Floor Statements

I want to compliment the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. She has done a good job. She does want to get back to regular order.

As we can see, nothing has happened. There is a reason nothing has happened. It is not in her control. Nothing is happening because there are a lot of amendments and they are not sure they want to take votes. Rather than the regular process of offering amendments that are germane and agreeing to a 60-vote level for their passage--having had that agreement--now we are not allowed to offer amendments because supposedly somebody has to agree with them.

Well, that is not what the Senate is about. The way we decide whether the Senate agrees to it is to offer the amendment, vote on it, and stand up and defend your vote. It is not the chairman who is doing this, and it is not Senator Shelby who is doing this, it is the leadership. We were criticized because we wanted to read the bill. We now have amendments. We have been waiting to offer amendments. I waited around here an hour last night to offer amendments, and then I had another commitment so I could not do it. I offered to come over here at 9:30 this morning, and could not do it. We have offered one amendment, and we have five other amendments. We could not get a vote. If we stay in a quorum call, people's business will not get done. People will start to be furloughed in the next 2 weeks, and it is because somebody wants to take away the individual right of a Senator to offer an amendment. We are not postcloture, so even amendments that are not germane are adequate to be filed against this bill.

I have no animus at all against the chairman. I am thankful she is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I trust her implicitly to move on regular order. This bill is out of her committee and we need to bring amendments to the floor. The idea that we have to have permission from somebody in the Senate to offer an amendment goes totally counter to what the Senate is all about. We have a lot of problems to solve. We could finish this bill. We are sitting here. I could offer all of my amendments in 15 minutes, and we could stack them and vote on them--60 votes, I don't care.

The fact is we cannot offer an amendment. If I ask to bring up an amendment right now, the chairman has been instructed to object to that. I understand. I will not make her go through that exercise.

I think it is important that the American people know what is going on. It is not out in the open; it is behind the scenes. They are negotiating away amendments so we won't know what could have happened or what might happen. Had we been in regular order, we would have been through with this bill. We are wasting time trying to play behind-the- scenes, nontransparent negotiation about a bill that is vitally important to this country. The process is not working well. I trust the chairman to bring that process back, but she is handicapped by the instructions she has received.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wanted to make a few comments. We have finished our analysis of this bill. The bill has 587 pages and spends well over $1 trillion. We finished at 9 p.m. last

night. We have no objection to moving to the bill through a fair and open process. We will be happy to submit our ideas to the chairman and ranking member of the Appropriations Committee. There is a lot we ought to discuss about this bill. However, there is no attempt to filibuster the bill. There was an attempt to do our job, which was to actually read the bill and see what is in it so we would be prepared to offer constructive criticisms to the bill.

With that, I leave and I will be back on the floor in a little bit when the managers of the bill come to the floor. If they want to offer amendments and ask unanimous consent to move on to the bill, I am sure there will be no objection.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first, I want to tell the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee that I actually very much appreciate her work. I actually trust her to do the right thing. But we got this bill last night at 9 o'clock. It is a 500-page bill. It has multiple levels of authorizations in it that we found so far--authorization on an appropriations bill. It has what I would consider--and we haven't been completely through it--some things that are totally counterintuitive to where we find ourselves today in terms of spending money.

Before I could grant a unanimous consent--and I will; as soon as we get through with the bill I plan on granting unanimous consent. But I want to know, we just heard the majority leader say he can't understand why somebody wants to read this bill. We are talking about in excess of $1 trillion. That is one of the problems, one of the reasons we are $17 trillion in debt. It is because people don't read the bills.

I also want to say to my friend from Alabama, I have the greatest praise for him. He knows some of the heartburn we have on this, but we knew that was coming from the House. But to not allow us the time to assess what you have produced by being able to read and study the bill is going against the best traditions of the Senate. It is also going against common sense.

How do we know whether we want to offer amendments unless we have been able to read the bill? Are we just to blindly say: Whatever you want to do we are going to approve it because we have a deadline at the end of this month?

I am willing to do whatever is necessary to make sure we get a continuing resolution, but I am not willing to do that blindly. I am going to study this bill. We have three Members' staff working on this full time. They have been working since last night. They are investigating and looking at this bill. I will not go into the details of the things we have seen so far, but we ought to at least have the opportunity before we rush into granting unanimous consent to go forward.

I plan to allow unanimous consent, but I will not do so until I know what the agreement is going to be in terms of amendments. Even if we read the bill and have some good ideas, we don't know whether we are going to be able to offer any. This is an appropriations

bill. We ought to be able to offer amendments with our ideas on ways to save this country money, increase its efficiency, increase its effectiveness, and still meet the deadline that the chairwoman outlined.

I hope the Senator understands why we are not in a mood to grant it until we actually know what we are talking about. To ask anything less of us would be asking us to deny the very oath we took when we came here.

With that, I yield the floor and thank my colleague John McCain for being here.

Madam President, I was sitting in my office listening to Senator Reid, meeting with my staff on the bill we have on the floor, and I wanted to explain to the American people what this bill is.

This bill was published last night at 9:00. We got it at about 9:45. It spends well over $1 trillion. And I agree with the majority leader, it is important that we pass this bill, but knowing what is in it before you can decide where you would like to try to amend it is asking something of Senators that they can't give.

So I understand the majority leader's frustration, but I would also make a couple points.

In this bill is $8 billion taken out of the victims' compensation fund. That is not tax money. That is money which criminals have paid into a fund to give restitution to children and women around this country for the harm that has occurred from the crime that has been committed upon them, and we are stealing $8 billion from that fund. In this bill, we are taking it away--not tax dollars but fines and penalties--and we are going to spend it somewhere else. You talk about being for women and children? This bill is exactly the opposite of that. Money that is due them we are not going to let them have. We are going to go spend it somewhere else.

So knowing those things are in the bill is one of the reasons we ought to read the bill before we can know whether we are going to offer amendments on it.

I would also make one final point. The vast majority of this bill passed the Appropriations Committee in the Senate last spring and early summer. There is not one of the things that are in this bill that the Appropriations Committee hadn't already done, and we had a deliberate choice to not put these bills on the floor last time. So if we are in a snit over the problems we are having, it is because the bills didn't come in regular order to the floor of the Senate so there could have been a conference.

By the way, the House passed 12 of the 13. Our committees worked 12 of the 13 out. So they came out in regular process. They were not allowed to come to the floor.

We have just about finished studying the bill. We have no problems moving on the bill and giving consent to move on the bill once we have looked at the bill. But for the majority leader to say that Members of the Senate can't have amendments after having their staff work since 9:45 last night to look at the bill and attempt to make amendments to the bill, that doesn't fit on a trillion-dollar bill. And when the American people find out what is in this bill that should not be in it, and the options that we can offer of what should be in it, I think they are going to agree that maybe we ought to make some changes.

I understand the frustration of the majority leader, but I also understand our rights. This is not about filibustering anything. This is about being an informed Senator who knows what you are doing and knows how to make a decision about how to amend the bill. We can call it something other than that, but it is not. It is about doing our job. The fact is, we got this last night.

What I would say to everybody who was fine with us going on it without having read it, I would say there is a problem with their position in the Senate in terms of their oath to do what they were sent here to do, which is to read what you are voting on, know what you are voting, and prepare amendments to what you are voting on.

We have this outburst at 16 hours after we got an almost 600-page bill? That doesn't fit with any common sense. We have instructed our side we are willing to go ahead and allow this to move forward but in a process that recognizes that this bill is not perfect, just as both the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the ranking member said. We do not have any problems with it moving forward. We do have problems spending money we don't have on things we don't need, and we ought to be able to offer amendments that would highlight that whether the body agrees with it or not--that would highlight it so the American people can see it. We may not be allowed, based on what the majority leader said, to offer any amendments. He is the majority leader. But if that is the case, we are probably going to be here all through the weekend because that is a right each Senator has and they ought to be able to offer them--especially on a $1 trillion appropriations bill.

I hope Senator Reid has a good night's sleep. I will try to call him in the morning and work out an accommodation that will allow this bill to move so we do not have to be here on the weekend. I don't want to be here this weekend, but I will if it is the right thing to get the point out and let American people know.

Right now we are having no tours of the White House. I can show you hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars that are under the control of the executive that they could save that are a whole lot less important than tours of the White House. The same goes for us in the operation of our House, in terms of the Senate and the House.

I am sorry I irritated Senator Reid. I am sorry he is upset with me, but I am going to do my job. I have been here, I am in my ninth year, and I have always kept my obligation to the people of this country to make sure I am thinking about the long term, I am thinking about priority on how we spend money and the best way, the right way, and offering amendments, whether they pass or not, offering those ideas. That is because that is not only my privilege but it is my obligation.

With that I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Madam President, I also ask unanimous consent to use an oversized poster.

Madam President, there has been a lot made of the sequester and the things that may or may not happen associated with it. Having spent the last 8 years looking at the Federal Government, I wrote the Secretary of Agriculture a letter this week outlining some things they could do that would not put in jeopardy food inspection and other things.

In my 8 years of looking at the Department of Agriculture, there is extensive waste and duplication--the GAO has confirmed that--and those things should be cut first and eliminated and consolidated before staffs that are in critical positions are furloughed.

The USDA currently has 120,000 employees, and they have over 16,000 offices. Just thinking about 16,000 offices ought to give us some pause. Why would any agency, no matter what their requirements, need that number of offices? The agency notes on their Web site that if they were a private company, they would be the sixth largest private company in America. That is how big the USDA is and how diffusive.

Today, there is one USDA employee for every eight farmers--one USDA employee for every eight people employed in the farm area--or, overall, one USDA employee for every 18 farms, primary or otherwise. So weekend farmers have a USDA employee, and for regular farmers--people where it is their primary business--there is an employee for every eight of them.

At the end of 2012, USDA was sitting on $12 billion in unobligated Federal balances. In other words, that is money that is sitting in an account that has not been obligated to any purpose, sitting there waiting to be spent, where we have borrowed money--$12 billion--that they have not obligated.

