[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 18 (Thursday, February 17, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H777-H784]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         STOPPING WASTE, FRAUD AND ABUSE IN GOVERNMENT SPENDING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Davis of Kentucky). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 4, 2005, the gentlewoman from North 
Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I rise with my colleagues today to highlight 
the important role this Congress must play in rooting out waste, fraud 
and abuse in government spending. The Federal Government currently 
spends over $69,000 every second of every day. That astonishing figure 
is simply too high. This Congress must become a better steward of the 
taxpayers' dollars and we must do it now.
  Our constituents deserve to send less of their hard-earned dollars to 
Washington and have more of their money to spend on their families, 
businesses and dreams. They meticulously budget their dollars at their 
kitchen tables and we owe it to them to do the same here in Washington.
  Mr. Speaker, in order to do this, we must crack down on waste, fraud 
and abuse in government spending. We are going to have others of our 
party speak.
  And now I would like to yield the floor to my esteemed colleague, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Conaway).
  Mr. CONAWAY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina 
for yielding. I appreciate the esteemed remark. I am not sure what that 
means, but I will take it as a compliment. Thank you very much.

[[Page H778]]

  You cannot talk about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in Federal 
spending without kind of putting it in some context. During the 1950s, 
the Federal income tax amounted to about 2 percent of the family 
budget.
  At that point in time, Americans had continued to experience a 
growing standard of living as it has continued to grow. In the 1990s, 
however, the Federal income tax consumes about 25 percent of that same 
family of four's income. And I think most of us have run on platforms 
that have said that Americans are overtaxed.
  Tax levels at all levels when you begin to add Federal income taxes, 
State income taxes, local taxes, the sales taxes, the variety of taxes 
that we all pay from cradle to grave, they consume about 50 percent of 
a family's income.
  We will celebrate, sometime in April, May, June, the day keeps 
getting longer each year, a tax holiday in a sense that most average 
Americans will have worked through that part of the year in order just 
to pay their taxes.
  We will spend in this government on the order of $2.5 trillion in 
fiscal 2005 and 2006. You have already put that in context, $69,000 per 
second that is spent across the board, for the most part, most of it on 
programs that we all agree on; but some of it I think gets spent on 
things and in ways that we believe would be inappropriate.
  The House Budget Committee has recently released a report that shows 
that there are billions, literally billions of dollars that are going 
to waste. These moneys are being paid to people who do not deserve 
them, people being paid by accident, being paid in many instances 
through fraud schemes, where folks are frauding the very systems that 
we put in place to help and nurture those in our society, those in our 
communities who can least afford to live. Those programs get preyed 
upon by some of the worst in our society.
  You know, I suspect that speaker after speaker has stood at these 
microphones, on both sides of the aisle, to condemn wasteful spending, 
money that is getting spent that should not get spent. I suspect that 
if we took a vote in this House it would be a 435-to-0 vote against 
wasteful spending. It is very difficult to find a politician who would 
stand up and defend wasteful spending.
  It is hard to find a constituent group that would stand and defend 
wasteful spending. The President has proposed a budget recently, and in 
that budget he has proposed about 150 programs that would be either 
cut, or spending reduced. In Washington, since that budget came out on 
the February 7, we have been the recipients of special interest groups 
across the board who want to defend those very programs. We cannot find 
a single special interest group who would be willing to defend waste, 
fraud and abuse in our Federal spending.
  Let me give you some examples that will help put this in context for 
our fellow Members here in the House this afternoon, kind of what we 
are talking about. Twenty-one of the 26 major departments and agencies 
currently receive the lowest possible rating for their financial 
management.
  Let me put this overall thing in context. I am a CPA. I have been in 
business as a practicing accountant for some approximately 36 years. 
And hearing things like this are obviously troubling to me on a 
professional level as well as on a taxpayer level, that we would have 
things like this going on.
