[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 157 (Wednesday, October 11, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S14958]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




[[Page S 14958]]


                   WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT ACT OF 1995

  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I rise this morning to speak in support of 
S. 143, the bill that is on the floor and will be on the floor later 
today, the job training bill.
  Mr. President, I first want to commend Senator Kassebaum for the work 
she has done on this bill, and the others as well. I am not on that 
committee, but I am interested in this bill and what it seeks to do. I 
think it is symptomatic of the changes that need to be made in many of 
the programs, and it seeks to bring together 150, roughly, programs 
that have been designed over the years, each with a certain amount of 
merit, of course, and certainly each now with a constituency, and to 
bring those together and to seek to make them more efficient.
  It seems to me, Mr. President, that one of the exciting things about 
this year in this Congress has been that there has been, for the first 
time in very many years, an opportunity to look at programs, to 
evaluate programs, to examine their purpose and then to see if indeed 
they are carrying out that purpose to see if there are better ways to 
do it and, perhaps as important as anything, to see if there is a way 
to shift those programs with more emphasis on the States and local 
government.
  I come from a small State; I come from Wyoming. When I am in 
Washington, I live in Fairfax County, and there are twice as many 
people in Fairfax County as there are in the State of Wyoming. So we 
have a little different and unique need there for the kinds of 
programs. We still have a need for the programs, whether it be welfare 
or job training, but we need to have it tailored in a way that, I 
suspect, is quite different from that of Pittsburgh or New York City, 
and that is what this program is all about.
  I think too often--and I am concerned about this, Mr. President--as 
we seek to make change--and I think voters want to make change; they 
said they want to make change in November 1994. Yet, of course, there 
are people who legitimately do not want to change and want to stay with 
the status quo. It is much easier to oppose change than it is to bring 
it about. So we find often those who are, for whatever the reason, 
opposed to change, saying, well, that is going to gut the program, that 
is going to do away with the program, and that is going to eliminate 
the help for the people who have been the beneficiaries of the program. 
And that is not true. That is not true in this program, it is not true 
in health care, it is not true in Medicare, and it is not true in 
welfare.
  On the contrary, these programs are designed to bring to those 
beneficiaries a more efficient program to specifically deal with the 
needs where those folks live. It gets us away from that idea that one 
size fits all, away from the idea that Washington knows best. Instead, 
it moves the programs where the decisions can be made by local people 
who respond to local needs. So we have, in this case, lots of money--
$20 billion--going in these 150 programs, and this is an effort to 
bring them together and to block grant many of them to the States so 
that the States can say, in effect, here is where we need that 
education money.
  We do need change, Mr. President. There undoubtedly has been a strong 
feeling that the things that the Government is doing are not 
succeeding. We have more poverty now than we had 40 years ago. So it is 
hard to say that the programs that are designed to alleviate poverty 
have been workable. It is not a matter of not having spent enough 
money, in my judgment, but rather not spending it as efficiently as we 
can. I think there is an adage that we need to adhere to, and that is 
that you simply cannot expect things to continue by doing the same 
thing. You cannot expect different results by doing the same thing, 
which is basically what we have done.
  So, Mr. President, I rise in strong support. I think we have a great 
opportunity to make some changes. This is a testing time. Probably the 
greatest test of representative government, when voters say, look, we 
are not happy with the way things are, we think we need to change them, 
the greatest test is to see whether that Government will indeed be 
responsive to that request for change. I am first to say how difficult 
it is. And in each year it gets increasingly difficult. As we have more 
programs and we have more money and we have more people involved in 
these programs, we have more people involved in bureaucracies, more 
people involved in lobbying, there is a great resistance to change. I 
think we have, for the first time in many years, the greatest 
opportunity to bring about that change.
  We need to reduce bureaucracy. We need to increase the private sector 
involvement. We need, perhaps most of all, to increase the 
accountability, to measure productivity in these programs, and we can 
do this.
  So, Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to move forward with this 
education bill, this training to work, S. 143. I urge that we pass it. 
I urge that we shift many of these funds and responsibilities to local 
government, to State government, so that they can, indeed, be oriented 
to the problems that we seek to fix.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senator from 
Virginia is recognized to speak for up to 20 minutes.

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