[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 23 (Tuesday, February 9, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S715-S716]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             BUDGET REFORM

  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, today the President of the United States 
unveiled the last budget of his Presidency: $4.1 trillion. Of that, 
$1.1 trillion is discretionary spending, which is the amount Congress 
will discuss over the next few months.
  It is no big secret that Presidential budgets typically are dead on 
arrival--this one especially so, obviously, as it is the last one of 
the President's term. It is a requirement of the 1974 Budget Act. The 
President turns in his budget by the first Monday of February. It is 
actually now into the second week. It is a week late, but it is closer 
to on time than the budgets of other Presidents have been in the last 
few years.
  There are a lot of wish list items in the President's budget. It also 
includes about $3.4 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years. It 
increases spending by $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years, including 
next year. The challenge in the President's spending plan is that he 
increases spending so much that we also continue to increase the 
deficit, the debt, and our interest payments.
  This body should realize that on the current track, the Congressional 
Budget Office and the President's budget that he released today 
forecast that within the next 10 years, the United States of America 
will spend more on interest on our debt than we spend on national 
defense. I want everyone to soak that in. Within 10 years, the Federal 
taxpayer will spend more on interest on our debt--our debt payments--
than we spend on national defense.
  When the President came into office, there was $10.6 trillion in 
total debt. The President's budget lays out a plan that by the end of 
his budget, there will be $27.4 trillion in total debt. This is an 
issue for us, and it continues to accelerate. And until this body and 
until the House and until the White House agree this is a problem, it 
will not be solved.
  I don't want to say this flippantly; the President and I have had 
this conversation. He does not believe that increasing deficits--that 
is, overspending what we bring in--is a problem. He believes, as he has 
shared with me and with the American people publicly, that if the 
government overspends a little bit, that stimulates the economy. Well, 
that might be true in some economic formula, but when our interest 
payments are larger than total what we spend for defense, we are in a 
spiral that we cannot sustain.
  We cannot keep saying we will add more debt every year and there is 
no reckoning for that. Our total debt right now exceeds our gross 
domestic product. Literally, if we took from every single American in 
the entire country all of their income for the entire year we could not 
pay off our debt.
  We are very much at a tipping point. The problem Congress faces is 
Congress never seems to act until we have to, and, in this time, in an 
economic crisis, when we have to, it is too late. How do we get on top 
of that? How do we stop bragging about how much the deficit has been 
cut and actually start reducing our debt? Many Americans don't hear the 
difference between the debt and the deficit because they don't live in 
this world of all of these different terms. Deficit is how much we 
overspend in any one year; debt is the accumulation of all of those 
deficits.
  Washington continues to talk about how in the last 6 years we have 
cut the deficit by $1 trillion. And that is a good thing, but the 
problem is that in the last 10 years, the debt has also doubled as 
deficits are still so large every single year, and that is a problem.
  So what do we do with this? I would say there are multiple things. 
No. 1, we are not going to get out of this in any one time period. This 
body needs to understand that this is not a car payment we are paying 
off. This is a really big jumbo mortgage. We are not going to pay this 
off in 1 year, and we are not going to fix it in one stroke. This is 
going to take multiple years of picking away at this.
  I have reminded several of my colleagues of one sobering fact: If we 
were to balance our budget and set this 10-year time period to actually 
balance the budget, if the next year after the balanced budget we had a 
$50 billion surplus as a nation, it would take 460 years in a row of 
$50 billion surpluses to pay off our debt. For twice as long as we have 
been a country, if we had a $50 billion surplus every year, we could 
pay off our debt. At some point we have to admit this is a really big 
issue.
  CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, as all of us know in this room, 
continues to rattle us and remind us that this debt is continuing to 
grow and we do not have the resources to do it. For the first time 
since 2009, our deficit will rise again next year to $544 billion. That 
is up 24 percent from just this last fiscal year. As we continue to 
have more individuals who retire and use Medicare and Social Security, 
which they have set aside their entire life to go into, and as that 
number continues to rise and as discretionary spending continues to 
stay fairly capped, we are not getting on top of the big issues that we 
face.
  Where do we go from here? In 1974 this Congress created the 
Congressional Budget Act, which set up the process of how we would 
actually do our budget every year. It is a very interesting process 
with the House and Senate passing budgets, putting them together, going 
through the process and getting everything to the President. All the 
timing and everything was set up with appropriations bills and how they 
would be done with all the deadlines. Interestingly, since 1979, the 
Congressional Budget Act, in the way that it was set up, has only 
worked two times--twice since 1979. Would anyone else admit that there 
is a problem with that setup? Coming out of Watergate in 1974, they 
wanted more transparency and an open process doing the budget. So they 
created this process that is so cumbersome that since 1979 it has only 
worked twice.
  To give more up-to-date details, in the last 10 years we should have 
passed 118 appropriations bills. Of the 118 appropriations bills, only 
7 of those individual bills were passed on time. We have a problem just 
in basic process.
  So allow this Senator to just throw out a few ideas to recommend to 
this body that we consider. If we are going to fix our debt and 
deficit, we have to look at the process of executing our budget to fix 
it.
  Here are a few thoughts. A biennial budget--if we don't do a budget 
every year, we should do a budget every 2 years. We are dealing with 
trillions of dollars. We should do a little bit of advanced planning. 
We should be able to do that at least 2 years in advance to be able to 
lay out how we are actually going to do the spending. We could do 
appropriations every single year to be able to provide the 
accountability, but at least the major budget process we should do 
every 2 years.
  We should get rid of the budget gimmicks that dominate this body in 
how we ``balance our budget.'' Budget gimmicks such as pension 
smoothing, corporate timing shifts, and all of our favorites--CHIMPS, 
or changes in mandatory programs, which everyone outside of this city 
thinks is a monkey, and everyone inside this city knows it is a great 
budgeting technique.
  Here is how some of these work. Here is an example from October's 
budget agreement. A pension payment acceleration in section 502 changed 
the due date for pension premiums from October 15, 2025, to September 
15, 2025, in order to get $2.3 billion into the ten-year window. Now 
what just changed there? They moved the payment time 30 days forward 
and so that is when it is due. Since they moved it 30 days forward 10 
years from now, suddenly that is another $2 billion into the Federal