  The single most troubling one, as a former auditor, someone who has 
examined other peoples' books and rendered opinions as to the 
reasonableness of those books, the U.S. General Accounting Office will 
not certify the Federal Government's own accounting books because the 
bookkeeping is so bad.
  Unfortunately we have got agencies, big and small, who cannot keep up 
with the tax dollars that Congress allocates to them to spend. We are 
2\1/2\-plus years now into living under the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, a bill 
that came into existence as a result of financial accounting abuses by 
certain of my brethren in the accounting profession and certain 
leadership in various corporations.
  We now have in place rules and regulations that require publicly 
traded companies to certify their books, that the chief financial 
officer certifies that book, that the CEO certifies that the books are 
correct under the penalties of going to jail for Federal felonies if 
those are incorrect. There is no one in the Federal Government who 
signs a financial statement under that same penalty.
  So the fact that we cannot keep our own books ought to be troubling 
on a variety of levels. Talking about some specific dollars, the 
Federal Government made $20 billion in overpayments in overall 
payments. Medicare payments by themselves totaled $12 billion 
overpayments in 2001.
  Mr. Speaker, I think we can do a lot with $12 billion. There is an 
awful lot of those programs listed in the President's 150 that could be 
covered by that $12 billion. I think the total savings that the 
President projects out of that 150 is about $20 billion.
  Now, those of us who have a checkbook and write checks, you know, 
never write a billion-dollar check. We do not have a clue realistically 
how much money a billion dollars is in trying to stack it up. But to 
put it in context of overall savings of $20 billion, if we have got 
overpayments, either through by accident, charges that should not have 
been, double billings, physicians and health care providers who are 
scamming the system, that 12 billion is a big number.
  Social Security income program has made overpayments of about $2 
billion in 2002. And the Federal Management Service at the U.S. 
Treasury Department could not produce details on outstanding checks. In 
one case it caused a $3.1 billion overstatement of cash.
  Now, I used to be a small businessperson and worked with companies as 
their auditor. One of the things you do when you write a check is you 
have a source document as to why you wrote that check. You got an 
invoice from a vendor in most instances, and you attach it; someone 
approves that invoice and someone sends it over to the check-writing 
department and they write that check. Then you file that invoice, and 
then at the end of the year the auditor comes in or the owner comes in 
and said, I need to kind of figure out where we spent our money.
  You see this list of checks. You want to know why this check was 
issued. Then you go look in the file cabinet, or, in today's world, the 
way electronic data is kept, you go look for that source document: Why 
did we write that check?
  Well, in an organization as large and as expansive as the Federal 
Government, you would expect a few invoices to be missing. I mean, that 
is just the nature of the beast. We do not all keep all of the records 
that we are supposed to. That is not to condone it, but it is the real 
world. $3.1 billion in checks written that we do not know why they were 
written, or we cannot prove why they are written, seems to be an area 
that we could make some improvements in.
  If I may give one example, a personal example. My mom and dad are of 
an age that they are on Medicare. And my dad has got diabetes and needs 
a certain supply of things to handle and take care of his diabetes. The 
suppliers continue to overship that stuff to my mom and dad.
  Well, my mother is just very diligent and Rambo about not accepting 
it and shipping it back, because, you know, she just keeps the regular 
30-day supply of the supplies that my dad needs to take care of his 
diabetes.
  Well, what is happening here is that these companies are gaming the 
system. Because when they ship it, then they get to bill Medicare for 
those products. That is just simply not fair.
  So I will brag on my mom. She is out there in the hinterlands lands 
of west Texas, out in Odessa, Texas, trying to save and do her part to 
save taxpayer dollars so that legitimate Medicare expenses that ought 
to be paid get paid. And that as we try to work with the very daunting 
task of cutting spending in Federal Government this next year, starting 
with the budget process right now, and working through the 
appropriations process and the authorizing process, that we are looking 
at dollars that ought to go to programs. We are not looking at dollars 
that are being funneled into areas or into scams or overpayments.
  As I mentioned, as a CPA and one who has signed the firm's name on 
audit papers before and audit reports,