One of the things my staff has discovered is the USDA has upcoming conferences in terms of food tasting and wine tasting on the west coast. Now, in normal times there would not be anything wrong with Federal employees traveling to the west coast to both encourage and assess where we are in terms of some of our agricultural production. But I would think maybe this is one of the things the U.S. Department of Agriculture ought to cancel, given where we are and the threat that has been put out there in terms of food safety that has been announced in terms of layoffs or time off for Agriculture Department employees.

Two USDA agencies--Rural Development and the Agricultural Marketing Service--are sponsoring the 26th annual California Small Farm Conference next week. In addition to speakers from the USDA agency, the gathering will feature field trips and tasting receptions. ``The Tasting Reception,'' according to their Web site, ``is the most well attended networking event of the conference and showcases the regional bounty from local farms, chefs, wineries, breweries, bakeries and other food purveyors.'' And ``special guest chefs will turn donated local agriculture products into tasty dishes to sample with exceptional local wines [provided].''

There is nothing wrong with that in normal times. There is plenty wrong with sending multiple employees to these types of conferences when we find ourselves in the position we find ourselves in today. These conferences, I am sure, are fun, interesting, and even educational getaways for USDA employees, but food inspecting rather than food tasting should be the USDA's priority at this time.

Not just to pick on them, but the thing is Americans are not aware of how expansive and duplicative many of these programs are. In the domestic food assistance programs, as shown on this chart, this is what GAO shows us we have running: 18 different Federal programs across three Departments that spend $60 billion a year.

According to the GAO, the availability of multiple programs with similar benefits helps ensure that those in need have access to nutritious food, but it also does increase the administrative costs of these programs.

So while our goal is great, with the fact that we have this many programs doing essentially similar work with similar overheads, the GAO's recommendation was to do consolidation. Fifteen of these programs are run by the Department of Agriculture, ranging from SNAP to the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program and the Special Milk Program.

According to the GAO, the effectiveness of 11 of these 18 programs is suspect. The reason it is suspect is nobody has done any oversight. No Member of Congress has done oversight on it--not the Budget Committee, not the Appropriations Committee, nor the Agriculture Committee.

We also have inside the USDA research and education activities within the Rural Development programs that duplicate, predominately, existing programs of almost every other agency in the Federal Government. Let me say that again. Almost every one of these programs is duplicated in another agency of the Federal Government. In other words, we are layering. They both have the same goals, the same hope for outcomes. One is run by one agency. Here are the ones that are run just by the

This was a letter I received in 2011 when we started raising the issue of duplication and making tough choices so that we could continue to provide benefits, we could continue to create and support a safety net for those who were truly dependent on it, but we do not waste money we do not have, spending it on things we do not absolutely need.

I would put forward that when we have a multitude of programs and they overlap, we as Members of Congress do not have an excuse for not fixing that, because the things that are critical in people's lives eventually are going to suffer. Every dollar we spend on low-priority duplication, every dollar we spend that does not have a metric to say it is doing what it is should be doing is eventually going to be a dollar that is not there to support a food stamp recipient or a Medicaid recipient or housing for the indigent or care for the homeless or implementing Justice grant programs for policing and tribal courts.

So it is not a matter of just solving the duplication problem, it is a matter of the arithmetic that is going to hit our country and that by delaying the time at which we decide we are going to address this multitude, which is now 1,400 programs through the first 2 years of reports from GAO and $367 billion of expenditures--and that does not count the other $800 billion that goes out of the Federal Government every year for grants that also address some of these same issues. So the time is now. Sequestration gives us a good time to start looking at priorities.

One of the things I am thankful for is that we have tremendous Federal employees. We are starting to hear them speak up now: What can be cut? What is wasteful? They now feel the freedom to not be criticized because they are going to take a critical eye to the way American taxpayer dollars are being spent in their own agency. We are starting to hear from them: Here are things we are doing that we should not be doing. Here are things that are not a priority. Rather than lay off a meat inspector, maybe we ought to do this: ``Cut this, not that.'' You know, we ought to cut out wine tastings for Federal employees and keep the meat inspectors employed.

There is no reason we need to furlough the first--with the waste in the Department of Agriculture, there is no reason that any significant program in the Department of Agriculture ought to suffer a furlough or layoff. There is no reason for it because there are billions of dollars there that are not wisely spent--well intended, not questioning motive, but poorly spent with poor return.

When there are two programs doing the same thing, let me describe what happens on the beneficiary end of that. People do not know where there is a need. What the requirement is in one program is a different requirement in another program. In terms of duplicative grants, what we have is people who apply for a grant and get it from one arm of the Department of Agriculture and then go over here and make the same application from another arm of the Department of Agriculture, get the same grant, and then go to one of the other agencies that is doing the same thing and get another grant for the same thing--all of them not knowing that each has given a grant for the same purpose. So it is just not good business practices, it is not good management, and it is not good stewardship for the future of our country.

So I would ask my colleagues to think about the great work the Government Accountability Office has done. They have done great work for us. We have failed to act on it. It is time we start acting. Come April 1, we will see the final report from the GAO where they now--over 4 years--will have looked at every program in the Federal Government. They are going to be able to give us a list. I have come out here with my big charts and shown the list of duplications. We are going to have three or four more charts that say the same thing. Think about how discouraging it is to the people at GAO who do all of this hard work and to the people who are trying to meet the needs in the individual agencies to know that we are actually duplicating things with poor results.

We are not meeting our requirements under our oath. We are not meeting the moral requirements to be prudent with the American taxpayers' money. In the long run, the people who will suffer for it will be the very people we intend to help because if, in fact, we do not respond in a way that creates a positive vision for our country in terms of growth again and a positive vision in terms of responsible behavior by Congress, ultimately the arithmetic swallows us up.

I will close with this: If you take today's budget, when the Federal Reserve starts unwinding the quantitative easing they have done--these very low, artificially low interest rates--or if something were to happen where the world economy would look at us and say: We do not think you are deserving of our AAA-minus rating--the difference in interest costs historically is about 3 to 4 percent. Let's take a conservative estimate; let's say it is 3. Our historical average is 5.83 percent, what we have borrowed money at historically over the last 50 years. We are borrowing at under 2 percent right now. Three percent times $17 trillion is $510 billion a year. We all lose when that happens. How do we lose? Because the dollar we are going to be spending on that additional interest cost is a dollar that is not going to help someone who is homeless, it is a dollar that is not going to provide food that needs to be provided for those who are depending upon us, and it is a dollar that is not going to go to match the FMAP for Medicaid. Consequently, the cuts we will make then will be much harsher than the cuts if we decide to do it proactively now.

You do not have to have partisan disagreement about the goal of a program, but certainly we should be able to come together and say: We do not want duplication. We want to have good outcomes. We want to put metrics on it to measure it to see if it is working.

There cannot be any disagreement on that. That is plain, good-old common horse sense. Yet there has been no action in 3\1/2\ years on any of these recommendations by the Government Accountability Office. Now, the administration has paid attention. I will give them credit. In a lot of areas where they have seen it, they have done what they can do, but we have not. I do not want the heritage of my time in the Senate to be when we were the Congresses that failed to meet the challenge.

I believe our country can cheat history. If you look at history, it is not great for republics. They have all failed. But we have the opportunity to cheat history, and the way we do it is by getting off our rears and starting to

do the job we were sent up here to do, which is oversight and legislate the elimination of waste, abuse, and duplication. We can do that, but it requires leadership. It requires leadership on the part of Senator Reid, on the part of Senator McConnell, every committee chair, every ranking member. It requires leadership that we are going to do that.

I am proud to say that Tom Carper, chairman of Homeland Security--we have a plan to oversight all of homeland security over the next 4 years, the whole thing, and the rest of the government as well because we do not really believe the rest of the committees are going to do it. So we are building our staffs for oversight to grab this information, to make cogent recommendations and legislation, where we can, that will actually address these problems. We are way past the starting point of when we should have begun. It is not too late, but it requires us to make a decision: Are we more interested in the parochial benefits of allowing programs that are not effective or duplicative to continue to run because we will not get any blowback or are we courageous enough to say that we are going to do what is right for the right reasons for the long-term well-being of our country?

I believe that is the feeling of most of the Members of the Senate. I just think we need the leadership to call us back.

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

Mr. President, with a $16.5 trillion national debt, the Federal Government needs to spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently and reduce costs during these tough fiscal times.

In 2011, the Federal Government owned nearly 660,000 vehicles. Although the size of the fleet decreased slightly from the previous year, it had still increased significantly over the past several years. Between 2006 and 2011, the Federal Government fleet has grown by more than 29,000 vehicles.

A 2012 Government Accountability Office, GAO, report examined the increase in the number of Federal vehicles, excluding postal and nontactical military vehicles. According to the study: ``Since fiscal year 2005, the number of federal non-postal civilian and non-tactical military vehicles has increased about 7 percent, from about 420,000 to 449,000 vehicles.''

On February 28, 2013, I introduced bipartisan legislation that would save millions in taxpayer dollars by reducing the amount the Federal Government can spend on buying and leasing nonessential vehicles. In its recommendations, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform strongly endorsed trimming the Federal vehicle fleet, and estimated it would save approximately $500 million.

This bill would reduce by 20 percent the Federal funding available for the acquisition and leasing of new Federal vehicles. It would also require agencies to maintain this funding level through 2017. Like the Fiscal Commission, however, this bill exempts the U.S. Postal Service from the reduction. It also provides an exception for vehicle purchases critical for national security reasons. Similar legislation passed by voice vote in the House of Representatives in September 2012.

This legislation would simply do what most American families are doing on a day-to-day basis. The Federal Government has to learn more with less.

I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support this commonsense legislation. I want to thank my colleagues for the opportunity to speak on the Senate floor today in support of this bill.

I ask to speak as if in morning business.

I want to spend a few minutes this afternoon talking about what is going to happen on March 1, something we have known is going to happen for 18 months. Nobody really wanted it to happen this way, but I want to make the case if we give the administration the flexibility, we can easily swallow $85 billion a year in reductions.

