Floor Statements

Madam President, would the chairman yield for a question?

The reduction is in overhead expense; it is not in labor. The definition the Senator is using is an across-the-board cut. That is not in this amendment at all. Does the chairman realize that the 5- percent reduction is in overhead--not direct labor, not actual employees, but the management costs to run the different agencies?

Madam President, I am taken aback by the chairman's remarks. We now sit at $13 trillion worth of debt, we have 10 percent unemployment, we are 4 years away from being Greece, and we are going to do what we have always done. The reason we can freeze Federal pay is because there is absolutely no inflation in this country. So instead of giving the raise, we don't. Every private sector business out there today is getting extremely more with less--to the tune that the productivity in the private sector was up 6.8 percent. If we had that same productivity in the Federal Government, we could lose 150,000 employees and do the same thing. But we would not accept what is necessary--the necessary pain--to protect this country for its future.

The chairman mentioned unobligated balances, but he spoke about obligated balances. We are not talking about money that has been obligated; we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that is not obligated. Last year, at the end of the fiscal year, there was in excess of $700 billion from the previous year that was unobligated, sitting there.

So it is about managing our money properly. That is like saying if you have $30,000 in a savings account and you want to buy a new home, you are going to leave it there and go borrow $60,000. No, you are going to use part of that to buy your new home. So we have the same approach that is disgusting America: We can't, we can't. What we can do is borrow against the future of our children. That is what this bill does.

So the first time we come out here with two good amendments that will offer a choice for the Senators of this body to actually make a downpayment on change in this country, to make a true downpayment on change, we get the same thing I have heard for 5\1/2\ years: We can't.

Let me tell you what we can do. We can cap Federal employees. We have added 180,000 Federal employees in the last 17 months in this country. By the way, their average salary is $30,000 more a year than in the private sector. Their benefits are $40,000 a year, which is twice what it is in the private sector. So capping Federal employees is a great way to start slowing down the growth and cost of government.

If the bureaucracy isn't responding, then it requires management changes rather than adding more people. The worst managers in the world always give the excuse: I need to have more people, rather than: I need to be creative about getting more out of the people I have today.

We need to change the standard under which we operate our government. We need to expect more, and we need to pay less. The American people cannot afford the government we have. We are unaffordable.

The chairman brings to the floor a bill that is more of the same. You can be critical of what we have offered. We don't have the advantages of the staff the chairman has. But this is an honest attempt to pay so we don't charge it to our children.

Notice he didn't say anything about the savings of $4.6 billion for not printing this paper every day that nobody reads but reads on the Internet. Yet we are going to spend $460 million a year printing government reports from this body and the White House that nobody looks at in hard copy. I would assume you would take by unanimous consent that we would cut $4.6 billion from the American Government. We didn't hear about that. That is not one of the bad ideas. We weren't attacked on that.

This Federal Government has to change if our kids are going to have a future. It isn't going to change until we have the courage and the fortitude to start making the hard choices. What the Appropriations Committee has said is that we are not going to make hard choices, we are just going to borrow the money. How many of you think the war is an emergency? How long have we known, or how long have we been in Afghanistan? It is not an emergency. Here on the chart is the definition of our own rules for emergencies. Nothing in this bill meets that except FEMA--nothing. Yet we have the gall to bring to the floor a bill called an ``emergency'' because we don't want to have to pay for it. We don't want to make tough votes or make choices between competing priorities.

We are just kicking the can down the road, and we are kicking the soup that was in the can all over our kids. We lack courage. It is not popular, it is not fun to make the hard choices, but we don't have any leadership that will bring the hard choices. That is why you have this amendment. Had we brought this amendment and we made the choices, we probably would not have gotten much kickback. But we decided we are just going to charge it to our children.

Guess what is coming after this. Another $200 billion that isn't paid for. Since the chairman of this committee voted for pay-go, we have borrowed $173 billion outside of pay-go because we voted and said it didn't count, and we had this wonderful celebration that we are not ever going to borrow money again. We are going to live within pay-go. But every time it has been there, we kicked it down the road. Pay-go means nothing. It means the American people will pay and we will go spend it. That is what it means. That is what this bill does. American people--you kids, you grandkids--you are going to pay, and we are going to go spend it. How are you going to pay? Your standard of living will decline.

This body--Republicans and Democrats alike--is complicit in ruining the

future for our children. It is time we change. We have a committee that makes fun of attempts to try to change things; actually, it stretches the truth. This isn't going to cost one TSA person their job or one FBI person. This government is so fat and so overladen with excess that any smart manager can come in and streamline it and we can save 10 percent and the American people know that.

We have 12 million people on SSI and SSDI. Do you know what we have discovered? We have discovered that 6 out of 100,000 of them are operating commercial vehicles right now, but they are ``disabled.''

We have all sorts of fraud going on. We will not address that. We will not fix that. There is waste--at least $350 billion the American public--maybe not this body--would agree we can cut out of the discretionary in fraud and Medicare tomorrow, and nobody would feel a thing. Yet we have a stoic Appropriations Committee that comes to the Senate floor and tells us we can't pay for it. It is not that we wanted to pay for it, we didn't want to pay for it because the staff on the Appropriations Committee knows where the dollars are, but they weren't told to pay for it. They are not going to be told to pay for the extenders bill that is coming either. What will have happened since February 12 when we passed pay-go? I will tell you what will have happened: $500 billion--$\1/2\ trillion--more in spending that is unpaid for and charged to our kids, and that will happen before July 1. So in 4\1/2\ months, after we say we are going to put in the discipline, that we are not going to spend money we don't have, we are going to spend another $\1/2\ trillion.

No wonder the country is sick of Washington. Our behavior causes them to wonder about the future of our country. I don't apologize for offering this amendment. I hope you vote against it because the voters, this time around, are going to be looking at how you vote and whether you are voting to make the hard choices, willing to eliminate things-- maybe some things that are good but not as good as what we need to be doing--and make this a priority.

We don't have that courage. My challenge to my colleagues in the Senate is, let's buck up. It is OK to take heat from the special interests, the well-connected and well-endowed. Let's do what is the best and right thing for the country, not the easy thing for us, because this bill, the way it is written now, is easy for us.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 4231 be modified with the changes at the desk.

Mr. President, I want to tell you that I concur in what I just heard----

The modification has not?

There is an objection?

I thank the Chair.

I want to say I enjoyed very much Senator Kaufman's words, and I agree with him. I think what he talked about and what we are doing for our military in this bill is appropriate. It is something that has to be done. The only difference I would have with him is it is not an emergency. We all know it is not an emergency. The reason it is being classified as an emergency is because we do not want to make the hard choices of getting rid of something else to pay for it, and we do not want to have another violation of pay-go, so what we do is we classify it as an emergency.

The only thing in this bill that is an emergency is the FEMA money. That is the only thing that meets the definition of our own rules for an emergency: unforeseen, unpredictable, and unanticipated. Everything else in this bill is predictable, foreseen, and anticipated. So we are actually violating our own integrity when we bring a bill to the floor and call it an emergency when everybody knows it is not.

Why are we doing that? We are doing that because we do not want to have to live with the rule we set for ourselves called pay-go. I did not vote for pay-go. I do not believe in pay-go because pay-go is exactly what I said it would be when we had the vote. The American taxpayer, you go pay, and we will go spend, and we will not diminish any of our spending, our profligate spending, because of this rule.

Since we have passed the bill on pay-go on February 12 of 2010--that is when it was signed into law--we have borrowed $46 billion and waived pay-go;

borrowed $10 billion and waived pay-go; borrowed $99 billion and waived pay-go--that was all in March. We borrowed $18 billion.

This one is not going to count against pay-go because we put a false emergency designation on it, and we have another $190 billion coming to us from the House for extenders, and we are going to waive pay-go on that. So we will have spent $530 billion since February 12 that we do not have, and we refuse to make choices about lower priority programs and eliminating them. That is the truth. Nobody is going to dispute it. You cannot even get anybody to debate you on these things. They will not debate you because they know it is the fact. They will not stand and even counter it because they know it is the fact.

Well, what are the other facts? Here are the other facts: FEMA is broke. Medicare is broke. Medicaid is broke. Fannie and Freddie are broke. Social Security is broke. It is running a negative balance. The U.S. Post Office is broke. The highway trust fund is broke. And guess what. So is the Federal Government. If we are not careful, we are going to add our kids to the list and say they are broke. That is where we are headed: broke. That means our liabilities are greater than our assets. That means the money we have is not sufficient to cover the debts we have.

We have seen this tremendous volatility in the markets over the last 2 weeks. They are upset because they are not sure there is a stable Euro right now. The Euro has dropped from $1.43 in the last 4 months to $1.22. That is a significant decline in that currency. Why is that? Because there is no confidence they are going to be able to solve their problems of being broke, because they are not making the hard choices among priorities that are necessary for them to get out of the problems they face. And we are just starting to see a backstop and IMF demands of Greece--and you are going to see it of many others--that they are going to have to make certain cuts in spending.

We have a couple of choices. We can wait 2 or 3 years, when we are in the same shape, to where the world currency and the world bankers are demanding of us that we make those hard choices or we can start making them now when they are a lot less expensive and a lot less costly.

I know the amendments we have offered have been sent to CBO, and CBO is saying--which tells us another entire problem we have--they cannot score a freeze in Federal salaries. Well, we know it is going to go up $3.1 billion next year if we do not score it, but CBO will not score it. We know regardless of the significant increase we had in our own budgets--4.6 percent--I have averaged turning back more than 400,000 a year. Everybody in this Congress, everybody in this Senate, could do that easily if they wanted to. We have offered $100 million in cuts to our own budgets. That is where we ought to start. If we are going to set an example, we ought to start with our own budget. CBO will not score that either.

Why won't they score it? We are clueless to what the real world is about in terms of spending and budgets. We cannot get a score even though the direction in the amendment is to sell off $15 billion in unused properties and physical plants that we know we do not use that cost us $8 billion a year to maintain. CBO is not going to score that either--so that is not going to be scored as savings--and rescinding unspent and uncommitted Federal funds, of which there is over $350 billion sitting in the bank right now that is unobligated. I am not talking about obligated funds. I am talking about unobligated funds, which says we are going to manage our money better. We are going to make it stream. We are not going to let it sit there for so long. We are not going to borrow the money. We are going to borrow it more on a time-as-needed basis, and we are not going to have as much money sitting in unobligated funds.

We are going to have criticism against our first amendment because CBO does not score it. Do you know what. CBO's accuracy is about as good as mine at throwing a baseball: not very good. I cannot hit the strike zone, and neither do they. That does not mean anything against them because we are giving them lots of unknowns. But we have also set up a set of rules that are designed to not give us what we need to have: the real information. No business, no family operates their budgets with such loose rules.

Where are we going? Here is where we are going right now. This chart shows discretionary spending in the United States since 1999. In 2010-- and this is in real dollars; this is not inflation-adjusted dollars; it would not look quite as bad if it were in inflation-adjusted dollars-- but we are going from $572 billion to $1.408 trillion. And do you know what. That does not count any of the spending--any of the spending--the $500 billion we are going to pass outside of pay-go. It does not count any of it.

So in a time when our country owes $13 trillion--it is going to over $26 trillion in 9 years; that is the path we are on--we are increasing spending, and we are not paying for any of it. We are not making one hard choice. One of the few things that is paid for in this bill continues to fund a commission we do not even need because we just passed the financial reform bill, and yet we are going to spend $1.8 million on the Financial Inquiry Commission. Why would we do that? You talk about throwing money down a rat hole. Why has the commission continued to meet? We have already decided in all our knowledge and all our wisdom we knew how to fix it, even though we did not even fix the underlying causes for the real collapse: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We did not address it at all. We did not address leverage ratios.

That is where we are going: $1.4 trillion this year, not counting everything we are passing out of here that is not paid for. What does it mean? We heard Senator McCain talk about generational theft. Here is the face of it. Here is little Miss Madeline. When I first put this picture up in the Chamber less than 7 months ago, it was $38,000. It is now $42,000 per man, woman, and child in this country. That is what they owe individually on our net debt. That is not our gross debt; that is our net debt. The $13 trillion does not represent our real debt. That only represents what we owe outside. It does not represent what we owe ourselves.

So she is at $42,000. Extrapolate the increase from $38,000 to $42,000 every 6 months and see what you get. What you get 20 years from now--if you include unfunded liabilities--Madeline, when she is 24, will owe $1,113,000. That is what she is going to be responsible for. So when we hear somebody talk about generational theft, what they are talking about is robbing opportunity.

If you had a 6-percent interest rate on $1,113,000, it is not hard to figure out that is $66,000 a year in interest that Madeline is going to have to pay before she pays any taxes to run the government, defend the country, pay for Medicare for me and the rest of the people in this room, before she owns a home, before she educates her kids. It is thievery.

