[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 176 (Wednesday, December 7, 2016)]
[House]
[Pages H7392-H7395]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     UNMANAGEABLE CABINET AGENCIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaHood). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arkansas (Mr. Hill) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the 
people's House this evening.
  Last night, I talked about my initial reflections on having been a 
freshman Congressman spending my first term in the United States House 
of Representatives. Last evening, I talked at length about the growth 
of the administrative state, the expansion of executive power, to the 
detriment of the first branch, the legislative branch. I traced those 
changes from my previous service on Capitol Hill as a young man in the 
Senate staff of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, and then, most 
recently, working for President Bush 41 during his 4 years in the 
Presidency.
  Tonight I want to turn and continue that discussion with our American 
people, Mr. Speaker, and talk about how the cabinet agencies, since I 
worked for President Bush, worked in cabinet affairs, coordinated 
economic policy during the last 2 years of his Presidency from the 
White House staff. I want to talk tonight about those cabinet agencies 
and how, in my view, they have become essentially unmanageable.
  You can see the critical need for spending and personnel reform in 
many of our departments. In fact, one may assume that change is desired 
by both the legislative and executive branches, yet reform flounders, 
whether it was at the Pentagon under Secretary Rumsfeld during Bush 43 
or the Veterans Affairs Department today under the current 
administration.
  I have watched the VA for the past 2 years. Secretary McDonald's 
plans changed, laws are changed, yet malfeasance, incompetence, and 
worse persist.
  On just this Monday, Mr. Speaker, The Washington Post published a 
shocking report that Pentagon officials buried evidence of $125 billion 
in bureaucratic waste during 2015. For that horrific activity, they 
were the recipient of this month's Golden Fleece Award by my office.
  To make it worse, they even made the effort, according to The 
Washington Post, of hiding this effort, knowing that it would be 
impetus for the Congress to come together and cut their budget. 
Clearly, that is a problem with an unmanageable cabinet agency.
  I have seen this firsthand right in Little Rock, my hometown, where 
the center of the Air Force's C-130 program is, for America's airlift, 
where the Department of the Air Force officials planned for years to 
transfer aircraft from Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi to Little 
Rock Air Force Base, basing it as a critical, cost-saving initiative, 
along with other force structure changes of some $922 million across 
future years of their 5-year plan.
  Yet, Congress' meddling prevented this commonsense Air Force plan 
cost-

[[Page H7393]]

saving initiative. So these bureaucratic efforts in the cabinet 
agencies that make them, in my view, unmanageable come both from the 
executive and from the legislative.
  Looking at the Veterans Affairs Department, some 360,000 employees, 
up 140,000 in the past decade alone. About two-thirds of the members 
are civilian employees, are part of the American Federation of 
Government Employees and Service Employees International Union. These 
VA employees are subject to, of course, the protections by the Merit 
Systems Protection Board.
  While there are many hardworking and dedicated VA employees, both in 
the healthcare area, across our VA hospitals, and in benefits, and many 
union members fight for high standards and fight for high quality 
across our veterans system, the facts are stubborn things, and they 
remain that the VA has had serious quality, ethics, and management 
issues that are hurting veterans and hurting the reputation of the 
Federal Government.
  Just in this Congress alone, under the leadership of Congressman Jeff 
Miller, the chairman of our Veterans Affairs Committee during this 
Congress, we have seen reforms to rein in construction spending by the 
VA, clawback bonuses, fire bad actors, stop paying official time to do 
union work. We have seen, though, people not fired, even though people 
have died in VA health care.
  We have seen a $300 million hospital complex, Mr. Speaker, be $1 
billion over budget; not possible, in my view, in the private sector. 
So there is no doubt that our cabinet agencies need reform. We talked 
about regulatory reform, executive overreach reform, but we must have 
work rule reform in our agencies.
  The other thing I want to touch on tonight before I talk about 
solutions is just spending overall to fund the obligations of our 
Federal Government.
  Every month, I receive numerous letters about the $1.1 trillion in 
annual spending that Congress typically approves each year. When done 
properly, this annual spending is approved by way of 12 appropriations 
bills in this body, the people's House, and six appropriations bills in 
the Senate. They are conferenced together, and they are presented to 
the President for his veto or approval.
  The problem is that this very typical, very constitutional program 
that has been applied for 240 years about how to authorize and 
appropriate funds to operate our government just no longer typically 
happens, yet this is Congress' most fundamental obligation under 
Article I.
  The appropriations clause is but 16 words long. ``No money shall be 
drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by 
law.''
  This is our job, yet the last time that all the appropriations bills 
were passed individually and enacted into law before October 1 of a new 
fiscal year was 1994. My, that is a terrible track record.
  So this is not a President Obama issue or a President Bush issue. 
This is an issue of the Congress itself. Now you know why, after 20 
years, I have seen so many things change, and not for the better, 
coming back to Washington to represent the people of central Arkansas.

