[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 173 (Tuesday, December 1, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8228-S8230]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, when you are home and the television is
on, the phone starts to ring, your dog is at the back door barking, and
the kids need help doing their homework, occasionally you can forget
that dinner is on the stove, but if you forget about it too long, your
house will catch on fire, and that is going to be a problem. You can
get distracted by a lot of things and suddenly miss out on something
that is very important.
Our Nation is dealing with a lot of issues right now, such as
terrorism, immigration, banking issues, our economy, education,
transportation, and I do have a concern that we have forgotten this
year we still have $450 billion in deficit and a total debt of $19
trillion hanging over our heads.
If we were in any State in America and faced with that, the
legislative branch would work, make hard decisions, and then balance
their budget. Every single State, at the end of the legislative
session, comes to a balanced budget, but we don't. We just overspend,
and it has happened consecutively so many times now, our debt has built
up to $19 trillion. I don't have an easy way to articulate $19 trillion
of debt, but let me give you a picture of that. Earlier this year we
passed a 10-year budget plan that would get rid of our $450 billion of
deficit and would slowly work down, within 10 years, back to a balance.
Good.
Let's do a hypothetical. Let's say we finish out that path, and we
have to get back to a balance within 10 years, and then in year 11 we
do very well and we have a $50 billion surplus. It is a good surplus.
Here is my question: How many years in a row would we have to have that
$50 billion surplus before we paid off our debt? If you are doing the
math in your head, the correct answer is 460 years in a row. If we had
a $50 billion surplus for 460 years in a row, we could pay off our
debt. That is not going to happen, is it? We are in a bad spot, and my
fear is that we are distracted and we are not focusing on something
that will come back and bite us.
What do we do about that? I ask if we can do the first thing: Can we
at least agree that this is a problem and that we should actually work
to balance our budget? At least have that as the common ground that we
can agree on in this body and say we need to get back to a balanced
budget, and then we need to begin to pay this down and start that
process--to approach this issue in a way that I think can develop real
solutions. We need to find common-ground areas, but first we need to
begin with that one simple principle.
Our office has come up with a list which we affectionally call the
Federal Fumbles List--100 ways the Federal Government has dropped the
ball. We are identifying areas of waste, duplication, and, quite
frankly, regulations that are well outside the purview of the Federal
Government, many of which slow down the economy and drive up the costs
to consumers.
These Federal fumbles are not an exhaustive list. This is not
everything; This is just our list. We took some from multiple agencies
and entities. As we pulled this list together, we encouraged this. This
is our to-do list. We encourage other offices to start their to-do list
so at least we can have a common-ground sense of, let's get back to a
balance and work together to identify something within our own office
to find out ways we can deal with some simple things, such as, how are
we wasting taxpayer dollars? What programs are ripe with fraud? What
duplication and inefficiency is out there? Where are we overregulating,
which in turn raises the costs of goods and services for consumers? And
how does the government actually have processes in place that deceive
taxpayers and add debt to their families?
When we walked through this, we had a common agreement on our team:
We are not just going to identify problems; we are going to actually
work together to find a solution. Our issues and conversations have
been simple. If I am back home in Oklahoma, I can sit in the
coffeehouse with other folks eating breakfast and talk about all the
problems, but when I get back in this room, we can't just complain
about the issues, we have to fix those issues. That is our job. We
spend a tremendous amount of time just complaining about the issues as
if fixing it comes from somewhere else.
So we take all 100 of these issues and say: Here is the problem, and
here is the solution we have proposed. If people have different ideas
and different solutions, bring them, but let's at least agree that
these things should be resolved. Some of them are small, some of them
are large, but we simply asked the question: How do we fix this?
I have several things to say on that issue. One is that we have to
fix our budgeting process and the way we make decisions about it.
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We have these cute little terms in our budgeting process, such as
CHIMPS, changes in mandatory programs. It is a cute term, but the
problem is that adds $11 billion to the debt every year and everyone
just pretends that it is not there, that it is not real.
There is a fund called the Crime Victims Fund. This fund is supposed
to go directly to what it says--to crime victims--but it is actually
not used for crime victims.
Eleven billion dollars each year--in fact, this is the same $11
billion that is used each year as an offset for additional spending,
but the money never actually moves out of that account, it just stays
there. We pretend we are going to spend it and then actually spend it
somewhere else and then the next year do the same thing again. It is
deceptive. We have to stop that. That adds deficit and debt onto
families by a deceptive tactic.
We have a thing called the corporate payment shift. This one is fun
as well. The corporate payment shift assumes that money is going to
come in or be spent, and we have a 10-year budgeting window and move it
in the very last month to year 10 plus 1 month. We move it just
slightly out of the budget window, but we say we are going to spend it
and actually go ahead and spend it anyway. If we had a budget that was
10 years and 1 month, it would be out of balance, but if we put that
little corporate payment shift in there, it looks fine on paper, but in
reality it doesn't work. So we identify that as one of the fumbles that
we have as a government. It is something that we obviously have to fix.
Basic oversight will help that, but it is also this body making a
decision on how we are going to budget it.
We also walked through a lot of areas where we just identified things
that the Federal Government spends money on that we thought were rather
unique to spend money on and we thought may need some oversight.
