[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 119 (Tuesday, September 14, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H8152-H8153]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          THE SENATE GOP'S PROPOSAL FOR A 13-MONTH FISCAL YEAR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, there are some times when we pick up the 
paper and we cannot believe what we are reading. I am looking at the 
Washington Post. The article is called: GOP Seeks to Ease Crunch With a 
13-month Fiscal Year.
  I came over to this floor because I want to put my name on record 
right here and now against this. I will tell the Members why. This is 
deja vu, for me. I was in the Washington State legislature in 1972 when 
they did what we call the light bulb snatch. We took the first month of 
the next year and pulled it into this year and said, now we have 13 
months of money to spend in 12 months. That is exactly what some 
brilliant theorist over in the other body has conceived of as a way of 
avoiding being honest about this budget.
  What happened in the State of Washington was that ultimately we lost 
our bond rating, and when I became chairman of the Committee on Ways 
and Means in 1983, I had to raise taxes to pay off this 13-month so we 
could get our bond rating back. When I read that they are going to do 
it in the United States Senate, that Republicans, the party of fiscal 
responsibility, those people who are really close with our money, they 
want to give it all back to us, are now going to create a fictitious, 
that is the word they use, ``By creating this fictitious 13th month, 
the lawmakers would be able to spend $12 to $16 billion more.''
  This is Alice in wonder land run by the Republican party. When the 
Committee on Ways and Means in the year 2001 is in Democratic hand and 
I am sitting there, I do not want to have to clean up a mess created by 
people who will not be honest about the budget process.
  I just was in my district, like the gentleman from Washington before 
me. I went to a liberal church talking about violence, and we talked 
about a variety of things in a forum. I asked them, how many of you 
want a tax break? Not a single person raised their hand, out of 150 
people. They began to talk about it, and what 90 percent of them wanted 
to do was to pay down the debt. But no, what we see in the Senate is we 
do not want to be honest about doing what the President said, pay what 
we need in social security first, then strengthen Medicare, and then 
deal with whatever else we have to deal with.
  I personally think the American people are ready to pay down the 
debt. They all understand that when they get additional money and their 
credit card is at $5,000, they do not go out and buy more, they pay 
down that credit card debt.
  We have an enormous debt, and yet what we are doing here is like the 
county fair. There is a guy there with three walnut shells and a pea, 
under it

[[Page H8153]]

and we move it around real fast and you are supposed to guess where the 
pea is. What this is is a shell game so that the American people will 
never understand what is happening here, except for the truth is right 
here, by creating this fictitious 13th month.

                              {time}  0915

  The people who thought it up ought to be ashamed of themselves. I do 
not know how they can go around and say that they are fiscally 
conservative and throw rocks at people like me who they call liberals.
  I paid one of these off. I did what I had to do to be fiscally 
responsible. It makes me angry to see people starting down this road 
and if they lose control in here or lose control in the Senate, then 
suddenly it will be the Democrats' problem, we will have to fix it. And 
I object to that, and I object very strongly.
  I think every Member ought to read this article and ask themselves do 
they want to be put in that kind of a box. Because at some point they 
have to pay it off. That debt is out there, and it has got to be paid; 
and by increasing it by 12 to $16 billion, we do not fix anything; we 
just make it worse.
  So I urge everyone, Mr. Speaker, to read that article. And I will put 
this article in the Record so that we can have it there and everybody 
can see it and remember when we decided to start down this stupid path. 
There is no excuse for this. There can be an honest budget discussion 
in here, but it is going to require that the majority party talk to the 
minority party, have conferences, talk about what the issues are.
  It can be done, but it is going to have to take both sides working 
together. And if it does not happen that way and we start down this 
path, they are on their own. I am against it from the very first day I 
see it in the paper.
  Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the article to which I 
referred.

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 14, 1999]

                   GOP Considers 13-Month Fiscal Year

                            (By Eric Pianin)