[[Page H779]]

we can do better. I do not pretend that we cannot. It is a tough job. 
Obviously the Federal Government is the single largest financial 
entity, I suspect, on Earth, the U.S. Federal Government.
  And so keeping track of all of those dollars ought to be hard. It is 
hard, but that is no excuse for why it should not be done, why it 
should not be done to the same standards that we require the largest 
multinational corporations in our country to maintain their books, to 
be able to report to their shareholders what is going on, so that each 
year in October when we get the financial statements from the Federal 
Government we have got some confidence in those numbers, that we can 
then take that information and use the information to make public 
policy decisions that ought to be made.
  Included in all of this effort of keeping the books correctly ought 
to be an ongoing vigilance to watch out for waste, fraud and abuse. 
Wasteful spending hurts, fraudulent spending is a crime, abusive 
spending is a crime. Those folks should go to jail. I know we have got 
some instances where that is happening. But the cost of not doing this 
means that legitimate recipients for all of those programs have the 
risk of not being able to get the money, because it has gone in a 
wasteful manner, or in a fraudulent manner or in an abusive manner, so 
that the taxpayers of this good country are overburdened to the extent 
that we do have waste, fraud and abuse within our system.

                              {time}  1545

  So I want to thank the gentlewoman for bringing this topic to the 
table today to let us have a chance to rant and rave about it, to talk 
to our fellow Members here in the House to try to help them with seeing 
how important it is as we go about this work to do that.
  So I thank the gentlewoman for her bringing this topic up today and 
allowing me to speak.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Conaway).
  One of the wonderful things about having these programs and allowing 
different people to speak is that we get lots of different 
perspectives, and I think the Representative from Texas has brought us 
the perspective of a CPA, and I think that is an excellent perspective. 
We need more people with the kind of background that he has.
  I want to say that I think we are extraordinarily fortunate to help 
us in putting a focus on this issue of waste, fraud, and abuse that we 
have the President having set the tone for us. He said in his State of 
the Union address a couple of weeks ago, the principle here is clear: 
taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely or not at all.
  I think that that is absolutely the attitude that all of us must have 
at all levels of government, but particularly at the Federal Government 
level. We all have to remember that we are in the business of spending 
other people's money, and we have to be as careful with that as we are 
with spending our own money, even more so. We have to really work at 
making sure that the dollars are spent wisely; and, again, as my 
esteemed colleague said, we do not want waste, we do not want fraud, we 
do not want abuse because where Federal dollars are being spent on 
programs, we want them to go for much-needed services.
  I want to, Mr. Speaker, yield to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. 
Jindal), my esteemed colleague who is here to add his perspective on 
this issue.
  Mr. JINDAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for the opportunity 
to speak on such an important topic.
  We as Members of the House have several responsibilities. Perhaps one 
of the most important responsibilities is to be a good steward of the 
people's money. We have to approve the budget every year, but we need 
to remember that money comes from the hardworking taxpayers of this 
great country of ours, and so often I get frustrated when people act as 
if that money literally grows on trees rather than being paid into our 
Treasury by people that are struggling to balance their checkbooks, to 
pay their mortgages, to pay off their debts. We need to be more 
responsible. The philosophy should not be, if we can get it, then we 
should spend it. We need to be much more responsible than that.
  I would like to share with my colleagues here just a few of the most 
glaring examples of the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Federal 
Government. Anybody who thinks that we need to raise taxes to get rid 
of a portion of our debt or deficit has not paid attention to all the 
waste that is currently happening in our Federal spending.
  I will give my colleagues a few examples. First comes from the 
National Park Service, and maybe my colleagues have heard of this one 
before. They spent up to $800,000, that number is not incorrect, 
$800,000 on an individual outhouse. The Park Service spent $330,000 in 
design costs, and then they built this particular outhouse at the 
Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area with imported wood and 
$20,000 cobblestone veneers, and that is despite the fact these toilets 
do not even work in the winter because the facility only has running 
water 6 months of this year. This is according to ABC News. Think about 
that. Hundreds of thousands of dollars for an outhouse that only works 
6 months a year. No wonder taxpayers are outraged and they demand we do 
better.
  A second example. The Women, Infants and Children program that is 
designed to serve low-income mothers and their children who are at 
nutritional risk. Some wonderful successes, and this program achieves 
some wonderful goals, especially in my home State of Louisiana.
  However, the $5 billion program annually does no income verification 
of its participants. If we did one simple thing, if we simply made sure 
that those who get WIC are actually eligible for WIC, that the number 
of participants who have incomes exceeding eligibility levels were 
properly limited the way we do in the school lunch program, as many as 
27 percent of the current participants may not be eligible. That is 
according to the Los Angeles Daily News. Twenty-seven percent of the 
participants in what is otherwise a good program may not be eligible if 
we just enforce our existing rules.
  Another example. This comes from an Inspector General's report. The 
Department of Justice's Inspector General audits of the COPS grant 
program, again a program that has had some successes, identified more 
than $1 million in questioned costs and more than $3 million in funds 
that could have been put to better use.
  Also from the same Inspector General at the Department of Justice, in 
the same year, found nearly $1 million in equipment purchased with 
grant funds was unavailable for use because the grantees did not 
properly distribute the equipment. They could not even locate it or had 
not been trained on how to operate it. That is $1 million of taxpayer 
dollars spent on equipment that might be needed to enforce laws and 
bring safety to our communities that is being wasted because they do 
not know where the equipment is or they have not trained their staff in 
how to use the equipment.
  The Forest Service, another example again from the Inspector General. 
The Forest Service recently said they could not figure out why they 
spent $215 million out of a $3.4 billion operating budget, nor why the 
agency double-counted $45 million of income. They double-counted $45 
million of income from other agencies. Think about that. If any of us 
did that in our private lives, in a business or in our checkbooks, we 
would probably not only be audited but may even be guilty of charges, 
and yet here we have our own government doing this, double-counting 
income, not knowing how they spent $215 million of our money.
  I want to spend some time on Medicaid fraud. In 2002, a Wisconsin 
transportation company repaid $1.6 million to Medicaid for multiple 
round-trip billings for dead people and people in the hospital. Think 
about that. They repaid $1.6 million, had to repay that back because it 
was found out they were billing the Federal program for providing 
services to dead people.
  In my own home State of Louisiana, I had the honor of serving as the 
Secretary of the Department of Health and Hospitals; and back in 1996 
and 1997, we were facing some fairly large budget challenges. As we 
tried to overcome those challenges, we discovered it was possible to 
cut hundreds of millions of dollars of spending, even while we improved 
the quality of health care.
  Part of the way we did that was to weed out the rampant fraud and 
abuse,

[[Page H780]]

even though the vast majority of providers, those who needed it the 
most, a small number of people, abused that program, ended up wasting 
millions, if not billions, of dollars in Federal taxpayer money.
  For example, we also had some challenges with nonemergency 
transportation providers. There used to be joke in Louisiana that it 
was sometimes hard to get a taxi because they would all become 
nonemergency transportation providers. There were reports of people 
being taken to shopping and other errands and the State and the Federal 
Government paying for this as if they were medical visits. We, too, had 
reports of agencies billing the Federal Government and the State 
government, providing services to dead patients.

