[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 34 (Wednesday, March 10, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1329-S1330]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       OVERSIGHT AND TRANSPARENCY

  Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about a bipartisan, 
commonsense amendment that Members of this body endorsed yesterday by 
unanimous consent. I wish to thank Chairman Baucus for his work and the 
work of his staff in managing this important job creation package on 
which we took a step yesterday. I wish to thank Senator Crapo for 
cosponsoring this bipartisan amendment and Senator Coburn for his ideas 
and support.
  My amendment is simple. It amends the Recovery and Reinvestment Act 
of 2009--what I think most folks refer to commonly as the stimulus--to 
correct gaps in oversight and transparency. It provides much needed 
additional accountability for these public investments, again, that 
have come about through the stimulus package.
  I voted for the stimulus package. It was one of the first and 
toughest votes I cast as a Member of this body. I have worked hard to 
make sure my State, the Commonwealth of Virginia, has had opportunities 
to compete for its fair share of this funding.
  The Recovery Act was not perfect, and reasonable people can debate 
whether it was necessary or whether it was ambitious enough. But I do 
think it is fair to say that the majority of the economists of all 
political stripes across most of the ideological spectrum now agree a 
year later that while imperfect, the stimulus package prevented our 
battered economy from sliding over a cliff last spring into what I 
think could have been a full-scale economic depression.
  Almost a year ago, I remember coming to this floor for one of my 
first presentations, and I stood on the Senate floor and spoke of my 
concerns about the potential challenges of implementing a piece of 
legislation as big as the Recovery Act.
  At that time, I said we needed to come up with a common set of 
definitions, performance metrics, that would allow us to honestly 
measure our progress as these stimulus dollars were pumped into our 
economy. I know that metrics, performance indicators, and other 
things--many Members' eyes start to glaze over when you go into these 
kinds of discussions, but if we are going to be truly responsible to 
the people of this country, it is our job to make sure we put in place, 
particularly when we start new programs, those kinds of performance 
metrics.
  As the Chair knows, prior to being Senator, I had the opportunity to 
be Governor. The hallmark of my administration was, that which gets 
measured gets done. My sense was that as we started down the ambitious 
path around the Recovery Act, we needed to have those same kinds of 
metrics in place.
  I suggested a year ago requiring specific timelines and checkpoints 
so we could better track the outcome of programs funded by stimulus 
dollars. I discussed at that time steps we could take to hold Recovery 
Act recipients more accountable. I actually recommended delaying or 
deferring stimulus payments if progress was not adequately demonstrated 
or appropriately reported. Here we are a year later, and while I do 
believe the macro level of a lot of the stimulus activities has 
accomplished its goals, it appears that requirements for program 
reporting and disclosure of spending plans have gone missing or just 
have not been reported and that the notion of putting in place, in 
effect, a business plan for some of the new programs of this 
legislation has never fully been vetted. In the amendment this body 
adopted yesterday--this bipartisan amendment--we have successfully 
included fixes to make sure that on a going-forward basis, we will not 
have this problem.
  When we passed the Recovery Act 1 year ago, we required recipients to 
report quarterly, we required agencies to post reports, and we 
established an oversight board to tackle issues of waste, fraud, and 
abuse--the Recovery Accountability Board. We required the Congressional 
Budget Office, various inspectors general, and the Government 
Accountability Office to provide oversight. One would think, with all 
this reporting and oversight, that we would have it totally covered, 
that we would have thought through all of the ramifications. 