I am going to go through a small set of oversight reports I have actually done in the last year or so talking

about waste within the Federal Government.

We looked at the urban area security grants of the Department of Homeland Security. We looked at the Department of Defense, the programs that were in the Department of Defense which don't have anything to do with defense; that is $67 billion a year.

Let me say that again: $67 billion a year is spent in the Department of Defense which has nothing to do with defending the country.

We outlined the 100 most wasteful projects, we put that out in December of this year, a treasure map. We looked at the Market Access Program and what it is actually doing to some of the wealthiest agricultural businesses in this country. It is subsidizing their export of sales. Money for nothing, all of the money that we spent that hadn't actually accomplished anything. We did a report on that.

Next we did a report on the subsidies for the rich and famous because we do have a mixed-up Tax Code, and over $30 billion a year in benefits goes to a very small number of people in this country inappropriately through our tax cuts. The discussion and disagreements we are going to have on that will be about what do you do with that. Everybody agrees we probably ought to fix that. Do you fix it by just raising taxes or do you fix it by reforming the Tax Code and actually getting greater taxes coming into the Federal Government?

The other point I wanted to make is there are a lot of things we may sequester that I have been talking about for years, which actually haven't gotten any traction, but I suspect right now will be getting some traction. The first one is the grant programs in the Department of Homeland Security.

In one area, the Urban Area Security Initiative, which is a component of the Homeland Security grants, we spend $170 million a year on one grant program. What we did when we looked at it is we found tremendous amounts of waste that have nothing to do with increasing the security in the communities where this money was spent.

Let me give you a few examples: domestic drones that have limited capability, can't fly over anything that is populated because they are not reliable enough. Also, underwater robots, snow cone machines, security upgrades for spring baseball training programs and stadiums, color printers, BearCat vehicles for communities of 20,000 people who will never have a need for that piece of equipment. Yet we spent it because the people making those pieces of equipment are so good at helping cities get grants whether they need them or not, they apply for them.

Columbus, OH, bought an underwater robot, $98,000. They don't have a facility, a true natural lake or other lake in which they could actually utilize this piece of equipment, but they bought it anyway.

Spring training in Arizona, $90,000 to install video surveillance at the Peoria Sports Conference Complex. The Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres have their spring training there.

Here are Urban Area Security Initiative grants which are supposed to be spent on security. What we found is a large portion of the money across the country is not being spent on security; it is being used to augment aspects of what communities need.

This is a good way to trim $700 million through these grants. While I am at it, what we do know is the Department of Homeland Security, 6 months ago, had $8 billion in unobligated balances. Secretary Napolitano made a decision--and her basis was for stimulus, economic stimulus--she would take the requirements off of those grants and push that money out the door. They were only able to push $3 billion out the door, so there is still $5 billion sitting in Homeland Security in unobligated money from last year alone that hadn't been spent. This addresses many of the issues that we are talking about in terms of the sequestration.

The Department of Defense, in terms of the ``department of everything''--let me outline for you a minute. Not all this money could be saved because they are doing some things, but they have no business being at the Department of Defense, with $67.9 billion over 10 years in nondefense spending; nonmilitary research and development, $6 billion a year. And education, the average cost to educate a child on base in America--not our foreign bases, not where we actually need private schools--is over $51,000 per year per student.

We could consolidate that program, as we do at all but 16 bases, and over 10 years save $9 billion.

There are STEM programs, 103 different STEM--science, technology, engineering, and math--programs within the Pentagon alone. Consolidating those would save $1.7 billion over the next 10 years. These are programs not necessarily initiated by Congress either, I might say. They do have the flexibility on a lot of these programs to make those changes.

The Department of Defense tuition assistance program totally duplicates our veterans assistance program. So you can do in-service, have access to tuition while you are in-service and then have the identical access to tuition afterward, and you can claim them both.

So we have multiple duplications there. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to give an educational benefit to our troops, but we don't need to do it twice. That is a significant $5.4 billion.

Alternative energy. We have a Department of Energy. Their whole goal is to work on alternative energy and renewable energy and efficiency within energy. The Department of Defense is spending $700 million a year on research in alternative energy that totally duplicates everything we are doing everywhere else. So there is $700 million we should not be spending at the Pentagon for something that is already being done somewhere else.

We also know we have a benefit for our military families called the PX and commissaries. But when we go out and price products, what we find is you can actually buy at retail stores at a lower price than you can at the commissary. For the cost of running all those organizations, we could give every troop an additional $1,000 a year and save $5 billion over the next 10 years. We could give them $1,000 more, and they would be able to buy at lower prices from a commercial vendor versus a commissary.

Overhead support and supply services. Over 300,000 military members are performing civilian-type jobs. In other words, these are Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force personnel trained as warfighters, and we have them doing nonmilitary jobs at the Pentagon. We could put civilian employment in place and have these military people available to be warfighters and save $37 billion over the next 10 years just in the differential in what our total costs are for the two different types of employees.

So when we talk about a sequester taking $85 billion, I have just cited over $85 billion over 10 years just by looking at a few programs. So we hear the number, and we think about the Federal Government being twice the size it was 11 years ago and that we are 27 percent higher in terms of discretionary spending in nondefense and that even if the sequester goes through, as it is now planned for the military, the military expenditures will actually still be greater next year than what they are this year. So it is important that we talk honestly with the American people about where we are on these projects.

Let me just for a second talk about a report called the ``Waste Book.'' We put it out every year. We gave 100 examples of the most egregious ways tax dollars were wasted last year.

Examples include $450,000 for an unused airport in my State and $325,000 for robotic squirrels. This was a grant issued to study what we already know about robotic squirrels and their interactions with rattlesnakes. I can't see that as a priority for us. At a time when we are running $1.2 trillion deficits, we don't need to be spending money on that type of research.

We spend $91 million a year giving--you won't believe this one-- charitable status to the NFL, the PGA, and several other sports entities. So on the profits they make, the PGA defers taxes coming to the Federal Government in terms of $91 million a year. Now, I don't know of a pro sports team that isn't in the business of being profitable, yet the organizations they send a lot of this money through we are allowing to hide that money through the Tax Code. That is $91 million a year. Why are we doing that?

Another example: $27 million was spent by the State Department on pottery classes in Morocco. The whole

project was an abject failure, but the real question is, Why are we spending $27 million on pottery classes in Morocco? Could we spend $27 million and have a better effect for the Moroccan people than a failed pottery class program? The answer is, certainly.

The size of the State Department is twice the size it was 5 years ago--twice the size in terms of total expenditures.

The other thing we talked about is the subsidy for the rich and famous in terms of what is out there. On average, we found $30 billion a year that millionaires--people who make at least $1 million a year-- enjoy in benefits from tax giveaways and Federal grant programs. That is $30 billion a year. That is $300 billion. That is over one-third of what we are talking about on the sequestration. Yet we have done nothing on that.

This has been out for a year, by the way. Here are some more examples. We have $74 million spent on unemployment checks that went to millionaires last year. That is right, $74 million went out to people who made $1 million, but we still paid them unemployment. We spent $316 million on people who are making more than $1 million a year farming. We sent them $316 million worth of subsidies and $89 million for preservation of their ranches and their estates. These are people making an adjusted gross income above $1 million a year. We sent them $9 billion in retirement checks, we sent them $75.6 million in energy tax credits for their homes, we sent them $7.5 million for costs and damages due to emergencies, and we also gave them a writeoff on their gambling losses in excess of $3 billion.

The other thing I found very unusual as we looked at this is that people making an adjusted gross income in excess of $1 million were given $16 million in government-backed education loans. That is right, $16 million in government-backed education loans.

One of the other areas we did a study on was the Market Access Program. We have all heard of Sunkist and Welch's and Blue Diamond. In 2012 we paid them $6 million from the taxpayers to help them sell their products overseas. These are hundred-million-dollar corporations, minimally. They are billion-dollar corporations. We don't do that for the rest of all the corporations in this country, but because they happen to be associated with an agriculture program, we decided to subsidize the overseas products of the very well-to-do corporations. That may be a laudable goal, but at a time of tight priorities, it is not a laudable goal. Over $2 billion has been spent on this program, which has indirectly subsidized their advertising costs. So $2 billion has gone to very profitable agricultural companies that, if we were to look at their 10-Ks, their SEC reports, they are doing just fine. They don't need the Federal taxpayer to do this.

The California wine industry, which had domestic sales of $18 billion in 2009--it is higher than that now--got $7 million, and the American cotton industry received $20 million and received another $4.7 million from a separate USDA market access program.

Finally, I wish to talk for a minute about more than $70 billion in Federal funds that has been left unspent years after it has been appropriated. We have $70 billion sitting out there in accounts that has been obligated but not spent, now older than 5 years old, which means it is never going to be spent. So that money is sitting in a bank account somewhere that we could pull back, if we had effective management, because people didn't use the money in a grant, they didn't use the money in a program, and yet we have failed to do that. So we are borrowing an extra $70 billion every year to fund the government when we have $70 billion out there in accounts that should revert back to the Treasury.

At the end of this year the Federal Government had $2 trillion in unexpended funds. This is according to OMB, not the Congressional Budget Office. The Office of Management and Budget says that two-thirds of this money was obligated, but a third of it wasn't obligated. So you have $650 billion in unobligated balances sitting in the Federal Government accounts that we are not shuffling around to direct to the things that are most important.

Let me finish, but first I would like to make one other point. I got a letter this week from the mayor of a medium-sized town in my State. It is from the mayor of McAlester, OK. I am going to enter this letter into the Record because in this letter we see a demonstration of the kind of leadership that is needed when there is a financial problem in front of you.

Let me read this.

The City of McAlester is currently working hard to

rebalance our budget after a sudden downturn in our revenues

over the past two months. As you know, municipalities in

Oklahoma are required by statute to maintain a balanced

budget.

In other words, it is a law in Oklahoma that you have to have a balanced budget. So what has he done?

Continuing to read:

The first step we took was to implement a hiring freeze.