  We used to have another joke in our State about dead people voting 
and being accused of that happening in the past; and I used to say, I 
do not know if they are voting, but they are certainly getting health 
care services in our State and we are paying for it. We as taxpayers 
are paying for it.
  We had instances where we had literally providers sending out vans to 
pick up children after school, and oftentimes they were reputed to have 
the parents or offer the children candy bars or cigarettes for the 
parents or maybe $5 to bring those children to these Medicaid mills 
where they bill again the State and the Federal Government for services 
they were not even being provided. They would literally run through 
dozens and dozens of children, billing thousands and thousands of 
dollars for services that were never rendered.
  We had an audiologist that billed the State for services even though 
he did not own the equipment needed to provide those services. We had 
one hospital paid even after it had closed its doors, and we could go 
on and on about these instances of abuse, of waste, of fraud.
  Perhaps two of the saddest things about that, and I am proud we did 
eliminate that, we did get rid of those abuses which saved hundreds of 
millions of dollars for the taxpayers, even as we improved the quality 
of health care.
  Immunizations went up. Louisiana rankings went up. People got better 
quality health care. We gave senior citizens more control over health 
care choices, even as we controlled spending; but there were two 
lessons that I learned from that.
  One, and unfortunately we were reminded of the fact, simply throwing 
money at the problem is not the solution. Louisiana went from the late 
1980s a billion dollar Medicaid program to when we took over almost 
between a $4.5 billion Medicaid program, spent all of that additional 
money, almost 70 percent of which came from Federal taxpayers; and yet 
we still did not improve our health ranking substantially. I think what 
that proved is simply throwing Federal money at a problem without 
putting in the right safeguards and accountability, it does not improve 
the quality of life for the people we were elected to serve, but rather 
too often wastes taxpayer dollars.
  So the first thing we must remember in this Chamber as we are 
responsible for appropriating the people's money, we are responsible 
for representing those that elected us here is we must keep a vigilant 
oversight over these Federal agencies, over these dollars being spent 
out of this Nation's Capitol, because there is too much of an 
opportunity for fraud, for waste, and for abuse.
  The second lesson that we learned that we also were reminded of was 
too often there are those that have the attitude that, well, I am 
simply spending somebody else's money, why are you worried about this. 
We confronted a provider who had been guilty of cheating the program, 
admitted he was cheating the program, and he simply said, everybody 
else was doing it, I thought I should do it as well. I cannot think of 
a sadder commentary when you think of the real genuine needs we have in 
this country, the people that truly need help in their health care, 
when you think of the needs we have to continue to cut people's taxes.
  We as an American people pay too much in taxes as it is, and here you 
have people whose attitude sometimes seems to be, well, that is 
somebody else's money, as if Federal money grew on trees, as if their 
taxes were not supporting these Federal programs.
  So I congratulate and I thank the gentlewoman for giving us this 
opportunity to come here and shine a spotlight on the abuses rampant in 
so many of our Federal programs, to give us an opportunity to remind 
this Chamber, to remind my colleagues of the importance of eliminating 
fraud, waste, and abuse.
  When we have serious challenges facing our country, when we have the 
obligation to provide body armor and supplies to our brave men and 
women in uniform who are defending our freedoms overseas, we have an 
obligation to strengthen Social Security so that our parents, our 
grandparents, and our children will all be able to benefit from this 
program in their retirement age.
  When we have got challenges with the number of uninsured in this 
country, we cannot afford to be wasting billions of dollars of 
taxpayers' money. It is not right, and it is something that we must put 
an end to.
  I want to thank again the gentlewoman for giving me this opportunity 
to shine the spotlight on what needs to be done.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much.
  I think that comments from the other two speakers are a perfect segue 
into our presenting some information on how individual citizens can 
report fraud and abuse to us. Both the Committee on the Budget and the 
Committee on Government Reform, on which I serve, have worked hard to 
try to identify fraud and abuse and inefficiencies, and I want to put 
up this information to show people that if you know of a situation 
where you know there is waste or abuse or fraud, that you will get in 
touch.
  You can get in touch, of course, with your own personal 
Representative or Senator, but you can also get in touch directly to 
the Committee on the Budget, wasteful spending, and there is an address 
here. The phone number may be a little bit hard to remember. It is 
(202) 226-9844. If you wanted to get in touch with me, and guarantee 
that something would be done or someone would follow up on it, my 
number is (202) 225-2071. This is an issue about which I feel very, 
very strongly and always follow up on.
  I have a letter here that I received recently that I have passed 
along to the people in the State of North Carolina because of the 
concern, and this is the kind of thing that we have to stop because all 
of us are paying for this.
  The letter says, I am a citizen of Greensboro, North Carolina, and 
something has come to my attention I just have to make you all aware 
of. I have been watching a case of Medicaid fraud for over a year now, 
and it has only gotten worse. I have called all kinds of fraud lines in 
North Carolina, and no one seems to care or know who to direct me to. 
So I have come to you.
  What I did was I passed this along to the appropriate people in North 
Carolina. I do not have answers on it yet, but this is an example of 
really egregious fraud, and I am sure there are lots of other examples, 
and my hope is that people watching us today will talk with their 
friends and let us know if there are other situations like these.
  There is this woman that is a certified nursing assistant that is 
supposed to be going into this home to give care to a 70-year-old 
woman. The CNA comes in for only 10 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes at 
the most, and goes to the ABC store for this woman and leaves.

                              {time}  1600

  Sometimes she just goes inside and comes right back out.
  The woman works for an agency that knows she is doing this, because 
at one time there was a complaint by a family member. The problem is 
that the State of North Carolina is paying her for services rendered in 
the amount of 4 hours daily at $9 an hour. This has been going on for 
over a year and it has gotten even worse because, as of last year, the 
husband now is on Medicaid and he is now receiving these same services. 
Now the hours have doubled but the care has not changed.
  ``The CNA is not caring for the husband and wife, only going to the 
ABC store. Sometimes she takes him to the grocery store. They only call 
the CNA when they want to go to the ABC store. I think this is an 
expensive way for the

