[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 164 (Monday, October 31, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6899-S6901]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      MINIBUS APPROPRIATIONS BILL

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I thank the Republican leader for his 
comments and would just say that the time we can borrow from the future 
to spend today in order to create some sort of sugar high that creates 
jobs is past. We have tried that. The debt has now reached a level 
where the debt itself is a threat to our economy. It is a cloud over 
our economy. It is slowing growth and job creation. I truly believe 
that. We need to move out of these difficult financial times we are in, 
but I think the debt itself now is a threat to us.
  I wish to speak about the minibus appropriations bill that is before 
the body and its effect on the budget we have. As the ranking 
Republican on the Budget Committee, I do believe it is my 
responsibility to present, as I am able, a straightforward, honest 
figure about the spending bills that come before our Senate.
  H.R. 2112 is the first of several minibus bills that apparently will 
be used in lieu of the normal appropriations process. This minibus is 
so named because it contains three appropriation bills put in one--not 
one as we normally see before the Senate: the Agriculture bill, 
Commerce-Justice-Science, and the Transportation and Housing bill, all 
cobbled together in one.
  The Democratic majority contends this package will save taxpayers 
money, but this is just more Washington accounting. We have crunched 
the numbers and discovered that these bills will not cut spending but 
will actually increase spending by $10 billion over last year. So I 
wish to take a moment to explain because this is very important. We had 
an agreement that we would begin the smallest of reductions this year 
in spending--not nearly enough, but we reached that agreement, and we 
should honor that at least. So this is the first appropriations bill 
the Senate has considered after the discretionary spending caps were 
established as part of the recent debt limit negotiations.
  The Budget Control Act, as you remember, was passed to raise the debt 
ceiling. As an exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, as 
President Obama asked, Congress insisted that there be some curtailment 
of spending so we wouldn't hit the debt ceiling again so soon. So the 
Budget Control Act, as the bill was pretentiously named in August, 
requires that discretionary spending be brought down this year from 
$1,050 billion to $1,043 billion in fiscal year 2012, an alleged total 
spending reduction of a paltry $7 billion throughout the entire year. 
Presumably, the other $6 billion that was required to be saved under 
this agreement will be saved in other bills to come before the 
Congress. We haven't seen them yet.
  Does the bill that is before us move us toward even this minor goal? 
That is the question. The majority party says it does. They contend 
that the bill, the minibus, spends $128 billion--which is $1 billion 
less than last year when it was $129 billion--a reduction of less than 
10 percent, and they are very proud of this. But, remember, as an 
aside, nondefense discretionary spending alone in the first 2 years of 
President Obama's Presidency went up 24 percent. So to take a $1 
billion reduction is basically to hold in place this surge in spending 
at a time when this Nation has never, ever faced such a severe debt 
threat to its future.
  Going through the bill and thinking it through, the Budget Control 
Act also created a new category of spending. The Budget Control Act, if 
you remember, was cobbled together in the dead of night and brought up 
on the floor on the eve of a financial crisis and it was demanded that 
it be passed, and hardly anyone had a chance to read it. Unknown to 
most of us, it allowed spending above the $1,043 billion limit for 
disaster assistance. The debt limit deal provided an allowance for 
disaster spending equal to the average of the 10 prior years of 
disaster spending, which can be assessed or spent simply by providing 
the proper words in the appropriations bills that come forward across 
the floor, as these three do. But the majority contends this money 
should magically not be counted when you decide how much is spent by 
the bill. Why? Well, it is a disaster, and disaster spending doesn't 
count. Don't you know?
  As amended on the Senate floor 2 weeks ago, the bill now contains 
$3.2 billion in new spending above the caps for disaster relief, a 
further increase of 20 percent to the disaster assistance. Two 
additional amendments were adopted last week adding to the amount that 
the committees had produced as disaster assistance.
  While there are arguments that the $3.2 billion should not be counted 
as an expenditure, the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, our 
official scorekeeper, includes it as an expenditure. It is included as 
an expenditure in the CBO score, $3.2 billion. No one has challenged 
them because it appears they are plainly correct to count the

[[Page S6900]]

