[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 147 (Wednesday, September 28, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6185-S6192]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
OUR BUDGET PROCESS
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I rise today and ask unanimous consent to
engage in a colloquy with my Republican colleagues up through the next
hour.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I believe what we are going to talk about
over the next hour is one of the most important issues facing our
government.
We sat here today and listened to a lot of very valid pleas for help
from the Federal Government. The reality is, we don't have the money.
There are four words I have not heard in the U.S. Senate or Congress,
actually, since I have been here over the last year and a half, and
those words are ``We cannot afford it.''
The problem is that right now we have a budget crisis. We have a debt
crisis. Let me say this: Fixing the budget process will not solve the
debt crisis. Let's be very clear about that. But we will not solve the
debt crisis unless and until we address the dysfunction in our budget
process.
The problem is that in the last 42 years, since the Budget Act of
1974, the budget process has only worked four times.
This chart explains this fact. We can see the yellow lines show
that--and I hope my colleagues can focus on this--only four times in
the last 42 years has this budget process that was enacted in 1974
actually functioned at all to fund the Federal Government.
One of the major responsibilities of our jobs here in the Senate and
the House is to fund the Federal Government, to take care of
discretionary needs such as those heard today from Flint, MI,
Louisiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. These are valid needs, but
every dime we spend in our discretionary spending is borrowed. I will
talk more about that a little later. We have some speakers today who
are going to talk about the results of not having a budget process that
works.
This chart explains that over the last 42 years, since 1974, there
were four times that the 13 appropriations bills actually got passed
and we funded the government the way we are supposed to.
The blue lines are the actual appropriations bills. Since 1998--
somewhere in there--we went from 13 bills to 12 bills that actually
fund. These are appropriations bills that fund the Federal Government.
They fund $1.1 trillion of a $3.9 trillion spend of the Federal
Government.
This chart shows that over the life of this law--these are the laws,
the appropriation bills that have been passed each year, and the
average is the red line. The average over this period of time is 2.6
bills of the 12 or 13 bills that have to be passed to fund the
government.
Over the last 19 consecutive years, we have used 107 continuing
resolutions to get past the fiscal year to make sure we fund the
government on the first day of the new fiscal year.
This is how serious this is. Next Monday is the first day of the next
fiscal year, fiscal year 2017. We sitting here today are voting on the
CR to get us past this day so the government doesn't have to shut down
next week--those dreaded words of ``irresponsibility'' and
``intransigence.'' Quite frankly, this is part of the problem because
what happens is what happened last year.
The dysfunction in the system is centered around this: The budget is
not a law, it is a resolution. That means that a majority, with 51
percent of the votes in this body, can pass a political statement. That
is exactly what happened last year.
Let me say this before we go any further: Everything you hear today
is nonpartisan. This should be about a nonpartisan exercise that we
have in funding the government. Yes, we are going to have debates based
on our partisanship and based on what our beliefs and principles are,
but the basic process should be a politically neutral platform that
allows us to argue our differences in the budget process, get to a
budget, move to the appropriations, and fund the government by the end
of the fiscal year, and we have only done that four times in the last
42 years.
The dysfunction is centered around this. If you look at this chart,
every year we just don't have enough time, basically. And it is not
just time, it is the process. The budget is based on a
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resolution, and 51 percent can vote for it. Last year, as an example,
the majority--the Republican majority, by the way--voted a political
bill that took $7.5 trillion out of the President's budget over the
next 10 years without one Democratic vote. Then we got to the
authorization process--and the authorization process, by the way, is a
law and they have to have 60 votes. So guess what. The people on the
other side of the aisle, my friends, said: Well, you didn't ask our
opinion in the budget process, why do you want our help now? So they
don't let us get on the appropriations. We have some $310 billion that
we are funding today that is not authorized, over 256 agencies and
programs.
The next thing is we go to appropriation. Again, the minority party
can stop the process by not letting us get on the bills.
We have a situation right now--this is nonpartisan, but it is a
reality. The Defense appropriations bill which funds our military was
passed unanimously in committee, the way it was supposed to operate.
Democrats and Republicans got together, worked it out, made amendments,
and came up with a bill that funded our Federal Government's military.
Yet we tried six times to get it to the floor. There are political
reasons why it hasn't gotten to the floor, but it shows the dysfunction
we have in this process.
Mr. President, the time has come for us to address this process. I am
so excited to have various Members of the freshman class here. We have
the chairman of the Budget Committee coming down. We have some other
senior Members who have been working on this for years.
I notice my good friend from the State of North Carolina, Senator
Thom Tillis, is here, and I will ask him to give us his perspective.
There is a big military effort in their State, and Senator Tillis has
been a soldier in this, not only in the Senate but in his time as
speaker of the house in North Carolina.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President.
I thank my colleague and friend from the great State of Georgia for
taking a leadership position to really cleanse the dysfunction and the
problems that are going on.
Mr. President, Senator Perdue is only a 2-year politician. His tenure
in the Senate is actually only 2 years. He has spent all of his time in
business. He spent time in business, where you didn't keep your job if
you couldn't balance your budget. You didn't keep your job if you
couldn't make the difficult decisions year to year--making payroll,
making strategic investments, and doing the kinds of things good
business leaders do. That is what he has done all of his life. Now he
finds himself in the U.S. Senate, where that is almost the exact
opposite of what we do.