[[Page H781]]

taxpayers to have to pay for taxi services, because that is all she 
does. She comes out of the house, laughing, after being inside only 10 
minutes. She is laughing all the way to the bank at our expense.
  ``Please look into this situation very carefully because there's a 
possibility that this CNA may have added another Medicaid person to her 
pay. The agency that she works for is very much aware of this but they 
have done nothing about it. She has brought in three cases, and one of 
them has dropped because of the attention it was bringing.
  ``This needs to be stopped and very soon. We've paid these people 
enough money for nothing. The couple that is receiving these services 
are in their right mind and know this is fraud because I have told them 
this and they continue to sign time sheets, false records.''
  And then she goes on to give the names of the people receiving the 
services, and she also says that she has been threatened for doing 
this. She has also given the information to newspapers in Greensboro 
and Winston-Salem, but they have done nothing about it. ``It is so 
crazy for dollars to be wasted and every year taxes go up.''
  So I want that individual to know that I have passed this along to 
the proper agencies in North Carolina and I am expecting them to look 
into the case and make sure that we stop this waste of money.
  Now, I want to go back to talking a little bit about what our 
committees are doing here in the Congress to deal with this. I commend 
the efforts of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), chairman of the 
Committee on the Budget, and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom 
Davis), chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, for the 
commitment they have made to eliminating waste and reducing the budget.
  The gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Nussle), as chairman of the House 
Committee on the Budget, spearheaded the effort to eliminate waste, 
fraud and abuse during the last Congress and made great strides in 
identifying and eliminating such spending. He pledged to find and 
eliminate one penny out of every dollar.
  Now, that may not sound like a lot, but it soon adds up. His 
commitment to deficit reduction should be applauded, and this is one of 
the mechanisms that the Committee on the Budget came up with, is to 
establish this abuse line and abuse office so that people could report 
it and have something done with it.
  The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis), as chairman of the 
Committee on Government Reform, also reminds us that the answer to the 
deficit problem is not to merely cut off fingers and toes, but what the 
Federal Government has to do is trim the fat. We have to, just like our 
constituents have done, tighten our belts and control the amount of 
spending so that we can reduce and ultimately eliminate the deficit. We 
must eradicate duplicative programs and hold government agencies 
accountable for their spending practices.
  This is something I am very proud that Republicans are emphasizing 
more and more, and that is to hold the programs accountable. As I said 
earlier, the President has said that if we are going to spend a dollar, 
it has to be spent well.
  I want to talk a little more about some of the differences between 
the Democrats and the Republicans and their attitudes toward holding 
down spending, but I would like to recognize my colleague, another one 
of my colleagues from the State of Texas, for him to make some comments 
about this very important issue.
  Mr. Speaker, I now yield the floor to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Gohmert).
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentlewoman from North 
Carolina for yielding to me. She is a dear friend, and I am glad to 
count her as a friend. I appreciate this opportunity.
  As we know, there are many areas in which there is plenty of waste, 
fraud and abuse. We can look around and see it for ourselves. One of 
the things I have felt more and more strongly about that I would not 
mind seeing is a moratorium on Federal building and leasing here in 
Washington. Because the more that gets built in Washington, the more 
that gets leased in Washington, the more bureaucrats it means back in 
our States, the more bureaucrats back in our State capitals, and then 
more bureaucrats have to be in our local districts. That is something I 
would sure like to work on.
  Now, having been a district judge and a chief justice of the court of 
appeals, I am also quite familiar with other types of waste. I do think 
it is a waste and an abuse when we have three separate branches of 
government and one branch decides to take the obligations of the other 
two branches and begins to legislate as well as usurping some executive 
functions.
  We have had courts that took on the management of different things. 
We have heard testimony about a court that is trying to manage, and it 
has been going on for, I guess 9 years, with regard to the Native 
Americans' money, and it is in litigation right now. Courts have an 
obligation to get cases to trial, to come to judicial conclusions. They 
do not have the right nor the obligation, for sure, to begin 
legislating or taking on the executive function of managing. We have 
seen far too much of that.
  Now, we have passed today in the House class action reform. Hopefully 
that will make a difference in some of the abuse that has occurred in 
some types of class actions. There has to be a remedy for people who 
are wronged. There has to be the availability of the class action in 
order to remedy some wrongs. But for those cases in which it has gotten 
out of hand, I am proud we have been able to pass some legislation to 
move toward curbing that abuse.
  Another thought has occurred to me. I know personally that we have 
courts that need help. They are overworked. We have had the President 
renominate 12 candidates for the judicial bench in the Federal system. 
One of my friends and classmates from Baylor Law School, Priscilla 
Owen, was nominated May 9 of 2001. She was abused to the extent that 
she is going on 4 years now without having an up-or-down vote, as the 
law requires.
  There were a number of other judges who were nominated in 2001. It is 
an abuse and a failure to comply with the oaths that were taken to vote 
up or down on these people. Give them a vote. Their life is in limbo. 
It is a pure abuse. And it has left courts unmanned. They need the 
help.
  So one of the thoughts I had, and I do not know that I have ever 
really talked to my colleague about this, but one of my thoughts is, 
where we find that there are courts, say for example the Ninth Circuit, 
who begin legislating from the bench, obviously they have got too much 
time on their hands. We have courts that just cannot get to their 
backlogs. They need help.
  My thought is that it would help the system, help curb the waste and 
abuse, if those areas where they have too much time on their hands, 
that we take some of their funding, take some of their personnel, take 
some of their benches and put them over in area where they do not have 
time to legislate; where they are strictly a judicial body. Because 
they need all the help they can to take care of their caseload. Let us 
move some of those people that had the free time to start legislating 
and started managing functions of other groups and let us get their 
benches, their assets, over in areas where they need the help. I think 
that would curb things greatly.
  I am also cosponsoring a bill. We have heard where some Federal 
funds, Medicare, may be used to buy Viagra for folks. Well, that has 
gotten a rise out of people here in Washington. That is something we 
need to address. Federal funds should not be for pleasure purposes. It 
is to help people that really need help. So I am looking forward to us 
curbing that bit of waste and abuse.
  Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address a couple of 
these issues, and I appreciate the gentlewoman's yielding some of her 
time. I think that some of the judicial waste and abuse that has 
occurred should be curbed because there are some really, really, fine 
Federal judges. They need help. We need to get them help and we need to 
cut out the waste in those courts that have abused their situations.

