[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 67 (Wednesday, April 25, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2412-S2414]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Unanimous Consent Request--S. 317
Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, Senator McCaskill and I rise to have an
opportunity to pass a bill and for the Senate to do some work on a bill
that has been around for several years and just hasn't been able to go
over the finish line. We would like to see that finish today.
It is a bipartisan bill with a very straightforward concept. Right
now, if any agency head or any sub-Cabinet individual or any individual
within the government wants to see what another agency is doing, they
have to go to the Office of Management and Budget. They would do a
study--and get it back to them--to find out if the program they are
doing exists somewhere else.
If any Member of this body or of the House wants to find out about an
agency and such straightforward things as how many employees they have,
what programs they are doing, if they measure those programs, how are
those programs measured--if we want to find out those very basic
things, we have to go to the GAO office to make a request, and 18
months later, we will get an answer back on that specific thing.
This is something that every agency either already has or should have
but that the American people can't see, the Congress can't see, and,
quite frankly, the individuals within the agencies also cannot see.
This is a straightforward concept. We call it the Taxpayers Right-to-
Know Act, and it is something Senator McCaskill and I have worked very
hard on. It is something that passed out of the Homeland Security
Committee unanimously. This is a bipartisan bill. In fact, to show you
how bipartisan it is, this passed in the House of Representatives last
session 413 to 0. Not a single House Member voted against this
proposal, but it wasn't able to pass in the Senate. So Senator
McCaskill and I brought it up again this year. It came unanimously out
of committee; it also has been through the House of Representatives. In
January of 2017, it passed unanimously in the House of Representatives
again. This is not a controversial piece of legislation.
What is interesting is that Senator McCaskill and I did a lot of work
with President Obama's Office of Management and Budget to make sure
there were no concerns. They had some concerns, so we made some
changes, and President Obama's Office of Management and Budget signed
off on this and said it would be a helpful document.
We have now worked with President Trump's Office of Management and
Budget, which also signed off on this proposal and said that this would
work.
We went to the Government Accountability Office, the entity we asked
to help us find duplication, waste, and inefficiency in government, and
in a hearing we asked Gene Dodaro, the head of GAO, a simple question:
Would it be a help to have the Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act? You have
the ability to see all agencies. Would this be a help to you? His exact
response:
I would urge the Congress to complete passage of that
bill--
meaning the Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act--
and send it to the president for signature. I think that it
would make a huge difference in identifying overlap,
duplication, fragmentation in the federal government and
provide a better accountability tool to the Congress and the
agencies. It's severely lacking.
That is from the head of the Government Accountability Office, the
one we have asked to help us find these things. He is saying that he
needs this tool. We need this tool. The agencies need this tool.
President Obama's team signed off on this. President Trump's team has
signed off on this. It has passed unanimously out of the House of
Representatives.
We bring it to the floor today to ask unanimous consent to move this
across the floor of the Senate today, to be able to get in place what
President Obama asked for, what President Trump has asked for, what the
Government Accountability Office has asked for, what all Members of the
House of Representatives have asked for, and what Senator McCaskill and
I are asking for.
With that, I yield to Senator McCaskill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Missouri.
Mrs. McCASKILL. Mr. President, I come today to join my colleague from
Oklahoma to ask unanimous consent that we take up and pass S. 317, the
Taxpayers Right-to-Know Act.
I want to thank Senator Lankford for his continued hard work on this
bill. Senator Lankford has been working on this bill since his days in
the House, and I worked hard to move this bill with his predecessor,
Senator Tom Coburn, to try to get this through the Senate before he
left the Senate. Hopefully, we can get it across the finish line, if
not today, in the near future.
American taxpayers deserve a government that can tell them how their
money is being spent. This is all this bill is trying to do. It is not
complicated. It is trying to get important information to the people
who are paying the bills. Don't they have a right to know where all the
money is going?
It improves a publicly accessible online database with information
about Federal programs, including the funding information for the
program and the activities it comprises; the authorizing statutes and
relevant rules and regs; the individuals a program serves; the
employees who work to administer it; and copies of recent evaluations
or assessments provided by the agency, inspectors general, or the
Government Accountability Office.
The truth is, much of this information, including the program
inventory itself, is already required by the Government Performance and
Results Act, or GPRA. It passed this body by unanimous consent in 2010.
But the current program inventory under GPRA is a mess. It is virtually
useless to help lawmakers understand whether these programs are
actually working as intended or whether they are a payroll without a
purpose.
This bill adds a few additional information requirements to the
program inventory and makes it much easier to compare apples to apples,
which is what we need to do when we are making funding decisions.
Senator Lankford and I have agreed to a number of changes to this
bill, raised not only by President Obama's administration but also
President Trump's administration and by leaders in this body. There
were some concerns expressed to us that OMB could use the information
to punish agencies by holding up rules and holding up budget requests.
I have news for everybody.