We just had passage of a continuing resolution today for a few weeks
because we can't come to terms on long-term spending measures. Over a
dozen bills passed out of appropriations with strong bipartisan support
and within the constraints of the bipartisan budget, and now we can't
get them passed. Why is that a problem? Because when you have the
world's largest and most complex entity that has ever existed that
can't figure out how much money it is going to spend or commit on more
than about a 12-month cycle--and sometimes only a few months--how on
Earth can you save money and make long-term investments?
We were in a committee hearing yesterday where we heard that right
now it takes an average of 15 years from the concept of a new satellite
to the time we are launching it into space. How on Earth can we make
those long-term investments when we can't even be clear on what we are
going to be spending money on but for every 12 months? This is a threat
to our national security. This is a threat to our economic security.
This is a threat to the security of every man and woman in the United
States because they can't rely on the government to provide businesses
or individuals with any kind of certainty whatsoever.
It is tough to make budget decisions, but they need to be made. I
know a little bit about this because I was speaker of the house in
North Carolina in 2011. We had a budget crisis. We had a $2.5 billion
debt and 6 months to solve it. Unlike the Federal Government, where you
can run up a deficit every year--it is now almost $20 trillion--most
States, with the exception of maybe one or two, have a constitutional
obligation to balance the budget, so we did it.
What was the result of providing that long-term certainty? Living
within our means and actually having a transparent and decisive budget
process. We had one of the greatest economic turnarounds in any State
in the Nation in the last 5 years.
Being decisive and making the tough decisions accrues a benefit to
the business community, accrues a benefit to every man and woman who
lives in the United States, and it actually settles the global economic
condition more than most people know.
At the end of the day, let's start doing our job. Let's not just
create a budget like we did, a bipartisan budget, set it on the shelf,
and then pass several appropriations bills and kill them on the floor.
That is what is going on here, and I think my freshmen colleagues think
it is time--there are a lot of people who put posters up here saying
``Do your job,'' but they are failing to do their jobs by preventing us
from doing one of the most important things we can do--make the tough,
long-term fiscal decisions that are necessary for this great Nation.
I say to Senator Perdue, thank you for allowing me to speak.
I thank Senator Perdue for bringing up this very important subject.
We need to stay in front of this and recognize that doing our job is
tackling this budget crisis, tackling the uncertainty that we, by
failing to do our jobs, are placing on every hard-working American and
business in this country.
With that, I yield the floor.
Mr. PERDUE. I say to Senator Tillis, thank you for coming to the
floor and talking about this issue. With your experience in State
government in North Carolina, you know that 44 States have a balanced
budget law. Guess what States don't have a financial situation, a
financial problem.
I thank the Senator for speaking.
I note that my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, is on the
floor.
He has been a warrior on this budget before when he was in the House
and now in the Senate for the last 2 years. I welcome his comments to
speak about this as well.
Senator Lankford.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, this is a long-term issue. This is not
something new. I am amazed at the number of times I run into people in
Oklahoma who say: Why can't we seem to get the budget done now? What
has happened?
I have said: Let's back up for just a second. Since 1974 we have done
a budget and done it correctly four times total. The Congressional
Budget Act was created right after Watergate, in 1974, to try to create
this more transparent process. What they created was a process so
incredibly difficult to work with that it has worked four times since
1974. We have only had 2 years since 1974 when we haven't had a single
CR. That is a continuing resolution. This body just passed another
continuing resolution, meaning the appropriations process won't be done
on time again this year. That was settled today.
The issues we face with budgeting are not new. It has been 20 years
since we had no CR at all. This constant issue of putting the big
budget issues off and trying to figure out how we are going to navigate
through the Senate procedures and get the budget done has to stop. At
some point we have to have a determination to say that we can't just
keep saying: Next year this will improve; next year this will improve.
We are not going to get a better product until we get a better
process. We have a very bad process right now, and we need to admit it
is a bad process.
What I am proud of is that there are multiple Members of this body--
from the leadership of the Budget Committee through the freshmen who
are brandnew Senators--who are all focused on the same thing. Let's
solve how we do budgeting and actually get to a better product by
improving the process. What do we have? We have almost $20 trillion in
debt, and everyone
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argues about what we are going to do on a few things to try to do
management, but no one is really talking about how we actually get us
back to balance and paying off the debt.
It is a common conversation I have with people in Oklahoma.
This is a conversation where people say: Can we ever get this
resolved? Is it too late?
On the whole, Americans believe nothing will get better in
Washington, DC, dealing with the budget, and their question is this:
When and how does it get better? I wish I could give them a lot of hope
on that.
What I typically tell people is this: Let's just do a ``for
instance.'' Right now, let's take the balanced budget piece that we had
and that we put out earlier this year. It actually took 10 years and
chipped away at the deficit. In 10 years we chipped away at it and got
back to a balance where we had no deficit that year. It was balanced.
Then let's say the next year we actually had a $50 billion surplus. It
would be a pretty good surplus. So we chip away and in 10 years get to
balance. The next year we have a $50 billion surplus.
Do you know how long it would take us to pay off our debt if we had a
$50 billion surplus? If we had a $50 billion surplus every year for 460
years in a row, we would pay off our debt--460 years in a row of $50
billion surpluses and we can get on top of this. Everyone says that is
unreasonable. I would say it is certainly unreasonable if we don't
change the way we do our process. It just continues to get worse.
There are some basic things we can do. We can do budgeting every 2
years. People may say: Well, how does that solve anything? Well, that
is predictability and planning. It creates greater oversight.
Right now we do this every single year. In the speed of what has to
be done, how it has to be done, there is very little oversight on our
spending. We could actually put all the areas we have in spending--all
accountable, every year.
