[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 30 (Thursday, February 25, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2023-S2025]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Ms. SNOWE (for herself, Mr. Graham, and Mr. Voinovich):
  S. 483. A bill to amend the Congressional Budget and Impoundment 
Control Act of 1974 to limit consideration of nonemergency matters in 
emergency legislation and permit matter that is extraneous to 
emergencies to be stricken as provided in the Byrd rule; to the 
Committee on the Budget and the Committee on Govermental Affairs, 
jointly, pursuant to the order of August 4, 1977, with instructions 
that if one committee reports, the other committee have thirty days to 
report or be discharged.


                     surplus protection act of 1999

  Ms. SNOWE. Mr. President, I rise today, along with my friend and 
colleague from Florida, Senator Graham, to introduce the ``Surplus 
Protection Act of 1999''--legislation that will reform the budget 
process by tightening the manner in which emergency spending 
legislation is considered in the Senate. Not only will these reforms 
ensure that there is greater accountability in the emergency spending 
process, but they will also ensure that the unified budget surplus we 
now enjoy will be protected from spending raids that are designed to 
circumvent the normal budget process--and that could undercut our 
ability to utilize the surplus for strengthening Social Security.
  Mr. President, as my colleagues are aware, last year the federal 
government enjoyed its first balanced budget since 1969. To be precise, 
the federal government actually achieved a unified budget surplus of 
$70 billion in fiscal year 1998. According to the Congressional Budget 
Office (CBO), this surplus will not be a one time occurrence; rather, 
unified budget surpluses will continue to accrue during the next 10 
years if CBO's projections for economic growth, federal revenues, and 
federal spending hold true.
  While the surplus is welcome news after decades of annual deficits 
and burgeoning debt, we must never forget how easily this valuable 
national asset can be squandered if we fail to be vigilant in 
protecting it. For too long, the federal government treated the budget 
like a credit card with an unlimited spending limit, and such bad 
habits--even if broken for a few years--can quickly return, especially 
when there is a surplus just burning a hole in the pocket of Congress 
and the President!
  Therefore, in an effort to ensure the surplus is protected from 
future spending raids, we are offering legislation today that will 
crack down on arguably the most insidious manner in which budgetary 
spending limits and protections can be circumvented: the emergency 
spending designation. In light of the $21.4 billion in emergency 
spending that was contained in last year's omnibus bill, the need to 
provide safeguards against the abuse of this provision--and the 
squandering of the surplus--could not be more clear.
  Mr. President, the emergency spending designation was created for a 
very important reason. If a sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary 
event occurs, the strict spending limits imposed in the budget 
resolution can be exceeded through the designation of that event as an 
``emergency.'' This exception is understandable when considering that 
the hands of Congress and the Administration should not be tied when 
the pressing needs of our nation override the need for strict budget 
discipline.
  For instance, recent earthquakes in California, floods in the 
Midwest, hurricanes in the South, and ice storms in the Northeast--
which were devastating to my home state of Maine--are all examples of 
natural disasters that warranted the emergency designation because they 
were completely unexpected and unforseen, and could not have been 
addressed in a timely manner through the regular budget process. By the 
same token, the tragic bombing in Oklahoma City is an example of an 
unexpected and unforeseeable event that also warranted emergency 
treatment.
  Yet even as the emergency designation is necessary and warranted for 
these and other unexpected disasters, it can also be used as a major 
loophole by those who wish to circumvent the normal budget or 
legislative process. Rather than restricting the use of the emergency 
designation to only those bills or items that are truly unforseen and 
urgent, some may use this designation to either fund programs or 
projects that are debatable as to their emergency nature, while others 
may use emergency bills to push through unrelated legislation or 
spending programs without the normal level of scrutiny provided in the 
normal legislative process.
  For example, the omnibus bill adopted at the close of the 105th 
Congress contained $21.4 billion in emergency spending that came 
directly out of the surplus. While some of the provisions in that 
package undoubtedly deserved the emergency designation, several items 
were either debatably an ``emergency'' or were an outright effort to 
circumvent the regular budget process. Specifically, the $2 billion in 
emergency funding for our three-year-old mission in Bosnia was hardly 
unexpected and should have been included in the President's budget at 
the beginning of the year. It should not have be designated an 
``emergency'' simply to avoid the budget caps that ensure fiscal 
restraint.