  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comments.
  As I said earlier, one of the nice things about having these events 
is

[[Page H782]]

that we get different perspectives from different legislators and from 
different parts of the country.
  I think that Republicans feel very, very strongly about what the 
President has said, that we must spend taxpayers' dollars wisely or not 
at all. I have asked the pages to put these charts up here again, and 
we will do it right at the end of this hour once more, so that we can 
make sure people know that there is a place they can write, there is a 
place they can call to report abuse, fraud and inefficiency, and that 
we will look into those.
  I think Republicans are very much committed to this principle. But, 
unfortunately, we are having to overcome an attitude that has been in 
existence for a long time in this country relative to the spending of 
Federal dollars. The other day in a meeting of the Committee on 
Education and the Workforce, I was struck by a comment that one of my 
Democratic colleagues made. As a freshman, I had decided I was not 
going to make very many comments. But this comment just struck such a 
nerve with me that I had to speak up. He said that we were not spending 
enough money on counseling for people who were out of work in New York 
City and that he wanted us to spend $750 million more on a program. He 
called that a paltry sum of money.
  Paltry means a very, very small amount. Insignificant. As I said, I 
had not intended to say anything, but that struck such a nerve with me, 
because I know that the American people think that $750 million is not 
a paltry sum of money. As one of our predecessors in the Senate said 
some time ago, ``A million here, a million there, and pretty soon 
you're talking about real money.''
  So we have to adopt the attitude that even a dollar is real money. 
And when we have people who speak in a committee and say that $750 
million is a paltry sum of money, their way of thinking is quite 
different from mine and I think from the majority of the Republicans in 
this House, and I am glad to report that.
  I know that we have some other Members that are going to speak on 
this issue, and I want to recognize another colleague, who has a very 
famous name, the gentleman from the great State of Kentucky (Mr. 
Davis), to offer his comments at this time.
  Mr. DAVIS of Kentucky. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for 
yielding to me.
  I believe that our founders would stand aghast if they saw the size 
and the reach of the Federal Government and how it has grown over two 
centuries. Certainly times have changed, but the cost of government 
continues to rise. Archaic processes, lax accountability and a lack of 
connectivity, and often competing agendas on top of that, consume more 
and more dollars and waste untold billions of hard-earned taxpayer 
dollars.
  My colleagues have shared horror stories of how these dollars have 
been wasted, but this afternoon I would like to offer a prescription 
for reform. The solution is not simply removing regulations, it is not 
simply identifying programs where we feel pain or see pain, it is, 
rather, we need to change as a government, as a people, and as 
regulatory agencies, how we think about the spending of this money, how 
these processes are run and, ultimately, how the citizens of the United 
States are best served.

                              {time}  1615

  King Solomon said in the Bible that there is nothing new under the 
sun. Successful businesses, successful service organizations have 
applied principles for decades that have cut billions and billions in 
waste. They have improved our ability to compete internationally and 
made many of our businesses and aid organizations the envy of the world 
for efficiency and for effectiveness. I might add that these are in the 
private sector.
  I think there are several steps that need to be understood, four key 
ones in bringing about any rational change to our government. They are 
simply this: we need to identify, we need to simplify, we need to 
accelerate, and we need to automate.
  To identify means simply that we need to get to reality. We need to 
understand where these problems are before we can make a decision about 
what to fix or what to change. As we have seen so many times here in 
Washington, knee-jerk legislation is often the reaction to a symptom 
rather than the root cause of our problems. Instead of helping people, 
it often creates problems that hurt the very ones who are intended to 
be helped. I believe that the old saying, ``The greatest source of 
inspiration is desperation,'' needs to be applied in our institutions. 
We need to get beyond what we think the governing process is, how we 
think our agencies work and understand how they really work, see what 
reality is and see those opportunities to take steps out of the 
process, time out of the process, and resources out of the process. In 
the end, what it will do is bring about great benefit when we get to 
that reality.
  That means simplifying. Over and over again it has been shown that if 
we challenge the way we think, if we challenge our assumptions, we can 
assure, Mr. Speaker, that we are going to spend the people's money more 
wisely and ultimately can increase service, increase the breadth of 
service and reduce costs. Our Armed Forces have shown that in the 
transformation they are undergoing where they are massively multiplying 
combat power, but keeping the size of the active military the same.
  The Navy has shown with its carrier task force that it can actually 
take a carrier task force out of operation and actually increase the 
ability to project combat power into a theater of operations.
  These principles applied there, applied in business, need to be 
applied to our agencies that are serving our citizens as well.
  Once we identify those improvements, we can accelerate them. Change 
will speed up. We have seen it applied in the medical arena; we have 
seen it applied in factories, where processes that took days and weeks 
can be reduced literally to hours or minutes. It gives back 
flexibility, it reduces the cost and the overhead that is necessary to 
serve people, and ultimately provides a better return to the taxpayer.
  Finally, once we have achieved that, it is time to automate. So many 
times, we have spent billions of dollars on projects, system 
integrations in the government that have failed, that have never been 
implemented because people never challenge their basic assumptions of 
why they were doing what they were doing, and they automated 
inefficient and ineffective processes.
  All that did to the agencies was allow them to commit error and 
increase waste more efficiently, which is an ironic contradiction. We 
have agencies that do not communicate. In the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service, for example, nearly 20 information systems do 
not communicate with each other on the tracking of aliens. This is 
unbelievable in an age of connectivity when international organizations 
have real-time information around the world. Major retail distributors 
can take the purchase of one single item on the other side of the world 
and have it documented in their system within seconds of that 
transaction taking place at a cash register.
  Likewise, we need to bring about a greater level of connectivity to 
reduce waste. Another benefit that would come from that is increased 
security as our agencies are able to share information more 
effectively. It also reduces error that causes increased costs and also 
increased anxiety and burden on American citizens who are depending on 
government services for their lives. I think that in the end we want to 
increase our capacity to serve our citizens without increasing the 
amount of money that is being spent. Adding more money will simply add 
more problems in the long run because we are not dealing with the root 
causes, Mr. Speaker.
  For example, 9 percent of the food stamp allocations or spending on 
food stamps are incorrect payments. Fundamentally, that is nearly $3 
billion in wasted taxpayer dollars. By having some simple improvement 
to the process with real-time information systems, off the shelf, used 
today in the commercial world, we could give that $3 billion back to 
the taxpayers whose money it is.
  We also speed up the turnaround. In our district as we have inherited 
a great deal of Social Security claims, there is a great need and a 
necessity to help our senior citizens, to effectively keep our promise 
to them. They do not