Right now there is about 25 percent to 30 percent of our budget with
the appropriations process that we actually focus on every year. The
rest of it is on autopilot, and it is never touched.
Until we get everything in front of everybody every year to be able
to look at it for oversight, we are not going to solve the big issues.
We have to deal with what are called budget gimmicks.
I have been at war with a budget gimmick called CHIMPS. It is my
favorite of the gimmicks. There are a lot of them out there. It stands
for ``changes in mandatory programs,'' or CHIMPS. The changes in
mandatory programs is a budget gimmick out there that says we were
planning to spend this much--when we really weren't, but on paper it
said we were--and then instead we said: No, we are not going to spend
that much this year so we will spend it on something else.
But guess what. The next year they come back to the exact same
dollars again and say: No, we are planning this year to do it, but we
are really not, and so we will to spend it on something else.
It just adds debt every year. We will have billions of dollars of
CHIMPS built into our budget and claim that the deficit is even lower
than it is. It is not. It is just this budget gimmick, and in real
dollars it makes it even bigger. We have to deal with those budget
gimmicks in there and be able to take that away so that when the
appropriations process is done you get real numbers. The hardest thing
to get in DC is the real number. So you have to deal with all these
gimmicks out there to remove those. You get a longer time period to be
able to plan and create some certainty, but one of the key things we
have to have is an actual deadline. This town doesn't function on
anything other than deadlines and pressure points. When it is time that
it actually has to be resolved, we get it resolved. But if we don't
have to resolve it right now, this town just says: Tomorrow. We will
get it done next week. We will get it done next session.
The focus is how do we actually create those pressure points? How
about a simple idea that says that if we don't get the budget done on
time--the appropriations bills done on time--then it goes to an
automatic CR so we don't have a government shutdown, because government
shutdowns just waste money on the whole? It automatically kicks in to
last year's budget amount. But here is what changes. All of the Members
of Congress, our budget, our staff for how we function, our operating
expenses, all of our committees, and the Executive Office of the White
House--that is the three groups. From both the House and the Senate and
the White House, all of our budgets drop immediately. Let's say 4
percent, 5 percent, 6 percent the first day and then it does that for
30 days. Then, if you still don't have the appropriations process, it
cuts again another big percentage. It puts the pressure where the
pressure needs to be. It is not the fault of the agencies or the
American people that the job wasn't done. It lies squarely in the
House, the Senate, the White House, and our negotiations for not
getting it done on time.
It is a simple mechanism to say: If the task has not been done, put
the pressure where the pressure needs to be--the cuts in the House, the
Senate, and on the White House. Push all of us to the table and get it
resolved.
The goal is to do appropriations in a transparent process so the
American people can see how their money is being spent and to be able
to do it wisely and to be able to create a process where you can
actually solve the problem.
Currently, we don't have a process that solves the problem. This
magically doesn't balance the budget. It still takes hard decisions,
but it at least creates a format where we could solve the problem.
Right now, we don't even have that.
In step one, like an AA group, let's at least admit there is a
problem. There is a problem.
In step two, let's get to work on fixing it and actually resolve the
process. Then let's actually get to work balancing this and paying off
our debt.
I appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk about this issue.
Mr. PERDUE. I say thank you to Senator Lankford.
I think my colleagues can see the passion and history he has had here
and a lot of great thoughts.
I note that the chairman of our Budget Committee in the Senate,
Senator Mike Enzi from Wyoming, is here on the floor. I am going to
turn it over to him and ask him to give us his comments. He has been
fighting this for years. As chairman of the Budget Committee last year,
he managed to get a budget out of our committee that actually took over
$7 trillion out of the President's budget at that point in time.
I say to Senator Enzi, thank you so much for joining us.
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for his comments. I
don't get invited many places to speak because I talk about what the
Senator has been talking about. It depresses people, but it is about
time we got depressed over the budget and made some changes. I
appreciate everybody on the committee and those who are not on the
committee who have been working to solve this problem. I know that most
of you ran on getting a balanced budget, getting to a balanced budget,
balancing it now if we could.
I get real frustrated because I know we are $20 trillion in debt and
heading to $29 trillion. Then I hear people say: Yes, but we cut the
deficit in half.
That is not the debt.
I don't like the word ``deficit.'' I call it overspending. That is
what we are doing.
We just got the report that we are going to be $590 billion overspent
this year. As Senator Lankford pointed out, 70 percent of the budget is
on autopilot. So that 30 percent that we get to make a decision on is
$1,070 billion.
We have to worry a little bit because interest rates might go up. But
on $20 trillion, if it is 1 percent, that is $200 billion a year that
we are throwing into a rat hole. But if that goes to 5 percent, which
is the norm for the Federal Government, we are out $1,000 billion a
year in interest.
Let's see. We get to make decisions on a $1,070 billion and $1,000
billion of that would go to interest. We better solve this pretty
quick. I think we could be at 5 percent within 3 years. The defense is
over $500 billion, and that is not enough.
We definitely have a problem, as has been pointed out by the chart.
In the 40 years since the Congressional Budget Act was passed, we have
only completed all 13 bills four times. We have been holding hearings
in the Budget
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Committee. This group of people have been holding other meetings to see
how it is done in the private sector, how it is done by other
countries, and how it is done by the States. Nobody does it like the
Federal Government.
When I was trying to figure out first budgets, I found out the format
we use is not the same as the one the Appropriations Committee uses and
definitely not the same format the President uses. Then I found out
that is intentional. That is so you cannot follow the dollars.