How about a $43 million natural gas filling station built in
Afghanistan? It cost $43 million for one natural gas filling station.
Now that that station is in place, it is not being used at all and it
is a $43 million waste.
How about the Academy Awards. It is a pretty ritzy event. The Academy
Awards are choosing to build a $250 million museum, and the Federal
taxpayers are kicking in $25,000 to that museum. Why in the world are
we kicking in $25,000? Did we believe at some point that they couldn't
raise the last $25,000, and so we had to kick in a Federal connection
to it? I would disagree.
One of my favorites is the fact that we just spent almost $50,000 to
study the history of tobacco use in Russia. I am still looking for the
national security implications of why we just spent $50,000 to study
cigarette use in Russia.
The National Park Service spent $65,000 doing a study on what happens
to bugs when you turn on a light in dark areas. I can tell anyone in
this Chamber what bugs do if you turn on a light in a rural area. They
fly at the light. But we spent $65,000 trying to investigate that.
The VA in Arkansas installed solar panels to show that they have
green energy in this area. Many VA centers around the country are doing
this project. The particular one in Arkansas put them on in the wrong
spot, relocated them, and spent $8 million in total just for the
installation for their solar panels. Any guess on how long those solar
panels will have to run continuously to before they pay off the cost of
installation? They will have to run continuously for 40 years just to
pay for the cost of installation. That is not green energy, that is
just waste.
How about a challenge like this. The Social Security Administration--
the definition for Social Security disability is that you cannot work
in any job in the economy. You are only eligible for Social Security
disability if you cannot work in any job in the economy. But there are
individuals who receive both Social Security disability, which by
definition means you cannot work, and unemployment insurance, which by
definition means you are looking for a job. You should not be able to
get unemployment insurance and Social Security disability insurance at
the same time. They violate the definitions between the two. Even the
President of the United States agrees with that. Yet we have not been
able to get that done. That is a fumble.
As American taxpayers, we spent $374,000 studying the dating habits
of senior adults. Can someone help me understand what the national
security implications are for that and why we spent $374,000 studying
the dating habits of senior adults?
We also created what is called the Ambassador Slush Fund.
The Ambassador's Cultural Fund from the State Department, $5
million--almost $6 million--is designed to be able to help us give away
money to do construction in other areas.
We have done projects like building a welcome grotto into a Buddhist
temple in China, which I find the ultimate irony. If any church in
America said we wanted to be able to add on a welcome center onto our
church, we would forbid the use of taxpayer dollars for that, but in
China we literally borrowed money from them, gave it to our State
Department so they could build a welcome grotto into a Buddhist temple
back in China. I am not sure that is a great idea.
The State Department also has a Twitter account called
ThinkAgainTurnAway. It is to discourage people from joining the jihadi
movement. Any guess on how much Americans spend for a Twitter account?
For that one Twitter account with 23,000 followers, we spent $5
million--$5 million to maintain a Twitter account. I am very confident
there are multiple teenagers at home who could help us run that for a
lot less than the price.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to extend my remarks for a
couple more moments.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. LANKFORD. Let me mention just a couple more.
I have a real concern that our Social Security Administration is not
sharing what is called the death master file. That may seem like a
macabre comment, but what happens is, if we don't share the death
master file, then we literally don't know in other agencies when to be
able to pull a Social Security number off the record. The Social
Security Administration recognizes that someone has passed away, but
the IRS doesn't, so that is still a live Social Security number to
them, meaning someone could get that Social Security number, file, get
a work permit, even register and vote--all sorts of things can be
done--under that number.
We have 6.5 million people, according to our government, who are over
112 years old--6.5 million people. That is quite a few. Actually, in
the world, there are less than 100, but according to our government we
have 6.5 million and those numbers are being abused.
I can't even get into multiple issues, but let me just mention one
more on this list of waste. We identified what many Americans already
know. Social Security numbers are being stolen and used to file
fraudulent tax forms. Many Americans in the coming months will file
their taxes only to get notification from the IRS that someone has
already filed under this number. It is infuriating to them, and it is
billions of dollars of loss to the Federal taxpayer. The IRS knows how
to fix this. We list out the solutions. We have to actually implement
the fixes. We have to be able to protect the taxpayer and to protect
individuals from identify theft. That is a fumble, but it is fixable
and we need to do it.
I haven't even gotten into some simple things such as school
lunches--ask any teenager what they think of school lunches at this
point with the new regulations--or waters of the United States and how
even the Corps of Engineers doesn't want to implement the new EPA rule.
The fiduciary standard is causing chaos among retirees and individuals
wanting to get retirement advice or rural banks in how they want to be
able to give out loans for mortgages but can't in many rural areas of
America.
There are solutions to these problems, and it is our responsibility
to be able to work through the process to solve them. With $450 billion
in deficit spending and an economy that continues to slow down, this
body needs to determine what our job is and do it. It would be my
encouragement in the days ahead that we actually achieve that; that in
the days ahead we speak of what we have solved for the American people
rather than pretending, as
[[Page S8230]]
we are eating breakfast back home with some friends who are complaining
about the problems. It is time for us to fix the problems.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
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