[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 33 (Tuesday, March 12, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H2096-H2103]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2000
               CHANGES TO EPA BY THE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 
12, 1995, the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Gutknecht] is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, Winston Churchill, who was one of my 
favorite speakers, said that truth is incontrovertible. Malice may 
deride it. Ignorance may attack it. But in the end, there it is.
  John Adams, who I think was a Member of this body at one time, said 
essentially the same thing, far more simply. He said, facts are 
stubborn things. We can ignore the facts. We can deny the facts. But in 
the end, facts are facts.
  So tonight, for at least a few minutes if not the full hour, and I 
think we are going to be joined by some of my colleagues, we are going 
to talk about some of the facts, not only about the budget and some 
numbers and some facts about what we are really talking about and the 
consequences it brings for the American people, but also talk about 
some of those environmental issues.
  I want to first of all turn it over for a few minutes to the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Mica], who would like to share a little 
information and a few facts about what the President has been saying 
and what the truth of the matter really is.
  Mr. MICA. I would like to thank my colleague for yielding, and also 
spend a few moments tonight talking about what is going on as far as 
the environment, what is being said as far as the environment, what is 
being said as far as the Republican policy and some of the changes 
proposed relating to the environment by the new majority.
  I can tell you, I am a member of the new majority. I am a Republican, 
but I

[[Page H2097]]

consider myself a strong advocate of the environment, of protecting our 
air, our land, or water, and making certain that it is safe for this 
and future generations.
  But I am also concerned that there has been a great deal of 
misinformation spread about what we are trying to do and want is being 
done by our chief environmental enforcement agency, and that is the 
Environmental Protection Agency. Just in the last day or two, President 
Clinton has visited New Jersey and he has made some comments relating 
to the EPA and also the Republican agenda for the environment, and I 
think that it is important that we respond to those.

  He stated in New Jersey that lobbyists for special interests were 
dictating the environmental policies by the new majority. I am here to 
tell my colleagues and the Speaker tonight and the American public that 
that is just not correct, that in fact the agenda that has been 
dictated on making changes to EPA and to regulations that deal with the 
environment has not been dictated by lobbyists or corporate interests, 
but in fact by the mayors, by the Governors, by the legislators, by the 
county commissioners across this great Nation.
  In fact, I have a story dated March 24, 1993 from the New York Times, 
and it says that in January mayors from 114 cities in 49 States opened 
the campaign by sending President Clinton a letter urging the White 
House to focus on how environmental policymaking had in their view gone 
awry. So the genesis of the changes proposed by the new majority are in 
fact by our local government officials. They have seen that the 
regulation and some of the other edicts out of Washington have in fact 
cost the taxpayers, their local taxpayers, enormous amounts of dollars, 
and not gotten very good results for it.
  Let me just cite, if I may, how some of the money is being spent. In 
fact, it really concerns me that the moneys are being spend in 
Washington on administration and on employees in a huge bureaucracy 
that in fact has been built up over the past few years. In Washington, 
DC, for example, out of 18,000 EPA employees, there are a total of 
almost 6,000, nearly 6,000 just within 50 miles of Washington, DC. Part 
of the argument with the changes that we are trying to make is to stop 
the command and control and the bureaucracy and administration from 
Washington.
  What is interesting is EPA in fact is a Republican idea. It was 
founded in 1972 under President Nixon to provide some better 
regulations, some better national standards in cleaning up the air, the 
water and the land. What has happened is, over the years we have 
created a huge bureaucracy, now with 6,000 employees in Washington, and 
that number, I might say, is about the total figure of EPA employees 
that was in the entire Agency about a dozen years ago.
  Since 1972, I might add, almost every State in the Nation has created 
their own department of environmental protection. Each State has 
created an agency which can deal with enforcement, which can deal with 
some of the problems, which can take into consideration some of the 
local issues and factors relating to the land and the water and the air 
in that particular area.

  So we have built a huge bureaucracy centered in Washington that wants 
to keep command and control. Republicans in fact have proposed that we 
dismantle some of that administration, we dismantle some of the 
overhead.
  Not only do we have the administration in Washington to deal with, 
you take, for example, the State of Georgia where 1 of the 10 regional 
offices is located, and that is Atlanta, GA, there are 1,300 EPA 
employees located in that regional office, 1 of, again, 10 highly 
bureaucratized and highly staffed offices that are not out there, 
again, with the cities and the counties and the special districts and 
the States tackling the tough environmental problems.
  So the money and the bureaucracy is in Washington and these regional 
offices, and the real problems are not being tackled out there. Let me 
give you just a statistic. More than 90 percent of the environmental 
enforcement is conducted by the States today, not in fact by Federal 
EPA. However, the majority of environmental funding goes to EPA, if we 
look at the statistics. Furthermore, the EPA has doubled its size 
during the past 20 years, as I have pointed out, now employing these 
18,000 employees and maintaining a budget of $3.6 billion.
  So the question before the Congress and before this new majority is 
not just how much money we spend but how we spend it.
  Let me say that even Carol Browner, who is now the Administrator of 
EPA, admits there is a problem with environmental problems. She said to 
the New York Times on November 29, 1993, let me quote, and she was our 
State administrator in Florida. Let me quote her. Carol Browner said, 
``When I worked at the State level, I was consistently faced with rigid 
rules that made doing something 110 times more difficult and expensive 
than it needed to be.'' It makes no sense to have a program that raises 
costs while doing nothing to reduce environmental threats.
  What Carol Browner said in 1993 is what we are talking about today in 
1996. Even President Clinton proposed a request for a reduction of 400 
full-time employees in environmental enforcement for fiscal year 1996. 
So we have even the President saying we need a reduction in this 
massive bureaucracy in the proposal he made to Congress. We have Carol 
Browner in 1993, fresh from Florida and her role there as the State 
director of our environmental program.