How hard is it? How hard is it in a $3 trillion budget for us to find the money--find the money--to pay for this war? How hard is it? It is only as hard as we make it. We are risk averse. We do not want to be criticized because some program that had somebody who was for it is not going to be there anymore. We are going to do it. We are going to eliminate those programs. I can promise you we are. The question is when we are going to do it, and how drastic it is going to be, and who is going to make us do it. If we do not do it ourselves, then the priorities are not going to be the priorities of the body. They are going to be the priorities of the world bankers. That is who is going to do it. We are going to do this. We are going to cut spending. The question is, Do we do it now and make it less painful or do we wait until we are forced into it like the Greeks?

I think our history, I think our culture, and I think our children are worth us starting to make those kinds of difficult decisions. It is my hope we will give consideration--I do not care what combination of cuts we make. I just offered some. I am willing for the appropriators to make the cuts. But we no longer live in a time when we can borrow from the future of our children to pay for now. It has to start. I would ask my colleagues to support that start.

I yield the floor.

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

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado.) Without objection, it is so ordered.

Amendment No. 4232

Mr. President, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the bill before us and also call up two amendments. I will call up the amendments first and get that out of the way.

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 4232 be called up.

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

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 4231 be called up.

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

We have before us almost a $60 billion emergency supplemental appropriations bill. This is about the eighth supplemental bill we have discussed since I have been in the Senate--some appropriate, some not.

But the thing that I think the American people need to know, given the fact that this week our debt will be $13 trillion--this week--and that does not count what we owe trust funds inside the government, account money we have stolen from Social Security that will have to be paid back; it does not count money that has been taken from the oil recovery fund that will have to be paid back; it does not count the money from the inland waterway trust fund and all of these other trust funds. That is $13 trillion outside of what we have borrowed from ourselves--$13 trillion.

So we have before us a bill that is an emergency supplemental appropriations bill, and I thought it would be interesting for the American people to see what the rules of the Senate say about what is an ``emergency'' because nobody can say the war is an emergency. Since September 11, 2001, there has been no emergency other than the fact that we knew we were going to war. And the fact is, we have known that at least for the last 5 or 6 years. Nobody can say that.

But when you look at the definition we are supposed to follow--our own rules--about emergency designations, there are five characteristics, and those five characteristics are, one, it is necessary, it is essential, and it is vital. Well, some of this bill is necessary, some of it is essential, and some of it is vital--not all of it is by any means.

No. 2: Sudden, quickly coming into being, and not building up over time. Well, this bill certainly does not meet that requirement, except for a very small section of it.

An urgent, pressing, and compelling need requiring immediate action. There is no immediate action here on anything, except maybe the FEMA portion for both the upper Northeast and the flooding and Nashville, TN, and its flooding. But we have $900 million sitting in FEMA right now that has not been spent that we can start spending, so we don't have to pass $5 billion right now.

Unforeseen, unpredictable, and unanticipated. Well, the war certainly wasn't unforeseen, it certainly wasn't unpredictable, and it certainly wasn't unanticipated. We have known it. So it certainly doesn't meet that definition.

It is not permanent, it is not temporary in nature.

So we have what we are supposed to be following, and I would portend that 98 percent of this bill doesn't meet the requirements of being an emergency designation. Yet why are we calling it an emergency designation? There is one real reason for that; that is, we don't have to confine it in with the total amount we are authorized to spend. This is outside of what we are going to spend. It is $60 billion that we are going to borrow. We are going to borrow it. We are going to borrow it from the children of the people who are in Afghanistan and Iraq who are fighting this war. The people in this body aren't going to pay it back. We are going to kiss it goodbye and we are going to say: Here is your present, grandchildren. Here is a present for the kids of the warfighter who is over there today, who is sacrificing, his family is sacrificing, her family is sacrificing. But we are going to borrow it from them.

And it is not that we haven't done it. We made a big fanfare about that we were going to institute pay-go; that we were not going to violate pay-go; that pay-go was going to force discipline on us. So we passed a statute, and the President had a big signing--except here is what has happened since we have signed it.

It was signed into law on February 12.

On February 24, we violated pay-go. We said the rule doesn't apply; we have a need; we are going to spend $46 billion. So we spent $46 billion outside of the budget. We borrowed $46 billion. Oops.

March 2. We don't have the courage to eliminate lower priority parts of the government. We borrowed another $10 billion.

All of a sudden, on March 3, then we borrowed $99 billion. Pay-go didn't count. We just said: We waive pay-go. Sixty votes of the Senate. We have no fiscal discipline--$99 billion.

April 14. We borrowed $18 billion. Did it again.

So if you add those up--and that doesn't count the last one we did. I will bring a more accurate chart tomorrow when I talk about the rest of these amendments. But so far, we have borrowed $173 billion, when we said we are not going to borrow money anymore because we are going to have pay-go that says that will force the discipline on us to put lower priorities off the spending line, to put higher priorities on.

So just since February 12--it is now late May--we have borrowed $173 billion. We are going to add $60 billion here, and we have a tax extender package that is coming with another $230 billion. That is $563 billion since February 12 that we are going to spend money--I understand the majority leader is on the floor. Would you like time, Mr. Leader?

I will be happy to yield to the leader.

So $\1/2\ trillion since we famously passed pay-go, and we are going to waive it six times, and when we haven't waived it, we have declared something an ``emergency'' so we do not have pay-go law applying. The budget rules go out the window because it is an emergency--except we do not meet the criteria for emergencies by our own definition.

So what is this all about? Is it about playing a shell game with the American people, to say we are going to do one thing and then turn around and, before July 1, in 5 months--less than 5 months--we are going to borrow another $\1/2\ trillion after we tell the American people: Oh, no, we are not going to do that anymore.

We have an emergency. There is no question this country has an emergency. Do you know what it is? It is a $13 trillion debt we have today that is going to be $23 trillion 8 years from now. We have a debt that is going to suppress our GDP by 1\1/2\ to 2 percent in what we could normally grow because the government's debt is such a burgeoning hangover on the capital markets. Yet we don't have the ability to do what we promised the American people we would do.

You know, I feel as if I ought to read the signing statement of President Obama when he signed pay-go and the statements of all of my colleagues that said: This is the answer. Except that will not do any good. The only answer is for the American people to hold us accountable. I obviously can't. For 5\1/2\ years, I have been trying to tamp down spending, to have us make a position that we are going to go to the lowest priority, cut the lowest priority out so we can fund the highest priority, and we have refused to do that.

So does it have real consequences, what we are doing today? There is no question this bill is going to pass. There are votes in this body to pass and add another $60 billion. What are the consequences? Well, the consequences come about to our children.

You have seen this sign before. This is Madeline. This photo was shot of Madeline as she walked around Capitol Hill. I actually had a visit with her and her parents. When we first put this up here, she was only $38,000 in debt. That was less than 6 months ago. Less than 6 months ago, she only owed $38,000--per man, woman, and child in this country. She is at $42,000 now. When we finish what we do before July 1, she will be close to $50,000--per person in this country. If you extrapolate what the budgets are going to be over the next 8 years, she is going to be close to $200,000 in debt. And that does not count the unfunded liability.

When this little lady is 28 years old, her responsibility, both in terms of debt and unfunded liability, will be $1,113,000. We never think about it in terms of young lives and how we are impacting them. We can always rationalize away the ability to make hard choices. That is what we are doing. Does anybody in this body not think we couldn't squeeze $60 billion out of $3 trillion? Could we not do that? Are there things less important than fighting the war? Are there things that are more important about our future and less important about irritating some special interest group because their program did not get funded? Which is it? I vote with the kids and the grandkids. They supposedly have a voice, except we routinely ignore it. That is what we are doing with this bill.

I am not saying we should not fund the war. I am not saying we should not create the money for FEMA for the projects we need. I am not even saying we should not help Haiti where we can. What I am saying is that we ought to pay for it by making hard choices that every family right now is making. They are having to make choices between what is an absolute must and everything else that is not. They don't have the luxury of an unlimited debt service because their credit card company has already said: You can't have any more. Their bank has already said: No, you can't borrow any more. Their house and its equity has been maxed out. They don't have any other choices. So they make the hard choices.

We are kidding ourselves if we think we have another choice. We don't have another choice. We are just delaying the time at which we make the choice. The pain associated with delay is going to be twice as great as the pain of doing it now.

John McCain and I are offering two amendments. The whole purpose of the amendments is to give the body a couple of choices on how to pay for this. It is not easy, it is not fun. But is it necessary? Is it necessary for the health of our Nation? Is it necessary that we start acting in the way the American people expect us to, which means we are going to get rid of the things that are not as important as the things in this bill?

I understand that is novel because the Congress has only had one net rescission in the last 16 years. It occurred with the 1996 appropriations bill where we actually cut total government spending in 1996. We had the will to do it. The appropriators had the will to do it. But we don't have that will anymore. The environment we face as a country is three or four times more severe for our future than it was in 1996.

So what is the disconnect? What is the disconnect that we would not make hard choices? I am not going to say my choices are the best choices; they are just my choices. But it ought to be rolled back to the appropriators that this bill should have never come to the floor unpaid for. They know more about spending than anybody in this body. They are more qualified to make the cuts. But they chose not to make the cuts in lower priority items to pay for this bill.

What is the choice? The choice is to indenture our children and grandchildren. That is the choice we are making. When we choose not to do it, we are choosing proactively to indenture our children and grandchildren. We are better than that.

What is so sacrosanct? Do you realize in 2 weeks in December we found 640 instances of duplicate programs that had exactly the same goals with multiple sets, 70 programs for food and nutrition for hungry people. Why do we have 70 programs to help poor people get food? Nobody can rationally explain why. We just have it. The reason we have 70 is because we used to have 40. We didn't have any metrics on it so somebody thought we ought to have another program for feeding hungry people. So we put another program together. Then we funded it. But we didn't have any metrics on it. So then we did it again, and we continue to do it.

There are 640 different instances just like that, 70 programs to feed the hungry across 6 different agencies--not just 1 but 6, none of them with metrics, none of them working to see if they actually work, no oversight hearings by the Appropriations Committee to see if they work or the authorizing committee to see if they work. We have 70.

There are 105 to incentivize kids to go into math, engineering, science, and technology, 105 programs across 9 agencies. That is just 2 examples out of the 640 sets of duplication we found.

Where are we going to eliminate some of that? When are we going to accomplish what the American people are asking us to do? It is not about eliminating food for the hungry. It is not about eliminating incentives. It is about eliminating the management structure for 70 programs or 105 programs so we can have one or two good ones, and we can have metrics on them.

I yield to the majority leader.

Cloture Motions

We now have cloture filed on a $60 billion bill. I don't know what the intentions of the majority leader are but the fact is, we are going to limit debate. We have been on this bill about a day or a day and a half, $60 billion. We are going to cut off debate. We are going to attempt to limit amendments and limit the debate. This is a debate this country ought to be having. This is an opportunity for us to do what the American people want us to do.

So 30 hours from now we will have a vote on cloture on this bill. We also have cloture to end debate filed as well. What does that mean? That means the American people are not going to get to hear everything that is in the bill, No. 1. That means there will be a very limited number of amendments that will be actually voted on.

By rule, we are going to close off our responsibility to Madeline. We are going to say: Madeline, you don't count. We have to get out of here. Don't you know Memorial Day vacation is coming? So we don't want to be here. We have codels leaving Saturday morning. That has to be more important than saving the Republic so we don't end up like Greece.

We are only about 4 or 5 years behind them. We are only 4 or 5 years behind Greece. We are going to see this tremendous money flow come into this country because people are worried about Europe. We are going to see it come in from Japan because people will be worried about Japan being able to pay their debts. We will feel all good and fuzzy for about 2 years. After they inflate their currency or debase it or default, the money is going to flow right back out. Guess who is going to be looking over the abyss. The United States of America. We will be at the same point. What is the problem? The problem is their spending as a percentage of their GDP creates an environment where they can't pay for their debt. That is where we are going to be.

My first degree was in accounting. I had a business career for 9 years before medical school. I can tell my colleagues, if we truly accounted for the liabilities of this government, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--we refuse to recognize their liability--our debt would be far in excess of $13 trillion. So what we are going to do is say Senators' comfort is much more important than Madeline's future.

Let's talk for a minute about what the word ``indentured'' means. That means you are under the control of somebody else. Your ability to have free choice becomes limited because you are indentured. Is there any wonder why we have trouble bringing hard core sanctions against Iran, when the Chinese own $900 billion of our debt and the Russians have $800 billion? Our debt affects our foreign policy. Our ability to support our military is jeopardized by the very fact that we are making a decision today to pay $33 billion for the war effort in Afghanistan by not paying for it. We are jeopardizing our long-term future.

The other ironic thing in this bill, this body just passed a financial regulatory reform bill, but we created a commission called the Financial Inquiry Commission. In this bill we are appropriating on an emergency basis $1.8 million for that inquiry commission that is going to give us what went wrong and what we need to do about it in December. We have already figured out we don't need them; We passed a bill without that knowledge, without that look, without that in-depth analysis of what went wrong because we had to get it done. Yet we are going to continue to fund a Financial Inquiry Commission that we are not going to do anything with the results of, and we are going to call it an emergency.