So they reassigned workers. And with a revenue shortfall projected at $1.2 million, they took every other expense account category, including supplies, repairs and maintenance, fuel, utilities, travel and training, consulting services and legal services, and reduced their budgets. In other words, they responded.

The mayor continued in his letter:

None of these cuts are without pain. But all will be

accomplished while maintaining essential city services.

Now, for McAlester, a $1.2 million budget cut is a bigger hit than we are talking about with sequestration. If the mayor of a community of 25,000 people can make the adjustments to serve his constituency without decreasing services, why can't we?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter to which I just referred.

The final point I would make is the following: A little more than 3 years ago we passed an amendment that I offered that forced the Government Accountability Office--the government's accounting office--and the Comptroller General to identify every program in the Federal Government, and not only to identify it but to outline where we have duplications and overlaps. And they have done a wonderful job. We are going to get the last third of that report about a month from today, April 1, but what do we know so far? We know we have

about $370 billion in the first two-thirds of this where they say there is massive duplication. There is $370 billion worth of expenditures a year.

I have talked with the President, and he disagrees with me on this, but when you think about it, we have 47 separate job training programs, of which all but three overlap. They are highly ineffective in total. So why don't we have two or three? We spend almost $19 billion on those programs. We could spend $9 billion, cut it down to three programs, put metrics on it, and make sure it is working. The reason I know it is not working is I looked at every job training program in my own State, and the ones that are most successful are the ones that are totally State run without any Federal Government interference. The ones that are federally run--and some are good, I will give you that, but most are not--most are not successful in efficiently and effectively giving somebody a life skill and getting them into employment.

We have 253 different, duplicative Department of Justice grant programs spending $2 billion a year. If you are needing a grant, you might apply to DOJ in one of these 253 areas and then you might apply again over here in another area for the same thing. And the fact is that the Government Accounting Office says: We don't know if people are double- and triple-dipping. As a matter of fact, what did we find? We have people getting the same amount of money from different grant programs from the same grant application. So what we have is a tremendous problem.

We just discovered in the State of Oklahoma that we have a housing administrator for a city that has no houses. There are 3,700 housing administrators in the United States--probably closer to 4,000 because we are still counting. Some of those have very big responsibilities. I don't mean to diminish them at all. But couldn't we consolidate those, especially in areas such as rural Oklahoma and the other rural States so we spread that overhead and have fewer housing administrators?

We have 56 financial literacy programs. Think about that for a minute, 56 different programs for the Federal Government to create a program to make you financially literate.

First of all, there is a problem with that because we are not financially literate, borrowing $1.2 trillion a year. No. 2, we don't know what the words efficiency and effectiveness mean in the Federal Government--or, at least, have limited knowledge of that. And, finally, why do we have that many financial literacy programs? There is no sane answer to that question.

As I outlined in some of the others, 160 housing assistance programs, $170 million a year. We have 53 programs across 4 agencies to help entrepreneurs. The Federal Government is helping entrepreneurs? Our entrepreneurial spirit is not very active and not very successful in terms of what we are doing within the government, and yet we spend $2.6 billion on it.

We have 15 different separate unmanned aerial aircraft programs within the Federal Government. We are going to spend $37 billion on that. Why do we have 15? Maybe two or three, because we have different requirements, but 15?

So we have the massive amount of duplication that is going on within the Federal Government which implies massive amounts of duplicative administrative and overhead costs. I would bet that one-third of what is happening in the sequester, if you consolidated programs--didn't eliminate any, just consolidated the management--you could save one- third of what the sequester is just from the administrative overhead associated with those.

So when you hear discussions about we shouldn't be doing the sequester, that the sequester is going to be painful--and it is; I don't deny that. But it doesn't have to be. All it takes is a small drop of common sense, both in Congress and the executive branch, to work our way through these problems.

My hope is the President will work with us on giving him flexibility in terms of managing this.

Remember, $85 billion really isn't 85. It is only going to be about 44. That is what we are talking about. It is disproportionately heavy on the defense. I have a lot of colleagues on my side who disagree with me on the waste that is in the Pentagon, but I have seen it, I have looked at it, and I have had a lot of people inside the military call and talk to me about the waste that is there. We now have an admiral for every ship we have in the Navy. Nobody else has that anywhere else in the world, and with that comes an average of 200 other employees per admiral.

The question is, Can we do this? Should we do it? And can we do it in a way that is best for the American people? We are going to cut this money one way or the other. It is not because a Republican wants to cut it or because the President wants to cut it or because a Democrat wants to cut it. We are going to cut it because the math in our future is going to force us to cut it. I know people don't think discretionary programs are much of the problem with what we are spending money on, but I would surmise that well over 15 percent of everything we do in discretionary spending--including the Pentagon--is not effective or efficient.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today in strong support of the nomination of Magistrate Judge Robert Bacharach of Edmond, OK, to be the next judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Bacharach is well-qualified for this position and has received widespread support and accolades from across the State of Oklahoma, including members of academia and members of both the Oklahoma and Federal Bar Associations. In fact, last year, the Oklahoma Bar Association passed a resolution praising Judge Bacharach's legal abilities and supporting his confirmation.

This broad array of support is indicative of his exceptional legal background. Judge Bacharach received his B.A., with high honors, from the University of Oklahoma in 1981 and his J.D. from Washington University School of Law in 1985. Judge Bacharach began his legal career as a law clerk for fellow Oklahoman, Chief Judge William J. Holloway, Jr., on the Tenth Circuit; thus, he is already quite familiar with those chambers. Following his two-year clerkship, he joined the outstanding Oklahoma-based law firm Crowe & Dunlevy, becoming a shareholder in 1994. After 12 years of private practice, he was appointed by the judges of his district court as a United States Magistrate Judge for the Western District of Oklahoma where he currently presides. In addition to serving as a magistrate judge, Judge Bacharach also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Law and received a number of outstanding awards and recognition for his years of scholarship and service.

In addition to his clear legal qualifications, even more important to my decision to support Judge Bacharach's nomination are the strong testimonies to his integrity and commitment to service outside of his judicial role. He is currently the Vice President of the Federal Bar Association (FBA) for the Tenth Circuit and formerly served the Oklahoma City Chapter of the FBA as President, Vice President, and a member of the Board of Directors.

Furthermore, Judge Bacharach serves the Oklahoma legal community beyond his professional capacity. One of his primary areas of service to his colleagues is through his involvement with the Oklahoma Bar Association's Lawyers Helping Lawyers Committee, which helps attorneys who are experiencing personal problems such as depression, alcoholism, and drug dependency. He has served on the committee for three years and also joined the Board of Directors of the Lawyers Helping Lawyers Foundation. Judge Bacharach serves Oklahoma outside of the legal profession as the Director and Executive Committee Member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Oklahoma City and on the Board of Trustees of the Temple B'nai Israel.

I believe Judge Bacharach will uphold the highest standards and reflect the best in the American judicial tradition by joining the Tenth Circuit as a distinguished and respected member of the Oklahoma legal community. The Judiciary Committee received many letters of support for Judge Bacharach's nomination, including recommendations from judges, deans and professors from Oklahoma law schools, several bar associations, and attorneys from Judge Bacharach's former law firm, Crowe & Dunlevy.

Equally important to Judge Bacharach's qualifications is his judicial philosophy. I believe his record and his hearing testimony demonstrate that he respects the limited role our founders intended judges and the federal government to play in our constitutional democracy.

Based on all of these factors, I believe Judge Bacharach will be an excellent addition to the Tenth Circuit, and I urge my colleagues to support his nomination.

I offer my congratulations to Judge Bacharach and his family on this momentous occasion of his confirmation and wish him well in his new endeavor.

Judge Bacharach's nomination got caught up in the political shenanigans the majority leader and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee carried out at the end of the last Congress. Never before has a circuit court nominee come to the floor without notification of the very members of the Judiciary Committee who sponsored their nomination in the committee. So it was purely a political trick. And for that I think the Senate owes Judge Bacharach an apology for the delay. I have no doubt he will be confirmed, and I doubt there will be anybody who will vote against him.

That leads me to two other comments I wish to make. I have sat on the Judiciary Committee for four Supreme Court nominees, and so what I am about to say may strike some people as hyperbole, but it is not. The four Supreme Court nominees who appeared while I sat on the Judiciary Committee displayed great qualities, and what I am about to say doesn't diminish their characteristics or qualities at all, but I must say that Judge Bacharach has the two qualities that are at such a high level that we should want each and every judge who sits on our Federal bench to have them.

The first is personal integrity. Now, those words are used a lot in our country, but this man has demonstrated it with his life, with his commitments to other people, his commitment to helping other people, with the way he spends his time, with his commitment to his family and to his faith. You cannot find a blemish on this man in terms of his personal integrity, and very rarely can we say that about anybody. He is actually a stellar individual, exactly the type of individual our Founders had in mind, someone who has the kind of personal life that exemplifies the characteristics and qualities that built this country, a love for the law, and an understanding that the rule of law is the glue that holds our society together.

That leads me to the second quality. I have interviewed a lot of candidates for the Supreme Court and for judgeships and circuit court positions, and I have never met anybody who knows the Constitution, its limitations, and its intent better than Judge Bacharach. I think he quite assuredly impressed every member of the Judiciary Committee with his knowledge, his insight, and his background.

So Judge Bacharach brings together the two qualities that are so important and represent the upper end of all the candidates I have seen in my 9 years in the Senate of those whom we would ask to fulfill some of the most important positions in our country and in our society.

I believe Judge Bacharach is the first judge I will have voted for whom I have no doubt of his absolute fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. So I sleep well at night. I wish we had 100 Judge Bacharachs--100--to put on the bench today. I don't believe he can be influenced by anything other than stare decisis, precedence, and the U.S. Constitution and the statutes. His personal life gives reflection and insight into how he is going to be a judge, how he will carry himself, how he will act in this position of power. When you meet him, what you find is one of the humblest of men with one of the greatest intellects I have ever known in my life.

So I will just say that I fully support his nomination. I congratulate him because I know he is going to be approved, and I say, Mr. President, bring us more Robert Bacharachs.