  What has happened, again, is we have threatened these 6,000 
bureaucrats in Washington. They have a role and they view their role as 
pumping out rules and regulations. What would they do if they had some 
reduction in force? No one wants to see, again, any lessening of 
regulations, of protections, of standards. What we are saying is let us 
get the work force where it should be and the dollars where they should 
be, and that is in our States and local governments, and let the 
Federal Government set some national standards and also work on 
international standards.
  One of the first bills I introduced in the last Congress was the 
Global Environmental Cleanup Act, and that dealt with the problem that 
we have and where some of our focus should be. Countries around the 
world are polluting the Earth and destroying the planet, in fact, and 
some of our financing of this Congress and the American people is going 
to promote that destruction of the planet.
  I can tell you, I have been on international business across this 
hemisphere, across the Southern Hemisphere. You can go through Brazil 
and see the destruction of the Amazon. You can go to Guatemala, see the 
destruction, clearcutting of forests on the Mexican border.
  You can go to Mexico and see the raw pollution going into the streams 
and river and land. You can go to China and see the destruction of the 
planet, raw sewage and raw fluid going into the rivers, and no 
consideration of protection of the air or water where the largest 
population of the world is. Then you can go to Europe. I traveled the 
Tatra Mountains, and you can see the destruction from the former Soviet 
bloc of the beautiful forests, and again the raw pollution going into 
the land.
  Some of our taxpayer money is going into international financing of 
projects in these countries without a consideration of environmental 
cleanup. So we have a role for EPA on the international level, we have 
a role on the national level with pollution between our States, and we 
are concerned about that. But we do not need 18,000 full-time 
employees, the bulk of which is in Washington, not to mention thousands 
and thousands of employees who are on a contract basis, ruling and 
dictating from Washington.
  We need to get the money where the problem is and to those that are 
cleaning up the environment. They are State and local officials and our 
State legislatures. That is the emphasis this new majority is 
interested in.
  Then if we look, and the President talked yesterday in New Jersey 
about cleanup and Superfund. Superfund must, in fact, be one of the 
worst government programs ever devised. Its original intent, now, was 
good. It was designed to clean up hazardous waste sites and have 
polluters pay for polluting, and in fact it has not done that. In fact, 
polluters do not pay. We find that and I have evidence of, in fact, 
polluters not paying, and also EPA letting the statutes of limitation 
expire, according to one of the reports from a

[[Page H2098]]

subcommittee on which I served during my first term.

                              {time}  2015

  So polluters get off the hook. They do not pay under the current 
system. The President says this is a successful program.
  Then would you think that in fact we are cleaning up sites that pose 
the most risk to human health and safety and our children's safety? The 
fact is a GAO study in 1994 said no, that is not the truth, that in 
fact we do not clean up sites on the basis of risk to human health and 
safety and welfare, that they are chosen basically on the basis of 
political pressure.
  So we are not cleaning up these sites, we are not cleaning up the 
sites that have the most risk.
  These are just a few of the studies about EPA, the failures of EPA on 
the subcommittee on which I sat for my first 2 years in Congress. This 
first study talks about EPA's pesticide program, and food safety reform 
and the disaster in that agency. This particular report talks about the 
impact on safe drinking water regulation and small systems, drinking 
systems, how the regulations have forced our local governments to the 
point where it is almost cheaper to deliver bottled water than it is to 
comply with some of these regulations. We had testify the mayor of the 
city of Orlando at a field hearing, and she said that EPA requires in 
the treatment of water, and water comes in, to take out certain natural 
occurring substances, one part of the process at the beginning, and 
then put them back at the other end, and she said this makes no sense 
and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to comply with these 
ridiculous regulations.
  So another report that details Superfund and the liability 
provisions, how now under Superfund, and again the President talked 
about the success of Superfund and the need for Superfund, and we 
agreed that there should be a Superfund. But when 80 percent plus of 
the money in Superfund, a program that was supposed to start out at 1.6 
billion and has grown to $75 billion, when 80 percent of the money, in 
fact, goes to attorney fees and studies, there is something wrong with 
what we are doing with Superfund.
  So we do not want to let polluters off the hook. We think that they 
should pay. But you find, in fact, that EPA gives them a free ride 
under current law. They do not enforce the current law; they let the 
statute of limitations expire. They are letting it happen now, that 
polluters not pay, and we think there should be a change there. And 
then also spending all of the money for a cleanup program again on 
attorney fees and studies and ignoring the real risks makes no sense.
  So all this is documented in hours and hours and days and days of 
hearings.
  Then you look at the management problems in contracting activities at 
EPA. The American people would be appalled to see the waste. We held 
one hearing on this particular matter, and they said that this 
particular activity with EPA laboratories is out of control, 
mismanaged, examples of abuse.
  Then we held another hearing on information management systems, so 
the right hand of EPA would know what the left hand of EPA is doing, to 
better communicate. I could not believe the hearing, and it is detailed 
also in these reports, that, in fact, they had spent almost a half a 
billion dollars and had no clue as to what they were going to do as far 
as a real management information system.
  So one problem after another at an agency again that is out of 
control.
  I spoke just a moment ago of the contract employees. I spoke about 
18,000, nearly 18,000 full-time employees that have mushroomed this 
agency to a huge bureaucracy in Washington.
  We found in one of the hearings, and this is interesting to note, 
that of the thousand of contract employees and the hundreds of 
contracts that are let out there that nearly all of the contracts that 
are let by EPA go to former EPA employees. So they have a revolving 
door, an incestuous relationship, that really would not be permitted 
under any other circumstances.
  So almost every program we look at as far as the management of this 
agency is again out of control.
  Here is another report on clean air protection problems at national 
parks and wilderness, and this details how EPA cannot even get its act 
together at it relates to Federal operations.
  So each and every one of these reports, and these are just a few 
tonight that I detail, tell about a story of failure, and that is the 
Federal EPA program.
  And let me say that between the House of Representatives and the 
other body there are many disagreements. You rarely find the two houses 
agree on anything. But there was unanimous consent on both this side 
and the other side, in fact both sides of the aisle, the majority and 
the minority, that we needed to make some changes in the administration 
and management of EPA. The House recommended a cut in their funding of 
somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 percent. The Senate was somewhere 
in the neighborhood of 20 percent. And rarely do you find that 
unanimous agreement that an agency should be cut in that fashion.
  But these are the reasons, in fact, that I presented tonight that 
there is unanimous consent on both sides of the aisle, Republican and 
Democrat, and both of the Houses of Congress, that there needs to be 
change there. So we have presented changes, we have said that we should 
look at the way the money is being spent, not just throw money at 
problems, but in fact try to get a better result so that taxpayer hard-
earned dollars are expended in appropriate fashion, that we clean up 
the environment, that we clean up the real risk areas for our children, 
that in fact the money does not go just to attorney fees and to 
studies, that we work with local governments, with State governments, 
with local authorities, with business and industry, trying to resolve 
some of the environmental problems, that we renew our emphasis on 
international problems, that we look at problems that do, in fact, 
transcend the State and local boundaries, and concentrate on where EPA 
can do a better job.

