broken system that is highly inefficient, that tells people they are going to have care, but they are not going to have care, and those who have a doctor are going to be told by the Federal Government what care they are going to have. It is exactly the opposite of what we should have done, and we did it in haste.

We know there are 1,600 new sets of rules coming, of which about 100 are through. We have another 1,500 to go.

CBO says that is $100 billion in costs just to implement all this, which was never even considered in the cost of this bill. That doesn't consider the cost of complying with all of the new rules and regulations.

My time is up. I will be back to talk on this again. My hope is that--now we have three physicians in the Senate and we have all seen the same thing. I am a primary care OB, one is an ophthalmologist, and one is an orthopedist. We pretty well have it covered.

What we have done is not going to work. We are going to be sorry we did it. But do you know who will be the most unfortunate receivers? It is the people who think they have care but don't, the people who get seen by less than qualified individuals for the care they need, and we are going to pay twice what it should cost.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Constitution of the United States is an amazing document. Every day I appreciate the foresight of our Founding Fathers who knew that future Presidents, of any political philosophy, would seek to expand their power and try to impose their will over the legislative branch, the branch closest to the citizens of the United States.

For this reason they added an important clause in article 2, section 2 that says ``He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;''

Negotiators for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty on both sides know the terms of our Constitution, which predates both the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union it replaced.

However, as the Senate considered the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or the START treaty, supporters of the treaty seemed to say that the Senate should abandon its role of advice and just focus on consent. It was repeated many times that any change, no matter how minor or no matter how much it improved the treaty, would be considered a treaty-killer as further negotiation with Russia was inexplicably taken off the table as an option.

The reasonable amendments offered by Republican Senators were all rebuffed. The supporters of the treaty repeated many times how reasonable the amendments were but that the treaty was not the appropriate time to be debating such matters. Authors of amendments involving ensuring a robust missile defense, improving verification to prevent Russia from cheating, and merely mentioning the existence of tactical nuclear weapons were all told that another day is the best time to discuss those matters. However, one of the greatest threats to United States national security is the acquisition of a tactical nuclear weapon by a terrorist organization. Since Russia has a preponderance of the world's tactical nuclear weapons, how can it be that a treaty dealing with nuclear weapons control is not the time to discuss this issue?

Supporters of the START treaty say that after it is ratified the President will be able to go and negotiate further agreements with the Russians on matters important to the United States' interest such as the tactical nuclear weapons. However, both opponents and supporters of the treaty know that there is no intention of this administration to pursue follow-on nuclear agreements with the Russian Federation. There are several reasons for this. We now have no leverage with the Russian Federation since they have already gotten a treaty favorable to their interests. Further, we will be pressing the Russians on other issues impacting our national security such as sanctions on Iran. Supporters of the treaty believe that Russia will be more amenable to our requests when history shows that Russia will act in their interest and are not concerned with existential threats to our national security.

Finally, one of the purposes of any arms treaty is to clarify and inform signatories to the treaty about capabilities and intentions of each side. However, the new START treaty neither clarifies nor informs anyone about the United States' capability and intentions with regards to a national missile defense program. It is clear that the negotiators wanted to avoid this difficult topic knowing that Russia opposes the concept of the United States being able to defend itself from a rogue missile attack. However, by avoiding the topic completely, Russia is forced to consider the mixed messages of the Obama administration withdrawing missile defense capability from Poland and statements by administration officials and Congress calling for a robust four-phase missile defense program. The treaty as written can only cause further instability and confusion on the critical issue of missile defense between the United States and the Russian Federation. Clarifying amendments from Republican Senators regarding missile defense and the United States' intention to deploy technologies against all four phases of ballistic missile flight would have helped the treaty, not killed it. Instead, the lone statement on missile defense in the preamble of the treaty clearly implies that the United States should limit its missile defense in an attempt to limit the need for offensive missiles. The United States has no intention of doing so as it is a national security threat for us to ignore the dangers posed by North Korea and Iran in this area.

Because of these many reasons, I voted against the new Start treaty. While it did pass over my objections, I hope that future Senators will not use the debate we just held in this lameduck session of Congress as precedent to abdicate their constitutional role for international agreements.