Unfortunately, a year later we have found that is not the case.
  Not that anyone here needs a recap, but I think it is fair to once 
again explain--and I do not think particularly those of us who are 
supporting the Recovery Act and the administration ever did a very good 
job of actually explaining to the American people what was in the 
Recovery Act. It is not a long recap, but I do think it is important 
for viewers and my colleagues to recall what it was.
  Literally more than one-third of the stimulus act was tax cuts, $288 
billion of tax cuts. I believe it was, in effect, the third largest tax 
cut in American history. As I travel Virginia--and the Presiding 
Officer, I know, travels the great State of Illinois--I very rarely 
find a constituent who realizes the stimulus had a huge amount of tax 
cuts. We have only paid out less than half of those dollars, but a 
third of the stimulus was tax cuts.
  A second third was direct assistance to State and local governments.
  I can tell you, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, I sometimes run into 
the legislators there, some folks from the other side, who oftentimes 
will say to me: Senator, we are going to keep kicking you in the tail 
about the stimulus, but keep sending those checks because otherwise we 
would be right down the tubes at the State level.
  Oftentimes, these dollars have gone to prevent what would have been 
otherwise catastrophic layoffs in our schools, in our highway 
departments, providing health care. Many State governments that are 
working on biennial budgets are finding, in the second year of the 
budget when the stimulus dollars run out, the enormous budget 
shortfalls they are going to face.
  Again, for many of our constituents, because these dollars did not 
necessarily create new jobs but prevented massive additional layoffs, I 
am not sure we conveyed that to folks adequately.
  The third part of the stimulus package and the category I am 
primarily concerned with today and the focus of my amendment included 
significant new investments in our Nation's economic infrastructure. 
These are areas this body and policymakers have talked about for years, 
but we never really put our moneys where our mouth was until the 
stimulus. These areas include such policy goals as smart grid; 
investing in high-speed rail; making sure we have the power of 
information technology to transform our health care industry to make it 
more productive and cost-effective, so we have significant dollars in 
health care IT; and an area I am particularly interested in: deployment 
of broadband across our rural communities.
  As you can see in this third category, as of mid-February we have 
only paid out about $80 billion of a total of $275 billion. And it has 
now become clear that many of the programs in this third category are 
what I would term ``high risk.'' That means they include Federal 
programs that sought enormous increases in funding and new 
responsibilities. Some of these programs barely existed a year and a 
half ago. They had relatively modest priorities before. But now with 
broadband, we have seen a 100-fold increase, and dramatic increases in 
health care IT. These programs have had a year to gear up, but we have 
to make sure they actually have business plans that can be vetted. In 
some cases, these stimulus funds were actually designated for brand-new 
priorities and new programs. Now many of these programs are just now a 
year later getting their stimulus funds out the door.
  Here is the challenge my amendment will address: We simply do not 
know a year in and with $80 billion being spent out very much about how 
these high-risk programs are actually doing in terms of delivering 
broadband, health care IT, and smart grid.
  For example--let me turn to the next chart--on the Web site 
recovery.gov, you learn that the Energy Department has paid out about 
$2.5 billion in stimulus money so far. Close to another $24 billion 
remains to be spent out.
  If we look even further, we find that the Energy Department complied 
with OMB requirements last year to come up with an implementation plan 
for its Weatherization Assistance Program. The Energy Department plan 
set a clear and reasonable goal. It said it would use stimulus dollars 
to weatherize 50,000 homes across the country in 2009. Weatherization 
programs are geared to low-income homes. They help