But there are a lot of problems besides that in following the
dollars. For instance, we have 120 housing programs administered by 20
different agencies. That is not seven per agency or one having more
than the others. That means that the 120 programs are administered by
all 20 of the agencies. Nobody is in charge. There is no goal set. We
don't know if they completed what they set out to do, and there is no
way to make a correction if they did.
I pointed out a lot of times how far behind we are on actually
approving the things that we do. We don't ever go back and look at the
old stuff. We are paying for a program from 1983 that has expired,
another one from 1987, and a whole bunch of them from before 2006. We
have to get off this auto pilot and get to a new format.
I congratulate this group and particularly Senator Perdue. The first
time we had a Budget Committee meeting I remember introducing him, and
I said: Senator Perdue knows how to balance a budget. He has been
working in the private sector.
He said: No, in the private sector you have to show a little bit of a
profit.
Well, we are going to have to show a little bit of a profit around
here if we are ever going to get rid of the debt. We better do that or
our kids are really going to suffer.
In fact, in the private sector we are having some pension problems,
but we have been making the private sector put money away for the
pensions, invest the money so they would be able to meet the promise
that they made.
The Federal Government doesn't do that. We just take it out of this
budget.
If we spend $1,000 billion on interest and there is only $1,070
billion, what do you think is going to happen to Federal employees who
are expecting retirement? That could be in worse shape than the
multiemployer plans.
We are going to have to come up with some solutions, and I appreciate
this approach where we are looking at what the private sector does,
what the States do, and what other countries do--and they have had
success.
It is a little difficult because it causes some reorganization in
what we are doing. Maybe we can wind up with one or five housing
programs, and they would all be under one agency so we could have
goals.
We are going to have a portfolio method of budgeting so that we know
what we are trying to do and whether we get it done. There are already
some laws on the books that say that we do that, but we don't.
I congratulate you for doing this. I am so pleased that we have
Senator Perdue heading up this effort because, as I mentioned, he has
saved some businesses before. They took his advice and reorganized. I
think a lot of us have looked at this and said it could be done. It is
going to be difficult because we don't even go back and look at old
programs--let alone reorganize.
I hope people will pay attention to this and see if they have some
other ideas to throw in. But listen carefully to what is being said
here today because this has to be fixed.
I was hoping we could fix it before the elections because we were
getting cooperation from the other side of the aisle and a lot of good
suggestions. One of the reasons we were able to participate in a very
bipartisan way, I think, is because none of us knew who was going to be
in the majority in the Senate, nor did we know who the President was
going to be. I think that made all of us a lot more reasonable. I hope
after the elections we can still be reasonable and do something that
will save this country.
I thank the Chair.
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank the chairman for his comments, but
more importantly I thank him for his heart in terms of running the
Budget Committee and leading us into this observation and recognition.
As this chart says, we have a dysfunctional system, and we don't have
an alternative but to find a better plan.
With that, I note my good friend and esteemed colleague from
Tennessee Senator Corker is here. He is chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, but more importantly he lets me sit next to him on
the Budget Committee.
I want to say this about the Foreign Relations Committee. It is a
very bipartisan committee. Under Bill Clinton, just 16 years ago, we
spent about $20 billion on the State Department and USAID. Currently,
we are spending about $54 billion. That is just one department. Those
are constant dollars to show you how government has sort of exploded in
the past 16 years--both under Republican leadership and under
Democratic leadership.
I am so glad Senator Corker is here, and I look forward to his
comments.
Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I am thrilled to be here. I thank the
Senator for his leadership on this issue. I also thank Senator Enzi for
the way he conducts committee business, as the Senator just mentioned.
We are on a committee where basically the way it is set up, it binds
both his arms and his legs behind his back, meaning that just the
process we have in place makes it impossible for us to deal with our
country's fiscal issues. With the Senator from Georgia joining the
committee, having been a person who has dealt with businesses
throughout the world, and quickly seeing these frailties that Chairman
Enzi has to deal with, the Senator has thrown himself into trying to
deal with those issues, and I admire him for it.
I think the Senator from Georgia and I both know this is going to
take a while because, in essence, we are talking about a total reorder.
We really don't have a budget process. To even call what we do a
budget, for most human beings' understanding of what a budget is, is
obviously not realistic. So I thank my colleague for that.
I am an advocate for what Senator Perdue and Senator Enzi are trying
to do. We have to, in essence, get a process in place that actually
works. That is impossible with the process we have today, and today is
the perfect example of that, right? We passed a CR through December 9,
and, by the way, we make no policy changes.
Now, think about an entity the size of our Federal Government, where
we spend $4 trillion of the American people's money each year, and yet
we don't do the authorization process which lays out policies. If you
can imagine IBM or Apple or Google or any company like that just
continuing each year to do things exactly the same way and thinking
there is going to be a different result, that is not possible.
Worse than that, in spending the $4 trillion we spend each year, we
only have a budget over $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion, and the rest is
on autopilot. It is the part that is on autopilot that is the greatest
threat to our country's national security.
So I actually think we need to do two things at once. One is we need
to continue working through the processes that Senator Perdue and
Senator Enzi are working on. It will take a while to get that done. We
are going to have a total reordering of how we do business. That
affects Senate careers and staff, and we understand how difficult that
is. We are dealing with human beings. We are dealing with people who
have an investment in what they have been doing for years, and it is
going to take us a while to overcome the culture that has been
established here.
Simultaneously, as my good friend Senator Gregg from New Hampshire
had laid out, we also need to begin putting in place policy changes
that begin saving our Nation.