[[Page H783]]

need to be standing in line or waiting for weeks or months for casework 
to be completed. Using state-of-the-art technology not only would we 
save the taxpayer money but we could serve them effectively and nearly 
immediately.
  In closing, nothing is going to change until we learn to see the 
ground differently. We need to observe opportunities and zero in on 
them, orient on the thousands and thousands of small opportunities in 
government to bring about improvement and change. We need to decide 
that we are going to exercise the will that is necessary to bring about 
that improvement, and then we need to act energetically, persistently, 
and patiently. To do otherwise assures one thing, Mr. Speaker, that is, 
that this problem will grow, that Federal spending will continue to 
grow, that the waste will continue to grow and eventually strangle the 
United States Government.
  If I were working in my former profession, helping manufacturing 
companies to compete, I would say that the United States Government, my 
client now, is sick and is filled with waste that can be taken away 
with simple principles applied to return to healthy agencies, healthy 
fiscal status, and ultimately to strengthen our agencies and our 
ability to serve our citizens in the long run. Little by little, we can 
see the same kind of effective transformation that our military has 
gone through, that is coming out of the Cold War era. There is nothing 
new here, simply applying proven principles that other institutions 
have applied successfully for decades.
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?
  Ms. FOXX. I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. I 
have to say after listening to the gentleman there in that strong 
condemnation of the current state of the American Government, the 
Republican Party has been in control of the Presidency, the executive 
branch and both Houses of Congress for more than 4 years, and yet the 
gentleman and others have talked in a very condemnatory tone. Are you 
not being a little hard on yourselves? If, in fact, things are still so 
bad, what has the Republican Party been doing for the 4 years in which 
it has been in complete control of the government, not to mention seven 
of the nine Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republican Presidents?
  Ms. FOXX. Let me respond to the gentleman from Massachusetts. The 
Republicans have worked very hard always at reducing waste, fraud, and 
abuse at all levels of government. I will give you an example of 
something that I did. I have only been here for about 6 weeks, but I 
can tell you that I am already working on looking for ways to reduce 
spending in the Federal Government, and I can assure you that all 
Members of the freshmen class are doing that. As people point out to us 
over and over and over again, one of the great things about having new 
people come into government is that you bring in new ideas and fresh 
ideas and that you work at trying to get these accomplished.
  I think that our colleagues who came before us and especially as they 
have been in charge have shown ways to cut spending and they have done 
that. We have reduced the Federal deficit last year. We have not cut 
spending because there has been so much demand for spending. We have a 
war to fight. The money that is being spent on the war is appropriately 
being spent, but we are having to overcome 40 years of profligate 
spending, and we are working very hard to reduce again the waste and 
inefficiencies in government.
  I can assure you that there will be no let-up. As I said, I think 
that the President has set the tone for this and I think that you are 
going to see, particularly in this session of Congress, us working hard 
at making sure that we live up to what the President has said, that we 
are not going to spend a dime or a dollar of the taxpayers' money 
unless we can spend it wisely.
  Let me give you an example of something that I was able to accomplish 
and how I challenged my colleagues in the State of North Carolina on my 
last speech that I made in the North Carolina Senate. I had been 
contacted by a family and this is a Democratically controlled State, by 
the way, both at the gubernatorial level and at the legislative level. 
This family contacted me and said this lady's husband who had retired 
from the Department of Transportation had passed away. The month he 
passed away, they got his check. They notified the retirement system. 
They said, go ahead and cash the check and we will make sure that we 
show her as the beneficiary. She did not get a check the next month. 
She did not get a check the next month. She did not get a check the 
next month. She inquired as to why. Well, she needed to fill out a 
form. She filled out a form and sent it in, did not get her check, 
contacted the people, they said, well, you filled out the form wrong, 
you have to fill it out another way.
  They called me on a Sunday afternoon. On a Monday morning, I 
contacted the retirement system and I said, I want to know why this 
lady has gone for 4 months and not been able to get her check. They 
said, we will look into it, and we will get back in touch with you. So 
by Friday, they got back in touch with me and they said, she will be 
getting her check at the end of this month. I said, you know, that is 
not good enough. It is not good enough that you are solving this one 
problem for this person. What I want to know is, why is the system 
broken? Tell me what is wrong with your system that would allow this to 
happen. They promised they would look into it.
  About 3 weeks later, I had a visit from the head of the retirement 
system. Actually, he wrote me a letter and then came by to see me and 
he said, I am so glad that you brought this to my attention. I did not 
know this, but we have a system whereby three different people had to 
approve this lady filling out a new form. This is a system already set. 
She is due the money. She is not asking for something she is not due. 
She is the inheritor of her husband's retirement. So she is due the 
money. But in that system there, in the State government, controlled by 
the Democrats, they had three different people who had to approve 
something that did not need to be approved at all. By my bringing this 
to his attention, he changed the system to show that it would not have 
to be done that way.
  I challenged my colleagues in the North Carolina Senate, anytime that 
someone came to them and complained, to follow the complaint to its 
source and to make sure that if there was a systemic problem that they 
changed the system. And I said to them, if all 50 of you once a year 
could go to the source of the problem and change the system, we pretty 
soon would be cutting out lots of useless positions, because we cut 
out, in effect, two positions or the handling by two people of that 
paperwork.
  So what we have to be doing is going into every single system and 
making sure that we go to the heart of the matter and we solve the 
problems at the heart of the matter. That, I think, is the way we are 
going to do that. And I think that you are going to see a renewed 
effort in this session of the Congress to go to the heart of the matter 
and make sure that we are solving the waste, fraud, and abuse. We are 
encouraging citizens to get in touch with us, let us know where there 
is waste, where there is fraud, where there is abuse, and we ourselves, 
and I would challenge you and every other Member of the Congress to do 
the same thing. If you have a constituent who has run into a problem 
with the Federal Government because they did not get something taken 
care of at the right time, let us look at that and see where there is 
waste in systems.
  But if you have somebody who tells you that there is waste and fraud, 
let us go to the heart of that matter and prosecute those people for 
doing things that are wrong, whether it is on the part of a citizen or 
whether it is on the part of a Federal official. I think that that is 
something we all have to do. We take an oath to uphold the 
Constitution, and I think a part of that is to do everything that we 
can to promote the principles that we were elected to promote and that 
is a part of our responsibility.
  Mr. DAVIS of Kentucky. If the gentlewoman will yield further, in 
response to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts, the 
distinguished gentleman has a long and illustrious career of leadership 
advancing the values of his party. He is widely respected