[[Page S1330]]

the homeowners. They decrease energy costs and decrease our commitment 
on foreign oil. There is a lot of good in this program. But a report 
from the Energy Department just 3 weeks ago showed that these funds 
actually paid to weatherize only 30,000 or so homes in 2009. That means 
the programs missed the goal by 20,000 homes. That is a score of 60 
percent. When I was in school, 60 percent was not a passing grade.
  We should be concerned that almost every dollar of the $5 billion 
program for weatherization has already been awarded. We have to make 
sure we are getting the results we were promised. How can we have 
confidence these grants already in the pipeline for this year are going 
to be properly managed? We must have more transparency and 
accountability from the Energy Department about how they are managing 
this program and overseeing the spending of these funds.
  There are the same kinds of challenges around the smart grid program. 
I am not just picking on the Department of Energy. If we look at the 
other areas--health care IT and rail--we find similar challenges.
  There is no information, beyond once these funds are distributed, how 
this fund distribution fits into the overall management of these new 
programs. That information should be easily accessible and available to 
taxpayers, and it should be reported on a regular basis to those of us 
in Congress who have this oversight responsibility. If these agencies 
are not meeting their milestones or deadlines and if stimulus programs 
are not producing measurable results, we need to know about them. If 
there are problems of potential barriers to distributing these stimulus 
funds, we in the Congress and the administration could do more to 
support reasonable solutions. We should be able to work together to fix 
the management barriers that have slowed down this work.
  It is not too late. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the 
government spent only about 18 percent of the stimulus funds in fiscal 
year 2009. By the end of this fiscal year--that means October of this 
year, 2010--that number grows to about 54 percent. But that still means 
over half of the dollars will be spent out after October of this year. 
That means much of the stimulus funding remains in the pipeline, and 
that means we have an opportunity now to correct any management and 
transparency gaps.
  Our amendment this body adopted will do that in three important ways:
  First, it requires agencies to update and refine their implementation 
plans they developed last year for these high-risk programs. We define 
``high risk'' as any program that received more than $2 billion or any 
program that saw a funding increase of 150 percent or more from the 
previous year's funding. These are the programs that went from quite 
small to ramping up to huge amounts. It also includes brand-new 
programs. Under our amendment, these programs will be required to 
update their stimulus implementation and oversight plans by July 1. As 
a former business guy, what that means in legislative speak is they 
have to show us their business plan in a way that is intelligible and 
understandable to the taxpayers and to Congress by July 1.
  Second, our amendment would require these high-risk programs to 
report their outcomes to Congress and taxpayers every quarter beginning 
September 30. We cannot wait for a year to go by to see if these 
programs that are spending billions of dollars are actually achieving 
their goals. These reports must include relevant information on 
spending and outcomes that clearly measures whether these programs are 
working and meeting the goals defined basically in the business plans 
they would have submitted by July 1.

  Finally, our amendment adds an enforcement mechanism to make sure 
that Federal agencies, Members of Congress, and the public have access 
to the information they deserve to evaluate whether these stimulus 
investments are actually working. One of the things we found is that 
close to 1,000 recipients of stimulus funding in this last quarter 
never even filed the required reports so that we know and the taxpayers 
know how these dollars are being spent.
  The amendment will impose civil and financial penalties on stimulus 
grant recipients who deliberately or consistently fail to comply with 
quarterly reporting requirements. The amendment provides sufficient 
discretion for the Attorney General and the courts to set these 
penalties and to make sure there is consideration of whether the 
recipient is a nonprofit organization or State and local government or 
a small business. Again, we are not trying to unduly penalize, but we 
want to put some teeth in the fact that these organizations that are 
recipients of Federal funds document what they are doing with those 
funds. This is basic accountability.
  Once again, I applaud my colleagues for stepping up in a responsible 
and bipartisan way to correct obvious gaps in management, 
accountability, and transparency of the Recovery Act programs. With so 
much of the stimulus funding still in the pipeline, this amendment will 
allow us to dramatically improve the way we measure and report outcomes 
and demonstrate accurate, verifiable results for the taxpayers.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I compliment my colleague from Virginia. I 
am a cosponsor of his amendment. I think it is a very noble attempt to 
try to put better hands on the stimulus.
  It is interesting to note that when we had the first hearing with the 
IG who is overseeing the stimulus, he said, regrettably, $50 billion 
would be wasted; that is, $50 billion out of $867 billion--actually, 
some $940 billion--was going to be wasted. We started with the 
assumption that about 6 or 7 percent of this money was going to be 
defrauded. I congratulate my colleague because some of the steps he is 
talking about in his amendment will actually lessen that, hopefully. I 
agree with him.
  It is exciting for me to see a bipartisan attempt to start bringing 
teeth into the laws we pass, not toward the American public but toward 
the agencies that administer the funds.
  I congratulate him. I think he has a good amendment. I think we will 
have a great vote on it.

                          ____________________