How ludicrous is that? The whole purpose of the Financial Inquiry Commission was to guide Congress in what to do. We have already ignored them. We have already decided what we are going to do. That bill is in conference. We are going to pass a financial regulatory reform bill ultimately that is devoid of the recommendations of that commission. But we are going to do the typical Washington thing. We are going to continue to fund the commission, even though we are not going to use its results. Why is that?

What does just $1.8 million out of a $60 billion bill, what does that mean for her? Multiply that times thousands of times every year, the stuff that we are doing that isn't a priority. Nobody can agree it is still a priority that we ought to borrow $1.8 million to fund that commission. You can't argue that is still a priority because we have already made up our minds on financial regulation reform. But that happens thousands of times a year, billions and billions and billions of dollars.

These two amendments are tough amendments. I am not deceiving myself to think that all of a sudden grown-ups are going to show up in the Senate. They are not. Let me tell my colleagues what they do. The first amendment will reduce our own budget. We gave ourselves a nice stellar raise, not salarywise but for our own budgets. We are going to reduce that budget for Members of Congress.

We are going to disclose on the Senate Web site the cost of borrowing money and how many times we violate our own rules, pay-go. There should be nobody who voted for pay-go who votes against that because if it is good enough for us to use, it is good enough for the American people to see.

We are going to dispose of unneeded and unused Federal Government property, whether it is military, whether it is buildings, whether it is lands--things we do not use, do not need but we are spending $8 billion a year taking care of. We can get tremendous savings from that. That is what any other right-minded person would do. They would get rid of the stuff they are not using so they do not continue to send money down a rat hole.

We are going to rescind uncommitted and unspent Federal funds. We have hundreds of billions of dollars setting that are not even in the pipeline, and we are going to borrow more rather than more efficiently use money we have. That is the first amendment; it is $60 billion, $60.5 billion.

The second amendment is $59.6 billion. It is a 1-year freeze on bonuses and raises and other salary increases for Federal employees. They make 45 percent more than everybody else in this country doing exactly the same thing, on average. We are going to cap the total number of Federal employees. We have added 180,000 Federal employees in the last 18 months--180,000.

We are going to collect unpaid taxes from Federal employees. We have Federal employees who are working today who owe the Federal Government $3 billion. We ought to collect that money. It ought to come out of their paychecks. That is undisputed debt; that is not the disputed portion. That is the undisputed portion of what they owe the IRS. For everything except DOD we are going to ask for a 5-percent efficiency gain in administration. Do more with less. Everybody else in this country is doing more with less, except the Federal Government. We are going to say: No, we cannot do that? Why not? It is interesting, on the Debt Commission we had a good discussion with Dave Cote, who is the CEO of Honeywell, explaining that every year they do more with less. They spend less dollars to get more out. They have less people to produce the same amount. It is called efficiency. It is called productivity-- except we will not apply that to our own government employees.

We are going to reduce nonessential government travel. It is billions of dollars a year. If we are in a financial pinch--and I would love for somebody to debate me that we are not--why would we not limit travel to that which is only essential?

We are going to rescind money that Chairman Obey in the House recognized on the WIC Program is not being used. We are going to strike $68 million in U.N. emergency funding for the next fiscal year. Most of the Members of this body voted for an amendment that required transparency in the U.N. We give them over $6 billion a year. Twenty- six percent of the budget for U.N. peacekeeping is ours; we pay for it. Yet with an audit of their moneys, half of their moneys--over 60 percent of it--was found to be fraudulent. So we passed an amendment out of the Senate, unanimously, that required transparency from the U.N., except when it got to the conference committee it was not there anymore.

I will tell you, the American people deserve to know where their money is being wasted at the U.N. So we ought to clip that. We ought to cut that back. We ought to say: You give us transparency; we will give you money. You do not give us transparency; we will not give you money.

We are going to eliminate bonuses for poor contractor performance. Do you realize the Federal Government pays bonuses for companies that never complete their contracts? Two years ago, the Pentagon paid out $4 billion in bonuses to contractors who did not meet the standards for the bonus, but they paid them anyway. Well, that makes a joke of the contracting process. It also makes a joke out of us that we would allow that to continue to happen.

So on these two amendments you will have plenty of opportunity with which to make a decision on whether you want to be on the side of Madeline or on the side of the elitism in Washington--the group that does not care what America thinks. We know better. The group that says: We are not in an emergency. We are not in a problem. We can continue to spend money and not make hard choices.

There is an emergency, and the emergency is our very survival, our economic survival, our survival as a republic.

I will close with the following: If you study the Roman Empire or if you study the Athenian Empire, you will find common threads among both. The No. 1 common thread is they fell after they became indentured in their own fiscal policies. They could no longer support their military. Their elected bodies refused to make tough choices.

We are sitting here saying: Europe, you have to make tough choices. You have to get your spending in line with your productivity. We are talking with a hollow ring to our voice because if there is anybody who needs to get their spending in priority, it is us. I am not against paying for the war. I am not against supporting our troops. I am not against the FEMA money we need. I am against us not paying for it, and I am very disappointed we have cloture filed this evening because what that means is the American people are not going to see how we as individual Members vote on tough choices.

I am going to have two tough choices out there. It remains to be seen whether we get a chance to vote on them through the majority's ability to cut off debate. But we ought to. We ought to do what is the best, right thing for the country. We ought to be able to come together and agree we should not abuse the emergency designation; that we should not abuse pay-go; that, in fact, we should not delay making the hard choices because the choices are just going to get harder. They are going to get harder every year we do not do this.

Now is the time to start doing it. If we choose not to, then what we are saying is: Madeline, as to your future, we are going to steal it from you. We are going to steal opportunities for a future like we have had. We are going to take those, and we are going to indenture her to an economy that does not grow, with opportunities for an education that will be limited, including the ability to own her own home. All those things will come around.

We only have three ways to get out of the problem we are in. The first way is we can default. Everybody says: Oh, no, you cannot say that. You cannot talk about that. Well, when Moody's is getting ready to downgrade our bonds from AAA, that is the first sign we are moving in that direction.

The second thing we can do is have the Federal Reserve inflate our way out of it to where that means the life savings of everybody are going to be debased, and their purchasing power is going to go away or markedly be reduced.

Or we can do the third thing: Not let either of those two bad things happen by making hard choices ourselves on what we need to be doing--by eliminating the junk, the waste, the duplication, and the fraud in the Federal Government. It is there. It is there to the tune of $300 billion a year.

So when this extender package comes--whether it comes this week or next week or the week when we come back--there is plenty of money to pay for it, too, if we will just stand and be counted, not as Senators but as Americans who would like to see the future bright for their Madelines.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my letter to Senator McConnell dated May 18, 2010, be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise today to express grave concern regarding the misplaced priority of annually deeming this day, May 18, HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. This year marks the 13th annual observance of a day that epitomizes our government's inability to set priorities with the Federal dollars this body is entrusted.

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, Web site:

This annual observance is a day to recognize and thank the

thousands of volunteers, community members, health

professionals, and scientists who are working together to

find a safe and effective HIV vaccine. It is also a day to

educate our communities about the importance of preventive

HIV vaccine research.

As a practicing physician and former cochair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS, I believe the development of a safe and effective HIV vaccine should be among our Nation's highest health care priorities. HIV/AIDS continues to devastate communities in the United States and around the world. In the United States, more than 50,000 people become infected with HIV each year. Approximately 40 million people are living with HIV around the world, with more than 5 million new infections each year. To date, more than 25 million men, women and children are believed to have died from AIDS worldwide.

Unfortunately, we have not yet developed an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine--nor are we close. At a time when our national debt is approaching $13 trillion and patients suffering from HIV/AIDS are being put on waiting lists for life-saving drug treatments, we simply cannot afford to misspend $1 million a year to make people aware of a nonexistent vaccine.

Furthermore, this well-intentioned propaganda campaign is being funded at the expense of HIV vaccine research itself. Regardless of the intentions, the unfortunate fact is that finite resources intended for HIV vaccine research are being siphoned away for a project without any potential scientific benefit. With no effective vaccine likely anytime soon, it seems silly, or worse, to waste funding that could be much better spent on research or scientific investments that could one day lead to a vaccine.

The discovery of a vaccine or cure, after all, would be the best way to thank the researchers and volunteers. As every cent counts in this endeavor, it is unconscionable that precious dollars are being squandered by NIAID's well intentioned but unnecessary public relations campaign.

Between 2001 and 2005, NIH spent more than $5.2 million on this ``HIV vaccine awareness'' campaign, not including staff time or travel expenses. It is reasonable to assume that the federal government continues to waste over $1 million annually on HIV vaccine awareness, despite the fact that no vaccine exists and scientists believe that it is unlikely that a HIV vaccine will be developed anytime soon.

Some of the HIV Vaccine Awareness Day events supported in the past include various lunch and dinner receptions, a fashion show in Massachusetts, a bar night in Tennessee, a bar event and entertainment contest in Washington, and other gatherings and media events. Clearly, this awareness campaign serves no obvious public health or scientific value.

There is no doubt, however, that development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine should be a national priority. HIV/AIDS continues to devastate communities in the United States and around the world. At least 56,000 Americans become infected with HIV each year. More than 33 million people are living with HIV around the world, with more than 2.5 million new infections each year. To date, more than 20 million men, women and children are believed to have died from AIDS worldwide.

The development of a safe and effective HIV vaccine should be among our Nation's highest health care priorities. It imperative that not a single dollar of the Federal funds set aside for the development of an effective HIV vaccine is wasted.

This year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, highlighted what he called ``significant progress in HIV vaccine research during the past year.'' The study he referred to was a clinical trial in Thailand finding a vaccine to be 31 percent effective at preventing HIV infection. Unfortunately, the results of this study have been found to be statistically insignificant and the findings of the study have received much skepticism. This latest clinical trial is the latest in a long line of promising but unsuccessful attempts at creating an HIV/AIDS vaccine.

Dr. Fauci in recent years has conceded publicly that no one has been very close to developing a vaccine that would prevent infection. Over the past 5 years, in fact, two large clinical trials of HIV vaccines have failed to demonstrate efficacy of the candidate being tested. The disputed Thailand trial aside, this is still the case today.

Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that an HIV vaccine is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunization against the virus may never be possible, according to a survey conducted released in 2008.

A poll of scientists reflects the declaration made at a NIH ``summit meeting'' in 2008 that was ``tantamount to an admission that almost no progress has been made in the search for an AIDS vaccine in the past 25 years and that something close to new start is necessary.'' The government scientists announced that ``more of their budget needs to be spent on basic lab research and less on testing the current crop of vaccines, none of which has proved useful in human trials.'' In light of these failures and daunting prospects, Dr. Fauci pledged to re- evaluate the use of all $1.5 billion his agency spends on AIDS noting that ``we are going to have to justify what we are doing.''

Dr. Anthony Fauci has noted that while Federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, NIH, continues to increase, it will not increase as quickly as it has the past decade, and as a result, NIH must concentrate on more promising research. Fauci said the heads of NIH institutes such as his had been told to reexamine the entire research portfolio to ensure ``the most bang for the buck.'' The AIDS vaccine candidates that don't show early results in clinical trials could be shut down, he said.

That may mean cutting back some AIDS vaccine research even though virtually all health experts agree a vaccine will be the only way to stop the pandemic of a virus that is incurable, always fatal and that continues to spread worldwide and in the U.S.

As I have done in the past, I am sending a letter today to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to inquire about this misuse of funds. It is my sincere hope that the Department of Health and Human Services will cease spending Federal dollars on this misplaced priority and reinvest these HIV/AIDS dollars into actual research or care.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record my letter dated May 18, 2010, to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes kind of general talking. I wish to give an example because this is a very big bill with a lot of hard work by the Banking Committee and their staffs. I want Members to compare this bill to a loved one who gets pneumonia. They go to the doctor and they have a cough and a fever and chills. They feel terrible. Think about it. If you would take your loved one to the doctor and the answer you would get is: I think I can take care of that. I can give you something for the cough that will suppress the cough and I will give you something to take care of the fever and I will give you a little something to take care of the pain in your chest. You go on home. You come back if you don't get better. Of course, 2 days later your loved one ends up in the hospital with raging, now bilateral pneumonia and sepsis, bacteria in the blood. This bill is kind of like that. It is kind of like a doctor treating symptoms instead of the real disease.

The real disease was Congress. The real disease was poor underwriting standards, actually no underwriting standards. The real disease was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the real disease was the rating agencies that haven't been controlled effectively by this proposed legislation. This legislation does nothing for the real disease. It treats a lot of symptoms. It grows government gigantically. It will create more bureaucrats and rules than we can shake a stick at. But it does not fix the underlying problem.

When people dispute that, ask the following question: If you are at home, working and paying your mortgage, guess what. The reason we are not fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is so you can continue to pay more taxes so Freddie Mac can solve those mortgage problems through your tax dollars and other people not being responsible for theirs.