One of the problems with the budget process is, we pass a budget that
makes assumptions, but those assumptions never become reality. So we
say the budget balances over 10 years, but we never do the tough things
it takes for those policies to actually be put in place. So a forcing
mechanism--I know several thoughts have been put forth--to force us to
do that, to force us to do that and to keep government open and
functioning is something that has to occur.
I am proudly a part of this effort as a wingman. I appreciate all the
meetings that are taking place. I hope we are going to get to a result.
I agree with Senator Enzi that it would have
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been good to have done it when we didn't know who the President was
going to be or who was going to be in the majority. That is not going
to happen, but things like this that matter, that save our Nation, take
years to happen.
Senator Perdue is a young Senator here by tenure. These things take a
long time. I look forward to working with him to ensure we get the
right outcome to save our Nation and to keep us from this moral
depravity that is taking place where, in essence, every day that goes
by, we are involved in generational theft because we are not doing
this. We are really laying a huge burden on future generations.
I yield the floor, and I thank my colleague for his effort.
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank Senator Corker very much.
Moral depravity is so prevalent here, and it is no more present and
no more important than in the area of funding our military.
I notice Senator Ernst from Iowa is here, and I appreciate her
leadership as a fellow freshman in the Senate, but let me highlight one
thing very quickly. Senator Corker just mentioned that about one-third,
30 percent of what we spend--35 percent over the last 8 years--is
borrowed, and it is projected that over the next 10 years about 35
percent will be borrowed. About 30 percent of what we spend is
discretionary. That means every discretionary dollar we spend as a
Federal Government is borrowed. Let me say that again. Every dollar we
spend in our discretionary budget is borrowed. That means our military,
our Veterans' Administration, our military construction, our domestic
programs, all the things we are talking about are borrowed. That means
we have to get serious.
We have disinvested in our military because of this budget crisis,
and it is just another reason to get at this budget process.
I can't tell Senator Ernst how much I appreciate her being here, and
I look forward to her comments.
Mrs. ERNST. Mr. President, I would like to thank my colleague from
Georgia for spearheading this very important effort. We have heard
discussions about getting back to regular order. We have heard
discussions about the difference between the debt and the deficit and
where do we go as America. So I am glad my colleague is investing his
time in this effort, and we look forward to walking through that
process.
It is good to see so many of us here today, engaged and very active
in this effort, and so I would like to thank all my colleagues. I know
a number have already spoken.
Truly, our Nation faces some very serious challenges and challenging
budgetary times and all of that coming at us in the future. If we
aren't honest about where we are right now and where we are headed in
the future and fix it, our children and grandchildren are going to be
handed a very heavy burden.
We are already over $19.5 trillion in debt and a level that is
growing rapidly every single day. I am from Iowa, and back home in Iowa
we generally don't talk about things in trillions of dollars or even in
billions of dollars. So when you break it down, that debt load
represents about $60,000 per person in this great country. That is
quite a number, and one that all of us should be concerned about.
The American people are concerned, and they are frustrated with
Washington for a reason. Washington doesn't seem to be serious about
stopping the reckless spending habits this town has. That is why I
think this proposal is a very interesting one and one that could
provide opportunity as we move into the future.
As we stop and look at the reckless spending habits--and most
Americans agree we have reckless spending habits here in Washington,
DC. I tend to agree with those Americans. I agree. Since coming to the
Senate last year, I have worked to cut down wasteful and duplicative
spending. Let me give just one example of taxpayer money that has been
wasted.
Earlier this year, I introduced a bill that would limit the perks
that wealthy former Presidents receive. In 2015, taxpayers spent $2.4
million on travel, office space, communications, personnel, and other
expenses for past Presidents--I might add, wealthy past Presidents. At
a time when they receive well-compensated book deals, speaking
engagements, and all kinds of activities, hard-working Americans
shouldn't foot those bills, and they shouldn't be expected to.
We passed that bill in the Senate and in the House with bipartisan
work on that effort. Unfortunately, President Obama decided to veto it.
While we are still working on a path forward, it leaves me just as
frustrated as all the other Iowans who know we can't continue spending
money we don't have on things that aren't necessary.
Washington can't even do the basic business of balancing our own
budget. Plain and simple, we should. Families in Iowa do it every day,
and they expect us in Washington, DC, to do the same. After all, it is
their tax dollars that are being spent, and it deserves to be spent
wisely. Unfortunately, it might just take a complete overhaul of
Washington's ways to help us solve this problem.
Again, I thank my colleagues for joining us in this effort. While
some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have certainly
made it very difficult, if not impossible, to conduct business in any
sort of regular manner, the reality is excess spending in this town
seems too often to be bipartisan.
I know my colleague from Georgia mentioned earlier our debt has
ballooned under both Republican and Democratic administrations. We are
far too often unable to take a good hard look at the money that is
being spent because we often will get a 1,900-page bill at the last
minute, and we are given the choice of either taking it or leaving it.
Normally, that is for funding most of our government. That kind of
practice doesn't show us a good way forward. It forces us to make
difficult choices about how we are spending taxpayer money, and it
certainly doesn't give us the opportunity to cut wasteful spending. We
have to do better by our taxpayers.
I thank my friend from Georgia and my other colleagues joining us
today to help us start thinking about how we solve this crisis and how
we can do it in a creative way. I again thank Senator Perdue for
leading this effort, being at the tip of the spear, and hopefully we
are moving toward a smarter way of doing business in Washington. If we
don't do better, I am afraid the future of this great country will be a
lot dimmer.
I thank the Senator and I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank Senator Ernst. I enjoy her
leadership in the Senate.