  So these are some of the issues that we wanted to bring up tonight, 
and then you think you have got it all together, and you think that EPA 
has been criticized by Members of Congress, again from both sides of 
the aisle, and you think that we are trying to get our message across, 
and maybe it has gotten across. You read articles like the article that 
I found last week in EPA Watch, which says that in fact EPA's office of 
enforcement and compliance has circulated a memo of January 19 that 
notes that staff from no fewer than 11 EPA offices are working with PTA 
on a project to protest budget cuts in the department. And I think that 
that is rather sad, that an agency that has been criticized also for 
misusing its resources and not cleaning up the environment, protecting 
the environment, but in lobbying Congress and coming after Members of 
Congress, is now using its limited funds from the office of compliance 
and enforcement in a lobbying campaign that brings in the children and 
the PTA with the misinformation campaign. So I think that is the wrong 
way to spend these limited resources.
  When I found this article, I asked the appropriate chairman of the 
House committees and subcommittees to investigate now their activities. 
Even after being criticized, even after being asked not to conduct this 
type of activity, today you find EPA spending again limited resources, 
taxpayer dollars, on lobbying the Congress and on misleading the 
parents, and teachers, and schoolchildren of our country in their 
campaigns.
  So it is disturbing, and I think that that should be thoroughly 
investigated by the appropriate subcommittees of the House of 
Representatives and the Congress.
  So those are some of the points that I wanted to bring out tonight. 
Again, when the President makes these statements, I think that someone 
should address that in fact the new majority is interested in 
protecting the environment, that we have children, that we care about 
the environment, we care about the future of the environment of this 
great country, we would do nothing to lower the standards. But in fact 
when you see the misuse and abuse of power, and authority, and an 
important charge given by the Congress, you become concerned, every 
American

[[Page H2099]]

must be concerned, and every American should also have the correct 
information, that in fact what the President is saying is political 
rhetoric, in fact political rhetoric. It is not based on fact or the 
action of this agency. What Carol Browner is trying to do with the 
resources of that agency are, in fact, not a proper expenditure of 
those resources. If she would concentrate in remembering what she said, 
and I quoted it to you 3 years ago about how she is forced to spend 110 
times the energies on things that do not make sense, then we could all 
be better off.
  So this is a debate about command and control in Washington. It is a 
debate of how our limited resources, your taxpayer dollars, the 
American taxpayer dollars, are expended, and how we really go about 
facing the problems of pollution and cleanup across, again, our great 
lands.
  So tonight I wanted to bring some of those facts to the House, and to 
my colleagues, and to the Speaker's attention. We can do a better job, 
we must do a better job, we do not need a huge bureaucracy to do it, 
and that is a part of what we have proposed here, and again I think I 
share the concern of everyone on this side of the aisle that the 
environment, clean air, clean land, clean water are our priorities and 
part of our agenda, and we can do a better job, again with limited 
resources.
  I thank the gentleman for yielding and wanted to make those points 
tonight.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. I would like to thank the gentleman from Florida 
because I think he makes some very good points.
  My grandma always said if you always do what you have always done, 
you will always get what you have always got, and unfortunately one 
team is saying that the real way to clean up the environment is to 
spend even more money on the failed programs we have had in the past, 
and I want to thank the gentleman from Florida for bringing those 
studies. Those are not Republican studies, those are not Democrat 
studies. Those are independent studies done by the General Accounting 
Office which, I think, demonstrate that what we have done in the past 
has not really helped solve the problem.
  And I served with you on the Committee on Government Reform. I also 
serve on a separate subcommittee that looks at regulatory reform, the 
McIntosh subcommittee, and we have had some of those field hearings as 
well. And I remember just a few weeks ago we had some hearings in Iowa, 
and the mayor of Manson, IA, came to that meeting, Mr. Speaker, and 
talked about what they had had to do. The EPA came in, and they have 
had no problems with their water for 75 years. The EPA came in and 
tested, and they found 1 milligram more than the allowable EPA standard 
of one chemical, and they forced this relatively small town in Iowa to 
install over half a million dollars' worth of reverse osmosis filtering 
equipment to remove that 1 milligram.
  Now that dangerous chemical that they were required to remove at 
substantial expense was fluoride. Now fluoride is a chemical, as most 
of us know, that many cities, in fact virtually every city in the 
United States, now puts into the water. They were required to take out 
that 1 milligram.
  And frankly, we also at one of our other field hearings, we had a 
gentleman who helped develop the spectrometer. Now I am not a 
scientist, but a spectrometer is that thing that allows us to measure 
parts per million and parts per billion.