  Ultimately, regardless of the manner in which the emergency 
designation can be misused--whether it is to fund a military operation 
that has been ongoing for years, or to fast-track a piece of 
legislation that has no relationship to the emergency in question--it 
is a practice that we must stop.
  The legislation we are offering today will do just that. 
Specifically, the bill establishes three new rules to ensure that bills 
or individual provisions receiving the emergency designation are 
subject to careful--but reasonable--scrutiny.

[[Page S2024]]

  The first provision--which is patterned after the ``Byrd Rule'' that 
applies to reconciliation bills--will ensure that non-emergency items 
will not be attached to emergency spending bills by creating a point of 
order for striking these provisions. Simply put, because emergency 
spending bills are often put on a ``fast-track'' to ensure rapid 
consideration, we should not allow non-emergency spending or 
legislative riders to be attached to these bills in an effort to avoid 
the normal, deliberative legislative process. To waive this 
restriction, an affirmative vote by three-fifths of the members of the 
Senate would be required--a level that will be easily achieved for a 
true emergency.
  The second provision--which is also patterned after the Byrd Rule--
will ensure that the validity of any item that is designated as an 
emergency--in either an emergency spending bill or a non-emergency 
bill--can be challenged by the members of the Senate. The bottom line 
is that just because an item placed in a bill is given the emergency 
designation does not mean it deserves that designation--and this point 
of order will ensure that members agree that the designation is 
warranted.
  As outlined earlier, the omnibus bill adopted at the close of the 
105th Congress contained a variety of provisions that were debatable 
``emergencies''--in particular, the funding for troops in Bosnia, 
because this cost was hardly unforeseen, sudden, or temporary. This 
point of order will ensure that such provisions do not avoid budget 
scrutiny, and that the surplus is protected for Social Security 
accordingly.
  The final provision will ensure that any legislation that contains 
emergency spending will require a three-fifths vote for final passage. 
Because members may feel compelled to act quickly on bills that contain 
even a single item designated as an emergency, this provision will 
ensure that such bills do not slide through the regular legislative 
process without full consideration and without more than simple 
majority support. While the previous two points of order will prevent 
improper abuse of the emergency designation, this requirement will 
serve as a final safeguard in the process.
  Mr. President, the bottom line is that although the emergency 
designation is a vitally important means of ensuring the unexpected 
needs of our nation can be addressed, it can also become a loophole 
that subverts budget discipline, drains our new-found surplus, and 
potentially impacts our ability to strengthen the Social Security 
program. But with proper safeguards put in place, we can ensure that 
this potential loophole is closed while still ensuring legitimate 
emergencies are addressed.
  The legislation I am offering today along with Senator Graham 
provides such thoughtful and reasonable safeguards, so I urge that my 
colleagues support the ``Surplus Protection Act of 1999.''
  Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, earlier today our colleague, Senator Snowe 
of the State of Maine, introduced legislation, of which both I and 
Senator Voinovich of the State of Ohio are the cosponsors, relating to 
reforms in the emergency appropriations law. Mr. President, I would 
like to discuss the rationale for this legislation.
  Mr. President, we received some good news just a few months ago. We 
learned that after 5 years of fiscal austerity and economic growth, we 
had transformed a $290-billion annual deficit into the first budget 
surplus in more than a generation.
  I am dedicated to strengthening the Nation's long-term economic 
prospects through prudent fiscal policy. The discipline that helped us 
to create favorable economic, fiscal, demographic, and political 
conditions to address the long-term Social Security and Medicare 
deficits that will accompany the aging of our population will be fully 
required if we are to meet these challenges. These deficits threaten to 
undo the hard work and fiscal discipline of recent years, as well as to 
