[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 10 (Tuesday, January 17, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S333-S335]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  GAO ACCESS AND OVERSIGHT ACT OF 2017

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Committee on 
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is discharged from the bill, 
and the Senate will proceed to consideration of H.R. 72, which the 
clerk will report.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 72) to ensure the Government Accountability 
     Office has adequate access to information.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 30 
minutes of debate, equally divided in the usual form.
  The Senator from Nebraska.
  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, in just a few minutes we are going to vote 
on a bill that probably will not get a lot of attention in Washington. 
No cable news shows are going to give it breaking alerts, headlines. 
Roundtables of pundits will not be gathering to scream about it, and 
partisans are not going to score the bill.
  It is a straightforward bill with a straightforward purpose--to 
ensure that the Government Accountability Office can tap into the data 
at the Department of Health and Human Services. But in this case, looks 
can be deceiving. The GAO Oversight and Access Act of 2017, which I 
introduced together with Senator Tester 1 year ago, represents a 
significant victory for taxpayers.
  Its impact won't be felt tomorrow in Washington, but over many years 
to come, taxpayers from Nebraska and across the country will see how 
passing this legislation played a role in forcing Congress to address 
some of the biggest problems that our government faces. Let's step back 
for a moment and understand why. What is the problem?
  The Federal Government has a very serious budget problem. This isn't 
news to anyone who has been paying attention. It is not even something 
about which Democrats and Republicans disagree. We may not often agree 
on solutions, but we can and should agree to clearly identify the 
problems that the government and, therefore, our people face. Some of 
the problems are very big--so big, in fact, that it is hard to even 
wrap our minds around how large the numbers are, like the fact that 
last year this government spent $587 billion more than all it collected 
in taxes. Consider how big $587 billion is.
  National defense is the first and fundamental reason that the Federal 
Government exists. Last year we spent $595 billion on all of our 
national security or in the entire defense budget. When Ronald Reagan 
was sworn into office, the entire Federal budget was $590 billion. Now 
that is what we are borrowing annually.
  Or look at it this way. Historically, the amount we borrowed last 
year was bigger than every Federal budget for the first 160 years of 
the Nation--combined. That is, if you added up every dollar that the 
government spent from 1789 through 1950, it would still be less than 
the $587 billion that we overspent and therefore borrowed just last 
year. The former number got us through the Civil War, two world wars, 
and the Great Depression.
  Some of our problems are actually relatively small, but they 
ultimately add up to something big. Just look at some of the stuff 
Senator Flake dug up in this year's ``Wastebook'' report or what 
Senator Lankford put in his report this year entitled ``Federal 
Fumbles.'' The Commerce Department gave $1.7 million to the National 
Comedy Museum to resurrect dead comedians using holograms. Also, 
$70,000 of our taxpayers' money went to a Minnesota theater to put 
together an opera of Steven King's ``The Shining.'' And $17,000 was 
spent for people to wear fat suits to learn sensitivity to those with 
weight problems. These things are tiny individually, but when you put 
them together, they add up to a lot of our budget.
  Expert after expert testifies before our committees that this is 
unsustainable. We all know this cannot go on forever. At some point, 
the government's borrowing and overspending ways will catch up with us 
and we will have a Greek-style debt crisis.
  Congress needs to begin acting now to fix the government's structural 
problems--chiefly in the entitlement programs, for those are the 
spending categories whose trajectories dwarf all others.
  All of this gets to the central problem that the bill we are 
considering this afternoon was designed to solve--namely, that Congress 
is flying blind when it comes to overseeing huge portions of our 
budget, and therefore we don't have the information we need to fix 
these problems.
  The portion in particular I have in mind is the means-tested 
entitlement programs and the tax credits program. These include 
Medicaid; the earned-income tax credit, or EITC; the Supplemental 
Security Income--or disability--Program; food stamps; and Pell grants. 
All of these were designed to assist our low-income friends and 
neighbors. All of them together absorb a significant part of today's 
Federal budget.
  As of right now, $1 in every $6 we spend is on only 10 means-tested 
programs and tax credits like the ones just listed, according to the 
CBO, but because of an anomaly in the law, Congress has been blocked 
from getting the best information that is available about how these 
programs are actually working or not working. What do I mean by that? 
For years, the Government Accountability Office--the GAO, the agency 
that is supposed to be the taxpayers' watchdog because it is supposed 
to hunt down waste and expose