                              {time}  2030

  He said, ``Sometimes I rue the day that we developed that technology, 
because just because we can now measure parts per billion does not 
necessarily mean they are statistically significant, or that they are 
dangerous.''
  Again, we see that $50 solutions imposed on $25 or $5 problems.
  Mr. MICA. If the gentleman will yield, Mr. Speaker, I am glad the 
gentleman mentioned one case. I would like to mention another.
  In Hastings, NE, that community began a review of its environmental 
costs and concluded that the single biggest drain on the Treasury was 
the $65 million it would take to build a treatment plant to meet a 
proposed EPA rule for removing radon from the city's water. Now, radon 
is a radioactive gas that occurs naturally.
  Before the EPA proposal, almost no public health specialist had 
considered radon in drinking water to be any sort of a threat. 
Independent radiation health experts said that in virtually every area 
of the United States, the amount of radon that evaporates from water is 
only one-thirtieth to one-one hundredth of what is really naturally in 
the air. So here is another example of a small community that had 
imposed on it a burden from EPA that made no sense. This is what we are 
talking about. This is not some fancy lobbyist coming in here asking 
for changes. These are our cities, our counties, our States, our 
legislatures asking us to look at what we are doing.
  Again, even Carol Browner said before she got into the empire and 
bureaucracy-building business in Washington that what the Federal 
Government was doing to her as a State director of the EPA in Florida 
made no sense. That is what this argument is about. The rest is just 
not the truth.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman. President 
Kennedy once observed, ``We all inhabit this same small planet. We all 
breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future.'' One of 
the things that is most frustrating to me as a parent and one who 
cherishes my children's future and one who enjoys the out-of-doors, I 
enjoy the environment, I like to hunt and fish, one of the things that 
disturbs me so much is when we start talking about finally using cost-
benefit analysis and good science to determine whether or not these 
solutions that are being imposed from Washington really makes good 
economic sense. When we start talking about real reform, the other side 
seems to always question our motives; that we somehow want the world to 
live with dirty water, that we want to put raw sewage into Americans' 
drinking water.
  Nothing could be further from the truth. But they measure success by 
how many dollars go into the programs. We are trying to measure success 
by what we really, ultimately get out of it.
  I want to give one more example. We have the director of the 
waterworks of the city of Des Moines, IA, who came and testified at one 
of the field hearings. He said, ``The EPA requires us to test for 53 
different chemicals and organisms in the water. I have worked for the 
waterworks here in Des Moines for over 20 years, and nobody knows more 
about the water that goes in and out of these pipes than I do.''
  As a matter of fact, he said, as far as he could tell, only about 16 
of those chemicals or microbes could ever be found in the water 
surrounding Des Moines, IA, and yet they are required to spend over 
half a million dollars a year in testing for chemicals and testing for 
microorganisms which will never be found in the water around Des 
Moines. He said it is just nuts.

  He said, ``The other thing that is important is if somebody should 
get sick from drinking the water in Des Moines, IA, they are not going 
to call the bureaucracy out in Washington; they are going to come to 
me, because ultimately I am responsible for the quality to the water in 
this city.'' Really, that is also what we are talking about. We are 
talking about more responsibility down at the area where the people 
actually can have that responsibility, can exercise responsibility, and 
ultimately get the job done.
  Mr. Speaker, having a large bureaucracy, I think that the gentleman 
mentioned 6,000 people here in Washington----
  Mr. MICA. Just in Washington.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. It does very little to ultimately guarantee we have 
clean water. As a matter of fact, one of my first trips to Washington a 
few years ago, and I had been to Washington maybe one or two times 
before that, maybe you remember this, there was a scare that came 
through in the water system here in Washington, DC. They thought it was 
somehow infected with Cryptosporidium. This is just blocks away from 
the EPA offices. They have their own water system. But the EPA did not 
take responsibility for that. Ultimately, the city of Washington, DC. 
took responsibility.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am glad the gentleman mentioned 
Cryptosporidium and contaminated water supplies. I sat on the 
subcommittee, of course, that oversaw some of

[[Page H2100]]

these issues in the 103d Congress. One of the things we have heard 
folks talk about here on the floor was Milwaukee and how their water 
supply became contaminated. We questioned, in fact, some of the people 
who were involved in the problem. I think there were some deaths there, 
and many people were sick.
  In fact, it turned out, and the gentleman spoke about the 53 or 54 
water contaminants that are mandated by Congress and the EPA for each 
area to look at. And the folks from Milwaukee told us in fact that they 
were busy checking on some of these mandated contaminants that actually 
had no opportunity to occur in that area, and had to use their 
resources on these edicts that were sent out from Washington, when in 
fact Cryptosporidium, which is caused by deer or animal feces, I think, 
is the root of it, was ignored by the community.
  So we are requiring, with these edicts and mandates from Washington, 
them to spend their limited resources not looking at where the real 
risks are, and that is part of what we are trying to change.
  I had another example of an area, and it is good to cite these, 
engineers in Columbus, OH, were Attempting--the city was attempting to 
build a parking lot behind a city garage. They discovered traces of 
chemical in the dirt. Federal hazardous waste required a $2 million 
cleanup. This is over a parking lot.
  The city was required to dig up 2.4 million pounds of dirt containing 
no more than a few pounds of toxic chemical from a patch of ground no 
larger than a baseball diamond. They shipped that dirt 1,500 miles to 
the south of Texas to be burned in an incinerator. They had to install 
detection equipment to monitor the air for up to 25 years for traces of 
any contaminants that might be remaining. All this is to build a 
parking lot.
  These are the examples of an agency and regulation out of control. 
The cost is being passed to the cities, the counties, the special 
districts, the States who have asked us to make these changes. These 
are the interests we are talking about.