That is what is going on here. That is why you are going to see $500 billion in additional losses with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because we are going to get them to keep going until we have satisfied all this, not doing the hard work, not recognizing that we are actually going to need $5 or $600 billion more in taxes or we are going to borrow that to take care of this problem.

So everybody who is out there today who is working hard, paying the mortgage, and keeping up is going to get to pay extra because we are not going to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in this bill.

That is why this amendment is so important. We decided in this country a long time ago that we were going to set forth a policy to help people own homes, except we overdid it. We created incentives that would bring out the worst nature in people. If you don't believe that, look at Long Beach Mortgage, where 90 percent of the mortgages they wrote prior to them folding were totally fraudulent. Where was the oversight? There wasn't any--the Office of Thrift Supervision, but we didn't oversee the Office of Thrift Supervision. We created the symptom and a set of incentives and now we want to leave them right there.

This underlying bill does not address the three main diseases that caused the problems we have. Congress genuflects and redirects any criticism from us to the greedy banks or the greedy loan originators, but they never say anything about us not doing oversight. They never say anything about us not reforming Fannie and Freddie when we knew what was coming in terms of their losses and also the financial difficulties they had. We have a bill that doesn't fix it--a lot of hard work, a lot of good intentions, but it doesn't fix the core problems so they will not occur in the future.

As the Senator from New Hampshire said, if you combine strong underwriting standards and transparency associated with limiting the loss the American taxpayer is going to take on with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you will do something. But the way the bill is now, we will have created big theatrics. Everybody will shake hands and holler and dance around when the bill passes, except the dirty little story will be that we didn't fix the real disease. When that loved one in ICU with double pneumonia and sepsis dies, we go after the person who didn't fix it, who should have fixed it, who had the knowledge to fix it, and we say: You are liable.

Well, we are liable. We ought to be fixing this. The very fact is we are not.

The McCain amendment is a commonsense amendment. I understand the reservations. They don't want another $400 billion of recognized debt. They don't want to account for the losses that are continuing to flow, $20 billion so far in the first quarter of this year, out of those two institutions. The Senator from New Hampshire way underestimated the cost to the American taxpayer and what it will ultimately be by not fixing this.

My appeal to the chairman of the committee is to seriously look, give us good answers on why we are not fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What are the real reasons we are not fixing that? What are the real reasons we are not creating strong, transparent underwriting standards so the problem doesn't occur in the future? What is the real reason? What is the real reason we don't hold accountable the rating agencies and take away the conflict of interest thoroughly--not partially but thoroughly--from the rating agencies?

The rating agencies are supposed to be a check. Had they been doing their jobs, we wouldn't have had all these securities sold that were worthless or were nonperforming. But they don't do their job. We didn't do our job. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't do their job. Yet we are not going to address the core issues that created the setup and framework we are now experiencing as an economy. To me, that creates a tremendous amount of liability on our part. We ought to have to be in explanation of every ounce of our being on why we don't fix the real disease that caused this problem.

I yield the floor.

I object.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I wish to make an inquiry of the Chair as to the interpretation of the rule we passed, because it is my understanding that the rule doesn't require you to publish, but it does say the majority and minority leader are no longer obligated to honor your request for a hold if you have not.

I ask for the Chair's opinion on that.

OK. I will take that reading of the law as an assumption that agrees with the position I put out there.

I would say--if the Chair would give me some time in consideration of my reserving the right to object--I served in the majority for 2 years prior to the Senators who are here on the floor today, and I understand the frustration. I have been there. I was on the other side. It is difficult. In terms of numbers, we have more of President Obama's nominees cleared than President Bush's nominees at the same point in time.

I wish to raise the question. I am going to comply. First, I don't have any problem explaining why I hold somebody. The BBG nominees: The BBG is in such a mess, I want to make sure I visit with every nominee before I give them a clearance to get on that board, because we are wasting three-quarters of a billion dollars there and not doing anything positive for our country as we spend that money.

There are a lot of reasons why we hold people. One of the dangers of coming forward, from my experience as a Senator myself, of putting a hold on and then putting it out there, is this: If I want to do further work or study or have a question, the assumption with a hold is that you don't want them to move, and that may not be the case at all. The reason for a hold oftentimes is I want to look at the history, I want to look at the background, and I want to take the time to meet the individual myself. That fulfills the true obligation of advise and consent.

I would also say we were frustrated when we were in the majority the same way, and we played the same kind of parlance, except with our own nominees. When somebody on our side had a

hold, we didn't ever mention that. We didn't ever complain about that. We just complained when the other side did. So the perspective has to be--understanding the frustration; the President deserves advice and consent--but I also know there are 150 nominees right now sitting in committee who haven't been cleared in committee and we are a year and a half, a year and 4 months into this administration. It is not just that.

I intend to object to every one of these, not because I personally have an objection, and I want my colleagues to know that, but one of the considerations of courtesy on the Senate floor is if somebody else does, you will honor that.

The final point I will make is that the majority and minority leader usually work these things out. I think we passed 28 in the last few weeks, probably because of some of the good effort of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to apply the pressure and heat. But I plan to object to every one of these because there are those on our side who have a problem with the individual. But I don't disagree that you ought to have the courage to stand up and say who you are holding and why you are holding them. I don't disagree with that. But that isn't our case right now and that isn't the case of the law, as I understand it; it just removes the obligation.

So on that basis I will object to this first package and plan on objecting to every other one in forbearance and as a courtesy to those on my side of the aisle who have a problem with these nominees.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

Reserving the right to object, Mr. President, I want to make it known that I am carrying on a Senate courtesy on my side of the aisle, and these are not necessarily my objections, but they are on behalf of my colleagues. I object.

I object.

Will the Senator yield for a moment?

Will the Senator from Minnesota yield?

Mr. President, I think the motives ascribed by the Senator from New Mexico are improper. I do not think it is so people can't get into a job to cause President Obama problems. I reject that motive.

With any administration, there is a very big difference of opinion. That is why we have elections. That is why things move like this in our country. It is about whether somebody objects to somebody's either philosophical bent or qualifications for a certain job.

I make the point again that at the same time under a Republican Congress, President Bush had fewer numbers approved than President Obama does at this time.

I hope we would not ascribe that motive. I want President Obama to have, in fact, the people he needs to have in place to effectively run our government. I will give the numbers again. To this date, President Obama has 596 of

his nominees confirmed. At the same time, President Bush had 570. In the two previous administrations, President Bill Clinton had 740 and President George H.W. Bush had 700.

I think what my colleagues are fighting for is fine. I agree with them. I am on the team as far as that is concerned. But I think we ought to be careful with the motives we ascribe. I really do not think it is to try to handcuff the administration. I think it is different. Of course, the sign that is being put up is about who is pending. I understand that. Let's be careful on the ascribing of motives. As I talk with my colleagues, I do not really find that motive. Even though they may not be out front with it as I have been, that does not mean they necessarily want the administration to not be effective.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

Reserving the right to object, I am not sure it is a vacancy in the District of Connecticut at the U.S. Attorney's office. I think this is a replacement nomination. And I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I have an appointment with the gentleman to have a discussion.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for approximately 15 minutes as in morning business for myself.

Mr. President, I pay tribute to one of my staff members today. She recently left. She had a child and is being a mom and a civic activist. But she was a trusted adviser and, more than that, a dedicated patriot.

Jane Treat, who has been with me since the earliest parts of 2004, is leaving to become a full-time mother. It is hard to lose her. But I understand the attraction as well as the commitment for a much more important job. She first came to work for me as a volunteer, fresh off her studies at Patrick Henry College.

Since that time she has played a key role on my Judiciary Committee through many intense legislative battles. She spent many long days in the Dirksen Building poring through briefing materials, preparing background notes for me, and negotiating on my behalf with other offices.

She was there during the Roberts and Alito hearings. For a time she also served as my interim chief counsel on the committee, since I had no attorneys and she was a nonattorney as well, which was a rare occasion. Her dedication has never wavered. The fact is, she worked the day she delivered her first child. She prepared negotiations that day for a bill that threatened the second amendment of the Constitution and how it interacted with our veterans. We prevailed that day in no small part because of her efforts. One would be hard pressed to find anyone who cherishes the Constitution and who knows its principles as well as Jane Treat.

My legislative director jokes:

Although Jane did not actually write the Constitution, she

is its fiercest defender.

I would have to agree.

For the past 2 years, and after the birth of her daughter, Jane has managed a correspondence team that works in my office, ensuring that every letter that reached my desk was treated with the utmost concern and professionalism. She cared for each constituent as if it were written to a close relative or a neighbor. In that, she has done a terrific job.

There is one last quality of Jane that I commend to everyone in the room, and that is courage. Jane has a keen sense of right and wrong and will not allow an injustice to stand, whether it is policy related or simply human. She fights for everybody.

When she disagrees--I am laughing about this because when she disagreed with me, I was always sure I would hear about it later. She would come to the office and knock on the door, and say: Now we need to have a talk. You were wrong.

Of course, I would remind her that she was not elected and I was and there is some interpretation to the Constitution.

But the quality of having the courage to confront on things that are strongly held beliefs is a great quality that built our country, and she distinguishes herself in it. That is in contrast to what usually happens in this town where we avoid difficult issues rather than confront them.

True to her principles, she will turn her attention toward her new community in Broken Arrow, OK, where she will be a full-time mom. It will not be long, for sure, before she is volunteering again for a cause close to her heart.

Jane, we appreciate you. We thank you for your service, and we thank you for the modeling of your behavior.

Secret Holds

Now, I just want to spend a few minutes because what we have just gone through is a challenge to a process that has been ongoing for a long period of time. The President knows I am in agreement with sunshine. As a matter of fact, the President and I created the Transparency and Accountability Act so that everything we do gets published in terms of what we spend and how we spend it.

I agree we ought to be forthright with the reasons we hold individuals. But let's talk about what a hold is. A hold is saying you do not agree to a unanimous-consent request to pass out an individual. In other words, what is a hold? What does it really say?

It really says, first of all, I either may have some very significant concerns with this individual or I may want to study this individual for a period of time and their record before I agree to it or I may want to debate it, the qualifications of the individual.

I agree on the transparency. But I think it is very important that we go back to say--and not necessarily attune the motive. But when I read the sign about those who are being held now versus in the Bush administration, I am reminded that there were over 100 U.S. attorneys and marshals and 50 judges at the same time who were blocked in committee so they could not even get to the floor at that time.

So it depends on where one takes the snapshot. There are lots of reasons to not agree to people being confirmed. I have no problem with stating my reasons, and I will publish my reasons. I do not have any problem even publishing them. But I am not sure that we want to necessarily impugn the motives of somebody who takes advantage of that.

I agree with the Senator from Missouri. I have no problems with putting it out in the open. But I did ask the question, and at some point in time I think it would be wise for those who think that, that we get a parliamentary ruling on what the rule really means because I think there is some discussion. I do not doubt that the intent of what was passed was exactly what we intended: to put it out there. But I think the interpretation or how it may be read is subject to some debate, and it would be great to have a Parliamentarian rule on that.

Finally, I would say, the other side of this issue, which comes back to things that are dear to my heart, is the fact that 94 percent of everything that passes in this body passes by that very process, unanimous consent.

Unanimous consent says: We will not have debate. We will not have an amendment. Things will pass because nobody objects to it passing.

There is a real disadvantage for our country in that. The disadvantage is that the American people never know what we are doing. They do not get a hearing. They do not get to hear the policy debates on both sides of the issue. It is good that we work some things out, but if you watch the floor, what we know is 40 percent of the floor time is spent in a quorum call.

The real issue we are fighting is the moving, is the reason the majority leader does not move them, because it takes time to move them. Right? That is our problem. Time is our biggest enemy in the Senate. But yet that is exactly what our Founders intended. They wanted it to be very difficult to change what they had put in place, and they set in motion this system that says: We are going to make things thoughtfully, under full consideration, with open debate.

We hear our colleagues all the time say this is the greatest deliberative body in the world. It is, but not all of the deliberation goes on on the Senate floor. I have no doubt there are abuses on both sides. I do not know what the motives are.

When I hold somebody, I hold them because I think they are either not qualified for the job, I think they have a past record that would question their character, or I think, in fact, they will do a terrible job at the position even if they are qualified. And I have the right, as an individual Senator, to say I am not going to support that nomination. So I am all for moving and giving Presidents what they want, but I am not for doing it without the debate and the consideration that needs to be there.

So I am very supportive of people standing up and saying why they are holding up people. Through the courtesy of the Senator from Missouri, she did not list one of the judges that I am sure she was going to ask unanimous consent on because I was the lone Senator in the Judiciary Committee to vote against him. Now, I do not know who is holding him. But the fact is, I do not think he is qualified. I want him to be debated. I want to have a chance to inform the American people why I think he should not be a circuit court judge. And that is my right.