[[Page S334]]

abuses--has been trying to gain access to a database at the Department 
of Health and Human Services called the National Directory of New 
Hires. The new hires database was created in 1996 to help enforce child 
support payments, and in order to do that, it collected some basic 
information--basically, who has a job, where they work, whom they work 
for, and how much they make.
  The GAO's interest in this data should be pretty obvious. If it could 
compare the information in the database to the information in the 
means-tested programs, it could easily spot fraud, waste, and 
mismanagement. For instance, if a program's rules say that to qualify 
for benefits, a person needs to earn less than a certain amount of 
income annually, GAO would be able to use the database to see if the 
program is actually operating as designed and then issue reports to 
Congress. This is exactly the kind of thing that the GAO does across 
all other Federal programs and that Congress routinely uses the GAO 
for--to take their recommendations to figure out how we should reform 
programs that are failing. Only in this case, HHS has blocked the GAO 
from accessing the database.
  Again, these are the biggest categories of Federal spending. The 
place the GAO has not been able to do its work is in the places where 
we are spending the most money. It is classic Washington--bureaucracy 
blocking oversight for taxpayers. It is not always malicious, but this 
is definitely wrong.
  HHS has argued that when Congress created the new hires database, it 
didn't expressly give the GAO permission to look at this data, and so 
its hands are tied. GAO countered that Congress had previously given 
blanket permission to the GAO to access all Federal records many years 
prior.
  Many in Congress believed that the law was clear and that GAO is 
entitled to this entitlement data under the law, but HHS has refused to 
budge, and the argument stalemated. The result has been the status quo, 
with GAO repeatedly requesting data and HHS steadfastly refusing to 
grant them access to the data, which means they have refused to grant 
us access to the data.
  The GAO Access and Oversight Act of 2017 was introduced to settle 
this legal dispute between GAO and HHS once and for all in GAO's favor 
or, better, in the taxpayers' favor. In short, today's bill ensures 
that the GAO will have full access to the data in the national 
directory. By doing so, it will ensure for the first time that GAO has 
a key tool it needs to oversee some of the government's largest 
spending categories.
  This bill does two additional things as well. No. 1, it clarifies 
that GAO does have standing in court to fight for Federal records the 
next time a Federal agency tries to deny the GAO--and therefore us--
access to that data; and No. 2, it requires the GAO to let all relevant 
congressional committees know when it issues reports in their 
jurisdiction.

  We are now on the doorstep of hopefully passing this legislation 
today, which has rightly gotten a lot of support in Congress. When it 
passes the Senate tonight, it will head straight to the President's 
desk for figure. Last year, it passed the House by a vote of 403 to 0, 
and the only reason it failed to pass the Senate was because of an 
anonymous hold.
  In response, the House of Representatives took up this legislation as 
one of its first pieces of business and sent it over to the Senate 2 
weeks ago, on January 4, moving just as quickly. It is a pleasure that 
the Presiding Officer today happens to be the chairman of the relevant 
committee that moved so quickly. Chairman Johnson and his new ranking 
member, Claire McCaskill, immediately took up this legislation and 
moved it through the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental 
Affairs, for both the chairman--the Presiding Officer today--and 
Senator McCaskill, the champions of oversight of the GAO. I thank the 
Presiding Officer, the chairman of the committee, for his leadership.
  I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill tonight. It is 
appropriate that one of the first bills of this new Congress will be 
one to strengthen the authority of the GAO because by strengthening the 
powers of the GAO, what we are really doing is strengthening the 
Congress.
  There has been lots of talk around here on both sides of the aisle 
about the needs to reclaim Congress's article I power. Across the 240 
years of this Nation--or 226 years since the Constitution; 227 as I do 
the math here in my head--the Congress is at a fairly weak point in 
history, and we should be strengthening the article I branch of the 
Constitution.
  One obvious important way to strengthen the powers of the Congress 
and therefore the accountability that we all have to the American 
people is by doing better oversight. Conducting hard-hitting but fair 
oversight of the executive branch agencies is how we protect the 
separation of powers, and it is how we guard the taxpayers' funds, how 
we guard the wallet of the people. It is the Congress's job to write 
the laws and to control the purse strings, and it is the President's 
job to faithfully execute the laws. Good oversight gives the Congress 
the information we need to do our job and to ensure that the executive 
agencies are doing theirs. There is no better friend of the Congress in 
this regard than the Government Accountability Office. GAO is not 
simply another agency of a big government; the GAO is a part of the 
legislative branch, and it works hard to give Congress world-class 
insights into the operations of the other two branches. GAO is 
thorough, independent, and respected for its judgments by people of 
either party and no party at all.
  I am deeply proud to see that Senator Tester has joined us on the 
floor, for he and I were the original sponsors of this bill. It is a 
pleasure that tonight we will be giving the GAO the tools it needs for 
oversight and therefore for our oversight.
  It would only be natural, at the start of a new administration and a 
change of party in the executive branch, for Democrats to become more 
interested in oversight and Republicans to become less so. May that not 
be the case. I am hopeful that oversight will remain a top priority for 
Members on both sides of the aisle. None of us came here to be partisan 
cheerleaders. We came here to exercise the functions of this office on 
behalf of the people in our States and across this Nation. It is 
therefore encouraging tonight, even as a new administration is about to 
begin in 3 days, that Congress will be asserting its constitutional 
right to oversight with a big bipartisan vote.
  I want to thank my partner on the bill, Jon Tester of Montana, who 
will speak next. When we first heard about this issue together during 
briefings and committee hearings, we immediately realized that 
something was wrong, that the GAO had been handcuffed and not able to 
access this data, and we committed to each other to make sure something 
was done about it.
  I would also like to name the other original cosponsors of this bill, 
including Ron Johnson, Claire McCaskill, Tom Carper, Mike Enzi, Brian 
Schatz, Mike Lee, Tammy Baldwin, David Perdue, Joni Ernst, Jim Risch, 
Steve Daines, Tammy Duckworth, John McCain, Thom Tillis, Todd Young, 
Rob Portman, and James Lankford.
  Finally, I wish to thank our House partners, including Representative 
Buddy Carter, Chairman Jason Chaffetz, and Ranking Member Elijah 
Cummings.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I reserve the remainder of my 
time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.
  Mr. TESTER. Mr. President, I wish to start off my remarks by thanking 
Senator Sasse for us being able to work on this bill together. This is 
a good bill. He is exactly right--that this bill came out of the 
Presiding Officer's committee last year, the Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs. We met in the hallway and said: 
Let's fix this problem, because it is a problem. We have a bill on the 
floor today that does exactly that. It is a good-government bill. As 
the Senator from Nebraska has already pointed out, it is a truly 
bipartisan bill.
  The GAO Access and Oversight Act makes the government more 
transparent and more accountable to our taxpayers.
  Congress passed legislation in 1996 that created the National 
Directory of New Hires at the Department of Health and Human Services. 
Since that time, Congress has amended the law to permit other Federal 
agencies to access the directory. Today, Departments such as the 
Department of Education and the Department of the Treasury