undermine our potential for future economic growth.
  But that success, the success that we had in converting a $290-
billion annual deficit into this year's surplus, did not give to 
Congress a license to return to the free-spending ways of the past. 
That absence of license is especially true since over 100 percent of 
the surplus was the result of surpluses in the Social Security trust 
fund.
  I say over 100 percent because the only surplus we had is Social 
Security, and a portion of that surplus is still being applied to the 
deficit that is being run in the general accounts, a deficit which will 
continue for the next 2 to 3 years. We owe it to our children and our 
grandchildren to save this Social Security-generated surplus until 
Social Security's long-term solvency is assured.
  As you know, what we have been doing for the last 30 years is asking 
our grandchildren to pay our credit card bill. Now what we are saying 
to our grandchildren is that we are going to give them a secure Social 
Security system that will last for our generation, for their parents' 
generation, and for their generation--to the year 2075.
  Unfortunately, both the last legislative action of the 105th Congress 
and the first legislative action passed by the Senate in the 106th 
Congress have made a mockery of our promise to our grandchildren. Last 
night the Senate passed a military pay bill without simultaneously 
approving a way to fund it, an action that, if not corrected in the 
conference committee, could subtract as much as $17 billion from our 
children's and grandchildren's chances of having a secure Social 
Security system.
  I wish I could say that last night's vote was an aberration, nothing 
more than a momentary lapse of judgment, an inadvertent mistake in the 
haste to turn from impeachment to legislation. Sadly, I cannot make 
that claim. It is the second time in less than 4 months that we have 
proven ourselves willing to sacrifice future generations' well-being on 
the altar of immediate expediency.
  In the waning hours of last fall's budget negotiations, mid-October 
1998, we passed a $532-billion omnibus appropriations bill. Included in 
that $532 billion was $21.4 billion in so-called emergency spending. 
Since that $21.4 billion could be approved without having to find an 
offsetting funding source, those $21.4 billion came directly out of the 
surplus.
  Some of you who might have been making speeches to the effect that we 
were going to have an $80-billion surplus at the end of the last fiscal 
year therefore had to strike out ``80'' and insert ``59'' as the amount 
of surplus we would have, because that was the figure that remained 
after we had paid out of the Social Security surplus for $21.4 billion 
in emergencies.
  That action would have been possibly more palatable had all of that 
$21.4 billion been allocated to true emergencies, to those kinds of 
incidents which in the past Congress has recognized as being 
appropriate to not require an offset in spending or increase in 
revenue. While some of the $21.4 billion was used to fund what have 
traditionally been accepted as emergencies, defined as necessary 
expenditures for sudden, urgent, or unforeseen temporary needs, much of 
the $21.4 billion was not. Let me give some examples.
  The Y2K computer problem, the problem that at the turn of the 
millennium our computers might be rendered inoperative because of the 
failure to account for the new century, received $3.35 billion of the 
$21.4 billion. It is hard to argue that it took us until October of 
1998, and then under urgent duress circumstances, to wake up to the 
fact that the millennium was coming and that there might be a problem 
with our computers. In fact, here in the Senate, our colleagues in the 
House of Representatives and in the executive branch, as well as in the 
private sector community and State and local governments, had been 
aware of and working on this problem long before October of 1998.
  Another smaller example of a nonemergency emergency was $100 million 
that was appropriated for a new visitors center here at the Capitol. A 
new visitors center has been under consideration for a decade or more--
hardly an emergency that just came to our attention in October of 1998.
  These expenditures might have been desirable, might have been 
appropriate, but to label them ``emergency,'' and therefore remove them 
from the fiscal discipline requiring offsetting spending or additional 
revenue to support them, threatens to undermine the safeguards that we 
have built in to protect our Social Security surplus.