With that, I notice Senator Rounds of South Dakota is here. He was a
Governor who dealt with this budget issue in an executive and
legislative body in South Dakota, and I am looking forward to his
comments. I thank him for being here.
Mr. ROUNDS. Mr. President, first, I want to start by thanking my
colleagues here today, particularly Chairman Enzi, who leads the Budget
Committee, as well as Senator Perdue for not only being the only
freshman who serves on the Budget Committee but for leading us on the
floor in the discussion of this very important topic of our Federal
broken budget system.
Once again, today, Congress has just met our deadline to fund the
government past the end of the fiscal year. While many of us in the
Chamber, as well as the American people, are rightly frustrated by this
requirement for a last-minute reprieve, it is a reminder of our broken
Federal budget process and why we can no longer afford to continue down
this dangerous path.
I spent a great deal of time holding different meetings across South
Dakota during August, meeting with folks all over the State. During
that time, our soaring national debt and runaway spending has continued
to be a concern to me. What I relayed to them about our country's
fiscal future and what I would relay to you now is that it is just not
very pretty.
I shared with them a report from the Congressional Budget Office,
which, in January of this year, released an indepth analysis of our
debt and our deficit. It found that, by 2026, annual deficits will
double the share of GDP to 4.9 percent--more than tripling in dollar
terms to $1.37 trillion, or $1,370 billion, as the chairman of the
Budget Committee likes to put it.
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It also found that in 2026, just 10 short years from now, 99 percent
of revenue that comes into the Federal Government--income taxes, both
personal and corporate, all the gas taxes, all the fees--will go back
out in mandatory payments and net interest spending, leaving no room to
pay for roads, bridges, health care, our Armed Forces, and other vital
needs within our Nation. That 99 percent number, as they projected in
10 years, is a crisis. I would suggest to my colleagues that crisis is
not in 10 years. That crisis is now.
Earlier, we heard Senator Corker explain very, very eloquently the
fact that it takes time to move things here. I suggest that time is of
the essence, and we no longer have a 10-year cycle in which to make
these changes. We have to begin the process of fixing this broken
system, and we need to begin now.
In 2026, our country turns 250 years old. Wouldn't it be a marvelous
goal if, by that time, we not only had this process fixed, but it was
actually working once again?
The CBO report concluded that the driver for this rising debt is
largely from growing mandatory payments, as we heard our colleagues
say. That is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, as well as
interest on our debt. Yet here in the Senate, when we work through the
appropriations process to determine the best way to spend Americans'
hard-earned money, we don't even vote on mandatory payments, which are
mandatory payments on mandatory programs. Today, those mandatory
payments account for nearly three-quarters of all Federal spending.
That means the continuing resolution we just did is based upon about 28
percent of the total amount we will spend next year. It is simply not
acceptable that we continue to look at and try to balance yearly
deficits of $500-plus billion every single year when we only look at 28
percent of the total spending that goes on.
Let me suggest this. In order to fix this, as my colleagues have said
today, we have to begin a process with expectations that the process
actually works once again and that there are timelines established well
in advance of the end of the fiscal year. But even more than that, any
process we use in the future also has to bring in accountability,
authorization, and appropriations together. Why is it that when we talk
about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--well, we just don't talk
about it. There is no place in which we can actually sit down in a
committee assigned specifically for Social Security, a committee
assigned specifically for Medicare, or one for Medicaid. Why is it
that, in States like South Dakota, where we have the South Dakota
Retirement System--a retirement system which is one of the best funded
and best run in the entire United States, and it has been there since
the 1970s--it gets looked at every single year. Yet, as to Social
Security, which is such a huge and important part of a lot of people's
lives in the United States, we are afraid to touch. It is not a matter
of cutting it. It is a matter of managing and making it more efficient
and delivering the services and actually keeping it up to date--
revenues and expenses--so that the people a generation from now can
count on it being there.
It is irresponsible for us to sit back here and to say that we are
going to balance our budgets this year and make a commitment without
looking at all of the programs that are out there because we simply
can't balance a budget. We can't take care of those programs--Social
Security, Medicare, or Medicaid--unless we actively participate in
managing them and in making good decisions. Again, the buy-in from the
public is that what we are trying to do is to make it better for them
long term and that we have their best interests at heart.
With that, I say thank you. I think this is a critically important
thing for all of us. Last year, we did an omnibus bill at the end of
the year, and a group of us got together and said no more. In our
freshmen bear den, as we call it, we said: It is time we have a meeting
with our leadership. I cannot tell you how pleased I was with the
reception that we received from our leadership, who said: Look, we
agree. You guys work together and put this through. I give Senator
Perdue huge accolades for actually doing the hard work to get this
done. This is important to our country, and this is one way in which we
can begin to build credibility once again with the citizens of our
Nation. I thank the Senator for the work he is doing, and I certainly
look forward to working with our colleagues to fix a broken budget
system--not only in the Senate but in Congress--and to get on with
actually sending back to the American people on a regular basis a
budget they believe in and they can count on.
With that, I yield the floor.
Mr. PERDUE. I thank Senator Rounds for his comments. I appreciate his
leadership as an ex-Governor in this body.
I note that Senator Sullivan from Alaska is here, and he has been
very outspoken about this since he got here last year--another freshman
Member. I look forward to Senator Sullivan's comments.
Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Perdue for his
leadership on this important colloquy.
As some of us have seen down here, as Senator Rounds mentioned, there
are a lot of Members of the Senate who are very concerned. But what we
are seeing here are a lot of the new Members--12 new Republican
freshmen. It is good to see the Presiding Officer, who is one of them.