To say we are just going to move him without a debate, without anything but

a vote, I am not going to do that on people I think are not truly qualified. So it is not as straightforward as we think. I think we ought to think about how the process is working, that the leaders do work on this process. They move a lot of them forward. I understand the frustration, and I would be giving the same speech if it was turned around. As a matter of fact, I have before.

So I concur with my colleagues. I think sunlight is a wonderful thing. I think there are times where we have the problem, and I will give you three specific examples.

I publish all of my holds. Under the Emmett Till bill, I was immediately accused of being a racist. I held the bill because I wanted it paid for, but as soon as I put out that I was holding the bill, I was accused of being a racist. So there are reasons for people to work behind the scenes to be able to work on things, to solve the problem with their concerns, without it becoming public, so that you get the ultimate action but do not impugn the integrity of people because they may not agree.

So the potential of letting go of all of this idea that we cannot negotiate before we come, and that we have to expose everything--what happened was the special interest groups attacked me ferociously. I ended up becoming best friends with a very significant individual who drove that. What has happened today is we still have not done it because we did not put the money in to pay for it, which is what I wanted. There is still no special provision. There is still no action. We passed it 2 years ago.

Next thing was the Veterans Caregiver Act.

I hated veterans because I thought we ought to pay for it, and I thought it ought to apply to every veteran who had that kind of injury who served this country. But yet there was a ferocious attack by the interest groups. I am willing to take that heat. That comes with the job. But it is certainly not fair to put yourself in that position. I understand why other Senators will not stand up and say every time why they are holding a bill when we see that kind of attack coming at us.

Same thing on breast cancer. My sister-in-law, a cousin, all with breast cancer, two-time cancer survivor myself, but I hated breast cancer patients. You can see why the idea of objecting to a unanimous consent and then immediately putting it out there will end up with the attack of the special interest groups in this country, because you are trying to make something better but your motives are impugned because you don't agree with the special interest that is running the bill in the first place or, in the case of a nomination, the special interest of the administration. They think this is the individual.

I don't defend. I put it out. I am willing to take that. But I understand that is not always the best way to get something accomplished, because you end up burning a lot of energy defending yourself on something you are totally innocent of in the first place. You want a different result for a different reason, but that never gets covered.

This morning has been great. It is interesting that we have had this debate. My hope is we will have people who will stand up and speak and put up why they believe what they believe, fight for the principles they believe in. I think I can defend my principles to the hilt. In front of 100 commonsense folks in this country, I can get 85 of them to decide with me. I am not afraid to do that. I am willing to be honest and transparent and straightforward. But the impugning of motives worries me, because it has nothing to do with not wanting President Obama to have his people. It has to do, in many instances, with people who are truly unqualified or truly are divergent on what their past has been versus what they say. Those are legitimate reasons to have debate on individuals who are going to serve a function in this government.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Walter Isaacson, of Louisiana, to be Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the following reasons:

I have had longstanding concerns regarding transparency and effectiveness of our taxpayer-funded international broadcasting agencies under the purview of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In particular, I am troubled by the operations and management of Voice of America (VOA) given issues raised by the media, Inspector General, and former employees of VOA. Therefore, I have requested to meet with all the prospective nominees to discuss these issues. The Broadcasting Board of Governors performs a vital role regarding oversight and management of our international broadcasting. As the nation faces threats from the Middle East and in fact throughout the world, transparent and effective international broadcasting agencies are critical to ensuring our international broadcasts are in fact fulfilling America's interests in securing peace for ourselves and our allies.

Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Victor Ashe of Tennessee, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Michael Lynton of California, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I object to proceeding to the nomination of Susan McCue of Virginia, to be member of casting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Dennis Mulhaupt of California, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of S. Enders Wimbush of Virginia, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

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

Mr. President, as we have watched the debate the last 6 days on the financial regulation reform bill, I thought it would be interesting just to raise a few questions. The Congress--both the House and the Senate--created what was called the Financial Inquiry Commission. As a matter of fact, they had a meeting today. The purpose of that Commission--that will turn in their report in December of this year--was to take a thorough and complete look at what happened to us in 2008--the causes, the regulatory failures, the poor incentives--and then make recommendations to the Congress on what we should do.

The question I have for my colleagues is, we have a bill on the floor that has given no credence to the Commission we created, and we are actually, according to the majority leader, going to finish this bill next week without the benefit of that Commission's inquiry. So a couple questions I would ask are, No. 1: Why? Why are we doing that? And, No. 2--by the way, the people on that Commission are learned people with great exposure and great experience in the areas of which we are discussing--Why are we allowing the Commission to continue spending money if we are not going to pay any attention to them? Why don't we just end the Commission, since we have obviously decided what they are going to have to give to us is not of value as we make the decision about what we need to change? I thought that is what we had the Commission for.

So I find it peculiar that in our rush to blame somebody, our rush to take the focus off of where it belongs--by the way, that is right here in the U.S. Congress because 90 percent of what went wrong was our fault--our fault; that is where it lies--in our rush to shield and reflect that away from us, we are going to pass a bill with all sorts of unintended consequences of which we fully do not understand right now. It is a bill that is going to treat the symptoms, not the underlying disease of the financial problems we had. It rings well from a populist standpoint, but in the long run it does a disservice to our country. That does not mean this bill may not hit it 100 percent on what this Commission recommends, but we have no idea what they are going to recommend.

So I think it is a great question for the public to be asking us: Why are we doing that? And why are we continuing a Commission that we obviously are not paying any attention to? One, it was created so we could offload the problem. That is why we created the Commission. We obviously did not care what they thought because we are not going to pay any attention to them. No. 2, we are going to continue to spend money on a Commission that we are not going to value. If we were going to value it, we would at least either give it a mandate to hurry up so we can make appropriate decisions and use their expertise or we would eliminate it.

Now to the bill that is in front of us. What really happened to us. This is my opinion of what happened to us. The Congress created incentives to increase with ease the ability to own a home in this country. Then we created incentives through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do that even greater. Then we created the ability to package and offload what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had taken and securitized it.

We wonder why people would take advantage of that. There was not one oversight hearing on the Office of Thrift Supervision, which absolutely failed in terms of loan originators. There was one hearing in 4 years at the SEC that had nothing to do with their oversight of the packaging of these incentives before they became a problem. There was no oversight--significant oversight--on the explosive nature of derivatives trading in this country and around the world. We are so quick to point the finger at the people who took advantage of the incentives we set in motion.

So now what do we have? We have $6 trillion or $8 trillion worth of exposure for the U.S. taxpayer in terms of guaranteed mortgages by the Federal Government through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA, and we are hustling along so none of that ends up getting focused on us. We have a bill on the floor that does not address the core problem of what went wrong.

Here is the core problem of what went wrong: There were no mortgage origination standards that were enforced by the Federal Government, as they took American taxpayers, to guarantee what was going to be an asset. What did we find at the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations? That in the last year before this, for one company alone that originated a vast majority of the loans in California--Long Beach Mortgage--90 percent of the mortgages were based on fraudulent data.

OTS knew it and did not do anything about it. Why did they not do it? Because they got 16 percent of their revenue from Washington Mutual, who owned Long Beach Mortgage.

So we set up all these systems, we incentivized this system, and now that it blew up in our faces--because we did not look at it, we did not oversight it, we did not do our fiduciary responsibility--we want to be quick and get rid of that blame from us by pointing the finger somewhere else.

We have minimal leverage requirements in this bill. If we are going to create an incentive for people to act badly, at least we ought to put a block somewhere else that will limit the exposure of financial institutions based on capital ratios. We have not done that. We have not accomplished that in this bill. That is something that has to be there. We had companies leveraging to 40 and 50 times their net worth. Yet we are not addressing that issue to a significant extent. It is one small portion of the bill.

Then we are going to take a consumer protection agency--which we created the problems for--and create a massive government bureaucracy that is going to filter all the way down to every small business in this country and isolate that power within one individual who is not accountable to the Congress and not accountable to the President, and we are going to say: You fix it. There will be an unlimited funding stream that is going to be totally out of control that is going to impede and impact the freedom of Americans' ability to make a living in the name of consumer protection.

If you think I am giving a speech to protect the banks, you are wrong. I like them about as much as I like insurance companies. But we have to think about what we are doing, and we ought to be about fixing the real disease. That real disease is us--us not doing oversight, us not being responsible for the legislation we created, and setting up incentives, and then yawn as it goes awry and point our fingers somewhere else.

There is no question we need to change the regulatory structure in this country. But there is something we need to change more than the regulatory structure; that is, the demand on the Congress to start doing its job in terms of oversight. We are quick to whip a bill out when it is politically expedient to do it and create a whipping boy, or several whipping boys, and say we are addressing things. But it is kind of like the pea under the three walnut shells. You never know where the pea is. The reason you never know is because there is not really even a pea there. There was when it started, but it went away. Then it gets put back.

So we are playing the game. We are playing the American people that what we are doing is substantive, and that, in fact, it is going to enhance capital formation, when what we are doing is going to decrease capital formation.

We have one section in this bill that says every small bank in Oklahoma--if they write a mortgage and sell it, forever they have to keep 5 percent of it. Well, if they are a small capitalized bank, guess what they are going to do. They are never going to create another mortgage in Oklahoma. So we are going to concentrate all the mortgages in the big banks in the country. That is why Goldman Sachs loves this bill. That is why Citibank loves the bill. We are not making the big banks smaller; we are making the big banks bigger. We are going to undercut the small and

medium-sized banks in the country because we are going to put a 5- percent retention on every mortgage they write, when, in fact, all we would have to say is: If you write a mortgage and you package it and sell it, there is recourse back to you, the originator of the loan; that mortgage, when it becomes nonperforming, comes back to you. That is all we have to do. That does not tie up their capital. That does not limit their incentive to create housing in our own regional markets that is made available with capital in those regional markets.

No, we are going to make the big boys bigger. All the regulation that is in this bill none of the big banks will ever have a problem with. They already have thousands and thousands of staff to handle government regulation. They will not add a person. But every small community bank in this country, every small financial institution in this country, is going to drown in the requirements of this bill.

I know the chairman of the Banking Committee has worked hard to try to bring a forth bill. I know there have been great deliberations with many from our side of the aisle on the bill. But I think we have thrown common sense out the window. The motives are good. The goal--fix the problem--is good. But if we treat the symptoms of this and convince the American people we have fixed it when, in fact, we have not, when we have not eliminated too big to fail--because we are going to make the big banks bigger--what we are going to see is a further decline in confidence.

In the name of fixing things, we are going to be taking massive amounts of freedom away from small businesses in this country. We are going to take discretion away from capital risk that has minimal risk to the country but has every bit of risk to the person lending the capital. We are even going to take away ``sugar daddy'' investors who are the only hope for some ideas--not venture capitalists. We are going to take away the ability for somebody to come in and say: I will invest in 40 percent of your business and give you the capital to try something. We have actually created requirements for that.

As we look at what we are about to do, the American people ought to ask three questions, three very important questions: No. 1, does it fix the problem? No. 2, does it grow the government and require increased spending? And, No. 3, is there anything to make you think--since we were regulating all these industries already--the Congress might oversight the next set of regulations we put out there to fix this problem? I think the answer to that--all three of those questions--is no. I am in a minority, I understand that.

I said previously, I think we ought to change the regulations in this country. I think we also ought to eliminate too big to fail by making those that are too big become so small they won't make a difference if they do fail. We ought to create the market circumstances that would force that to happen. But this bill doesn't do that. This bill won't do that.

So as we go through this rather large bill, which I think has had three or four accepted amendments thus far and which is 1,409 pages long, one of the other questions we ought to be asking is how many Members have read the entire bill. How many Members understand what is in the bill? How many Members can have the capability to anticipate the unintended consequences of what is in the bill? I think we will find the answer to that is zero. Yet we are in a hurry to do this for a political reason.

So I will go back to what I started on. We created the Financial Inquiry Commission. What are we going to do with it? What happens if they come out in December and say everything we did was wrong? Why did we create it? I would love to read back some of the speeches that were given on this floor about why we were creating it, because we had to know what went wrong. Now we have a commission that has been charged to tell us what went wrong, but we are going to ignore them. We are going to pass a bill before they have even completed their hearings.

I think it is no wonder the country has a low level of confidence in our deliberations, because they don't make sense to the average American. They understand the political spin. They understand pinning the tail on the donkey. They understand placing blame so you can deflect it from yourself. They get all that. They see it and they see right through it. But we are creatures of habit.

There are good things in this bill. Let me end on that. The elimination of the Office of Thrift Supervision had to happen. The reason they were ineffective is they got their money from the very people they were supervising and when their biggest customer is doing something wrong, rather than lose some of their revenue, they turn their eye the other way. Consequently, billions and billions and billions of dollars out of Washington Mutual became junk. Most of it was junk to begin with. It is the concept of greed.

Other good things: Changing the rating agencies and what they are accountable for. This bill goes in a direction different than I would have gone, but the point is there needs to be a change. They need to not get paid by the very people who are asking them to rate something they are getting ready to sell, and they ought to be paid by the person who is getting ready to buy what they are getting ready to sell, so the accountability will be there. But we haven't done that.

