[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.
____________________