  This kind of regulation accounts for the largest percentage of 
increase over the last 10 years in local taxes. All of these 
regulations are passed on to cities and counties for compliance, and 
then in fact we make them spend this money, whether it is for water 
treatment, whether it is for building this garage in some expensive, 
not cost-effective fashion, and it results in higher taxes for the 
local property owner. So this is another example of an agency and 
regulation out of control.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. We do cherish our children's future, and we all 
breathe the same air and we all want a clean environment, but we want 
results. We do not want 70 percent of the Superfund cleanup money being 
spent on lawyers and consultants, we want results. That is what this 
Congress is really all about.
  I think particularly those of us in the freshman class came here to 
change the way Washington does business. We want to talk a little bit 
tonight, too, about the budget. We are being joined by the gentleman 
from South Carolina, Mr. Lindsey Graham, and perhaps the gentleman from 
Connecticut, Mr. Chris Shays, is going to join us as well. I am not 
sure.
  We want to talk a little about some of the budget numbers, where we 
have come from, what it is going to take, the kind of discipline. 
Again, I restate, if you always do what you have always done, you will 
always get what you have always got. Unfortunately, where we are today 
is at least some of the people in this Capital City want to continue to 
do what we have always done. That is, ``Well, we will continue to spend 
normally; but manana, or next year, or 5 years down the road, then we 
are going to start to really get serious.''
  As somebody said the other day, it is a little like saying you are 
going to lose 20 pounds by the end of the month, but you are going to 
gain 5 pounds during the first 2 weeks, and you really will not get 
started on it until the last 3 days. That is sort of the way Washington 
sort of looks at balancing the budget. We have said that is not 
acceptable.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend, the gentleman from South 
Carolina [Mr. Graham].
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. Speaker, along those lines, President Clinton had a 
good quote. A good definition of insanity was doing everything the same 
and expecting different results. That would be crazy. If you do 
everything the same, it will probably turn out the same.
  The budget debate is often talked about in my district, ``Why can you 
not come to an agreement on the budget? What is wrong with all you guys 
and ladies up there?''
  I ask this to the audience that comes to my town meetings: ``Have you 
ever had a disagreement in your family about how to spend and how much 
to spend?'' And everybody laughs and everybody raises their hands. It 
is probably not uncommon for American families to have arguments at 
times over how to construct the family budget and how much to spend and 
where to spend it.
  That is exactly what is going on in this Congress right now. We are 
having an overdue, long overdue debate about how much money to spend at 
the national level and where should it be spent. Let us kind of give 
people at home an update of where we are right now in the process.
  Here we are in March 1996. We have had a couple of budgets vetoed. 
One budget that would have balanced in the year 2002 was offered by the 
Republicans that spent $12 trillion, $12.004 trillion, to run 
the Federal Government over the next 7 years. When you compare that $12 
trillion expenditure to the last 7 years, it was a 26-percent increase 
in Federal spending. This harsh budget that you hear about that the 
Republicans have offered increased Federal spending 26 percent, it 
increased Medicare spending 63 percent, it increased Medicaid, welfare, 
by over 50 percent, it increased spending on student loans by 50 
percent.

  Instead of being accused of being harsh, I ought to be apologizing to 
people for spending that much money to run the Federal Government over 
the next 7 years. Again, it is a 26-percent increase for the next 7 
years compared to the last 7 years. Most people are not going to get 
that much increase in pay.
  So the first thing you have to come to grips with is, is $12 trillion 
enough. I guarantee you, it is enough for Lindsey Graham. If you spend 
63 percent more on Medicare over the next 67 years than you did in the 
last 7 years and that is not enough, there is something wrong with 
Medicare; and there are two things wrong with Medicare. It is very 
inefficient, and it is going broke.
  Our budget addresses the Medicare problem. It addresses the 
entitlement problem, because when we look at the budget and we look at 
the national debt, which is $5 trillion, under the Republican budget, 
it goes up to $6 trillion. The budget we came up with is not one bit 
harsh. As a matter of fact, we should apologize for taking 7 years. The 
freshmen put a budgets together that balanced in 5 years. You can do it 
in 5 years and not hurt anyone if you just have a little discipline, 
you work together, and you work smart.
  But one thing you have to understand about $1 trillion, most people 
do not know what it is. I certainly still cannot imagine $1 trillion. 
But if you spent $1 million a day, do you know how long it would take 
you to spend $1 trillion. Two thousand seven hundred years. It you 
started at the time of Christ spending $1 million a day, you still 
would not have spent the first trillion.
  We have appropriated $12 trillion, not $1 trillion. To get $1 
trillion in taxes from the American public is the equivalent of $3,814 
from every man, woman and child in America. The truth is, every man, 
woman and child in America is not paying taxes. Those of us that are 
paying a lot. So $12 trillion is enough. You need to say no somewhere, 
and $12 trillion is where I am saying no.
  But when you look at the budget and figure out why you are $5 
trillion in debt, one thing jumps out at you, I believe: 50 percent of 
the Federal budget is entitlement spending, 16 percent of the budget is 
interest payment. The interest payment on the national debt this year 
will be over $400 billion. We will pay more in interest this year than 
the entire Defense Department budget. That is a fact that astonishes 
me, that we have to really do something about this debt situation. 
Fifty percent of the budget is on auto-pilot.

