[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.
____________________