                              {time}  2030

  What happens without such a process of appropriations bills is what 
we will be voting on this week: a continuing resolution which simply 
freezes spending at current levels and extends forward to a date 
certain, or, as an alternative to that kind of continuing resolution, 
an omnibus spending bill where everything is rolled into one.
  These massive bills reflect the work, hopefully, of our House and 
Senate committees. They frequently contain items, Mr. Speaker, that are 
parachuted into the bill at the end of the negotiations between the 
House and the Senate, and those produce fireworks on both sides of the 
political spectrum.
  The irony about that debate of that $1.1 trillion in typical annual 
spending, approved by this body, is that it composes about $600 
billion--50 percent--that goes to our national defense that funds the 
essential expenditures for our men and women in uniform. About $80 
billion goes to our veterans and military construction projects around 
the United States and the world, and the balance is for everything else 
that we consider government: highway finance, local education 
initiatives that go to our States, our national parks, and help for our 
Corps of Engineers on our ports and along our rivers.
  What shocks the Arkansans that I respond to about their letters is 
that, while I appreciate their correspondence, their emails about that 
$1.1 trillion in spending, the so-called domestic discretionary 
spending, I remain frustrated that Congress' lack of action on the 
other $3.5 trillion that this government spends is in the mandatory 
spending portion of the budget. It is not subject to annual 
appropriations.
  So I thank you for your mail and your suggestions about how we can 
reform spending at the Pentagon or reform spending in our national 
forests or our national parks, but $3.5 trillion is in mandatory 
spending which funds Social Security, Social Security Disability, 
Medicaid health care for the poor, Medicare health care for the 
elderly, and interest on our national debt--and these programs are 
essentially based on eligibility.
  Yet, many of us remain concerned about the size of our annual 
deficits--the total size of our national debt--particularly when you 
consider the size of the national debt to our total economy. We 
currently have about $19 trillion in outstanding debt of the United 
States with about $6 trillion of that owed to foreign investors outside 
the U.S., principally in Japan and China. This debt is a percentage of 
our GDP, that is $19 trillion, which is about 100 percent of GDP.
  Back in my twenties, when I worked for Senator Tower from Texas on 
the Senate Banking Committee, debt to GDP was about 30 percent. When I 
worked for President Bush 41 as a member of his White House staff for 
economic policy, our debt was about 50 or 60 percent of GDP. Now you 
know why after 20 years I remain so concerned, because it has now 
doubled.
  There is a lot of economic research that tells us about the dampening 
impact on our national growth rates if we have national debt at these 
kinds of levels. It saps capital alternatives to the private sector 
that can bring faster growth. Clearly, since the Great Recession of 
2008, we have had low growth--well below what I believe should be the 
growth rate of this great economy.
  Likewise, we are at a time of low interest rates. Interest rates are 
likely on the rise. And while we are paying a modest amount of interest 
on that soon-to-be $19 trillion dollars today, the Congressional Budget 
Office believes that, as interest rates gradually increase over the 
next few months and years, interest will move from about $220 billion 
to $830 billion, Mr. Speaker, over the next 10 years, surpassing what 
we spend as a nation on our national defense. So there is no doubt the 
Federal Government has grown too big and too complex and interferes too 
greatly. We must get our fiscal house in order.
  Mr. Speaker, eliminating waste and fraud will not do it. Raising 
taxes won't do it. I am always reminded by members of the opposition 
that insist that we can only balance our budget by raising taxes. 
Winston Churchill's favorite quote about taxes: ``We contend that for a 
nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a 
bucket and trying to lift it himself by the handle.'' It is not going 
to do it, Mr. Speaker.
  This problem is too large and requires reform, and it requires this 
Congress to reform in the out-years and put us on the right track. 
Former Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen said in 2010, 6 
years ago, Mr. Speaker, that the biggest national security problem 
facing the United States was the size of our national debt.
  So let me talk now, Mr. Speaker, about potential solutions that this 
Congress has to adopt working with our President-elect in the coming 
days, in the coming years, and in the early months of the Trump 
administration. First, Congress, heal thyself. We must reassert our 
Article I powers: the power of the purse; the power of the proper 
appropriations process. We don't need someone to impose that. We need 
to impose it on ourselves.
  We need to remind the American people to contact us, to help us 
return to regular order and return to the appropriations process. We 
need all 12 of