[[Page S2025]]

  This budgetary sleight-of-hand was also used to increase funding for 
projects that had already been funded through the traditional 
appropriations process. For example, after previously allocating $270.5 
billion to the Department of Defense in the emergency appropriations 
provision without any offsetting spending reductions or revenue 
increases, Congress provided an additional $8.3 billion in 
``emergency'' defense spending in the omnibus appropriations bill.
  That is not all. Because these pseudoemergency spending provisions 
were included in an omnibus appropriations conference report--that is, 
a bill that was the result of reconciliation of differences between the 
Senate and the House--then, under the normal rules governing a 
conference report, that legislation was not subject to amendment. 
Therefore, there could be no motion made that would have removed, 
reduced, or otherwise modified the provisions that were labeled as 
``emergency appropriations.''
  Members of the Congress were left with an unpalatable choice: Shut 
down the Government in mid-October of 1998 by failure to pass this 
significant appropriations bill that covered approximately one-third of 
the Federal budget, or steal from our children's and grandchildren's 
Social Security surplus. Mr. President, that is not a choice; that is a 
national disgrace. It is vital that we institute an emergency spending 
process that responds expeditiously to true emergencies without 
maintaining this open door to abuse. We must establish procedural 
safeguards to deter future Congresses from misusing the emergency 
spending procedures. We should not attach, as an example, any emergency 
spending to nonemergency legislation.
  We should not designate emergency spending measures that do not meet 
our own definition of an emergency.
  Mr. President, as I indicated earlier, I am pleased to join with 
Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine in introducing legislation that will 
protect our newly won budget surplus from false emergency budgetary 
alarms. Senators Snowe, Voinovich and I are introducing the Surplus 
Protection Act to amend the Congressional Budget and Impoundment 
Control Act of 1974. This will limit consideration of nonemergency 
matters in emergency legislation.
  Specifically, we propose the following three reforms: First, to 
create a point of order, similar to the Byrd rule which currently 
exists, that prevents nonemergency items from being included in 
emergency spending. This will enable Members to challenge the validity 
of any individual item that is designated an emergency without 
defeating the entire emergency spending bill.
  Second, we would require a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate for 
passage of any bill that contains emergency spending, whether it is 
designated an emergency spending bill or not. This will encourage 
Congress to either pay for supplemental appropriations or make certain 
that they do, in fact, represent a true emergency, as that term has 
been defined.
  And third, to make all proposed emergency spending subject to a 60-
vote point of order in the Senate. This rule will help to prevent 
nonemergency items from ever being included in emergency legislation by 
providing a forum in which they can be appropriately challenged on the 
Senate floor.
  Even if passed, our legislation would not be the total cure for 
Congress' apparent addiction to emergency spending. In the short term, 
it is vital that we immediately replenish the surplus with the funds 
that were ``borrowed'' last fall.
  Let me repeat that, Mr. President. We have a challenge before us in 
the next few weeks to recoup to the Social Security surplus those funds 
that were improvidently labeled as emergency spending and thus became 
the means by which the Social Security surplus was raided last October. 
We will face that challenge when we deal with the budget resolution and 
subsequent appropriations bills.
  The day after the passage of the Omnibus Appropriations Act on 
October 21, 1998, I wrote the President and asked that the Federal 
Government commit itself to restoring funding for the nontraditional 
``emergency'' items which were included in that omnibus legislation. I 
must state with disappointment that I have not yet received a response. 
So, in January, I again wrote to the President and made the same 
request for a commitment to fiscal discipline. Once again, I have not 
received a response.
  On January 18, 1999, Roll Call published an opinion piece which I had 
written in which I asked the President to address this subject in his 
State of the Union Address. Mr. President, he did not.
  Fortunately, the U.S. Constitution says that the Congress need not 
wait for the President. We can and must take steps necessary to restore 
the budget surplus to its previous levels, and we must do that now, 
before the urge to spend the surplus becomes a full-fledged addiction.
  We must also realistically fund existing emergency accounts. While 
the Congress cannot anticipate the precise nature or cost of future 
emergencies, we do know that emergencies will occur. For instance, 
Congress prospectively budgets an annual amount not to exceed $320 
million in emergency funding for the Federal Emergency Management 
Agency disaster relief fund. That is the good news. Now the bad news.
  Over the past 12 years, the average emergency outlays from the 
Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief fund have exceeded 
by $1.7 billion per year. What we have consistently done is underfund 
the account based on 12 years of experience, so that we have mandated 
that we are going to have unfunded emergencies. It would be as if 
homeowners consistently underinsured their homes or the contents of 
their homes, knowing that when the disaster struck, they were not going 
to have sufficient funds to rebuild or to recoup their losses.
  If we are to save the surplus of Social Security, Congress should 
stop systematically underfunding the emergency accounts and, thus, 
shifting anticipated emergency spending off budget. We should require 
emergency accounts to be funded through the normal appropriations 
process based on our historical experience.
  Mr. President, I join Senator Snowe in the hopes that our colleagues 
will support this important legislation. It is vital that we assure 
that we do not misuse our emergency spending powers. The next Congress 
that leaves the door wide open to raids on the surplus will be the one 
that passes on more debt and a less secure future for our children and 
our grandchildren.
                                 ______