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

Madam President, this is an amendment that follows GAO recommendations with which the Justice Department agreed in terms of an audit on the duplication within their program. As a matter of fact, I have the data where the Justice Department actually concurred with the GAO on it. The purpose of the amendment is to eliminate the backlog in DNA testing, both in terms of rape kits and CODIS. The Cornyn amendment improved the bill but does not direct the money necessary. It is a small percentage, less than 2 percent over 10 years out of that bill, less than 2 percent of 1 year's spending. We spent $40 million for 10 years on these grants and what we are asking for is .4 of 1 percent to help solve the backlog on all the DNA cases.

Madam President, this is simply an amendment that says if a woman is raped and there is an article of indictment against the rapist, she ought to have a right to know the sexually transmitted diseases that rapist carries.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

The people who oppose it oppose it on the grounds they might not get as much money unless they actually keep a woman from getting raped twice--once by the system we set up and once by their attacker.

If Senators vote against this, what they are saying is they don't have any compassion for the women who don't know the status of the person who raped them. Therefore, they go under treatment; they go through unknown and severe psychological stress, having to be repeatedly tested.

We put this in the bill the last time at 5 percent. All we did this time is raise it to 20 percent to try to reduce this behavior in the States.

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee voted for this last time. So to say what we are doing is not in the best interests of women is wrong. If someone really thinks women ought to get raped twice, vote against this amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I wish to spend some time outlining some amendments I have to the Violence Against Women Act, but I also ask unanimous consent to use oversized charts, and even with the size I have, on the one chart, you can barely see it, in terms of the grant programs.

I would also like to comment on the Trafficking Prevention Reauthorization Act of 2012, which is the Leahy amendment. When we first started working on this issue, it was 2001 and $31.8 million, with one or two Federal agencies involved. With this bill, we are going to create eight different agencies with responsibility for this. That is absolutely crazy, and it duplicates exactly what we have done in every other area of the Federal Government, which I will show here in a moment. It shows what we have done in the Justice Department in terms of grants.

Now, we spend $3.9 billion a year out of the Justice Department on 259 different grant programs, many of which--as a matter of fact, the majority of which overlap one another. We have found--and this is not my data, this is GAO data--that we have multiple entities making a claim for a grant in one area, and then they go over and make a claim for the same thing in another area. Guess what. The Justice Department doesn't know that. They have no idea what is going on with their grant programs. They do not do any followup, they do not put in any metrics, and so therefore the $3.9 billion or the $40 billion we have spent on these programs in the last 10 years has been highly ineffective.

These grants are well intended. I don't doubt that. The amendment of the Senator from Vermont, Mr. Leahy, on the Trafficking Victims Protection Act is very well intended. I am not disputing that. But we find that the vast majority of money in that amendment goes overseas for trafficking prevention and protection, not here in our country where it is coming across Interstate 35 and Interstate 40 through my State, coming from the west coast to east and from south to north.

When we find that the vast majority of money will be spent outside the country, especially in light of our present budgetary situation, we ought to reconsider this amendment. We ought to refine it down to one or two agencies, not eight. We ought to put line responsibility and transparency in it, and we ought to put in metrics to make sure the money we are spending is actually going to be measured so we will know whether we have been effective in spending the American taxpayers' dollars.

So I am opposed to the Leahy amendment because although well intended, it is a very wasteful throwing of the mud up against the board and hoping to hit something. It is not organized, it is not well thought out, and it is certainly not efficient in terms of the way the money will be expended.

Let me spend a moment on these three charts. I am going to have two more when GAO issues its release on April 1 of all the duplication in the Federal Government, but I want you to notice something here: the Department of Justice grants, 253 different programs not just run by the Department of Justice but 9 other agencies besides them, spending $3.9 billion a year. Now, one might say: Well, that is OK.

But let's look at the organization because we have this chart, which the Department of Justice doesn't have. So here they are, layer upon layer of administrative costs for all these programs--very well intended, all of them, but highly inefficient.

Now, what are we doing with this bill? We are going to add more to it. We are not going to add a lot of metrics to see if what we are doing actually works.

The other thing we are doing with this bill is we have an authorization that is far greater than the amount of money we are ever going to spend on it. Now, why would we do that? Is it political? Could it possibly be political, that we are going to authorize way above what we know is ever going to be spent? Yes, it is. We know we are not going to spend what is authorized in this bill.

Authorizations ought to be what we intend to be spent, not how we intend to soothe someone with what we say we are going to spend, yet knowing full well we will never spend the money. It is a very shameful sleight of hand because these are important issues. As a practicing physician, having delivered over 4,000 babies, I have seen violence against women in lots of ways. I have done a lot of counseling, spent a lot of time there. And any dollar we take from the American taxpayer, we ought to make sure it actually does something very positive.

I have several amendments to this bill. I didn't get all the amendments I wanted. One was denied, and I will explain to the American public what it was. It was to eliminate $200 million in expenditures for campaign conventions for the Democrats and Republicans. It passed here with 94 votes, but they wouldn't allow it to be voted on here. It passed the House. So here is a way to take $200 million and let the parties run their own conventions rather than the American taxpayers paying for the parties. But that wasn't allowed.

So we haven't moved forward yet in the Senate, where people can actually offer what they think will be good-government amendments that will save this government money and do what the vast majority of the American people want us to do.

Just look at this chart. And I want to add one other thing. There is only one agency of the Federal Government that, at the end of the year, if it doesn't spend its money, doesn't get to keep it. Guess what department that is. It is the Department of Justice.

We have set them aside. So even though we don't have good controls on the grants, we don't have oversight. We haven't eliminated the duplication which the GAO says is tremendous in terms of its goals. We had an opportunity to do that on this bill. We didn't do it. At the end of the year, whatever they don't spend they get to spend where they want to spend outside of the appropriations process of Congress. It is time we change that. It is time we know where every dollar is going.

Now, I admit this is a dizzying poster, but it equates well the lack of certainty, intelligence, and planning of Congress. Congress created that.

Think about that: 250-plus different grant programs, most of them overlapping and doing the same thing, with

multiple grantees hitting multiple grants. Since we don't oversight them, and the agency doesn't oversight them, and they don't know whether the money has been spent on what it was supposed to be spent, we have no idea if we are accomplishing something good other than appropriating money to go to grants that go to the cities.

The other problem I have with this bill is that there is a federalism concern. One of the reasons we have been running trillion-dollar deficits, one of the reasons we are close to $17 trillion in debt, one of the reasons we have $86 trillion in unfunded liability--and if we used generally accepted accounting principles and measured our debt like every other country, we would be at about 120 percent of our GDP, and we would be in excess of $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. And one of the reasons is because we step all over the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

If we were to take this act and look at it, 98 percent of it is for State violations of laws. Nobody will dispute that. Where in the Constitution does it give us the right to go down to the State level and direct and mandate how States are going to respond to their own tort and civil laws? Whether it is the Presiding Officer's Commonwealth of Virginia or the State of Oklahoma, what gives us that right?

I am for fixing these problems, but there is a bigger problem about to swallow our country, and we continue to blindly follow our hearts rather than putting a measure of common sense with our desire to do well. So I have a couple of amendments.

Amendment No. 15

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 15.

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

Mr. President, one of the things the VAWA legislation fails to do is to address the duplication and overlap within the very grant programs and nongrant programs of VAWA operated by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services. It doesn't address those.

At the beginning of every Congress, I send to each and every Senator information outlining the criteria that I would use--seven others joined me last year--in terms of determining legislation. Last Congress we sent this out, and what I will tell you is that this legislation significantly violates one of the principles that we have to do for us to get out of the hole; that is, to eliminate duplication and consolidate what is in front of us.

So this legislation does do some small consolidation. I will readily and freely admit it hasn't come close to eliminating all the duplication. There are several VAWA grant programs that are so broad that they duplicate one another, providing multiple opportunities, as I said before, to double-dip into Federal programs. They also duplicate significant programs with Health and Human Services. So you can get a grant at Health and Human Services and you can get a grant at the Justice Department. So the whole proposal of this amendment is to force the Department of Justice to make recommendations on what is duplicated, what is effective, and capture those savings to more quickly address the deficits we have in terms of DNA collection and identification.

We have hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence that could significantly change both the cost and the time period in which we address both violent crime and nonviolent crime. According to the GAO, we wasted billions of dollars over the last 10 years in these grant programs. So what this amendment says is we are going to put it to the Justice Department--they know where they are--to come forward, save this money, and let's direct this money to clean up the CODIS system, the DNA backlog, and bring it forward and infuse that money into both technology and catch-up so we are timely.

Why is this important? It is important for a lot of reasons. Sitting in those hundreds of thousands of cases is the very clue to solving hundreds of thousands of cases and others that we don't even know may be connected.

The second reason it is important is there are people sitting in prison today who are innocent, and that data collection and DNA input could clear them of a wrongful conviction.

So what this is asking the Justice Department to do is to identify every program. By the way--and most people don't know--there is only one Federal agency that actually knows every program they have. That is the Department of Education. Go call anybody at the Justice Department and nobody over there can tell you. We know, because we have studied it, but they don't know. They can't even publish all their programs. They don't put it out.

Consolidate unnecessary duplication and apply the savings toward resolving rape cases and DNA data cases and with the remainder that is left over to go to reducing the debt. It is simple. Nobody in America except the Federal Government would run programs like this. Nobody would blindly create more programs rather than make the ones they have work now, except that is what we are doing.

So this is simple, straightforward math. I don't expect it to pass. We have only had one amendment pass in the Senate in the last 2 years trying to eliminate duplication, and therein lies the problem. We are afraid to do what is best because we would rather protect a constituency of one of these small grant programs than fix them all and still solve the general intent of why we put the money out there in the first place. We are conflicted.

So when GAO, at the end of March this year finishes the review of the Federal Government--which we had to mandate by an amendment that I put into law--we are going to see in excess of $200 billion a year in duplicative costs that shouldn't be there.