[[Page H7394]]

those bills passed and we need to stop depending on continuing 
resolutions like we will this week. This is something I think that is 
fundamental.
  Let's talk about some of the reforms to that budget process tonight. 
In this Congress, I was proud to support the Biennial Budgeting and 
Enhanced Oversight Act, which was introduced by Reid Ribble of 
Wisconsin. If this bill passes, it would help the government fix our 
broken budget system by establishing a biennial budget cycle. I think 
this would provide Federal agencies with the kind of planning 
capability that would make them much more effective. We could identify 
cost savings, no doubt, in the important infrastructure area and long-
term systems issues that we have, particularly in the Pentagon. This 
would be a large advantage.
  After reflecting on this, I support abolishing our Budget Committee 
process. Put in place in 1974, the intent was to have a way to rein in 
the executive. The Budget Act of 1974 was to help punish Richard Nixon. 
I believe that if we abolish the Budget Committee, we can allow our 
authorizing committees to serve both an authorizing and an 
appropriating function. We can eliminate redundancies in our Federal 
Government, and we can look inward in how we can eliminate also 
unnecessary procedures in Congress that waste time. In turn, our 
Appropriations Committee would oversee the budget resolutions, making 
sure that Congress spends no more than what we have approved in a 
budget resolution and that we can review individual ceilings for 
appropriating money for those government functions that don't require 
an authorization.