[[Page S335]]

can access the directory for information on the collection of defaulted 
student loans or the collection of delinquent Federal loans, but the 
GAO--the Government Accountability Office--has not been allowed access 
to this directory.
  Now, by clarifying that the GAO has the authority to access the 
National Directory of New Hires, we can ensure that the taxpayers' 
watchdog is more easily able to do its job and root out Federal 
overpayments as well as waste, fraud, and abuse.
  Federal agencies reported nearly $125 billion in improper payments in 
fiscal year 2014 alone--that is $125 billion with a ``b.'' By allowing 
the GAO access to this directory, Congress will provide the office with 
a critical tool that can help save taxpayers billions of dollars in 
unnecessary waste.
  Once again, I thank the Senator from Nebraska for reaching across the 
aisle and working in a bipartisan fashion. This bill has strong support 
from Senators on both sides of the aisle, and--guess what--it passed 
unanimously in the House of Representatives.
  I agree with folks across the country who have made themselves heard. 
They want a more transparent government, a more accountable government, 
and a more efficient government, and that is exactly what this bill 
does. That is why I encourage a ``yes'' vote on this good-government 
bill today.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nebraska.
  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all remaining 
debate time on H.R. 72 be yielded back.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The bill was ordered to a third reading and was read the third time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The bill having been read the third time, the 
question is, Shall the bill pass?
  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator 
from Alabama (Mr. Sessions).
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber 
desiring to vote?
  The result was announced--yeas 99, nays 0, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 28 Leg.]

                                YEAS--99

     Alexander
     Baldwin
     Barrasso
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt
     Booker
     Boozman
     Brown
     Burr
     Cantwell
     Capito
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Cassidy
     Cochran
     Collins
     Coons
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cortez Masto
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Donnelly
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Feinstein
     Fischer
     Flake
     Franken
     Gardner
     Gillibrand
     Graham
     Grassley
     Harris
     Hassan
     Hatch
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Heller
     Hirono
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kaine
     Kennedy
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lankford
     Leahy
     Lee
     Manchin
     Markey
     McCain
     McCaskill
     McConnell
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Paul
     Perdue
     Peters
     Portman
     Reed
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sanders
     Sasse
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Scott
     Shaheen
     Shelby
     Stabenow
     Sullivan
     Tester
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wicker
     Wyden
     Young

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Sessions
       
  The bill (H.R. 72) was passed.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.

                          ____________________