We recovered, and our recovery from this financial fiasco is because of the resilience of the American people. The price is enormous, with having 14 million people unemployed. That is a tremendous price to pay. The loss in terms of dignity, the loss in terms of the ability to provide for your family, the loss of losing the skill set you had and no longer can find a job to do it is a tremendous price that has been paid. But the American people are resilient. What they don't want to tolerate, however, is a Congress that fails to recognize and continues to repeat mistakes of the past.

We can say, Well, we have been working on this for 6 months. We have. There have been negotiations going on for a long time. My question is, Do we have the answers? Do we know what the answers are? And if the answer to that question is yes, then let's disband the Financial Inquiry Commission right now. Let's not waste those folks' time. Let's not spend another penny of Federal taxpayers' money if we think we already have the answers. We are going to do just as we do on every other program: We are going to create another one and we are going to keep spending on the first one.

Needless to say, I think this bill is fixable. I think we ought to address the real key issues: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Why are we not addressing them? Because we don't want to put out the bucks, the cost to do that. That is why. That is why we are not addressing it. We know the issues.

We have taken an unlimited amount of our kids' money and put it in exposure and we have given an absolute implicit and implied guarantee to both of those organizations. The President in late December took office, and they are now buying back close to $400 billion worth of mortgages from the Treasury--nonperforming mortgages--and our kids are going to pay all that back. It will be 20 or 30 years before any of that property actually reaches the level at which it was sold.

So what is coming next? What is coming next is we are going to mandate principal reduction on mortgages across this country. Who does that impact? What that says is that everybody who paid their mortgage on time and kept up with their payments by making tremendous sacrifices other places, guess what. You are going to get to pay for the mortgage of everybody who didn't through your taxes and through your kids' taxes. You acted responsibly, but what is coming down the pike is we are going to lift the load for those who didn't. You met your obligations. You signed the contract on the bottom line, and those who were less fortunate than you, you now are going to get to pay for them too. That is what is coming. Mark my words. You will hear it before November. That is what is coming through the HAMP, through the 40- percent reduction in the principal amount on many of these mortgages.

So what is going on? We are rushing the financial reform bill that doesn't attack the three major underlying diseases of the financial system, and then right after we pass that, we are going to force principal reductions on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of

mortgages, on which you, the taxpayer, are going to pick up the bill. That is what is coming. We are going to hear that it is not. That is what is coming.

Watch carefully what we do. Watch how we spin things. Watch how we create demons when, in fact, we are the source of the problem. Watch how we point our fingers at others whom we incentivized to take advantage of systems we created and say, Oh, no, we are not culpable at all. Oh, it wasn't us. We did all the oversight hearings. We changed it.

When we saw the writing on the wall, we didn't do any of that. The Congress created this mess, and we are going to continue to act in the same way that is going to create more. Because we are going to create a whole new set of regulations and then we are not going to have the oversight hearings: Are you doing it? Where is the metrics? How do we measure whether you are doing it? Are you, Mr. Bureaucrat, doing what the Congress directed? As a matter of fact, we don't even put in the regulations. We let somebody else write the regulations. We are so knowledgeable that we are getting ready to fix this problem, and besides the fact the Financial Inquiry Commission hasn't said anything to us yet about what the causes are and the potential solutions, but we are not even going to write the regulations, just as we didn't in the health care bill. The Department of HHS is going to write 1,690 regulations on the health care industry in this country. The same thing is going to happen in this bill.

As I say, I hope we can fix the bill because I think we need to make major changes. There are some good things in this bill.

We are in danger of losing what confidence is left of the American people in our actions. We ought to be asking the right questions for the right reasons that shouldn't have anything to do with politics, shouldn't have anything to do with partisanship, and ought to have everything to do with what is the best, right solution for our country in the long run.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have my letter to Mr. McConnell, dated April 28, 2010, concerning BBG nominations printed in the Record.

Madam President, our Nation has been at war for nearly a decade now in Afghanistan and nearly as long in Iraq and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the men and women who have fought on the front lines as well as to their families who have sacrificed so much.

The Senate is considering S. 1963, the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2009. While I will support its passage, I believe this legislation represents a significant failure of Congress to uphold the responsibility entrusted to us by the citizens of this Nation and our obligation to military families and taxpayers.

While there will be self-congratulating press releases from Members of Congress and some Veteran Service Organization lauding the bill's passage, I believe the shortcomings of this legislation--discriminating against most veterans and adding billions of dollars to our national debt--represent a failure of leadership and lack of responsibility.

I had hoped that the House of Representatives would make some significant improvements to the legislation over the Senate. Sadly, they did not.

The legislation that the Senate will consider still unfairly discriminates against severely disabled veterans from wars and combat prior to September 11, 2001.

Many of these brave men and women have needed the assistance of caregivers for decades and have done so without help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Many of these veterans were not the beneficiary of recent advancements in military medical care. The caregivers of these veterans will be left out of this benefits package.

There are currently 35,000 veterans receiving aid and attendance benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is approximately the number of veterans in need of caregiver assistance. Out of this population, around 2,000 veterans received their injuries after September 11 and would qualify for extra caregiver assistance in this bill.

Caregivers for almost 95 percent of severely disabled veterans from combat would not receive the level of caregiver assistance afforded to those veterans who were injured after September 11, 2001. When I offered an amendment that would provide equivalent caregiver benefits for all severely disabled veterans of all wars, the Senate summarily rejected that idea.

Unfortunately the House of Representatives also ignored the danger that our massive debt poses to our Nation and did not eliminate or reduce any current programs in the Federal budget to pay for this legislation. The bill is not paid for by trimming any wasteful, duplicative, obsolete, or lower priority Federal programs.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cost $3.6 billion over 5 years, which is slightly less than the version the Senate passed. The Senate also rejected my attempt to pay for this legislation out of the fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer dollars that we send each year to the United Nations.

Instead the Congress has decided, as it always does, to pass the debt onto our children and grandchildren, rather than bear the cost and sacrifice today as our veterans have done.

I fear that if we do not start paying for new spending then the sacrifice made by our veterans for future generations will have been in vain. At some point, the debt we are incurring today must be paid for and when that day comes, the promises we are making to veterans, caregivers, and others will no longer be affordable because Congress refused to be responsible by being fiscally responsible by trimming lower priority spending.

When the Senate first considered this legislation last fall, some of the proponents of the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act attempted to rebut my facts about our

growing national debt by saying that the bill does not actually appropriate any money for these programs.

In a technical sense, they are correct. I suspect that these same proponents will issue statements celebrating its passage, which will disappoint any caregiver of a disabled veteran expecting the promised assistance soon.

No caregiver will be helped unless the appropriations committee allocates the funding for this new program authorized in this bill.

Until then, this bill is an empty promise to veterans and benefits no one except perhaps the career politicians who will claim credit for doing something to help veterans without really having to make any difficult choices.

We owe an enormous sacrifice to our veterans who fought and died in our defense. This debt, which was incurred on a battlefield far from home, should be borne by this generation so that we ensure that the future they fought to secure for our children and grandchildren is not threatened by our own fiscal irresponsibility and shortsightedness.

Congress has once again failed taxpayers, veterans, and their families today.

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

Madam President, I appreciate Senator Reid working with us. We are going to try to work through the amendments we have left today and hopefully get this taken care of tonight. Our intent has not been to slow down but to pay for this.

I wish to discuss amendment No. 3726, which has already been called up and is pending. I don't believe there is another pending amendment at this time; is that correct?

That is my amendment as well. Thank you.

Yesterday we defeated, by a vote of 51 to 46, actually smart financial management that would have paid for all the costs for the next 60 days for the unemployment insurance. What we were doing was utilizing money that we are already paying interest on that is sitting, not being used, by taking a portion of that to pay for this so that we don't go and borrow another $18.2 billion. The wisdom of the Senate said, no, we don't want to do that.

We are going to have today two other opportunities on a way to finance that. This amendment basically takes the agreed-to tax loophole, which we agreed to before we left for the spring work period, and adds to that half as much of the financial management money that I recommended we do yesterday and the amendment was defeated. So we have about $9.5 billion worth of tax loophole closures that we have already agreed to in this amendment and $20 billion, which will save $10 billion in terms of the way CBO scores it--it is ridiculous the way they score it, but in terms of the way they score it, we have to move $20 billion so we can save $10 billion.

The point is that we get an option: we can borrow another $18.2 billion to pay for this or we can take money we are already utilizing very inefficiently and pay for it. We are going to choose not to do it again, and we will probably get another 46 or 47 votes. But we are going to choose to transfer the cost of helping people today to our grandchildren because in my lifetime we are not going to pay back any of this money. We are going to be borrowing and paying interest on this $18.2 billion over the next 30 years. So the cost really isn't $18.2 billion; it is $18.2 billion times 6 percent, times 106, times 106, times 106. It will end up costing our kids $60 billion or $70 billion because we are going to refuse to pay for something we ought to be doing.

What we are also not going to do is make tough choices about priorities, as every family in this country has to do. We are going to refuse to do that. We are going to say we are going to keep the bad habit, the thing that got us $12.85 trillion in debt, the thing that got us $75 trillion in unfunded liabilities. We are going to continue that process. We are going to continue that process until such time that we can no longer borrow the money. That is what it seems like to me. In other words, only until we cannot go to the world markets and finance debt against our children's future are we not going to change the habits in the Senate or in the Congress.

Of every dollar we spend this year, 43 cents will be borrowed. What are the long-term consequences of that? Very plainly speaking, it is a lower standard of living for those who follow us, a marked decrease in opportunity, a loss of freedom, an inhibition in entrepreneurial spirit, and truly an unwinding of what was the gift that was given to us, which was this great opportunity and this great freedom.

We don't often make the connection between freedom and debt as a government, but we do personally because when we are highly in debt as individuals, our choices start to get limited. If you are in a business that has a high degree of debt, your choices are limited by those who loan you the money because they start getting involved in your decisionmaking process.

If you really look at our foreign policy today, that is happening to us with what we are trying to do in terms of sanctions on Iran. What are the two nations that own the most of our debt and are also least likely to agree with us on harsh sanctions for Iran? They are China and Russia. They are the No. 1 and No. 2 holders of our bonds. So we are giving up tremendous flexibility and freedom.

I put forward that if we cannot find $18.2 billion in our Federal Government as we run it today, which will spend over $4 trillion this year, none of us need to be here. We need a whole new 100 Senators if we cannot find $18.2 billion. But the institutional stodginess of always doing it the same old way is inhibiting us from creating a bright future for our children.

I won't detail the exact tax loophole closures we have, but we have agreed they can be utilized for this purpose--Senator Baucus, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and myself--and they come to a total of $9.756 billion. To properly manage our money instead of having money sitting that has been appropriated but not obligated--and there is almost $900 billion sitting out there this year in the agency that is not utilized--to not utilize that money is foolhardy.

My hope is that my colleagues will consider at some point in the future that we have to start making harder choices.

I understand the bias against it. It eliminates somebody's control of power. But where should the power be in this country? Should it be in the Senate or should it be in the American people?

Do the American people want us to pay for this? Absolutely. Five to one think anything we are doing new we ought to be paying for. Yet it is going to skid through here today, and we are going to add another $18.2 billion over the next 60 days that we do not have to, but we are going to choose specifically to do so.

I wish to leave with one last point on this amendment. When we say there is nothing else that we can eliminate in the Federal Government to pay for this legislation, what we are saying is all the waste, all the fraud, all the duplication is more important than helping people with unemployment insurance. If it was less important, we would eliminate it and pay for the unemployment. But by not paying for it, by not making the choice to pay for it, what we have said is we have elevated everything else above this as a priority. We refuse to do what every other business, what every other family, what every other organization, except the Federal Government, has to do; that is, make tough choices.

In my State of Oklahoma, the legislature and the Governor right now are making tough choices. They are going to cut several hundred million dollars from our budget. I promise you, they are going to look at what is least important so they can continue to fund what is most important. We will have none of it. We have demonstrated none of it. We lack the character and courage to do what is best for the future.

Amendment No. 3727

Now let me talk about amendment No. 3727, which is, again, another opportunity, another way to pay for this good thing we want to do. It also has two components.

The first component utilizes the agreed-to closure of tax loopholes of

$9.7 billion. But then it gives us a real chance to do some real good things to eliminate spending that is low priority.

There are 14 spending provisions that I propose eliminating in this amendment. Many have been endorsed by President Obama and President Bush and, before him, President Clinton. In the past 3 months, the President has endorsed five of these offsets, the House passed four of them, and the Senate passed one identical to one section in section 203.

What is the first one? According to the Government Accountability Office, we paid out $1.1 billion to dead farmers. That is over the last 7-year period. Forty percent of those payments were people who had been dead more than 3 years. Most people in America would say: Maybe you ought to eliminate that. Maybe farmers who have been dead for more than 3 years should not continue to get payments from the government. It will save us $1.1 billion over 10 years if we hold the Department of Agriculture accountable to not continue to make payments to people who are not deserving of them.