[[Page H2101]]

  Entitlement means the following: There is a computer somewhere in 
this town that takes Medicare and Medicaid and welfare spending, looks 
at the growth of these programs, builds into the computer their growth 
rate, and in Medicaid it has been 19 percent growth rate since 1990, 
adds inflation to the growth rate, anticipates the number of people who 
are going to be on the program, sends us a bill in Congress, and we 
cannot say no. No matter how out of control Medicare is, no matter how 
inefficient Medicaid is, no matter how unwise welfare is, we cannot say 
no to the bill. And when the bill comes to Congress, 50 percent of the 
budget is on autopilot and we cannot say no. We do not have enough cash 
on hand to pay that bill, and we have to go borrow money. That is why 
we are $5 trillion in debt.
  We are going to talk about the President's budget, but let me tell 
you the difference between the President's budget. He is over four in 
balancing the budget, and on the fifth try he got to a balanced budget 
in the year 2002, but here is what he did not do. That 50 percent of 
the Federal budget that is on autopilot that led us to a $5 trillion 
national debt, Medicare alone went up 2,200 percent since 1980. All the 
President has done is for a 7-year period he has slowed the growth of 
spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, but he has not changed the 
reason we got in debt.
  In other words, he spends less on welfare, but he does not change the 
reason people stay on it a decade. He has spent less on Medicare, but 
he has not changed the reason that the program has grown 2,200 percent. 
He has spent less on Medicaid, but he does not change the reason it is 
growing at 19 percent. He has suppressed the growth, but he has not 
changed the reason we got in debt.
  I will not vote for a budget that does not address the reason we got 
in $5 trillion worth of debt. If that is harsh, mean, cruel, so be it. 
I think it is wise. I think it is smart. I think it is long overdue.
  Mr. GUTKNECKT. I thank the gentleman, Mr. Speaker. I want to also 
restate a couple of important points. One that I think gets lost in all 
this debate that the gentleman has made that I did not completely 
understand, and I dare say most Americans do not understand, is that 
half of the Federal budget right now is effectively on autopilot. These 
things we call entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, 
welfare, those are on autopilot, and Congress really has very little 
control over it. That is one of the reasons it is so difficult.
  The other point, if you add in the 16 percent we are paying in 
interest, which really is an entitlement, you are really talking about 
two-thirds of the Federal budget which is essentially an entitlement 
program.

                              {time}  2045

  We are trying to balance the budget here in the Congress and really 
only have direct control over that one-third of the budget.
  I want to point out something else that has been lost in all this 
debate. This is in the Constitution of the United States. A little over 
2 months ago we were sworn in, and we were sworn to uphold the 
Constitution of the United States.
  It is pretty clear, reading article 1, section 8 of this 
Constitution, that the power of the purse is vested with the Congress. 
It really is ultimately the responsibility of the Congress to balance 
the books of this Government.
  Something happened in 1974, that the Congress began to turn over the 
power of these entitlements, in other words, divorce them from the 
congressional oversight that I think they should have. That is one of 
the other issues I think we ultimately have to deal with if we are 
going to balance the budget.
  I want to welcome to our little discussion tonight the gentleman from 
Connecticut, Chris Shays, author of the Shays Act--I always try to work 
that in for the gentleman--one of the really powerful speakers on 
behalf of a balanced budget, who serves on the Budget Committee. I 
yield to the gentleman from Connecticut.
  Mr. SHAYS. I thank the gentleman.
  I remember the first day when we started this new Congress, and the 
gentleman basically introduced the Congressional Accountability Act, 
getting Congress under all the laws that we impose on the rest of the 
country, to the Congress. This was his first act on his first day as a 
freshman. The gentleman and his colleagues, other Members who had just 
joined us, did such a wonderful job of introducing that bill, the rule 
and so on, and getting that bill passed. I think we Republicans and 
Democrats alike can take great satisfaction that we now are looking to 
be under all the laws we impose on the rest of the country, something 
that we had not been for the last 30 years.
  I have been wrestling with really what is concerning me most. I 
cannot really speak to what is in the President's budget or what is 
not. All I know is that when I was elected in 1987, the gentlemen all 
triggered that major point, that I voted on one-third of the budget. 
Gramm-Rudman, which dealt with what came out of the Appropriations 
Committee, the 13 budgets out of the Appropriations Committee, the 
defense budget which was equal to the other 12 appropriations bills, 
was what I voted on.
  Yet we tried to control the growth of spending by basically squeezing 
the annual votes on the appropriations bill. While we were doing that, 
we had Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, agricultural subsidies, and a 
whole host of what we call entitlements. You fit the title, you get the 
money. We do not vote on them, they are not sunsetted, they were 
growing at 10, 11, 12 percent. In fact Medicaid a few years grew at 
about 20 percent a year. They double every 5 to 6 years. Now they are 
50 percent of the budget, and if we do not do anything by 2002, they 
will be about 65 percent of the budget. We really need to get a handle 
on it.
  The thing that concerns me I think more than anything, and I do not 
think that history will be kind to Congress over the last few years or 
the President over the last few years. I am candidly bringing in 
Republican Presidents as well. Republicans did not want to control the 
growth of defense and Democrats did not want to control the growth of 
entitlements, and they both agreed to just let things happen and ignore 
that we were creating these large deficits.
  But what I am most afraid of is, in the last 12 years since 1974, 
since the end of the Vietnam War, we have had our national debt grow 
from about $430 billion to $4,900 billion, a tenfold increase.
  So what do I think history is going to say about Congress and the 
White House? I think they are going to say there was a time when they 
basically decided to let their children and their children's children 
pay for the bill.
  Mr. Rabin, the former Prime Minister of Israel, pointed out on more 
than one occasion that the job of an elected official, they are elected 
by the adults but their job is to represent the children. That is 
really what this is all about: How do we save this country for future 
generations? How do we leave it better for future generations?
  What we attempted to do was get a handle, slow the growth of 
Medicare, slow the growth of Medicaid, allow those programs to grow and 
to meet all the needs that they have to meet. But if I could just 
conclude, I am constantly hearing in this place that we are cutting, 
and we are cutting some programs but not the ones that are identified. 
We are consolidating certain departments and agencies. We are 
eliminating some programs and discretionary spending, but the 
earned income tax credit, a program to help the working poor, that is 
growing from $19 billion to $25 billion. The school lunch program, 
which we were told we were cutting, is growing from $5.2 billion to 
$6.8 billion.