       As they struggle to live within tough restrictions on how 
     much they may spend, Senate Republicans have found another 
     creative way to shoehorn popular domestic programs into next 
     year's budget: declaring the coming fiscal year 13 months 
     long instead of the usual 12.
       By creating this fictitious 13th month, lawmakers would be 
     able to spend $12 billion to $16 billion more for labor, 
     health, education and social programs than they otherwise 
     would be permitted under budget rules. Because the additional 
     funds would not be technically released until immediately 
     after the fiscal year ends, they would not count against the 
     overall limits on federal spending next year.
       ``We all know we engage in a lot of smoke and mirrors,'' 
     said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate 
     Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the 
     programs. ``But we have to fund education, NIH, worker safety 
     and other programs. It's a question of how we do it.''
       The proposal--which has been embraced by Senate leaders--
     highlights how difficult it is for congressional Republicans 
     to cut spending and live within tight budgets without 
     resorting to what many experts describe as fiscal gimmickry. 
     With the government awash in surpluses, there is certainly 
     the money to pay for extra programs next year. But to do so 
     would require breaking existing spending limits and, more 
     than likely, dipping into extra money generated by the 
     popular Social Security program--something both parties have 
     pledged not to touch.
       As a result, GOP lawmakers have struggled to find ways of 
     spending money without technically breaking those limits. For 
     instance, lawmakers already have classified spending on farms 
     and the 2000 census as ``emergency'' spending not subject to 
     existing rules. All told, lawmakers already have exempted 
     nearly $28 billion in proposed spending next year from the 
     existing budget limits.
       The 13th-month gambit promoted by Specter has been used 
     before on a smaller scale, but fiscal experts expressed 
     concern that Congress would simply be putting off its day of 
     reckoning by employing it on so large a scale.
       ``It avoids the problem, it doesn't solve the problem,'' 
     said Robert Reischauer, former director of the Congressional 
     Budget Office. ``We will have spending caps in 2001 and 2002 
     as well, so all you've done is postponed and magnified the 
     problem.''
       ``They're degrading themselves and degrading the budget 
     process by resorting to these budget gimmicks,'' added Robert 
     L. Bixby, policy director of the Concord Coalition, a budget 
     watchdog group.
       While it is far from clear whether House Republicans or the 
     White House will go along with the plan, the Senate's so-
     called ``advance funding'' proposal underscores lawmakers' 
     desperation in trying to pass the largest and traditionally 
     most contentious spending bill without breaking the budget 
     deal that President Clinton and Congress agreed to in 1997.
       Spending in the Labor-Health-Education bill includes 
     funding for health and human services programs, the National 
     Institutes of Health (NIH), job training, Head Start for 
     disadvantaged youth and Pell grants for college students. 
     Last year Congress could not come up with a bill that was 
     acceptable to the administration until the last minute, when 
     GOP leaders and the president negotiated a giant package that 
     included nearly $20 billion of additional spending for 
     domestic programs. GOP leaders felt burned by the arrangement 
     and have vowed to avoid such a deal this year.
       Not counting mandatory entitlement programs, spending for 
     Labor-Health-Education programs totals roughly $92 billion 
     this fiscal year. For next year, House leaders have 
     essentially used the Labor-HHS bill as a piggy bank to 
     finance other spending bills and have set aside only $73 
     billion for the bill itself, a cut of roughly $19 billion. 
     Senate leaders have set aside a little more, $80.4 billion, 
     for those programs.
       If such reductions were sustained, House Democrats have 
     warned that across-the-board spending cuts of as much as 32 
     percent would be required on education programs, Head Start, 
     NIH grants, Job Corps, AIDS research and scores of other 
     programs. Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the bill 
     will have to be beefed up substantially--probably to this 
     year's levels--to win passage and the president's signature.
       ``The bill as it is set up right now falls impossibly short 
     of funding levels that are necessary to ensure even basic 
     services in education, health and labor,'' said Linda Ricci, 
     a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget.
       In the House, Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) is leading 
     an effort to try to identify $16 billion or so of offsetting 
     reductions in mandatory programs and other areas to finance 
     the additional Labor-Health-Education programs, but so far he 
     has reported little progress.
       Rep. John Edward Porter (R-Ill.), Specter's counterpart on 
     the House Appropriations Committee, has grown frustrated with 
     the process and contends that Congress and the administration 
     must face the reality that the 1997 budget agreement is no 
     longer practical.
       ``I still believe in the end the caps are going to have to 
     be raised, and the question is whether you do it honestly or 
     whether you put into place all kinds of gimmicks, including 
     emergencies and forward funding and the like,'' Porter said.
       But Specter, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted 
     Stevens (R-Alaska) and other Senate leaders see virtue in a 
     budgetary maneuver that would ensure adequate funding for 
     education and other programs next year and that meets the 
     letter--if not the spirit--of the budget law. Because the 
     non-Social Security budget surplus is supposed to be even 
     larger in the following year, such a move could also make it 
     easier to finance ongoing government programs without dipping 
     into Social Security reserves.
       ``If the money can be pushed off to expenditures in 2001, 
     that would give us the latitude of using that year's surplus 
     without breaking the caps,'' Specter said.

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