[[Page H784]]

nationally and certainly in his home State. We have seen ample evidence 
of that expansion of government service to serve his constituents. I 
respect the gentleman's contributions to this body and its history.
  Yet at the same time, I think that it is important that we set aside 
partisan rancor. This is not a Democratic problem or a Republican 
problem. This is an American problem. It is important that bureaucratic 
agendas be put aside, that party agendas, partisanship and rancor 
simply moving for control over debate and taking away that time for 
necessary dialogue be brought into the context of what the American 
people sent us here to do.
  I believe that it is important in the remainder of the time that we 
have before the gentleman speaks that we look at the problems that are 
being faced today. As you so effectively pointed out in those examples, 
our citizens on the street have seen over and over again examples of 
waste, examples of fraud, examples of abuse.

                              {time}  1630

  Much of the waste, the majority of that waste, is not ill-intended. 
We have thousands and thousands of very dedicated civil servants. I 
have met very few in my entire career of public service, whether in the 
military or in government, who were not dedicated and committed and 
worked very hard. Rather, the issue that I was addressing, which the 
gentleman missed, was the issue of process, processes that have grown 
up, processes that are not connected, processes that do not communicate 
effectively. These are not partisan issues. These are simple issues of 
accelerating the ability to make decisions more effectively and to 
reduce costs.
  I thank the gentlewoman from Colorado for yielding to me.
  Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate his pointing that out again. That 
obviously was something that I was trying very hard to point out, was 
the fact that we are trying to improve the systems, improve the 
processes. And I want to thank the gentleman from Kentucky for pointing 
out the fact that most of the employees of the Federal Government, 
indeed the States and local governments, are very dedicated people who 
want very much to do their jobs well, and that sometimes what we need 
to do is lead them in the direction of doing things better than we have 
been doing them. I know very often we lapse into a way of doing 
something that may not be the best way of doing it and it just 
continues that way because nobody has suggested doing it differently.
  I think one of the great things that we could do in this Congress and 
in future Congresses is to go to our employees and ask them to make 
suggestions on ways that we could save money in the Federal Government 
and make it operate more efficiently, and I thank the gentleman from 
Kentucky for reminding me that that is something that we obviously 
ought to be talking about.
  We not only want the citizens of this country to help us figure out 
ways to make the government operate more efficiently and effectively, 
but there is nobody better qualified to do that than the great 
employees that we have, because they are there on the front line every 
day and they understand what needs to be done and how we could do 
things differently. So I think that if we do have employees who could 
make suggestions on how we could do this better that we should do it.
  I want to point out again that we have places that people can write 
and call to let us know how they think that we can do things better, 
especially in the area of waste, fraud, and abuse, and I hope that they 
will take note of these places and be in touch with us.

                          ____________________