  The student loan program, that is the one that really gets me, it is 
growing from $24 billion to $36 billion, a 50 percent increase. Hardly 
a cut. Maybe in this place a cut, but anywhere else around the world it 
is known as a 50 percent increase.
  Just to end, Medicaid growing from $89 billion to $127 billion in the 
seventh year of our program; Medicare, $178 billion to $289 billion. 
Only in Washington when you spend so much more do people call it a cut.
  We are spending 60 percent more total amount on Medicare. Per 
beneficiary 49 percent more, from $4,800 to $7,100.
  I just hope that we keep the course, I hope we do not let up, I hope 
we try

[[Page H2102]]

to get a handle on this budget for the future generations that 
ultimately would have to pay the bill if we do not.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. I thank the gentleman. I started this special order 
tonight quoting Winston Churchill and John Adams' famous quotation, 
``Facts are stubborn things.'' I think that we have to continue to 
share with the American people those facts, because I have found, and 
we have had an awful lot of town meetings back in my district, when 
people are confronted with the truth about what is really in this 
budget, I think overwhelmingly what they are saying is, ``My goodness, 
you're being far too timid.''
  In fact, in the Medicare numbers alone, when you tell people we are 
going from $161 billion to $244 billion, as a matter of fact, in one of 
my town meetings I had some school children, and I went through that 
fairly slowly with them. I said, ``Now, if you go from $161 billion to 
$244 billion, is that a cut or is that an increase?'' They all looked 
kind of funny and said, ``Well, that's an increase.'' And I said, 
``You're right, but sometimes in Washington that's called a cut.''
  Then I go through the numbers again with some of the seniors and I 
say that we are going from $4,800 average per recipient, because there 
are going to be more senior citizens in 7 years, we know that, but from 
$4,800 to $7,100. That is not a cut. That is a big increase.
  I think again when you are talking to people who have common sense, 
whether it is in South Carolina or Connecticut or Minnesota or Florida, 
anywhere around the country, people recognize that these are 
significant increases, and if anything we are probably being far too 
timid in our budget changes.
  I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the gentleman very much. I have got to let the 
gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Shays] come in on us in a minute.
  We are talking about how much money we are spending over the next 7 
years on Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare. But let us look at the reason 
why we have spent so much money in the past. Why is Medicare growing at 
4 times the private sector?
  We have increased spending over I think the next 7 years by 63 
percent. A lot of money is going to be spent on senior citizen health 
care at the Federal level. But if you want to get the budget balanced 
and you want to keep it balanced, you better start now and you better 
start with entitlement reform. Senator Kerrey, a Democrat, said in his 
commission report that if nothing changes in the next 17 years, the 
entire Federal revenue stream, all the money coming to Washington, will 
be consumed by entitlement spending and interest payment on the debt. 
That there will be no money for the Department of Defense. That is how 
quickly the interest element and entitlement spending is taking over 
the revenue stream.

  Mr. SHAYS. There will be no money for any department, and any grant 
and any program for those departments according to Senator Kerrey.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Right. The good news may be that Congress will not get 
paid, too. They may like that part of it, but they will not like the 
other parts, the Government they have come to rely on in the 
discretionary side of the budget.
  But let us talk a minute about what we have done. We have spent a lot 
of money in additional spending but we have done the most responsible 
thing you could do, if you have a chance to participate in this great 
democracy at this level, and that is change the reason we got in debt.
  Let us talk a minute about not just how much we spend on Medicare but 
the improvements we have made to make sure that, one, it does not go 
broke, and two, that we will have a Medicare system for our generation.
  What we have tried to do is we have looked at the private sector, 
which is a new and novel idea up here, instead of looking to another 
bureaucracy and to another agency and building more buildings in 
Washington, we have looked outside the institution itself, outside the 
Beltway, we have looked in the heartland of America and we have found 
out that there are some great ideas in health care. Let us create some 
of those ideas and give options to senior citizens, something new and 
novel in Washington also for people who rely on the Government to have 
a menu of things to choose from.
  As a Congressman I think we have 3 or 4 health care plans to choose 
from.
  Mr. SHAYS. We actually have 10 programs we can choose and then 
variations within those programs, so we have lots of choice and we want 
seniors to have that same choice.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Let me give one option that would be put on the market if 
our bill passed. It is called a medical savings account and I am going 
to apply it to two people I know and love,my aunt and uncle. When my 
parents died, I was about 21, I had a sister who was 13, we were taken 
in by an aunt and uncle whom I am very close to. They worked in the 
textile industry all their lives in South Carolina. I doubt if they 
ever made over $8 an hour but they had a good job and proud to have the 
job. They are retired now, been retired about 3 years. They live off 
Social Security, they have Medicare as their primary health care, and 
they have a paper route. They are healthy seniors and God has been good 
to them. But under the current Medicare system, they have about $46.10 
taken out of their Social Security check. That is their part B premium. 
That money is taken out of their check and it is taken out of Ross 
Perot's check if he happens to be Medicare eligible and it goes into a 
fund and it pays doctor bills for senior citizens, 30 percent of the 
doctor bills. All doctor bills paid under Medicare the funding comes 
from two sources, a senior citizen premium, like my aunt and uncle pay 
out of their Social Security check, and 70 percent of it comes out of 
the Treasury. Medicare has been growing at 12 and 13 percent a year. A 
huge bill is being sent to the taxpayer because of Medicare growth. 
They have $110 a month they pay for a Medicare supplement policy 
because under Medicare it does not pay everything and seniors know this 
very well. You have got deductibles, copayments. They are paying out of 
their pocket over $300 a month for the Medicare system that we have 
today. A medical savings account option, if available, would have saved 
my aunt and uncle $10,000 in the last 3 years and would save the 
government a great deal of money.