I want you to think for a minute. If you look at every one of these grant programs, every one has an administrator. Every one has a staff. Every one has grant approval people. Most of them have grant investigators--most don't. Some have fund managers--most don't. So each one of these has a bureaucracy. And when the vast majority is duplicating one another, we are saying we are well intended, but we are spending money on the process, not on the problem. The intent of this amendment is to strike that balance between truly getting to the solution to a problem and at the same time solving another problem, which is the CODIS and the rape backlog.

In the bill--and I am thankful that the Cornyn amendment is there. The grant system previous to the Cornyn amendment said the vast majority of the money had to be spent on why you can't get the DNA data up rather than working on the backlog. What this will do is force us to get caught up. This creates $600 million of savings over a period of time that will then be applied to solving this problem once and for all. But there is great savings to come from that because what it means is we are not going to double-pay for things that we intended to solve.

I get dizzy looking at these charts. I have one for every branch of the Federal Government now. We actually know what is going on. Actually, we know what is not going on because we know what Congress intended, and we also know what isn't happening with the dollars that are coming from that.

Amendment No. 13

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set the pending amendment aside and call up amendment No. 13.

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

This is an amendment that is critical to my home State of Oklahoma and every State that has Native American tribes.

Oklahoma now has the largest number of Native Americans of any State. I believe we are at 36 recognized Federal tribes in Oklahoma. Inside this bill is a direct violation of the Bill of Rights of American citizens who are not tribal members because what we have allowed is for tribal courts to try U.S. citizens in their courts--for very good reasons--in terms of sexual assault, assault, abuse, and other items. The reason we are doing that is because either U.S. attorneys or the U.S. Justice Department has not effectively carried out their charge to represent

the Native American people in terms of prosecuting people who might have performed those acts.

What we have done with this solution is to trample on the Bill of Rights of every American who is not a Native American. I have no doubt--I am 100 percent certain--that this portion of the bill is going to be thrown out by the first Federal judge that hears it.

You cannot take away the rights of U.S. citizens under the Bill of Rights at any time, any place, any way domestically. What this bill does is totally eliminate the Bill of Rights for U.S. citizens in tribal courts. Most would not understand that most tribal courts don't recognize our Bill of Rights. Some do but the vast majority do not.

So are you guaranteed rights as a U.S. citizen? Are those rights enshrined in the Constitution and the statutes of this government and this Republic? Can we, as a Senate, forget about that and pass a law that says all of a sudden we are going to violate those rights because we are going to put people under the jurisdiction of a sovereign nation that does not recognize those rights?

This is simply an amendment to strike that section of the bill. I don't expect it to pass--which, again, tells us part of the disease that is in Washington: We pay lipservice to the Constitution rather than to believe its truths and rely on its guarantees of individual liberty and justice.

Amendment No. 16

Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk. I believe it is amendment No. 16.

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

Mr. President, this amendment is a perfecting amendment from the last Violence Against Women Act, which I coauthored with Senator Biden--then-Senator Biden--and Senator Specter.

When a woman is raped, right now in our country she gets raped two, three, four times through our justice system. Let me explain that to you. We have deadly diseases that are sexually transmitted--HIV, sometimes chlamydia. Now we have untreatable strains of gonorrhea. So a woman is raped and, under most State laws, she doesn't have any right, once an indictment has been placed against a defendant, to have them tested. By not having them tested what we do is we make the woman go through testing again and again and again, especially in light of HIV. So they are the ones who have to be tested because they cannot know that the accused perpetrator of their rape is not carrying HIV, is not carrying gonorrhea, is not carrying syphilis, is not carrying chlamydia, because they cannot be tested. What we do is we put them through that trauma once a month for months because the perpetrator, or at least the accused perpetrator, has the right not to be tested in this country.

We put a provision in the last bill that says you will lose 5 percent of your grant money if you do not institute these changes at a State level so that the woman who has been raped has at least an equal footing to know whether her health, other than her psychological, emotional, physical health, because of what occurred during the act, will continue to be deteriorating. Guess what. The vast majority of the States said we will do what we want and we will not take that additional 5 percent.

All this amendment does is it puts some real teeth in it. If you are going to say that somebody who has been indicted for rape has more of a right to not be tested than the woman who was raped, and she has to continually be tested to know whether she might have an outcome that is adverse for her long-term health, what this amendment says is it is going to be 20 percent.

I do not expect this amendment to pass either, because if we are really against violence against women, what we will do is start putting some of the consequences of that on the men who actually caused the violence. Being tested for HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis is not a hard test. It is what a prudent man would do.

Some people say don't worry about it, just treat them. They obviously are not aware of the side effects of all these medicines that we would use to blast this, the treatment for all these diseases. Not knowing and then sometimes covering up, what most people do not realize is that two or three of these diseases actually will affect the long-term fertility of the woman. But we have decided, at least the States have that are taking this grant money, that the rights of the indicted perpetrator are greater than those of the victim who has been raped.

It should not be. I have cared for those women. I have walked with them emotionally for years afterwards, wondering if the HIV infection was going to show up, never knowing for sure.

Here is the other thing that happens. We get all these plea deals of rapists and here is the plea that they cop: If you give me X lower sentence, I will submit to testing. So all of a sudden the person who perpetrated this ghastly, cowardly crime negotiates a much lighter sentence so that the woman can have some peace of mind and not have a question mark for the next 4 or 5 years. We need to fix that, and 5 percent obviously did not do it. Twenty percent will.

I got up very early this morning to get here today to be able to offer these amendments. I hope my colleagues are able to get in. I know the airplanes are backed up coming into Washington. But thinking about the real purpose, to stop violence against women--if you want to stop it, you have to make it effective. You have to spend every dollar as though it is the last dollar, and you have to measure every dollar. You have to quit having the waste in the Justice Department and the grants that are associated with them. You have to have every grantee know that if they get a grant from the Federal Government under one of these programs, they are going to be checked, they are going to be measured against performance, and if they do not perform they are going to send the money back.

We can do a lot better than we are doing with this bill. These are improving amendments. My hope is, my prayer is, that some of them will pass because they really will have a positive impact on both women and our freedom.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to use oversized charts on the floor today because, basically, the information I have will not fit on a standard size chart and still be readable.

Mr. President, in a very short period of time, we are going to be considering an increase in the debt limit. It is for a specific period of time, but it is, at a minimum, going to be $500 billion. What is in front of our country, especially as we see negative growth in the third quarter, as reported today, and the continued printing of money by the Federal Reserve, is that there is no accountability to rein in either the size, the scope or the spending habits of the Federal Government.

Over the next 2 weeks, I am going to be very succinctly outlining $1.35 trillion worth of spending reductions that I would imagine the vast majority of Americans would agree with me on. I am going to build the case almost every day as I come out here as to why we can't keep doing what we are doing, and I will demonstrate the stupidity in how the Federal Government is running today.

I know I will have no chance to defeat an increase in the debt limit that is coming forward. I don't expect to accomplish that. The votes are here to raise the debt limit and not do anything about our spending. But most Americans realize the Federal Government is twice the size it was 11\1/2\ years ago--twice the size. In just the last 4 years, the average family income has declined over 7\1/2\ percent. So while family income is declining, our deficits are rising. Our debt is now at almost $16.5 trillion and we are projected to spend $1.3 trillion more than we take in this year and we have claims by the President and others that we have already cut something from the Federal Government. The fact is, that is only true using Washington accounting.

As somebody with a degree in accounting and understanding generally accepted accounting principles, what I want America to know is the Federal Government is bigger right now than it was last year at this time. We have not spent $1 less than we were spending last year at this time. As a matter of fact, we have spent about $18 billion more. Is that an improvement? Yes. But the claims we have cut $2.7 trillion from the budget are absolutely bogus. There is no truth in it. There is no reality in it. All anyone has to do is look at the amount of money we are borrowing to recognize that.

I want to lay out in sequential fashion five areas where we can, in fact, make significant changes in the Federal budget and start truly addressing our problems. These changes will have an impact of over $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years. That doesn't solve our problem immediately, but if in fact we do this, what we will have done is to start down a long road of making the hard decisions. The decisions I will outline are not hard. They are the easy ones. But we will be starting down a road to get our country back and to secure the future of the young people sitting right down here and their children

and the expectation that opportunity could be alive and well in America.

There is coming to this country a debt bomb. There will come a time when the world will not loan us additional dollars. When that happens, the consequence of that will be rising interest rates. The Fed will no longer be able to control interest rates, and the interest rate will end up being whatever it takes, whatever the people of the world need in terms of what they require to loan us money. If we go back to historical interest rates, the average over the last 50 years on what we have borrowed--the cost per year for the debt we have today, not after the additional $500 billion, at a minimum, we will increase with this new debt limit--will be an additional $640 billion per year added to the must-pays coming from Congress. Once that starts, if we have made none of the adjustments, none of the changes, none of the choices of eliminating some of our wasteful and profligate spending, the next year it adds another $150 billion on top of that. So then we would be at $700-some billion, and pretty soon we will be in a spiral where the debt bomb explodes. That is the last place we want to go. The reason it is the last place we want to go is because the very wealthy aren't going to be harmed by that. The middle class will be destroyed, and with all the programs we have to support the lower class, we will not even be able to fund those.

It is imperative we no longer just have words. It is time for us to act. I know the administration doesn't agree with that. I know a lot of my colleagues on the other side do agree with it but will not offer up the courage that is going to be required to make the tough choices in this country.

We just increased tax rates in this country $600 billion over the next 10 years.

I voted for that bill. But the problem isn't revenues; the problem is the size and scope of the Federal Government.

I want to spend a little bit of time showing you what the GAO--not Tom Coburn, not my oversight, not my research, but what the GAO has said about where we are in terms of stupidity and duplication. I asked permission for these oversized charts because the detail behind them cannot be seen unless you have it on a chart this size. I will go through these rather quickly so the American people can get a little bit of a flavor of the programs we have.