$3.2 billion as spending. Only in Washington can it be asserted that 
the government can spend $3.2 billion and it not count. The bill's 
sponsors contend that the discretionary spending portion of the bill, 
as I indicated, has gone down from $129 billion to $128 billion, but 
CBO says it went up to $131 billion. The disaster funding represents a 
2-percent discretionary increase, at a time when spending is supposed 
to be going down.
  Further, the bill's sponsors say you should not count the mandatory 
spending programs that are contained in the bill. They insist that 
mandatory spending is not under the control of the appropriators. 
Again, this is logic that only exists in Washington. In truth, it is 
not unusual for the Appropriations Committee to take actions that 
impact mandatory programs, and it can be done. But, of course, it was 
not in this bill.
  For example, food stamps, the largest mandatory program by far in 
this bill--actually larger than any other program in the bill--amounts 
to 75 percent of total Agriculture appropriations spending. Seventy-
five percent. Most people think agriculture programs are bailing out 
farmers. Those benefits to farmers have been reduced steadily over the 
years. Now 75 percent of the Agriculture bill is the mandatory 
programs, food stamps being the largest. And this program, under the 
legislation before us today, is set to increase by 14 percent next 
year, $10 billion more than last year, a $10 billion increase in the 
Food Stamp Program. But that doesn't count, it is contended.
  This spending increase results in a doubling of the food stamp budget 
over the past 3 years--doubling the budget in 3 years--and then 
quadrupling it four times over the last 10 years. We have got to look 
under the hood of this program and find out what is happening to it. 
But nothing is seriously being done. Like welfare reform, responsible 
changes to the way government operates this program will improve 
outcomes, help more needy people achieve the goal of financial 
independence, not dependence, and stop fraud, which most Americans know 
is pretty common in the Food Stamp Program.
  When I offered an amendment to save a modest $10 billion over the 
next 10 years, a reform that would not have reduced eligibility for any 
of the needy but only require that the recipients meet the minimum 
legal requirements of the program--actually be needy and qualify for 
the program by reducing fraud and abuse--the amendment was defeated 
right here on the floor of the Senate. It would have saved $10 billion, 
according to the Congressional Budget Office, by making sure that 
people make actual, formal applications for their food stamps and sign 
a document saying they actually qualify for it. Is that too much to 
ask?

  Senator Stabenow, the agriculture authorizing committee chair, rose 
to explain that we are not to worry because, while we are increasing 
food stamp funding now, at some other time her committee will recommend 
and produce a bill perhaps that will reduce it by $23 billion over 10 
years. But if that promise were to be fulfilled, the effect on the 
fiscal year 2012 budget would be that food stamp spending would 
increase this year approximately $8 billion--or a 10-percent increase--
rather than $10 billion, a 14-percent increase. The program has indeed 
doubled since 2008.
  But now we are hearing in reports that this $23 billion in savings is 
not even in the Food Stamp Program, or most of it is not. We are 
hearing that 19 percent of it is a further reduction of aid to farmers, 
and only $4 billion of the reduction in savings would be from food 
stamps.
  Here is the bottom line. When discretionary and mandatory spending 
are scored in this bill, the overall spending compared to last year 
went up by $10 billion, or a 4-percent increase, not a cut. Relative to 
the amount Senators approved for these three bills last year, we are 
being asked to increase spending, not decrease spending. I believe that 
is a fair and honest analysis of the bill that is before us. If you 
were to exclude the mandatory spending, ignore that huge increase in 
the Food Stamp Program, the SNAP program, and even say disaster 
assistance should be ignored, the so-called reduction in spending would 
be only a paltry $1 billion on these three bills combined.
  It is time to get serious. Denial in this Congress must end. You 
can't borrow your way out of debt. We are spending money we do not 
have. Forty cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed, on which we pay 
interest every year. It is digging us deeper in a hole. It cannot be 
contended that this is serious work toward reducing our deficit. It 
just cannot be.
  Our deficit in fiscal year 2011, which ended September 30, was just 
shy of $1,300 billion. A spending cut of $7 billion for this year is a 
mere pittance in comparison. In no way is it even close to a 
significant reduction of the projected deficit we are going to have in 
this fiscal year, which began October 1. We are now at Halloween. We 
still haven't passed the appropriations bill for the year we are in. 
Congress is not performing responsibly. It is not.
  We haven't had a budget in over 900 days. The majority leader, 
Senator Reid, said it would be foolish to have a budget. No wonder the 
American people are unhappy with us. How can this be? We are 
responsible people. We are proposing to spend next year $1,043 billion, 
and act as though we are proud to have reduced the spending by $7 
billion when we will have over $1,000 billion in debt, $1 trillion 
plus, next year?
  But it gets worse. The bill also contains a number of Washington 
accounting tricks to sweep new spending under the rug. It is full of 
the typical gimmicks used to shove more spending into a bill that has 
already reached its spending limit. We have reached our limit. I remain 
amazed at the creativity used by spenders to defeat budget limits. Were 
they to use such creativity to control spending, would we not be so 
much better off?
  I have already talked about the new authority granted by the Budget 
Control Act to designate an item as a disaster outside and above the 
budget--it doesn't count if you call it a disaster--and to spend the 
money without a formal vote by the Senate to declare it a disaster. 
Indeed, until the Budget Control Act passed, you had to have 60 votes 
to declare something a disaster to go above the budget. That has been 
eliminated. That was changed in this Budget Control Act that reduced 
control of the budget. It reduced the power of the budget to contain 
spending by eliminating this end run. At least you used to have 60 
votes to spend above the budget by calling it a disaster. Now you do 
not.