We are very concerned about this. We were concerned because a lot of us
ran for office--a lot of us for the first time--because we saw what was
going on with this budget process. With all due respect to my
colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they didn't even attempt to
pass a budget for a number of years. They didn't even try.
Think about that. You are back home, in a State government such as
Senator Rounds was talking about or in a household or a business, and
you are not even going to try to pass a budget. That was what was going
on in the Senate--remarkable. So what we are trying to do is to fix
that.
The first thing we did--and Senator Enzi was on the floor a little
bit ago--is we came here and we passed a budget. It hadn't happened in
years. We passed a budget resolution. That was an important start. Then
we started to pass appropriations bills. As a matter of fact, this
year, to the majority leader's credit, we started working on
appropriations bills at an earlier time than at any time in decades. We
got 12 appropriations bills passed out of the Appropriations Committee.
Then what happened? We tried to start bringing them to the floor to
vote on them, to move them. The vast majority of those bills--all of
which were very bipartisan--were filibustered by the minority leader of
the Senate.
Again, I am new here. I still don't understand why they did that. A
lot of us who came down to the floor were really upset when the
minority leader of the Senate filibustered the Defense appropriations
bill--the bill that funds our troops--six times in the last year and a
half--six times. That is a disgrace, in my view.
So what are we doing here? More delay. More delay. We just got
through a continuing resolution, which is not how to run the
government, and they were looking at opportunities for more delay. For
example, at the very end of this discussion, there was the idea of
maybe adding additional funds for Flint, MI. Well, nobody cares about
clean water as much as I do. My State has huge challenges with
communities that not just have aging infrastructure, like Flint, MI,
but no infrastructure. I have over 30 communities in the great State of
Alaska that don't have clean water and sewer and don't have flush
toilets--Americans--if you can believe that. So I certainly wanted to
focus on that. That is what we did in the regular order through the EPW
Committee with the WRDA bill--for Flint, MI, the State of Alaska, and
other communities that have challenges with clean water. We are going
to address those through the regular order.
That is what Senator Perdue is leading on right now in the Senate--
the regular order and getting back to a budget process that can handle
the enormous challenges that we have heard about on the floor here--$20
trillion in debt and exploding deficit. That is what we need to do, and
I commend Senator Perdue for his leadership. What he did is something
that takes a lot of courage here--a whiteboard approach. We just need
to look at everything anew. With his leadership and his
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experience, a number of us lead by Senator Perdue have been working on
this for months. This is what we need to do to finally get ahold of
these enormous budget challenges.
I encourage all of my colleagues--Republicans and Democrats--to join
in this process, to bring their ideas to fix what is clearly, clearly a
broken process that is not helping our Nation, that is driving up the
deficit, that is saddling the next generation with trillions of dollars
of debt. We have the beginning of a way to start fixing this.
Again, I thank Senator Perdue and Senator Daines for their hard work
on this. I am certainly going to be part of their important efforts as
we look to put our country on a fiscal path of sustainable economic
growth and budgets, which we are not on right now.
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, Senator Sullivan is a warrior. I am glad
to be here with him. It gives me hope that we are going to persevere
and get this done.
Now to help us close this out, we have our good friend from Montana,
Senator Daines, who has real world experience--both as a consultant but
also starting and running a high-tech company. He understands what
profit is about, but, more importantly, he understands what meeting
needs is about. I am so glad that he can help us close this out. I have
a few remaining comments when he finishes, but I thank Senator Daines
for being here.
Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, I thank Senator Perdue for his leadership.
What an honor it is to be down here on the Senate floor surrounded by
freshmen--the freshmen Republican class. We have the Presiding Officer,
Freshman Cory Gardner from Colorado; Lt. Col. Dan Sullivan, U.S.
Marines, from Alaska; and David Perdue, who was the CEO of a company
before he came to the Senate. We have LTC Joni Ernst from Iowa. I am
proud to serve with Joni here and thankful for her service to the
country, both in the military and now in the Senate. There are others.
Mike Rounds is a former Governor from South Dakota who had to balance
his budget there or he would lose his job.
As Senator Perdue mentioned, when I first came to Washington, I did
come equipped with a skill that was familiar to Montanans, like hunting
and fishing are, and that is how to balance a budget. Before I came
here, I spent 28 years in the private sector, 13 years with Proctor &
Gamble and then 12 years with a startup company, and in between that, 3
years in our family construction business. I know what it takes to make
a payroll. I know what it takes to make a family's household budget
work. Yet balancing the budget is a skill this body has not embraced
for nearly 20 years. As Senator Perdue mentioned, four times out of 42
years has this process worked. That is broken.
Think about this. It is September 28. On Saturday, it is October 1,
the beginning of the next fiscal year of the U.S. Federal Government,
on which we will spend about $4 trillion this next fiscal year. We
begin the next fiscal year in 2 days without a budget.
We were all here last year at this same point in time--the last week
of the fiscal year, the last week of September--and we moved into this
fiscal year without a budget. It is no wonder that we are $20 trillion
in debt when you don't have a budget.
There is an old saying in business: If you aim at something, you will
hit it. We do not have a budget here, and that has created $20 trillion
in debt.
When the Congressional Budget Office issued its August 2016 report
last month, it shared that this year's projected budget deficit now has
increased from an already staggering $439 billion in a January report.
They have raised it now to $590 billion--an increase of 34 percent.
If I were running a business, I could not get away with this. I would
be out of business. Serving on a board of a publicly traded company, we
would be firing the CEO and we would be firing the board with results
like this.
