[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 1 (Thursday, January 4, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S202-S203]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  STEWARDSHIP OF THE TAXPAYERS' MONEY

  Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I want to spend a few minutes today to 
kind of summarize some of the events of the past year and kind of also 
to put the Senate on notice that what this election was about is us 
being good stewards with the taxpayers' money.
  I appreciate the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. I happen to be 
the Senator who held that bill up in the wee hours of the morning. 
There were some real good reasons why I did that. It is a great example 
of the habits that we have to change. There is no question that levee 
system needs to be authorized, and it will be authorized this year. 
There is no question. But there was a drudging component that was added 
to that bill. Nobody knew what it was going to cost, at least $100 
million. That portion had not cleared the committee, and it was 
important that we not have habits such as that, to authorize programs 
that we do not have any idea what they cost.
  We have heard a lot of talk about bipartisanship. We can all be 
partisan for America. If you go to the Federal Government's Web site 
and go to the Comptroller General, David Walker, and you read what is 
there--I would encourage every American and every Senator to go read 
it--what you will find is we are on an absolute unsustainable course. 
And the problems are bad now. Madam President, we have a $260 billion 
deficit this year with ``Enron'' accounting statistics, about a $360 
billion accounting deficit by real accounting statistics. That is what 
we are adding to the Nation's debt. That is what our kids get to pay 
back through a decreased standard of living. But I would encourage you 
to go read it. We cannot continue to do what Congresses over the last 5 
years have done; that is, we cannot spend new money because there is no 
new money. So that means if we are going to authorize a new program, we 
need to make sure a couple things happen. One is we need to make sure 
it does not duplicate something that is already there. And if it does, 
we need to eliminate what it duplicates if, in fact, it is better 
because there is an opportunity cost of funding two programs that do 
the same thing. One of them does it better, so every dollar you spend 
on the one that does it less well costs us money in terms of the value 
for our children.
  Let me give you a couple other examples, things where our rules kind 
of mess us up. Because of the budgetary rules, Federal buildings in 
this country are no longer owned by the Federal Government--new ones. 
Why is that? For any other business, any individual would, if they are 
going to lease a building, try to lease purchase it. Because of our 
accounting rules, we lease them. Because if we lease purchase, then the 
agency has to show the entire cost of the building in their budget that 
year.
  Well, it does not make accounting sense. I happen to have a degree in 
accounting. It is crazy accounting. But what it does is force us to 
make bad financial choices on fixed assets for the Federal Government. 
We cannot get rid of the buildings that we don't want now. We spend $6 
billion--that is billion with a ``b''--a year maintaining buildings the 
Federal Government does not want. That is $6 billion. The Pentagon 
spends $3 billion. That is a total of $9 billion.
  So if we had the $9 billion, if we could get rid of the buildings we 
wanted to by streamlining that process, we could save $9 billion a 
year. Madam President, $9 billion would do a whole lot for the people 
of Louisiana as far as this levee system repair.

[[Page S203]]