  When they first floated this idea that they were going to put 
disaster spending in the budget and it was going to be averaged out 
with what we normally spend, I thought that was a good idea. We know on 
average we have been spending this much for disasters. Let's put it in 
the budget and only spend above that if it meets that standard we have 
traditionally had. The idea was to arrange the amount of disaster 
spending and put it in the budget, but in the shell game that is 
Washington, that is not what the fine print did. The Budget Control Act 
establishes in effect now a slush fund to spend money above the budget 
limits, eliminating the 60-vote requirement for emergency designation. 
There is $3.2 billion in spending under this new authority that is in 
this bill, the first of multiple minibuses we will see. At the rate we 
are going, the ceiling of $11.3 billion for disaster established under 
the Budget Control Act will be exhausted and more emergency spending 
will be needed to further address legitimate disaster needs, but there 
will be no need for 60 votes to do so. That vote has been eliminated.
  In addition, the bill uses another gimmick to rescind discretionary 
appropriations provided in prior years that, for one reason or another, 
can no longer be spent for their intended purposes. That is, the bill 
rescinds budget authority that CBO estimates will not result in any 
cash savings over the next 10 years. Rather than letting the 
appropriations lapse and saving this money and being thankful we got 
the project done at less than normal, less than the projected cost, 
this bill, as has been done before, pretends to be responsible and 
rescinds that money which is then used to pay for the spending that 
will in fact result in cash expenditures from the Treasury. This one 
gimmick in this bill would add $131 million in off-the-books spending.
  Finally, the bill finds savings in mandatory programs that game the 
government's cashflow and score as savings

[[Page S6901]]

for this bill, but does not actually reduce the cost to the taxpayers. 
These so-called CHIMPS--we have a name for it now, changes in mandatory 
program spending--total $8.5 billion in this bill. Of that amount, an 
astonishing 88 percent, or $7.5 billion, results in no net spending 
reduction over 10 years.
  Some of these CHIMPS have been going on year after year. One example 
is the Crime Victims Fund. Every year Congress says that the crime 
victims will get the funds they are due under the law next year which, 
unfortunately for the Crime Victims Fund, has not yet arrived since the 
annual deferral began in fiscal year 2000. In other words, it is done 
every year and there seems to be no prospect that this will not 
continue. Meanwhile, the appropriators get the amount deferred over and 
over again, enabling ever higher amounts of discretionary spending. It 
would be like a family delaying a single $500 home repair for 10 years, 
and then counting it as $5,000 in savings, $500 for every year the 
repair did not take place. In this case, over the past 3 years the 
gimmick used in this bill has enabled $14 billion in higher spending.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator is informed the Senate 
is in a period for morning business and the time allotted for Senators 
to speak was 10 minutes.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair and ask for 1 additional minute to 
close.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I am unable to support this bill. By its own standards 
it fails. It represents everything that is wrong with Washington today. 
It crams three bills, which should have been considered individually, 
into one, creating a process that curtails debate on spending at a time 
when we need more debate, not less. Further, it does virtually nothing 
to address the fiscal crisis threatening this country. It treats 
spending caps established earlier this summer as the most that can be 
saved, not as the starting point for savings, and then uses gimmicks to 
spend over and above that advertised limit. It is not a serious 
response to the explosive growth in Federal spending and falls short of 
the commitment we must make to handle taxpayer dollars honestly and 
responsibly. It is business as usual. The American people deserve 
better.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Minnesota.

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