Here is something to think about. Deficit spending is nothing short
of age discrimination because this excessive spending is at the cost of
our children and grandchildren. That is what we are passing down. We
are racking up the credit card debt, figuratively speaking, and passing
it on to our kids. The American people are asking themselves: Why
aren't the people they have elected able to ensure the future for our
children? How can balancing the budget be so difficult?
Being here for 2 years in the Senate, I have come to realize that the
biggest hurdles to balancing the budget are the very rules, the very
process that guides this institution. They are broken. Unless we fix
the process with the leadership of Senator Perdue, who is getting out
in front of this issue--unless we fix that--we will continue to repeat
the growing deficits because this process is yielding the results it
was designed to deliver. It is unacceptable. It must change.
We are now approaching $20 trillion, which is 105 percent of GDP. The
first bill I introduced when I came to Congress--in fact, I walked down
to the Chamber, laid the bill on the desk of the clerk--was called the
Balanced Budget Accountability Act. It said simply this: If Members
don't balance the budget, they shouldn't get paid.
Let's bring some real-world accountability to this institution. Let's
put the pain on the Members of Congress instead of the American people.
I thought perhaps if our pay was on the line, it would force us to be
held accountable to not only balance the budget but get on track to
long-term responsible spending.
If we do nothing, we know what will happen. We will be right back
here--mark it on your calendars--the last week of September, and we
will be here debating a CR, pushing it into December with some big
omnibus vote. It will happen again, guaranteed, unless we change this
process and change the people who serve in this institution. We need
action, we need accountability, and we need it now.
In conclusion, I will say this. I have one distinction, perhaps; that
is, I am the only chemical engineer who serves in the U.S. House or the
U.S. Senate. When you are trained as an engineer, you are trained to
take a look at a problem and identify a solution. We have a solution
with Senator Perdue's leadership. You see, the freshmen Members of the
Republican class of 2014 came here not to accept the status quo but to
reject it and to change the way this country operates; truly, to save
the future of our kids and our grandkids.
I look forward to working with my colleagues to reform the budget
process. Let's get this country back on the right track.
I say to Senator Perdue, it is an honor to serve with you. Thanks for
getting in front of this very important issue.
Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I say thank you to Senator Daines. His
leadership means the world here. With that, I have hope we are going to
get there.
In light of the time and the hour and the other business that is
before this Senate body tonight, I will abridge my closing comments. I
want to say this. There is a four-letter word missing in Washington
today--H-O-P-E. People sent this class, 12 members of the Republican
caucus--that is almost 25 percent of our caucus--are freshmen this
year. We ran on this topic, as you heard several Members say, but we
had the chairman of the Budget Committee here. We had the chairman of
Foreign Relations here.
These people are very concerned about this topic. We are not just
complaining about the status quo. Again, we are not complaining about
the other side. There are no innocent parties when it comes to this
debt crisis. If you look at the last 75, 80 years, this country has
lived and benefited from the greatest economic boom in the history of
mankind. Yet here we are today, $20 trillion of debt, over $100
trillion of future commitments already made by this Federal Government.
It is basically $1 million for every family in America.
We don't need to talk about the need anymore. What we need to talk
about is what do we do. That is what we came up here for. We need to
focus on results. This is what we are proposing. We put it in language
now. We are moving to put it into a bill on the floor. We have
Democratic input.
Again, let me say this. The goal is not to solve the debt crisis.
That is the need. The goal in this process is to create a politically
neutral platform where both sides--whether they are in the majority or
the minority--can
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make their points during a budget process, move to an appropriations
process, and get the government funded every year without all this
drama. That is what the people of America want.
It will protect our military. It will protect our national security.
It will let us take care of the domestic needs we need, and it will let
us invest in our infrastructure to get this economy going again.
Without this exercise, we will not start down the path that may take 30
or 40 years to bring this debt under control. It is that large.
Let me emphasize one more thing. If this debt is not addressed soon,
the rising interest rates that we all know are coming--we are living in
a false world today of zero interest rates. If we just get back to our
30-year average of about 5 percent, we will be paying $1 trillion in
interest. That is not possible. It simply is not workable. All things
come into the conversation.
This is what is going to happen. We are going to start debating this
on the floor, hopefully soon. It may run into next year. It may go to
the following year. My commitment to my people at home is, we are not
going to give up on this fight until we get something done about this.
We proposed a couple of things.
Three guiding principles were developed by a small group of people,
and it has been welcomed by a growing number of people in this body.
No. 1, the budget needs to be a law. No. 2, everything we spend--all $4
trillion of it--needs to go into the budget. They need to be debated
and covered in the budget by both sides. No. 3, if we don't fund the
government by the end of the fiscal year, there has to be serious
consequences.
You heard one proposal tonight by Senator Lankford. There may be
others, but we are going to put on the Senate and the House, for that
matter, real consequences if we don't get the Federal Government budget
done. Again, this is an exercise that we hope will be bipartisan. We
want no advantage in this. We want a process that doesn't advantage
either party. It gives both equal standing in the budget process,
leading to a reasonable and effective funding of the Federal
Government. A politically neutral platform, that is our goal.
I will close with this. If not now, when? If not us, who? I thank the
forbearance of the Presiding Officer tonight. Thank you for allowing us
to do this.
I yield back my time. I see we have other speakers on the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The Senator from New Mexico.
(The remarks of Mr. Heinrich and Ms. Collins pertaining to the
introduction of S. 3458 are printed in today's Record under
``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
____________________