[[Page S716]]

budget. If our Federal budget was not 10 years, but 10 years and 2 
weeks, it would have been $2 billion short. Because they moved the 
payment over a month and made it earlier, suddenly the budget picked up 
$2 billion. It is not real. It is a gimmick.
  There are the changes in mandatory programs that go out, such as the 
Crime Victims Fund. That is a fund of money that is expected to be 
spent, but should we actually not spend part of it, they will say: 
Great, we can take that part we were ``expected to spend'' and actually 
spend it this year. Then guess what; next year you spend it again, and 
next year you spend it again. It is a gimmick. That should be struck. 
We shouldn't have gimmicks like that. Those things make Congress look 
good but don't actually deal with our deficit and debt. There are rules 
that are internal that need to be fixed. We need to get real numbers 
and be able to have agreeable real numbers.
  Right now there is a big argument all the time saying: How does the 
budget balance against the President's budget--this particular baseline 
and that particular baseline? How about this: We have a lot of programs 
that have not been authorized--some of them for more than a decade--
though we continue to allocate money for them every single year. 
Authorizing programs as we do for national defense every single year is 
important, and we should actually do the work with that to be able to 
bring bills to the floor and to be able to get it done.
  We have reports from the GAO and from the IG that come out every year 
showing waste, yet many of those no one ever acts on. Three folks I see 
on the floor right now--Senator Flake and Senator McCain from Arizona 
and my office--have all put out waste reports in the past 5 months 
detailing billions of dollars in waste. We can identify these areas, 
and the inspector general's office and the GAO can identify these 
areas. We need to set a process in place to actually solve those 
issues. Then we can do more than talk about it. We can move it from 
just a messaging moment to solutions on our debt and our deficit.
  I recommend a measure such as the Government Shutdown Prevention Act 
that says we don't have a government shutdown. I understand some are 
very romantic about government shutdowns and what they would 
accomplish. Government shutdowns always cost more money for the 
taxpayer than they save. They cost a tremendous amount of turmoil in 
the Federal workforce and multiple places.
  There is an easier way for us to handle this. Congress only acts when 
we have to. When we have a government shutdown, we suddenly have to 
act. How about if we do something simple and straightforward, and we 
put in place something that at the end of the budget year, if we do not 
have a budget in place and do not have proper appropriations done, we 
have a short-term continuing resolution for 30 days that automatically 
puts into place in all legislative offices and the Executive Office of 
the White House a funding haircut to create the incentive that we need 
to act? If 30 days later we still don't have the appropriations done, 
the Executive Office of the White House, the House, and the Senate get 
another haircut, and we continue to press. There are ways that we can 
add pressure to ourselves that won't actually damage what is happening 
in the rest of the Nation.
  Why don't we pass a balanced budget amendment, which we have talked 
about forever and which we voted on in 2011 and has not come up again? 
We will never get to some of these measures until Congress is compelled 
to do the right thing. Let's put some processes in place beginning with 
our budget process, with real reform in how we do the budget and real 
structural changes to actually push this body to do what everyone 
outside of this body says needs to be done.
  In the days ahead when we are spending more on interest than we are 
on national defense, this body should hang its head in shame. But 
before that occurs, we should fix it so that never happens and we get 
on top of our debt and deficit with a straightforward process that 
actually gets us back to work.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address the 
Senate in morning business and be allowed to complete my remarks, which 
won't be too long.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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