[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 122 (Tuesday, September 26, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H7492-H7494]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               RESTORING FISCAL DISCIPLINE TO GOVERNMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Ross) is recognized 
for half the remaining minutes prior to midnight as the designee of the 
minority leader.
  Mr. ROSS. Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding that we are going to 
get the rest of the minutes until midnight; that the other side did not 
plan to come, just a point of order, I guess, and you can tell us at 
the appropriate time when our time is up. We just want to thank you for 
the time that we have here this evening.
  It is almost midnight at our Nation's Capitol in Washington, D.C., 
and yet, as members of the fiscally conservative Democratic Blue Dog 
Coalition, we are 37 members strong, and we are here on the floor of 
the United States House of Representatives because we believe the time 
has come to restore fiscal discipline and common sense to our Nation's 
government.
  Today, the U.S. national debt is $8,538,760,336,803.43, and for every 
man, woman, and child in America, your share of the national debt is 
$28,564.23. As you walk the Halls of Congress, you will notice this 
poster outside the door of some Members of Congress, which signifies 
that they are members of the fiscally conservative Democratic Blue Dog 
Coalition, and each day this number, unfortunately, changes, and, 
unfortunately, each day this number goes up.
  I am very pleased to be joined this evening by one of the founding 
members of the fiscally conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition, 
someone who has really been outspoken in the area of trying to restore 
fiscal discipline to our Nation's government and particularly been 
doing a lot of work in the area of accountability, being accountable 
for the taxpayers' dollars, and that is my friend Mr. John Tanner from 
Tennessee. At this time I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee.
  Mr. TANNER. I appreciate my colleague being here tonight, and I want 
to take a couple of minutes to talk about something that is not a 
political matter, really. It is a matter of our government: theirs, 
ours, Independents, Americans.
  We have seen financial mismanagement of the assets of us all on a 
scale that really I don't remember in any history book of American 
history since this country was founded. Look, this is not something 
that is easy to talk about, because everyone who is in public office 
wants to give good news to people. We all have to run for elections, 
and one can't really run for an election talking about doom and gloom 
or about financial mismanagement. People want to hear uplifting things, 
people want to have hope, people want to hear, as I do, that things are 
going to get better. But, unfortunately, things are getting worse, and 
they are getting worse by the minute. That chart that you have has 
already changed. We are borrowing almost $1 million a minute, as we 
stand here tonight.
  You know, under our system of government, we have an executive 
branch, we have a judicial branch, and we have a legislative branch. 
The legislative branch is supposed to make the law, the executive 
branch is supposed to execute the law, or carry it out, and the 
judicial branch is to interpret the law. Well, we have a breakdown. The 
legislative branch in the last 5\1/2\ years has abdicated completely 
its responsibility to oversee the money that is taken away from the 
citizens of this country involuntarily in the form of taxation.
  The tax laws are written right here, in this room and on the other 
side of the Capitol in the Senate, and they are appropriated to the 
executive branch to be spent, hopefully on behalf of the citizens of 
this country. What we have seen, according to the September 6 GAO 
report, that is, the General Accounting Office report, is a complete 
abdication of any financial responsibility.
  As a businessperson, one looks at the government of the United States 
and one sees a failing business. Not only is it failing because we 
continue to borrow massive amounts of money in my name and yours and 
everybody else's around here as a citizen of this country, but 
Congress, this Congress is not even asking this administration what did 
you do with the money. And if they asked the administration, the 
administration couldn't tell them.
  The one thing I think that the American people ought to demand out of 
this Congress, or any other Congress, is what happened to the money. 
Tell us what you did with the money. We may not agree with it, but we 
want to know what happened to it. Well, they can't tell us. Sixteen of 
23 Federal agencies, according to the GAO, cannot produce an audit. In 
other words, they can't tell you what they did with the money.
  Not only that, you have a trailer picture you have shown before with 
all these trailers in Hope, Arkansas. The September 6 GAO report 
reflects that Congress has appropriated $88 billion to 23 different 
Federal agencies for Katrina relief, the great hurricane; but no 
central agency tracks the funding. So, in effect, neither Congress nor 
the American people have any way of knowing how the money is spent.
  But we do know this: more than $10.6 billion has been awarded to 
private contractors for gulf coast recovery and reconstruction. Only 30 
percent of all of those contracts were bid on a full and open 
competition. The others were just given as sole source single contracts 
to people for a myriad of things. FEMA, the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency, spent $3 million for 4,000 camp beds that were never 
used and $10 million to renovate a military barracks that was used as 
temporary housing for six people. No private company in the country 
could stand this kind of financial mismanagement.