  We know we can save about $30 billion every 5 years by having the 
buildings we acquire or lease become lease purchase because then the 
taxpayer gains from the real estate rise in value associated with those 
buildings. We have a lot to change in what we do. I am not a partisan 
Republican, but I am very partisan about the future of this country and 
what has to change to do that.
  Some other examples I would want the American public to know that we 
could do something about tomorrow: We have an earned-income tax credit 
that has a 40-percent error rate on it. That means billions of dollars 
every year get paid to people who do not qualify for their earned-
income tax credit, but we do not fix it. We have not fixed it. Shame on 
us. We have $350 billion a year that is owed in taxes to the Federal 
Government--that is what the tax gap is this year--that will not be 
collected.
  As a matter of fact, last year, the IRS, through incompetency, was 
putting on board a new program. They threw away their old program. But 
the new program was not ready, so they do not have a way to go back and 
track the problem tax payments. That is going to cost us $50 billion, 
$60 billion in lost revenues--one stupid error after another.
  We have a program to help people with food called food stamps, except 
we have an error rate there, where we give out $1.6 billion to people 
who are absolutely not eligible for that program every year. In this 
very short conversation of what we have talked about, we have talked 
about over $400 billion that we would have. We would not be running a 
deficit now if we did some things efficiently.
  In the last 2 years, the subcommittee I chaired, along with Tom 
Carper, the Senator from Delaware, had 46 hearings oversighting Federal 
financial management. We came up with, either from waste, fraud or 
duplication--not counting the tax gap, not counting any of these other 
things I have talked about--$200 billion of fraudulent, wasteful or 
duplicative programs associated with the Federal Government.
  What the American people ought to be asking us is, rather than 
creating new programs, fix the ones we have. Make them efficient. 
Eliminate the duplications.
  I am planning, when I come back, to send a letter to my colleagues 
outlining what my procedures plan to be in terms of blocking new bills 
to the floor. I thought I would read it into the Record tonight so that 
if anybody has any disagreement with it, they would come speak with me.
  First is for me to agree to a unanimous consent on legislation in the 
110th Congress, the bill has to conform to the vision of the limited 
Federal Government set forth by the Constitution and our Founding 
Fathers. In other words, it has to be constitutional.
  Second, if it creates or authorizes a new Federal program or 
activity, it must not duplicate an existing program or activity.
  Third, if a bill authorizes new spending, it must be offset by 
reductions in real spending elsewhere.
  If a program or activity currently receives funding from sources 
including, but not limited to, the Federal Government, the bill shall 
not increase the Federal Government's share of that spending.
  Finally, if a bill establishes a new foundation, museum, cultural or 
historic site, or other entity that is not an agency or a department, 
the Federal funding should be limited to the initial start-up cost plus 
an endowment that can be added to through private funding.
  The way we get out of the problems facing our country starting in 
2012 is to endow the future rather than expand it. If we start endowing 
things--one of the former Presiding Officers, the Senator from 
Arkansas, had a plan to honor Bill Clinton's birthplace home. I am not 
against that at all. But the average cost to the American taxpayer for 
every President's birthplace home--and there are only 22 of them--is a 
million dollars a year. Divide that out for a minute. That is $3,000 a 
day to take care of a birthplace home. Most Americans would kind of 
like to have that to care for their home.
  The answer to that is to create an endowment with a million dollars, 
set it up as a fund for the Bill Clinton birthplace home endowment. It 
can never be touched. People can give money to that, and they can care 
for that. The earnings off of that will be about $60,000 a year. That 
is about $200 a day, or about $5,800 a month. Most people in America--
as a matter of fact, the vast majority of people in America don't come 
close to spending that on maintaining their home in a year. So we can 
generously endow what needs to happen for the future and use the power 
of compound interest to help secure the future for our kids.
  My hope is that this spirit of bipartisanship we are starting off 
with will lead us to do the things the American people want us to do, 
and that is to get control of this behemoth we call the Federal 
Government. We can do it if we work together and if we are partisan for 
our children, partisan for the future of our country, and if we will do 
the oversight. If our oversight is going to point at what President 
Bush did wrong rather than what we can do right to fix programs, 
eliminate inefficiencies and fraud and waste, we will do much more for 
the country.
  I hope the words we have heard today will be acted on the entire 2 
years of the 110th Congress. If they are and we follow these 
guidelines, we will see a surplus much sooner than 2012. We can do that 
but not without the hard work and dedication that says future 
generations are worth it, worth us doing what we need to do to make the 
difference. We could take care of every need of the people in Louisiana 
because we have tons of waste where we are spending in the wrong way, 
whether it is bridges to Alaska or railroads across Mississippi or 
financing defense contractors when insurance is going to pay their bill 
anyway; we could do it.
  We have to stop playing the game and start thinking about the long 
term. My hand is out to work with anybody, whether on this side of the 
aisle or the other side, who wants to solve the fiscal problems facing 
this country. Then we can get about solving health care and retirement 
programs associated with Social Security and Medicare.

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