We recently passed a Feingold amendment to the FAA bill that rescinds any DOT earmarks that remain 90 percent or more unobligated after 9 years of being appropriated, with the possibility of holding funds one more year for earmarks the agency head believes will be funded within the following 12 months.

The only difference between what we passed and this amendment is that this section applies to all agencies, not just the Department of Transportation. The Secretary of the Department of Transportation endorsed the Feingold amendment.

If it works for the Department of Transportation, why would we not do that everywhere on earmarks? It is $500 million in savings immediately. We cannot quantify through the CBO what it will be in the future, but it will probably be at least that every year.

Another section is the President's request to eliminate a duplicative bus grant program. This would repeal the Inner-City Bus Security Grant Program. President Obama recommended this $12 million program be eliminated because the grant awards are not based on risk and it is duplicative of the Public Rail Transit Security Grant Program that is already out there and much less important than any other homeland security priorities. It saves us $120 million.

In other words, the President does not want it, the Department of Transportation does not want it, but somebody who is getting that grant somewhere is going to say: No, we cannot do that, even though there is a duplicative program already in place to take care of it.

Section 235 of this amendment would repeal the Resource Conservation Development Program. President Obama recommended this $51 million program be eliminated because it has outlived its need for Federal support. It was first begun in 1962 as a temporary program. It was intended to build community leadership skills through the establishment of RC&D councils that would access Federal, State, and local funding sources. These councils are now up and running--secure funding with continued operation without any money coming from RC&D. It saves $510 million. Why would we continue to spend the money? The President, the leader of our country, agrees with it. It has been voted on several times. But it will be voted against today because somebody somewhere is still sucking off this in a way that is not efficient and is not a priority for the country.

Section 236 would repeal the Brownfields Economic Development Initiative. President Obama recommended this program be eliminated because it is duplicative of a larger, more efficient Federal program, and local governments have access to many other public and private funds that address the same purposes.

This was designed to assist cities with redevelopment of abandoned, idle, and underused industrial and commercial facilities where expansion and redevelopment is burdened by real potential environmental contamination. They eliminated almost all of those, and we have a better program now taking care of it, which goes back to the habits of Congress. We create new programs to address the need of what some may think the present program is not doing rather than change the present program.

Here the administration, as well as the Bush administration, agreed we should eliminate that program. That is $180 million over 10 years.

Section 237: This provision would repeal water and wastewater treatment projects administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. President Obama recommended eliminating these projects. They are duplicative, and they are outside the scope of the Corps of Engineers. That is what private civil engineering firms do. They plan, build, and organize these events. The Corps of Engineers has stated they do not have the expertise to do these projects, which the Environmental Protection Agency normally funds through other grants in the Revolving Fund Loan Program.

Since these programs were first funded in 1992, they have been exclusively funded through earmarks. In other words, somebody put something special in for one city or one place through an earmark. It may not be the highest priority for the country. It may very well just be a priority for the State, but it has been exclusively funded through earmarks, special interests, lobby-generated earmarks. It saves $1.29 billion over 10 years.

Section 238: This provision would repeal the Rail Line Relocation Program. President Obama has twice recommended eliminating this program because it is not merit based--in other words, if you are well connected, you get it, but if you have a real need and somebody else has a lower need, you are not going to get it--and it duplicates other Federal programs that are larger and that are merit based.

The grant program is primarily earmarked, again; 75 percent of it gets earmarked every year. What happens is the administrators of the grants do not get the grants based on need and merit because a Senator has already said it will go here instead of into a pool of the greatest need. Again, duplicating an existing program that is more efficient, that is based on merit. It is a slush pot of money for earmarks.

We will hear lots of complaints about eliminating that program, even though the administration wants to get rid of it as well. Savings: $340 million.

Section 239: Enacting rescissions offered and passed by the House leadership. This would rescind $112 million from a Commerce Department program designed to provide coupons to households to help people buy analog-to-digital converter boxes. This has been used. The program is not going anywhere because everybody has converted. Why should we continue to put money out to a program that nobody is going to utilize? That money was used for an offset for a summer job youth program already this year but did not come here. Estimated savings: $115 million.

Section 241: Enacting the USDA nutrition rescissions amendments offered and passed by the House leadership. This would rescind almost $362 million of unobligated reserved stimulus funds for the WIC Program. This offset was selected because it was identified by the House appropriators and they unanimously voted to use these funds to offset another program.

It is obviously a low priority. It is a reserve fund. It has not been utilized. It is sitting there, and we need to eliminate it rather than borrow the money.

There are three or four other sections. There is a next-to-final section on Federal real property disposal. We have 21,000 buildings we own that we do not use, but yet we do not have a clear way to allow government agencies to dispose of property.

Last year, on these 21,000 buildings that we cannot get rid of because we have created a block to do so, we spent $8 billion maintaining them, even though we are not using them. We could sell those, we could give them to the States, we could do a lot of things that would immediately save us $8 billion. But if we sold them and we saved $8 billion a year, over the next 10 years that is $80 billion, not counting anything we might get for selling them. We might have some costs associated with razing some of them.

According to the Office of Management and Budget, 46,745 buildings that are underutilized with a total value of the ones we should be selling are worth $83 billion. We are going to hear people

say: You can't do that; you can't sell those buildings. Why? Why would we borrow money when we could sell buildings we are not using for $83 billion? Almost enough in properties that we do not need and are having to maintain to pay for this entire bill. The estimated savings this year alone from starting this would be $4 billion--just from starting it--that process would save us at least $4 billion this year.

Section 244: What we know is, at least 28 Federal programs, totaling over $9 billion, support job training and employment. Eighteen of these programs fall under the Labor Department's jurisdiction, and the agency spends $130 million administering its training and employment programs. We have 18 programs rather than 1. We are spending $130 million just to manage them--this is just inside the Department of Labor--rather than have one job training program with one set of administrators and not duplicating that administrative cost all the way across the board. Savings is probably $100 million to $130 million annually. There is well in excess of $22 billion to $24 billion in this second amendment-- No. 3727.

So the question becomes this, if we continue down this road: Fair to our kids, fair to us because the Senate refuses to act responsibly?

Oh, I have heard the harsh rhetoric: You don't care about people who are unemployed because you think we ought to pay for it. You know, I think there are two sets of people we ought to be caring for. I think we should be caring for the unemployed, making sure they have sustenance and their needs fulfilled, as long as they qualify. But I think we should care about those who are going to follow us, those who are going to have to pay back this $18.2 billion. Are they not both important, especially when we know we waste, through fraud and duplication, $300 billion a year in the Federal Government? I have just come up with $20 billion of it.

We have enough fraud, waste, and duplication in the Federal Government to pay for this the whole rest of the year, to pay for the war supplemental that is getting ready to come, without borrowing another penny against the backs and future opportunities and freedom of our children.

I am pretty cynical about whether we are ever going to do that. I think the American people will have to change who is here before we will ever get to the point where we are going to make the hard choices that families have to make. But I think that is a fight worth having to protect our future. I think it is a fight worth having for my grandkids and everybody else's grandkids.

I was born in 1948, right after the end of the war, and we had the highest debt ratio we have ever had in this country. But because we had a limited government, what happened was we moved greatly and expanded both growth opportunity, innovation, and wealth through the hard work and great character and spirit of the American people, and we handled that. We can do that again. But we can't do it if we don't have the leadership that is necessary to do it. We have to start sometime to start paying for what we are doing. We have to start making choices. That is a rare occasion in Washington, but it is one I sense the American people are going to start demanding.

I have been working at this for 5\1/2\ years, or almost 5\1/2\ years. I have not made much progress other than to make sure the American people are informed of the absolutely atrocious amount of stupidity, waste, and duplication that goes on here. It is time we act. And since the majority controls the outcome, and they will let a few Senators vote for these amendments, we will get a high number of them, but not enough to make a difference.

So the question we ought to be asking is, What is so wrong with trying to pay for what we are doing? Well, we have always done it as an emergency. We have always charged it to our kids. Well, we haven't always been $12.8 trillion in debt. We haven't always been to the point that in 2010 we are going to have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90 percent, which means we are going to have about $20 trillion in debt, and that is going to suppress and depress our economy by 2 percentage points in terms of growth. We have never been here before in terms of the risk to our economy.

I see the chairman of the Finance Committee here, and I will close by saying we are going to start doing this. The question is when. The question is, Should we be doing it when we are in control or when the bankers outside of America are in control--the sovereign nations outside who will tell us how we do it and what we can't do, just like what is happening in Greece today. The leadership in Greece is making decisions not because they want to but because they have to. They are not necessarily nice choices for the people of Greece. That can and will happen to us if we don't change.

I yield the floor.

Go to the vote.

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

Mr. President, if anybody has been watching the Senate today, there was a point of order made that the spending we are going to pass to pay for unemployment insurance extension benefits and benefits for health insurance for those people, in terms of buying through their former employers, as well as the sustainable growth rate formula, failed to be overriden.

We will have another vote on that because the majority side was missing one Member, and they will eventually win on that. What that says is, we are once again back to the point where we refuse to make the hard choices to pay for things we need to do today by eliminating things that are not as important.

The point of order was on the fact that it is an emergency so, therefore, we can say: Time out. But those who voted to override it fail to recognize the other major emergency that is happening in our country. We have $12.8 trillion worth of debt as of today. We are going to add another $1.4 to $1.5 trillion this year, this calendar year; that the increase in the cost of that debt over the last 12 months will require an additional, next year, $125 billion worth of expenditures.

There has to come a point in time when we grow to the responsibility that has been given to us; that is, make hard choices. It is very easy to pass an unemployment insurance bill by charging it to our children. The majority leader has graciously agreed to give me an opportunity to offer three different ways to pay for that. I am going to put those out today. One amendment now, which we will vote on, another amendment later, and then a third amendment later.

Most of the ideas for cutting spending, quite frankly, have come from my colleagues on the other side, and many of them you have already voted for. So it is going to be an interesting exercise today. The majority leader also spoke to me before lunch saying it did not matter because I was going to lose anyway.

That sends a signal. The leadership of our Senate today says: We do not have to pay for things.

Prior to leaving here, we agreed on a compromise of tax loophole closures that would have paid for this for a period of 30 days. The bill we voted on back then was for 30 days. We have now before us an identical bill before us for 60 days. It is going to cost $18.2 billion. That is what CBO says. The question I have to ask is, is it morally right for us to steal that money from our children's future or make hard choices about wasteful spending today? The choices are not hard other than in our stubbornness that we don't want to agree.

When businesses are taken over, when a larger business buys a smaller business, the first thing they do is become great cash managers of the business. In other words, they make sure the money in the business is always working for the business. So if there is excess cash lying around in accounts, they take that money and reduce whatever outstanding debts they have or forgo borrowing money and use that cash in a more efficacious and serious manner. The first amendment I will offer is asking us to do nothing but the same.

At the end of last year, the Federal Government had on its books money it borrowed but had not spent of $676 billion. That is what is sitting in accounts, money we have borrowed that is not being utilized efficiently. At the end of next year, at the end of fiscal 2011, according to the OMB, it will be $614 billion. That is almost half of the debt we will borrow this year. This first amendment simply says: Let the administration utilize its executive prerogatives and instead of us borrowing $18.2 billion from our children and then paying interest on that--and, by the way, the interest on that $18.2 billion that will go on in perpetuity, because we are not retiring any debt, is about $900 million, almost $1 billion a year. Why would we borrow money when we have money sitting there that is not being utilized effectively and pay almost $900 million every year? Why would we borrow again next year an extra billion to pay for the money we are going to borrow to fund this program?

Let me give an example of where this money lies. In our own accounts to run the legislature, we have $1.450 billion sitting there. In other words, it has not been promised to do anything. It is sitting there. It was sitting at $1.876 billion at the end of last fiscal year. It is projected to be $1.481 billion next year. We are keeping that money in the bank and not using it.

The Department of Agriculture has $20 billion and is estimated in 2011 to have still $12 billion sitting in an account that we are paying interest on that is not being utilized, not obligated for anything at the time, unobligated.

What all these figures show when you total them up is that we are sending money so fast to agencies, they can't spend it. In other words, we are throwing money at the agencies far faster than they can spend it, and it would be wise and prudent of us to send less money--still with the same rules, still with the same instruction, to utilize their money better.

The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Congressman

Obey, has already agreed to do that on the summer jobs program in certain accounts.

The idea behind this amendment is to take some of the $1 trillion that is sitting in accounts that is not obligated--in other words, it will not be utilized this year; it won't be utilized for at least 2 years--and utilize that rather than charge our children.

I have used Madeline's picture a lot, but I don't think you can overutilize this picture. This little girl was caught on the street outside of Washington protesting. Obviously, her parents put her up to it. At the time she was wearing a sign that says: I am already $38,375 in debt and I only own a dollhouse. At the end of this fiscal year, she will be $45,000 more in debt, and she will still only own a dollhouse. Why would we want to do that?