                              {time}  2345

  Because of this subcontractor system that was put in place because of 
these sole source contracts, just given to friends I guess of the 
administration, taxpayers paid an average of $2,480 per roof for a 
repair job that should have cost under $300, according to a report from 
Knight-Ridder newspaper.
  Credit card abuse. Credit card abuse by government employees after 
the storm led to the purchase of 2,000 sets of dog booties costing more 
than $68,000, a 63-inch plasma screen television costing $8,000, and 20 
flat bottom boats, only eight of which FEMA has in its records, at 
twice the retail price. I wish I was making this stuff up. It comes out 
of the GAO report.
  The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General identified 
1,395 cases of reported criminal activity, including officials who 
accepted bribes to inflate the number of meals provided by one of these 
sole source government contractors and to falsify the amount of debris 
a company had removed.
  After Katrina, FEMA purchased 24,967 manufactured homes and 1,755 
modular homes at a cost of $915 million for housing and temporary 
offices. The Inspector General said that as of January of this year, 
only 4,600 manufactured homes and 100 modular homes had been used at 
all. You have got pictures of them sinking in the mud in Hope, 
Arkansas.
  Mr. ROSS. FEMA at one time had 10,777. At this time, they are down, 
to

[[Page H7493]]

their credit, they are now down, a year after Hurricane Katrina, to 
9,778 brand new, fully furnished 16-foot wide, 60-foot long mobile 
homes, built-in whirlpools, built-in microwaves, fully furnished, 9,778 
brand new, fully furnished manufactured homes that never got to storm 
victims from Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita. They are simply 
sitting in a hay meadow in Hope, Arkansas, more than a year after 
Hurricane Katrina and 450 miles from the eye of the storm.
  This is a symbol of what is wrong with this administration and this 
Republican Congress, and this is a symbol of why we need to pass the 
Blue Dog accountability plan, a plan that you helped write, that we 
wrote together to restore accountability to our government.
  I yield back to the gentleman.
  Mr. TANNER. Again, this is not a political statement. I can't imagine 
the most partisan person in the world saying that this is good 
government, when we have money leaving here through a fire hose and 
nobody asking them where it is going or what happened to it, and if 
they did ask them, they couldn't tell them. They can't produce an 
audit. They can't tell you what they did with the money. This is the 
grossest kind much financial mismanagement on a scale that I can ever 
recall in the history of this country.
  We don't even get to Iraq and all the sole source contracts that have 
been given there and the billions of dollars that cannot be tracked or 
traced or even accounted for. I don't like to pay taxes any more than 
anybody else, but the one thing I do expect is the Congress to at least 
exercise its oversight authority to the extent that they hold people 
accountable who are spending this money.
  I know in business, you ask somebody, well, what is this expenditure 
for? ``I don't know, man. I can't tell you.'' Nobody would put up with 
that. No taxpayer would put up with it. And yet in our public life, in 
our public business, in the government of the United States it is 
happening every day, and people are tolerating it because you have a 
compliant Congress, a friendly administration. Nobody wants to 
embarrass anybody else.
  So what we see here is the grossest kind of financial mismanagement 
on a scale that is literally breathtaking.


                Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. There being no Republican here to occupy the 
rest of the time before midnight, the time will continue to be occupied 
by the two gentlemen who hold the floor now.
  Mr. TANNER. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I will finish up, 
because what we have done is introduced a bill, it is not going 
anywhere, unfortunately, because we don't have the power to pass it or 
the votes to pass it, that basically says when the Inspector General of 
any agency identifies either, one, a situation where the agency can't 
tell you what they did with the money that was appropriated with them, 
or, two, they identify a high risk program, that is government talk for 
a program that doesn't work, then in that event Congress must hold a 
hearing, a public hearing, about this matter, whatever it may be, 
within 60 days, so that at least the citizens of this country will know 
that their money is being wasted or stolen or somehow mismanaged.
  I think that is imminently reasonable. I can't imagine anyone saying 
we don't want to know what happened to the money we have taken away 
from people involuntary in the form of taxation and given to any 
administration. We simply don't want to know what happened to it. That 
to me is incredible and is not true.
  So I hope people will demand that Congress engage in what its 
constitutional responsibility is, and that is to oversee what happens 
to the money they remove from people's pockets involuntarily. That is 
all we are asking in this House bill that you referred to, that they 
hold a hearing and find out what is going on. If they can't tell you 
what they did with it, as far as I am concerned, they don't get it next 
year.
  This is a situation where we are literally mortgaging our country to 
people who do not have the same interest that the Americans have in 
world affairs, and we are not even paying attention to what we are 
doing.
  I appreciate you doing this every Tuesday night, but I hope that we 
can do something about this situation, because it gets worse not by the 
minute now, it gets worse by the second as we continue to borrow.
  We borrowed probably in the neighborhood of $20 million in the last 
20 minutes. No country can survive that. We can't survive it. We used 
to say it is up to our children and grandchildren. But people say no, 
no, no, we are going to have all of these things. And who is going to 
pay for it? Just borrow the money, borrow the money, borrow the money.
  Well, sooner or later, unless one can figure out how to repeal the 
laws of arithmetic, the financial mismanagement of this administration 
and the lack of oversight and accountability by this Congress is going 
to put this country literally in a deep black hole. Before it is too 
late, I hope that the people who care about this will rise up and say 
we want our government back, because that is what we are talking about.
  Mr. ROSS. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee, Mr. Tanner, a 
founding Member of the fiscally conservative Democratic Blue Dog 
Coalition, for joining us this evening to talk about his bill, our Blue 
Dog bill accountability, to demand that this Republican Congress become 
accountable for how they spend our tax money.
  Mr. Speaker, the total national debt from 1789 to 2000 was $5.67 
trillion. But by 2010, the total national debt will have increased to 
$10.88 trillion. This is a doubling of the 211-year debt in just 10 
years.
  Interest payments on this debt are one of the fastest growing parts 
of the Federal budget. What we call the debt tax, D-E-B-T. You can see 
it here.
  Today the national debt is $8,538,760,336,803 and some change. For 
every man woman and child, their share of the national debt, $28,564. 
Again, the debt tax. That is one tax that cannot be repealed, that 
cannot go away until we get our Nation's fiscal house in order and 
restore common sense in this Chamber. The current national debt, as you 
can see, is $8.5 trillion.
  Why do deficits matter? They matter because deficits reduce economic 
growth. They burden our children and our grandchildren with 
liabilities. They are the ones that are going to have to fix this mess.
  They increase our reliance on foreign lenders. Yes, I said foreign 
lenders, who now own about 40 percent of our Nation's debt. Foreign 
lenders currently hold a total of a little over $2 trillion of our 
public debt. Compare that to only $623 billion in foreign holdings back 
in 1993. Put it another way: This President, this President and this 
Republican Congress in the last 5\1/2\ years have borrowed more money 
from foreign lenders than the previous 42 presidents combined. Our 
Nation is borrowing money from places like Communist China to fund tax 
cuts for people in this country earning over $400,000 a year.
  It simply does not make sense. Those are not the kind of values I 
learned growing up at the Midway Methodist Church outside of Prescott, 
Arkansas. I learned about being a good steward. And here as Members of 
Congress we have a duty and a responsibility to be a good steward of 
the taxpayers' money, and we believe this Republican Congress is 
failing us in that regard.
  So who do we owe all this money to? Here is the top ten list, Japan, 
$640.1 billion; China, $321.4 billion; United Kingdom, $179.5 billion; 
OPEC. Imagine that, we wonder why we had $3 a gallon gasoline in 
August. I know it is coming down now, but I would ask you to think 
about this: I believe we all should be a lot more concerned about what 
gasoline and diesel fuel is going to cost a month after the election 
instead of a month before. OPEC, we owe OPEC $98 billion; Korea, $72.4 
billion; Taiwan, $68.9 billion; Caribbean banking centers, $61.7 
billion; Hong Kong, $46.6 billion; Germany, $46.5 billion. And all this 
debate about immigration reform, get a load of this. Rounding out the 
top 10 countries that the United States of America have borrowed money 
from to give tax cuts to those earning over $400,000 a year, Mexico. 
Our Nation has borrowed $40.1 billion from Mexico.
  I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. TANNER. You are talking about OPEC and the price of gasoline. 
Gasoline in July was $3-plus a gallon. Can

[[Page H7494]]

you name one thing that has changed between July and now as it relates 
to the world situation that would make gasoline come down? The 
uncertainty actually with regard to Iran and other oil producing 
countries is more now than it was then.
  The only thing that has changed is we are closer to November 7th. No 
other factor has changed. And yet we see a dramatic reduction in the 
last couple weeks in gasoline prices. But the underlying factors are 
still there. All the uncertainty about the oil producing countries, 
whether it be Iraq or the situation in the Middle East, is the same as 
it was in July. It is interesting, isn't it?
  Mr. ROSS. It is very interesting. Let me say as a member of the House 
Energy and Commerce Committee, I have a plan to put America on a path 
toward energy independence. If we had time we would go into it in all 
the details tonight.
  I was out visiting with constituents in 34 towns in my district in 
August talking about my plan to put America on a path toward energy 
independence. We have a plan to do that as members of the fiscally 
conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition.
  Mr. TANNER. We need to start on it tonight.
  Mr. ROSS. We have a plan. We have a plan to restore accountability to 
our government, to be sure that our government is accountable for your 
tax money, Mr. Speaker. We have a plan, in fact it is a 12 point plan, 
for budget reform.
  So, Mr. Speaker, we are standing here willing, ready and able and 
asking that the Republican Members of this Congress work with us, work 
with us to restore common sense and fiscal discipline to our Nation's 
government so we can pay down this debt.

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