  I also support the idea of properly directing the Congressional 
Budget Office to account for, or score, in their terminology, for long-
term investments as budget impacts versus just current-year spending. 
These ideas are not revolutionary; they are well known.
  We are stuck in the past, Mr. Speaker, and we must reform ourselves 
starting with this budget and appropriations process. In fact, these 
ideas are as old as my boss' suggestions. John Tower was a 24-year 
veteran of the Senate. He served on the Budget Committee and was 
chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. These were his 
ideas upon his retirement in 1984 as to how to make the Congress more 
effective.
  The Congressional Budget Office relies on a set of government 
statistics including GDP growth, inflation, and tax receipts. It takes 
into accounts dynamic scoring. In my view, these things need to be done 
in a more proper way to better calculate the cost of legislation and 
the benefits for the economy. For example, CBO does not currently 
include interest payments on the debt when scoring new legislation. As 
previously mentioned, this interest will grow exponentially in the 
coming years, and now spending programs and reforms, in my view, ought 
to be calculated and take into account the agency costs and the 
carrying costs on our national debt.
  Another recommended reform to the CBO from our House Budget Committee 
would be to eliminate built-in discretionary inflation, removing the 
automatic extensions of expiring programs, and removing the current 
assumption that entitlement payments will continue at current levels 
even when their trust funds are predicted to be insolvent. These 
practices currently used by CBO result in automatic plus-ups for the 
baseline budget, and these reforms, in my view, will remove the current 
bias to ever higher spending levels.
  We ought to consider what we do in the private sector, Mr. Speaker, 
zero-based budgeting to assess what is really needed and not needed in 
our Federal agencies. What a great idea for Mr. Trump's incoming new 
Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Interior Department, 
let's go to zero-based budgeting. Let's have you justify to the Chief 
Financial Officer in the Interior Department every program, and then 
come to Congress with your recommendation of what we really should be 
doing at Interior or any other bureau or cabinet agency of the 
government.
  House and Senate bills have been introduced on this issue. 
Representative Duncan of Tennessee and Senator Thune of South Dakota 
would, I think, bring a lot of common sense. They would say that if 
private enterprises are performing activities duplicated by an arm of 
the Federal Government, then they would have the opportunity to compete 
for that work that Federal agencies unnecessarily handle in-house and, 
therefore, give better value to our taxpayers.
  IT investments--information technology--is a critical function in all 
of our private sector life. Yet, GAO, the Government Accountability 
Office, found that 75 percent of the technology budget for the Federal 
Government goes to just painting up and fixing aging technology rather 
than modernizing and going in a different direction on IT.
  They are actually still using floppy disks at the Pentagon and 
maintaining 1970s-era computer platforms. Look, that stuff ought to be 
in the Smithsonian, not at the Pentagon. The report notes that the 
Social Security systems that are used to determine our eligibility and 
our benefits are more than 30 years old and are based on COBOL computer 
language. Mr. Speaker, I used COBOL computer language when I was in 
college almost 40 years ago. We need that kind of reform in order to be 
competitive and provide services to our constituents and safe, cyber-
ready protections. We have already witnessed the Office of Personnel 
Management losing people's identities and creating identify theft right 
in the middle of a Federal computer system that is supposed to be the 
best.
  Our chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, 
Jason Chaffetz, has expressed his support for modernizing our 
government's aging systems, calling it a vital part of infrastructure 
that we need in order to have a fully functional government. I couldn't 
agree more. We don't need to shortchange these agencies when it comes 
to delivering a safe, cyber-protected IT infrastructure.
  Last night I talked about the administrative state, the growth of 
regulation, and the cost of regulation exceeding that of all the 
revenues from the tax system. Let's talk about what we can do to rein 
in regulatory costs. The House passed a Separation of Powers 
Restoration Act in 2016, which would amend the Administrative Procedure 
Act, to require the courts to decide all de novo relevant questions of 
law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory 
provisions and rules. This bill would eliminate the Chevron deference, 
which, in my view, is blocking common sense being used and direction of 
this people's House and the Senate over our regulatory body.
  This is not a new topic, Mr. Speaker. James Madison in Federalist 51 
discussed the need of each branch of government to guard against 
overreach by another. He stated that when an overreach occurs, ambition 
must be to counteract ambition.
  That is what we want to do in this House, Mr. Speaker. We have passed 
the REINS Act, Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act. 
The REINS Act, which passed this act overwhelmingly, said that any 
major rule like those that I described last night that cost the economy 
more than $100 million would require coming back to Congress for 
approval. That will put the people's Representatives here in charge of 
the administrative state and not the other way around.
  I referenced a few minutes ago The Washington Post story about 
uncovering $125 billion of hidden-away, misdirected spending at the 
Pentagon that I awarded this month's Golden Fleece Award.

                              {time}  2045

  I brought back the Golden Fleece from the seventies. It was created 
by Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. It is that kind of thing that 
I think calls attention to egregious behavior by the Executive and 
allows us to have policy changes here. I commend former Senator Tom 
Coburn and his successor Senator Lankford for the same kind of work.
  Finally, Mr. Speaker, I want to turn to the subject of the Community 
Empowerment Initiative, something that I have spent a lot of time on in 
my district in Little Rock, finding ways to fight poverty and use the 
talents and time of the private sector to do that, and also to identify 
ways that we can

[[Page H7395]]

find a better way to enhance the lives of American citizens, get them 
out of poverty, get them the education they need and the skills they 
need to succeed in our economy.
  This is the big challenge before the incoming Trump administration 
and this Congress. It is important that people have a vested interest 
in their community and have a sense of community engagement about how 
we do what I talked about last night, the idea that we let people 
closest to the problems solve those problems and not be dependent on 
one-size-fits-all challenges here.
  So, Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to have been reelected and continue 
to serve the citizens of Arkansas and our country. I am humbled to be 
asked to raise my hand on January 3 and again affirm my allegiance to 
our country and our beloved Constitution.
  Every Thursday morning, we assemble for the House prayer breakfast, 
and every Thursday morning I feel the prayers around our country, for 
our country. We in that group pray for all of our families. We pray for 
our men and women in uniform around our world protecting our liberties 
and our freedoms. I pray for each of the families in my district, that 
they have the health and prosperity and the ability to pursue happiness 
under our great Constitution.
  On behalf of my family, I wish all of the people of the Second 
Congressional District of Arkansas a blessed Christmas season. May God 
bless our troops overseas and our great Nation.


                             General Leave

  Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may 
have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and 
include extraneous materials on the subject of this Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Arkansas?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________