This bill adds $500 for every man, woman, and child in this country. Why wouldn't we want to not charge it to them and utilize what we have in excess now, the inefficient use of the cash balances we have, to pay for something we all agree we want to pay for but the disagreement is over whether we should steal it from our children or actually make hard choices? These are not even hard choices. These are easy choices. We were told, when we came to an agreement prior to the April recess, that the reason this wasn't acceptable in the House is they didn't want to set the precedent of starting to pay for things when we are spending money. I would put forth that the American people are ready for us to start doing that. They are ready for us to start making tough choices. They think we need to make tough choices.

Out of every dollar we spend, we are borrowing 43 cents against the future. That is what happened last year. It will actually be probably higher this year. Maybe not. But somewhere about 43 cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spends is borrowed. Is there a time that we should stop and pause and say: Maybe a review is in order of our priorities, looking at the priorities of the Federal Government? I know that builds a lot of resistance in this body. But what I would like somebody to tell me is, when is that time? Is it when the Chinese won't buy our bonds anymore? Do we wait for the firestorm to come where we are at critical mass and then the choices are limited and few? Or do we start making the proper decisions now and live up to the authority and responsibility given to us?

There is a saying that the easiest thing in the world is to spend somebody else's money. I also think it is the most addictive thing in the world. We can see that. It doesn't matter whether it is Republicans in charge or Democrats. We have not seen the kind of behavior in Congress that will get our Congress out of the financial problems we face.

In terms of an almost $4 trillion budget, $18 billion doesn't seem like a lot, but if you keep doing that every 60 days, in a year you have done over $120 billion that you will add to the debt. Our kids will get to pay it back, but they will get to pay it back on compounded interest.

The interesting thing is what the OMB and CBO agree to. Actually, CBO came out with the latest numbers. We are going to borrow $9.8 trillion if we don't change things over the next 9 years, and fully 50 percent of that will be borrowed money to pay interest on the money we have already borrowed. Should we not do what is right for the unemployed but also what is right for the Madelines of this world in terms of protecting their future?

I call up amendment No. 3723 and ask for its consideration.

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

Here is a fairly painless way--just more efficient management of the money we have--of paying for this needed program without charging it to the children. We don't have to go to the bond market to borrow more. We don't have to incur an additional $900 million a year of debt, a tremendous benefit to those who follow us. The question is, when will we decide to start being responsible?

I am going to be offering two other amendments, if this one is not agreed to, that will give specific choices. Wait to hear the howling. In other words, nothing is less important than unemployment insurance. Said the other way, everything is more important. In other words, we can't cut anything to pay for unemployment insurance.

Let's talk about that for a minute. Just through competitive bidding, if we had mandatory competitive bidding in the Federal Government--in other words, we will not buy things that are not competitively bid--we would save $62 billion a year. But we have sweetheart deals out the kazoo. We have earmarks that have noncompetitive bidding. We have contracts that the government does without competitive bidding. We could save $62 billion a year by instituting competitive bidding.

Here are examples. It was recently reported that the Defense Department rewards no-bid work to small contracts for repairs at military bases costing taxpayers $148 million more than they were competed for. This is in 1 year on repair contracts. That is just on the repair of small items on military bases. We could save $148 million a year. Federal funds were spent by the State of Wisconsin, $47.5 million, on two Spanish-made passenger trains, no competitive bid. The Legal Services Corporation, 37 out of 38 consultant contracts had not been competitively bid. The Department of Interior inspector general issued a report on sole-source contracting within the Department of Interior total savings; $44.5 million, had they used competitive bidding.

If we go through all of the agencies, what we come up with is a potential savings of billions and billions of dollars; as a matter of fact, enough to extend this same bill for 7 months, if we use competitive bidding. But that will not be considered important. It is going to be too important to do that so we will borrow the money from our children.

Let's look at ourselves. In 2010, the legislative branch received $4.7 billion in discretionary funding, a 6-percent increase over last year. Do we know of any other people who got those kinds of increases who work in small business or private enterprise in a down economy? Last year and this year alone, every day without this bill we are adding $4.3 billion to our debt a day. Is that an emergency? I think that is the real emergency, that we are absolutely stealing opportunity from our children and grandchildren.

When Members of the Senate or the House don't utilize all their funds--and I average turning back about $600,000 a year--that money does not go back to the Treasury. It is consumed in other areas of the legislative branch. There is a disincentive for Members to be efficient with the dollars they are allotted as they represent their individual States. We ought to change that. There ought to be an incentive to be efficient. We ought to change it to where whatever we turn back goes to retire the debt, not goes back to spend on something that is not a priority.

If you look at the Department of Agriculture, for which one of my amendments will have some recommended eliminations, there are hundreds of millions of dollars that are wasted every year. But when we offer an

amendment that is going to have a program that both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have recommended be removed, we are going to have people say: Oh, no, you can't do that because maybe 1,000 people or 1,500 people want that gravy train, when we have 10 million people unemployed. So we are going to keep the gravy train for the small numbers and borrow the money from our children and grandchildren to take care of unemployment benefits.

In 2009, the Department of Agriculture made errors in payments and overpaid by $4.2 billion in that year alone. Think about that. That is just the Department of Agriculture. Should we not eliminate that to pay for unemployment insurance or should we borrow from our children? Which is it we should do? Should we make the hard choice and force the Department of Agriculture to clean up its act or should we borrow the money from our kids? It is a lot easier to just borrow it from our kids. Then we do not have to work. Oh, by the way, we do not get any of the complaints from the administration that: You are making our job too hard--let alone the fact that they are not efficient and oftentimes not effective.

In 2008, the Agriculture Department had 7,000 different employees attend conferences around this country. There was $22 million of expenditures in 2005 alone. The USDA is ranked among the four worst Federal agencies in paying its travel credit bills on time. As a matter of fact, they get charged interest because they cannot even pay their bills on time. Ten percent of their travel cards are in delinquent status. They have embezzlement cases on their credit cards. But have we done the work to clean that up? No. Have we gone after the $4.5 billion in overpayments? No. Mr. President, $4.5 billion a year for 10 years is $45 billion. Just cleaning up one aspect of improper payments at only the Department of Agriculture will pay for this bill for 4 months. But we will not do the hard work. We do the easy work. And the easy work is to put the credit card into the machine and not think about how that is going to steal opportunity and potential from those who follow us.

The Department of Defense--everybody says: Well, you can't go after the Department of Defense. My question is, Why not? It is the only Federal Government agency that cannot even come close to an audit anywhere. We cannot even audit their books they are in such a mess. But what we do know is we can save at least $36.5 billion from the Department of Defense by putting in competitive bidding, by making cogent management changes that every small business in this country runs on in the practices that are there. But it has not been changed. We have not insisted it be changed. We have not limited funding in areas that are noncritical to our troops to force the Department of Defense to come up and save this $36.5 billion.

Mr. President, 10 to 15 percent of everything that is spent in the Pentagon is wasted. Why wouldn't we go after that? Because somebody will accuse us of not supporting our troops? Well, what are our troops fighting for? They are fighting for the future of their kids and our country. Yet we refuse to look where the payments can be made in a way that is more efficient in the elimination of waste and fraud, with the institution of competitive bidding so we are not borrowing $18.2 billion against our kids and grandkids. Why do we refuse to do that? Is it too hard? Do we love our jobs so much that we love our jobs more than our children and our grandchildren? I do not think that is the case. I think the case is that we are focusing on the wrong emergency.

The emergency in front of us is that in 2020 we are going to have a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90 to 100 percent. Every economist in the world will agree that will suppress our potential growth by at least 2 percent a year. So we will go in a downward spiral. When you have that kind of a debt-to-GDP ratio, what happens is the debt service--the money that pays the interest--is not available to invest in capital and equipment to grow jobs, to improve efficiencies, to expand our Nation's economic base. We are adding to that problem by being irresponsible in terms of paying for an $18.2 billion program.

Over the past 4 years, I have identified in the Federal Government waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in excess of $350 billion a year. When I bring those amendments to the floor, they get voted down--not because they disagree with them but because we do not have the political will to make the hard choices.

The Congress, in a historic move, passed the health care bill that is going to continue to allow $150 billion of fraud a year to come out of Medicare and Medicaid. We did not do anything to fix it. There are no significant changes in the health care bill that will address a source of $150 billion in losses. Why? Because it is too hard? Kids are not important?

We are at a turning point in our country like we have never been before. We have never been walking into a financial situation that will totally limit our ability to get out of a situation. We can come out of this recession. But if we do not change the trajectory of the way we spend money and put the government back within the limited role the Constitution says it is to have, then the future will not only be economically not bright but not bright from a standpoint of liberty.

I have told my colleagues--and we are going to have this on every bill that comes before the Senate--it does not matter if it is a supplemental spending bill for the war, we ought to be paying for it. Rather than borrowing it from our kids, we ought to be paying for it. We ought to be making the hard choices about what is not as important as supporting our troops rather than charging the extra funding to our grandkids. So we are going to go through at least three cycles of votes on every bill that comes to the floor that is not paid for, that will add to the debt. I am not going to serve my last year in the Senate and say I did not do everything I could to try to put us back on track. So when we vote that this is an emergency and we do not have to pay for it, we are not hurting us. You are not hurting Tom Coburn. You are hurting the generations that follow us.

It would be different if we had an efficient, effective, well-run Federal Government that was within the bounds of what the Constitution said we were supposed to be doing. But we are not anywhere close to that. There is so much fraud, so much waste, so many well-connected goodies going to the well-endowed and well-heeled in this country because they have a connection politically, and we need to clean it out.

Everything ought to be competitively bid. There is no reason for it not to be competitively bid. To pass up that $65 billion a year because we do not do it--there is another thing we do. We spend $8 billion a year maintaining properties the Federal Government does not want. Think about that. For 3 years, I have tried to get through real property reform and cannot get it through. We either need to tear these structures down so we quit spending money on them or sell them, but we should not continue to spend $8 billion a year on buildings and properties we do not need. We have not done a thing to solve that problem in the last 3 years.

I have a book full of further examples. Just think about this: We want people to go into math, engineering, science, and technology. Everybody agrees with that. We know if we can get our younger students going into those areas, that is where they are going to have their greatest benefits of having a wonderful living in utilizing those skills.

The Federal Government has 105 different programs through six different agencies to incentivize math, engineering, science, and technology. The administrative cost for 105 different programs is ridiculous, and not 1 of them has a metric on it of whether it is working. So every time somebody raises the issue, some Senator comes and creates another new program, and we pass it, and we never look at what we are doing already. We do not eliminate things that are not effective. We do not put metrics on it to say we are going to look at this every year, and if it is not working we are going to get rid of it or we are going to fix it, and we are not going to create another program. Yet we have 105 different programs.

In the month of December, my staff found 640 separate instances just like that where we have duplication of programs across government agencies. In

the last debt limit extension, we passed one of my amendments that said the GAO must report to us a governmentwide assessment of all the duplications in all the programs because Congress does not know it. We do not know what is out there. So we see another problem. It does not matter that we may have 105 programs working on it; we go create another one. That is called incompetence. It is also called laziness.

Just inside the Department of Education are 230 duplicative programs and $10 billion in waste, fraud, and mismanagement--230. Why? Because we refuse to do the hard work of oversight.

So when we vote on this amendment, what we are going to be voting on is whether we have the courage to start making choices. If you vote to defeat this amendment, what you are saying is you lack the courage to do the hard work to pay for something out of waste today and mismanagement of Federal funds and you think the Madelines of this world ought to pay for that lack of integrity and lack of hard work. And there is not another reason for it.

We are going to hear why you should not vote for this. We are going to hear why it is going to be hard if we take $18.2 billion out of the management accounts of all these agencies. It is just going to be, out of what is there, about 3 percent of the cash that is sitting idle-- about 3 percent of what will be idle in 2011. What is idle this year, it will be less than 3 percent; it will be about 2.5 percent. Yet we are going to vote it down. We are going to vote it down because we care more about making a political point than doing the hard work of getting our country back on track.

We do not have forever to get our country back on track. If we get to 90 to 100 percent of our GDP, the job of making these decisions becomes 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 times more difficult because we will have less growth. We have a precarious economy right now. It is coming out of a recession. We want that growth to boom. We want those jobs to be created. When we borrow more money, we are putting a brake on that.

So if we can utilize the money we already have, we get the stimulatory effect of getting people unemployment insurance that buys the necessities of life, but we are not adding to the debt, which depresses the economy.

I will close for right now on this amendment. I will ask for the yeas and nays at a time that is agreeable to the majority leader.

I note the absence of a quorum.

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

I send to the desk a modification of the pending amendment.

Mr. President, I am prepared for the vote anytime the chairman of the Finance Committee is ready to proceed.

I am only going to take 5 minutes.

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

Mr. President, I thank my colleague for giving me a short time to deal with these two amendments. I have an amendment at the desk that I call up.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and my next amendment be called up.

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

Mr. President, I yield the floor to my colleague from North Dakota.

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