We have 15 different programs run by 13 different agencies in the Federal Government that cost $30 million to teach financial literacy to the American people. No. 1, I don't think that falls within the enumerated powers. But let's assume it does. Why in the world would we have 15 sets of administrators, 15 sets of overhead, to spend $30 million? It makes no sense whatsoever. Let's assume that is a role for the Federal Government. I disagree that it is. But why not one program? If you take away the overhead, you could spend exactly the same amount of money teaching financial literacy and you wouldn't waste it on overhead. The savings just from this one simple program are $15 million to $20 million a year. The way you get to 1 billion is 1 million at a time, and the way you get to 1 trillion is 1 billion at a time.

Let's take the next program, green buildings. We have 94 separate programs run by 11 different agencies spending $1 billion on green buildings. There is nothing wrong with incentivizing green buildings, but anybody with any common sense has to ask the question, Why does the Federal Government need 94 separate programs to incentivize green buildings? And why do we need to run it through 11 different agencies instead of 1? And why do we need to have 11 sets of overhead, administration, and costs associated with it? It makes no sense at all.

The next one, housing assistance. We have 160 programs. Nobody in the administration--nobody in the country--knows all the programs. I am probably the only one in Congress who does, because nobody else has looked at it. Twenty different agencies spending $170 billion. If we are really interested in housing assistance, why would we have 20 sets of overhead and 20 sets of administration? And what would it cost to accomplish the same thing?

All these numbers come from the Government Accountability Office, by the way. They don't come from me.

The other part of the report is that nobody knows if these programs are working. We have no data to say that with the 160 programs we are actually making a difference on housing assistance through this expenditure of money. So we are not even asking the most basic questions a prudent person would ask--in fact, if it is our role in housing assistance--do we know what we are doing is working? And the GAO says you can't tell. There are no metrics on it. No wonder we have 160 programs. Because the first time somebody sees there is another need out there, rather than reform and oversight the programs we have, we create another one without ever looking at our housing programs.

Department of Justice grants. The Department of Justice is the only agency in the Federal Government where if they don't spend all their money every year, they get to keep it. Most people don't know that. They have 253 different grant programs, and outside of the Department of Justice are 9 other agencies involved in that. Most of these grant programs have no metrics, no measurement on them whatsoever to say whether they are actually accomplishing the purpose Congress created them for in the first place.

So if, in fact, a prudent person would say, We have these grant programs, what are they doing, what are they supposed to do, and how are they measuring up, we don't know, because we don't require the Federal Government to measure the effectiveness of its programs.

If, in fact, it is a legitimate role for the Department of Justice and these 10 other agencies to grant taxpayer dollars to all sorts of State-based criminal defense--prison, police force, investigative--if, in fact, that is a Federal role--which, again, I would go back to the Constitution and the enumerated powers and ask the question, and I think about half of these would fail. But if it is, why would we have this many different grant programs? Why would we have this much overhead? Why would we have absolutely zero measurement on whether they are actually accomplishing their goal?

Where we have been so far, just so we know, we have $176 billion worth of spending that is wastefully spent. It is duplicative, one overlaps the other, and we have no knowledge whatsoever about what we are doing. We know from our heart we are trying to accomplish good, but we have no capability to measure what we are doing. And that is just the first four.

Look at diesel emissions. We all want clean air. Why would we have 14 separate programs on diesel emissions run through 3 different agencies? Why not have three--one for agriculture, one for routine surface transportation, and one for stationary? That is all there is out there. There is transportation, there is agriculture, and there is stationary, and yet we have five times as many grant programs as we have utilization.

I hope America can see how incompetent we are as we allow all these things to continue.

We are going to raise the borrowing against your children. In less than a week we are going to raise the borrowing against your children, and we are not going to do anything to fix these problems. Nothing.

Early learning and childcare. We have 50 different programs, 9 different agencies on which we spend $16 billion.

Employment assistance for disabled individuals. This is job training for disabled people. Fifty different programs run through nine different agencies, and we are going to spend $16 billion. I think that is an appropriate thing for us to be involved in, but why in the world would we have 50 different training programs for the disabled? Nobody can answer that. There won't be a person come to the floor and answer the question of why we have 50.

What we continue to do is treat the symptoms of our disease and not the real disease. We are going to argue we should have training programs for the disabled, but we are going to deny the fact that the training programs for the disabled that we have oftentimes are marginally working. And if we streamline them and focus them, we would get a whole lot more value for our money, and we would also save money just in the overhead associated with it.

Surface transportation programs, 55, and 5 different agencies. We have a transportation bill every year. It is $43

billion. And yet we take that money--which, by the way, isn't being adequately funded. We are stealing from other things to keep the transportation funding alive, and we run it through all this bureaucracy rather than say, We took the money from the States, it is for highways and mass transit, and give it back to them and let them prioritize it themselves. Instead, we consume a good portion of it here. We put all sorts of mandates on what they can and can't do with their own money that we collect from them and send it back to them, and then we run it through five different Federal agencies. So they are jumping through five agencies' hoops just to be able to spend their own money--their own tax money.

Support of entrepreneurs. I can guarantee you this one doesn't fit in the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

So we have 53 times that we have said, We don't care what the Constitution says, we are going to go out and support our entrepreneurs. It is not a role for the Federal Government. We are terrible at it. We don't know what we are doing at it. And yet we have 53 programs run through 4 agencies, $2.6 billion a year, and the vast majority of it is waste and ineffectively spent.

STEM education programs. This is science, technology, engineering, and math. It is an area we need to work on. It is an area we need to incentivize. But 209 different programs, 100 or more of which are in the Defense Department? Two hundred nine programs to incentivize science, technology, engineering, and math? How about a couple of them that really work, that really create the incentives people will really go after that you can really manage and measure whether they are effective--$3.1 billion a year.

This is just the first of what the GAO has so far outlined, at the request of my office, which became a law which forced GAO to have to do it.

Just a little history on this. Three years ago I asked the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Research Services, Tell me every program in the Federal Government. And both of them said, Impossible; we can't do it. The Congressional Research Service said: We can't do it. We do not have the capability to do it.

So I put into statute a law mandating that the Government Accountability Office over a period of 3 years will identify and seek out every Federal program, and notify Congress where they overlap. So that is how we have gotten this information thus far. In April of this year, we will get the last third. There is no doubt in my mind at all that we are wasting at least $200 billion a year through duplication coming from the Federal Government.

Think about that for a minute. If I am right--and I dare anybody to come down here and challenge me on it--that is $2 trillion over the next 10 years. That is 18 percent of our deficit this year.

The question you have to ask is, Where is Congress? Why aren't they doing something about this? We passed one bill out of the Senate in the last 3 years associated with this--it got thrown out in conference-- that saved $5 billion. We could easily save $20 billion to $30 billion with minimal work.

I know it is much greater than that. There will be controversy as you go up. But the fact that we have done nothing addressing these issues tells you that there is a problem in Congress in terms of facing reality.

It also tells you there is a problem in Congress in that the political is much more important than the country; that we dare not offend anybody who is a partaker of any of these programs, especially the people who are employed in the administration in the implementation of these programs--even though some programs have 250 or 209 duplications.

We have met the enemy, and the enemy is the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress.

Let me go to the next list.

Unmanned aircraft programs. There is no question in terms of our warfighting and our intelligence services that our unmanned capability has been a tremendous asset to us. But somebody needs to ask the question, Why do we have 15 different sets of programs run from 5 different agencies costing us $37 billion over 5 years? Where is the explanation for that? Where is the idea that we might concentrate expertise in one or two areas or three areas or four? But to have 15 separate programs means we are wasting money and getting less out of the research and less out of the dollars we invested than if we were to streamline those programs and limit them to targeted objectives. But we refuse to do that.

Domestic food assistance, 18 different programs, 3 agencies; homeless programs, 21 different programs, 7 agencies, $2.9 billion; transportation services for transportation-disadvantaged persons--that is something we ought to be involved in. I don't have any problem with that. But 80 programs, each with their own overhead, each with their own set of rules that communities have to comply with? Why would we not want to say: How do we make this 20 programs, make it more effective, eliminate the overhead and save the difference? We don't have to cut money. What we have to do is save money, and we could have exactly the same result through efficiency and smart planning by eliminating duplication.

In my hometown there are 78 different programs for transportation for these people that they can access, lapping over each other. It is not that we should not be doing it, but what about the saving? Are we in a crunch or not? Are we going to continue to stick our heads in the sand and say we don't have a difficult time in front of us in terms of our financing the basic needs for our Federal Government?

We are less than 8 years away, where Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the debt will consume every penny of tax revenue this country has. That is less than 8 years away, if we make it that long, before we have hyperinflation. Why would we in Congress not start addressing these very real needs?

Job training and employment--47 different programs, $18 billion a year, 9 different agencies. In the House subcommittee, Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, last year, I think, took about 35 of these programs and converted them into 6. She did not look at all of them because she did not have the authority or jurisdiction in her committee. It is the only thing that has been done in the last 3 years that addresses anything the GAO has said. Yet we will not even take it up. Saving billions of dollars a year and improving the job training programs, yet we will not take it up. It is not a priority for the HELP Committee.

Teacher quality--82 different programs. We have 82 programs to improve the quality of teachers. Remember, we have a Department of Education, but nine other agencies have teacher improvement programs. Why would we have agencies outside the Department of Education running teacher improvement programs? Is it because some Congressman or Senator wanted a program named after them? Maybe they saw a need and did not want to put it in with the other ones so we expanded it. So we expanded overhead and we expanded the costs and we decreased the efficiency.

I would also make note that Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural address, addressed the American people when it came to the Federal Government and education. Here is what he said: In order for the Federal Government to be involved in education, you must make an amendment to the United States Constitution.

I don't know a greater authority, other than maybe Madison and Monroe, on the Constitution. But here is one of the authors. In his own inaugural address as President of the United States, he said we have no business being in education. Just so I might enlighten my colleagues and the American people, since the Department of Education was founded, we have spent in excess of $2 trillion of Federal taxpayer money, and there is not one parameter that we can measure that is better than when we started. Not one--we cannot find one parameter that is better than when we started.