  Here is how it would work. The average senior citizen gets about 
$5,000 a year from the Federal Government on Medicare. We are going to 
take a portion of that money, the vast portion of that money, and put 
it into a medical savings account and do something really extreme, we 
are going to let my aunt and uncle manage their own health care and 
take care of the money. They can take out of that account about $4,000 
and buy a catastrophic health insurance plan that will be sanctioned by 
the Federal Government, that will take care of their health needs as 
Medicare would for any illness over $10,000. They will have a 
catastrophic health insurance plan bought by the Federal Government, 
not money out of their pocket. There will be $1,000 left over, and the 
game goes as follows. From zero to $10,000 is the game that they are 
going to be willing to play. In my aunt and uncle's case, in the last 3 
years, they have never spent over $450 to go to the doctor or to the 
hospital. They have been lucky. They have taken care of themselves. 
Under the medical savings account plan, $1,000 would be left over in 
this account. They could use it to manage their health care needs. That 
$1,000 would have taken care of every medical bill they have had. They 
would have had no out-of-pocket expenses, they would have saved over 
$10,000 over the last 3 years and the Federal Government would have 
saved money. Why should that option not be available and if they did 
get sick, if they did have a catastrophic illness, they would have been 
able to opt into another plan.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. We are doing some remarkable things. What we are 
talking about with Medicare--let me jump in, and I want to yield to the 
gentleman from Florida [Mr. Mica]--we are talking about using market 
forces, personal responsibility, and competition to help control costs. 
It works everywhere except in Federal programs. That is what we want to 
experiment with.
  I yield to the gentleman from Florida for a quick minute, as well.
  Mr. MICA. I wanted to comment, and I thank the gentleman for 
yielding. I come from the State of Florida. We

[[Page H2103]]

have a very large elderly population that rely on Medicare and some who 
rely on Medicaid. In fact, if you just spend a minute and look at what 
has been going on in a State like Florida, for example, the Miami 
Herald did a story last year and identified in Medicare $1 billion 
worth of waste, fraud, and abuse.
  I sat on one of the other subcommittees in what was Government 
Operations that oversaw Medicaid. We identified about $1 billion in 
Medicaid in Florida in fraud and abuse. One of the cornerstones of the 
Republican plan is to create some penalties, to root out waste, fraud, 
and abuse.
  That is the main, major change we have proposed. People can still 
stay on Medicare. We do offer choices. But, again, we must address the 
problem of waste, fraud, and abuse.
  Let me talk for a second, too, about nursing homes. The proposals 
that the Republicans have advocated, we provide some change there, also 
addressing fraud.
  But the other major change we have that affects the folks in Florida 
is, we are not advocating lessening of regulations or wheeling people 
out on the street from nursing homes. What we have said is we should 
give people some more compassionate, some more cost-effective 
alternative. Right now people have to divest themselves of any savings. 
They must expend all their savings and basically go on this program for 
the poor or transfer their savings to their relatives.

                              {time}  2100

  Once they have done that, they lie, cheat and steal in some cases to 
get on the programs or divest themselves of life savings. And then what 
do we do? We give them one choice. You go in a nursing home.
  What we said is why not allow the elderly to live with their 
families, pay for some attendant care. It could cost one-third, it 
could cost 20 percent, and they could live with their families. Why 
not, in fact, give some alternatives they they could stay in their own 
home and not be forced into a nursing home, and we live longer and can 
live longer by ourselves with a little bit of help from our friends 
rather than this one forced option that we are forcing. So we can and 
we should make a difference for the elderly. And these are the choices 
we hold out for them.
  I thank the gentleman.
  Mr. SHAYS. If the gentleman would yield, just to close the loop on 
both programs, the bottom line to our Medicare plan is we do not 
increase copayments, we do not increase deductibles, we allow the 
premium to stay at 31.5 percent, we provide choice.
  It is true, we ask the wealthiest of wealthy to pay a higher part for 
the premium for part B. I think sometimes Republicans do not like 
people to know we are asking the wealthy to pay more, and Democrats do 
not want people to know Republicans are asking the wealthier to pay 
more, but we are in that instance, and that makes sense.
  Most importantly, we are allowing for choice in the program and 
providing for the kind of innovation you and others have talked about. 
In this way we are trying to work to save the program from bankruptcy 
and to make sure it can continue for future generations.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. I yield for one last minute to the gentleman from 
South Carolina. We are just about out of time. The clock is ticking.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Welfare as you know it, we want to change it. One key 
difference, President Clinton's welfare bill says you cannot stay on 
welfare for more than 60 consecutive months. You can get off for 1 
month or 1 day, and have 60 more months waiting on you. Our bill says 2 
years, 5-year lifetime, big difference.
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. I thank everyone for joining us tonight. As we started 
with Winston Churchill's quote, ``Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may 
deride it, ignorance may attack it, but in the end there it is.''
  Mr. SHAYS. If we can end with Mr. Rabin's quote that, ``The 
politician is elected by the adults to represent the children.''
  Mr. GUTKNECHT. We have a moral responsibility to make sure we 
preserve this last best hope. If we do not make some changes, whether 
in Medicare entitlements, the way the Federal Government spends money, 
we are going to leave our kids a legacy no one can be proud of. If we 
continue down the same path, continue to do the same things, we are 
only going to get the same kind of results.
  I wish we had more time to talk about the President's budget. 
Recently he gave it to us. It is 20 pages, now, not a whole lot of 
detail, but it really, you know, back in January he said that the era 
of big government is over, but on the other hand, when you take a look 
at the budget and get the facts about this budget, you start to see 
that that obituary may have been written prematurely.

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