[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 23, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S499-S500]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      ENROLLED BILLS PRESENTED SUBSEQUENT TO SINE DIE ADJOURNMENT

  The Secretary of the Senate, on December 20, 2000, subsequent to the 
sine die adjournment of the Senate, presented the following enrolled 
bills to the President of the United States:

       S. 1761. An act to direct the Secretary of the Interior, 
     through the Bureau of Reclamation, to conserve and enhance 
     the water supplies of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.
       S. 2749. An act to establish the California Trail 
     Interpretive Center in Elko, Nevada, to facilitate the 
     interpretation of the history of development and use of 
     trails in the settling of the western portion of the United 
     States, and for other purposes.
       S. 2924. An act to strengthen the enforcement of Federal 
     statutes relating to false identification, and for other 
     purposes.
       S. 2943. An act to authorize additional assistance for 
     international malaria control, and for other purposes.
       S. 3181. An act to establish the White House Commission on 
     the National Moment of Remembrance, and for other purposes.

 Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, I oppose the conference report of 
the Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill, which has 
become the vehicle for the final budget agreement for fiscal year 2001, 
and I regret the need to do so for there are many laudable provisions 
included in this package. I was particularly pleased with the boost in 
funding for Pell grants, an absolutely critical program that ensures 
lower income students have the opportunity to go to college. Welcome, 
too, was the additional support for class size reduction and special 
education funding. This latter program, though, is still far short of 
where it ought to be. While this spending package brings funding for 
the Federal share of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to 
15 percent, the highest it has ever been, it is still far short of the 
40 percent which represents the maximum Federal contribution under 
IDEA. I was proud to join with my colleague from Vermont, Mr. Jeffords, 
in offering an amendment to the budget resolution earlier this year 
which would have provided that full funding for IDEA, and though we 
were not successful, I very much hope my colleagues will make full 
funding of this program a high priority.
  I was also pleased that this measure includes needed increases in 
support for Social Services Block Grants, a vitally important program 
that helps counties and social service providers serve our most 
vulnerable citizens and that had been drastically cut in earlier 
versions of the Labor, Health and Human Services spending bill. As 
well, I was glad that additional funding was provided to the National 
Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, and that 
additional resources were included to relieve funding pressures on 
those who provide Medicare services. In this last area, I was 
especially pleased that the legislation will provide relief for 
Medicare services delivered in rural areas and that it will delay for 
one year the scheduled 15 percent cut to home health care agencies.
  Unfortunately, this massive spending bill also includes a number of 
highly questionable provisions. I am deeply concerned that the Medicare 
package is disproportionately skewed toward HMOs, providers that do not 
serve the vast majority of Wisconsinites. The underlying reimbursement 
formula for Medicare HMOs is grossly unfair, punishing those areas, 
like Wisconsin, with efficient, low-cost health care providers. 
Significant reform is needed for the Medicare HMO reimbursement 
formula, and until that reform is undertaken, we should not pour 
billions and billions more into a Medicare HMO system that is so 
fundamentally unfair. Instead, those funds should have been targeted 
toward provisions to ensure adequate access to home health care and 
funding a significant prescription

[[Page S500]]

drug benefit. In this regard, I am particularly disappointed that 
Congress only delayed, and did not eliminate, the 15 percent reduction 
in payments to home health care agencies and only ordered a study of 
the inclusion of medical supplies in new payment system.
  More broadly, this measure contains the same defects that previous 
large end-of-session omnibus spending bills have contained; namely, 
special interest provisions that are slipped into the must-pass bill to 
avoid the usual committee scrutiny and full review on the floors of the 
House and Senate. My good friend and colleague, the senior Senator from 
Arizona, Mr. McCain, has identified at least $1.9 billion in pork 
barrel spending in this year's version of the omnibus spending bill. He 
notes that in the conference report for the Commerce, State, and 
Justice appropriations bill, itself an add-on to the Labor, Health, and 
Social Services appropriations bill, are many earmarked spending 
provisions that have never undergone appropriate review, including: 
$200,000 for the Kotzebue Sound test fishery for king crab and sea 
snail; $3 million for Red Snapper research; $300,000 for research on 
the Charleston bump; $150,000 for lobster sampling; $1 million for 
Hawaiian coral reef monitoring; and $1 million for the implementation 
of the National Height Modernization system in North Carolina.
  I am willing to concede that some of these programs may have merit. 
But if they do have merit, those who advocate funding for them ought to 
make their case before the appropriate authorizing committees and 
submit their case to the floor of the House and Senate in the normal 
way. That they chose instead to slip these matters secretly into a 
massive, must-pass spending bill at least suggests that some of these 
programs would not have withstood thorough scrutiny.
  Mr. President, these special interest provisions continue to be one 
of the best arguments for reforming an appropriations and budget 
process that has led to an annual, end of the fiscal year budget wreck. 
Unwarranted and wasteful special interest provisions flourish in such 
an environment, and fundamental reform, including moving to a biennial 
budget process, is the only solution. I very much hope such reform will 
be the very highest priority of this body during the 107th Congress and 
that this year's pork-laden omnibus appropriations bill will be the 
last of its kind.

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