So there was wisdom in our Founders. We have great hearts, but we are not very good at some things, and this is one of them that we are not very good at. Yet here we have 82 different programs from 10 different agencies.

Food safety--a legitimate role for the Federal Government. We have done

some work improving food safety in the last few years, but we have multiple agencies. Do you realize if you buy a cheese pizza that the FDA doesn't have any control over that, but if you buy a meat pizza the FDA controls the food quality? But the cheese pizza, that is not FDA. So the Agriculture Department takes care of one pizza and the FDA takes care of another one. Does that make any sense to anybody in America? Yet we do not have one agency totally responsible for food safety in this country. Instead, we have 15 different agencies with 30 different programs, and the cost of food goes up--not because we are markedly improving food safety, but we are markedly increasing the regulations and requirements from 15 different agencies. There are all sorts of hidden costs in this as well.

Military and veterans health service. I want you to think about this for a minute. We have a Pentagon and we have a Veterans' Administration, two agencies. But we have four different agencies involved in veterans and military health care. Why is that? Can anybody explain that? What is the purpose of that? Why do we have three different sets of rules and regulations within the Pentagon for health care: one for the Army, one for the Navy, and one for the Air Force? All of them are different. They are still taking care of the same diseases among the same group of people, but we are a bureaucracy. Rather than one organization running that we have three giant organizations running that. How stupid is that? Is that pride of keeping everything within the Air Force or in the Navy or in the Army?

When we are facing a $1.3 trillion deficit this year--that is what it is going to be at a minimum--why would we not streamline that? Why wouldn't we ask the hard questions? Why wouldn't we do the things aligned with common sense and prudence instead of a political spoils system?

Economic development--4 different agencies, 80 separate programs, tons of waste, tons of duplication, tons of overlap, tons of fraud. When we have 80 programs, or 85 programs, and the bureaucracies cannot manage them, the gamers come in. The Federal Government this year will create over $800 billion worth of grants. I want us to think about that for a minute. Somewhere between one-fourth and one-fifth of our budget will go out of here in terms of grants. There is only one agency that oversees their grants effectively and smartly. The rest of the grants are totally not overseen--effectively. We work at it a little bit.

If we think about it, one-fifth of the Federal budget is run out of Washington in terms of grants that have requirements on them, that have time lines on them, that have specifics on them, and nobody is watching them.

Do you know what happens when you go to look at those? What you find is fraud, mismanagement, some accomplishing exactly what they were supposed to but not in the time, some underbudget, but the money never gets sent back to the Federal Government; some grant money that is sent out and a penny is never spent, and it is lost out there so it is never recaptured. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of grant money sitting out there that have never been used and never been pulled back to the Federal Government. Why is that? That means hundreds of billions of dollars that we are going to borrow because we have moneys that we do not manage effectively.

Let me just do the third one, and I will wind up in a little bit, and I will come back tomorrow and talk about the details of these. Here is the third sheet. I suspect when we get the report, April 1, from the GAO, I will have another two sheets.

When we start adding up this money, we get real money. We get hundreds of billions of dollars that we are wasting. But nobody is working on it.

Reducing reliance on petroleum fuel for the Federal fleet. We have 20 agencies working on that, but we only have 5 programs. So we have 20 sets of bureaucrats and administrations and everything else for 5 programs, and we are spending--it is not a lot of money in terms of Washington money, but fuel efficiency for the Federal fleet? We put in new CAFE standards. We could replace this $50 million and say, you would not buy an automobile that doesn't have X mileage; you will limit trips. We can do lots of management things to eliminate the need for a program like this just through sound management and proper management.

Electronic health records system for veterans and the military. The VA has a pretty good program. We have two different agencies, the VA and the military, the Pentagon. We have 10 separate programs. We are spending all this money at the Pentagon right now on electronic medical records when we have a system already at the VA that they could have adopted. Are we just doing one? No. We are doing different ones for each branch of the service.

It makes you want to throw your hands up and get sick to your stomach when you think about what we are doing today that we should stop doing so we protect the future of this country.

Here is an area that I have looked at closely, preparedness grants. Remember when FEMA was started 10, 11 years ago--maybe 15 years ago-- preparedness grants, we built all this up so we could prepare for catastrophes--right? We have been doing this a number of years, well over a decade, maybe almost two. Why do we continue to need more preparedness grants?

I have not done this yet, but we plan on going back to look at all the money that has gone out for preparedness. But we just passed a Sandy bill, and 64 percent of the money is going to be spent on preparedness and mitigation for the future on 50-year events. Yet we are continuing to spend money every year on preparedness. Is there ever a time at which we get prepared, that we can stop spending money? That is a question the average American would probably ask: Is there a point in time when we have prepared enough? Or can we spend enough money to totally prepare against anything? And, of course, the answer is no. So how much is enough? How much is prudent, given our budget situation today.

Anyhow, I think you can see, just from this limited list of words-- and this is just one section of what I am going to be talking about. Duplication. I am going to be talking about health care. I am going to be talking about the Defense Department. Republicans have a blind eye to the waste in the Defense Department and the mismanagement and the duplication and the swinging revolving door from retired military officers to the very companies that end up getting the contracts that pay their salaries to get another contract to keep going on things that necessarily are not priorities.

Let me just take an example for a moment, if I can. This is the best one. Here is green buildings. Here are all the programs on green buildings. Does any of that make sense? That is why we had to have a chart this big. What we are doing is absolutely asinine as far as duplication and what we are doing through multiple different departments in terms of incentivizing green buildings.

Just think if we had 5 or 10 people in the administration of each one of these programs and what we could save if we ended up just having 5 or 6 programs. Just think what the benefit would be that would inure through the years in terms of the compounded savings for our kids and young people in this country.

This chart depicts green buildings. The Institute of Standards and Technology has three or four or five or six programs. The Department of Health and Human Services has a multitude of programs. The Department of Agriculture has a multitude of programs. The Department of Transportation has multiple programs for green buildings. Why don't we have a green building department in the Federal Government? If we have that, we can just have one and save the overhead and the money. We can see all the Environmental Protection Agency's programs on the chart. This is lunacy. It is craziness.

I am going to stop at that, but I have this comment for my fellow Oklahomans and fellow Americans: The next time you hear from a Member of the congress that we cannot cut spending, come and play this C-SPAN tape back for them. Either they don't want to or they know nothing about management or efficiency or common sense. There is no longer an excuse to say we cannot get marked savings from our Federal Government.

As I go through this over the next couple weeks, I am going to show example after example. It is painful to say the greatest Nation in the world is absolutely incompetent when it comes to managing its bureaucracy, its programs, and its money, but that is a true statement. I am going to show evidence over the next 2 weeks of just how incompetent we are.

I hope to build a case so no Member of Congress can ever tell a constituent again that we cannot cut significant spending by at least $2 trillion just from duplication over the next 10 years.

The work of the government is hard. The work of the Congress is built on compromise, but there is no longer going to be a bogus set of facts out there that says we cannot cut spending. I am going to prove we can cut spending and the onus is going to be on the rest of the Members of the body to say why we cannot.

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

Mr. President, the Sandy supplemental appropriations bill provides $3.5 billion in funding for new construction projects through the Corps of Engineers. Part of that $3 billion is toward reducing future flood risk--not repairing present but reducing future.

I talked to CRS this morning after listening to my colleague from New York. Over the last 25 years, the average participation rate was 35 percent-65 percent. No exceptions for future mitigation risks were made during Katrina. It was not 100 percent. It was not 90 percent.

All this does is restore it back to what we have had traditionally. We know projects that shouldn't get funded won't get funded when we have this kind of ratio.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

It doesn't mean they won't get rebuilt; it means that portion of the increase will be a contribution rate of 35 percent. We are going to do a complete restoration of what was there. The differential is and what we know from history, when this was put in, is it keeps projects that don't benefit from being built. The claim of the Senator from New York that they won't get built is just untrue. Everything is going to be restored, but new mitigation projects should have a cost share so we don't do frivolous mitigation projects.

So I would insist on the yeas and nays on this amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I have no doubt there was significant damage in the past of fisheries both on the west coast, Alaska, and on the east coast. But a large portion of this money in this bill is not for fisheries but for research. This should not be, in fact, in an emergency supplemental bill.

So all this amendment does is say that fisheries reparations inside 50 miles of Sandy qualifies for this money, outside of 50 miles does not. The regular process of going through the appropriations process, making appropriate judgments about priorities is what we need to be doing, just like the point of order that was made on firefighting.

I would suggest we eliminate this portion of it or at least limit it to Sandy and not other areas. With that, I yield back the remainder of my time.

I have no objection.

Mr. President, before we go to the second amendment--I ask unanimous consent--I am looking at my transcription of this amendment. It says 50 miles. So if, in fact, what is at the desk does not say 50 miles, I ask unanimous consent to amend the amendment so it would read 50 miles.

All right. Amendment No. 3371.

Mr. President, amendment No. 3371 is a good government house cleaning for FEMA. FEMA determines disasters based on a declaration process that is based on a per capita income--or per capita damage indicator. It has not been revised to account for the effects of inflation. Because we have not revised it, the smaller States actually get more benefit from FEMA than the larger States.

Oklahoma has had 25 disaster declarations in the last 6 years, more than any other State. So what I am actually proposing will not help my State; it will actually hurt my State. But it is improper for us to continue to use an outmoded number when, in fact, a small State has the same amount of damage as a large State, but the per capita indicator would say it does not meet the requirements.

All I am requesting is that FEMA, over the next 4 years, update this. It does not have any application until 2016. It gives them time to update it. Then, through good government, we have a better reflection of when we declare a disaster and when we do not as far as the per capita indicator would tell us.

I yield back.

I ask unanimous consent to recapture 15 seconds of my time.

Mr. President, this bill is full of authorizations--I mean, literally, full of authorizations. This is something I have studied and looked at. I have been looking at FEMA for 8 years. We should not wait to do this. Let's do it now. It is common sense. It does not harm anybody. It actually makes us better at what we are trying to do with Federal emergency management.

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

I ask for the yeas and nays.