[[Page S2413]]
They can already do that; they have the ability. But just because they
can do it now, we have agreed to include a clause which says that
nothing in this bill gives OMB any additional authority whatsoever,
other than what is needed to comply with the requirements of this bill.
I can't imagine anything clearer than that.
We have added caveats to make it easier for programs and agencies to
comply with the requirements of this bill.
I have to tell you, this is what drives the American people crazy.
Different from private business, somebody around here could have a good
idea and we can legislate a new program, but going back and determining
whether that program is actually delivering on the goals that were
stated and believed in at the time the legislation was passed--we are
really not very good at that. That is what this bill is about.
It will give us the tools to require that these programs and agencies
at least have information as to whether they are working--how much
money they are spending, what they are trying to do. Why are we hiding
behind a maddening bureaucracy when we can simplify things with the
technology that is available today? Frankly, if we can't defend these
programs and justify how we are spending taxpayer money, we should be
shutting them down.
I urge my colleagues to commit to and support this good government
transparency bill. I am worried that there is an objection. I am
disappointed there will be an objection from the leader of my own
party. That is disappointing to me, but it doesn't change my commitment
that this is the right thing to do.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the
immediate consideration of Calendar No. 43, S. 317; that the committee-
reported amendment be withdrawn; that the Lankford substitute amendment
at the desk be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be
considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to
reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Democratic leader.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I
certainly have a great deal of respect for my friends from Missouri and
Oklahoma and their desire to increase transparency in government. I
share that goal. But, respectfully, the legislation they are proposing,
I believe, would undermine and potentially threaten important programs
administered by the Federal Government.
The idea of requiring the government to publish an inventory of
Federal programs is not something I object to. As my friend from
Missouri has stated, it is already required under the law, but it is
such a cumbersome thing to do that for 7 years they have not published
an inventory, not because it is lacking the provisions in the bill
proposed by my colleagues but because it is virtually impossible to do
in the way that you would do it in other far more different and simple
things--in a factory that makes widgets.
This bill would go further and make it even more difficult to publish
the inventory they already haven't been able to publish. Neither the
Director of OMB under President Obama nor the Director under President
Trump has complied with the existing law.
I further have serious objections with the reporting requirements.
How can an agency, for instance--and this would happen on a thousand
occasions under this law--quantify the number of individuals who
benefit from the Community Development Block Grant Program? If one
neighborhood is revitalized, maybe it benefits the neighboring
neighborhoods. What if they put that number in, and the OMB Director
says: Oh, no. That is all wrong. There is no way to do that.
How about this: Is there a threshold to the number of people that is
too many to administer a program that helps disabled Americans get
appropriate schooling or access to healthcare? These types of questions
could fill volumes and volumes. There is no good answer to them, there
is no clear answer to them, and this law will not make it any easier to
discern which programs are working and which programs are not.
I have a great deal of worry, particularly, to be honest, with
Director Mulvaney. If you saw the budgets that Director Mulvaney has
submitted to this Congress--he has eliminated just about every
potential program. He is a scourge. He was one of the 10 most
conservative Members of the House when he was there. He eliminated
programs necessary in my State to keep the Department of Defense going,
to help our nuclear weapons stay strong. He zeroed them out; he didn't
just cut them. Can you imagine if he got his hands on this? He would
use this bill not for the purposes my colleagues intend but to
basically hold back money, punish, and in other ways delay very
necessary programs that 90 to 95 percent of this Congress agrees to. I
am concerned that this legislation, left to the implementation and
oversight of a man so hostile to government services up and down the
line, whose budgets have been dramatically and repeatedly rejected by
Democrats and Republicans alike in the House and the Senate, would be
used for ill, not good. The potential downside to this legislation far
exceeds the potential upside, dramatically.
I cannot in good conscience support a bill that would give Mr.
Mulvaney more tools to slash Federal programs that almost every
American would agree serve the public good.
In conclusion, I support the goal of this bill, which is to provide
more transparency to taxpayers, but I believe it will not. It will
confuse things, delay things, provide more layers of bureaucracy, not
less, and can well be used by someone who believes in slashing programs
of all kinds to delay them, fail to implement them, and not deliver the
services that so many Americans need. I strongly object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
The Senator from Missouri.
Mrs. McCASKILL. Mr. President, Senator Schumer is just flat wrong. He
is just wrong about this bill. There is nothing in this bill that gives
the OMB Director any additional power. There is nothing in this bill
that gives him any additional tools to delay or cut programs. In fact,
we specifically put that language in at the request of the minority
floor leader, that this would give the OMB Director no additional
tools.
Frankly, I remember when we were having the discussions under the
Obama administration. Many of my Republican colleagues were worried
that this would be a way for the Obama administration to somehow have
more power than we want them to have.
The bottom line is, we have the power in the legislative body to
decide which programs get funded. We are the people who appropriate
government funds. Shouldn't the taxpayers and Members of Congress have
an easily accessible way to get good information about a program?
By the way, no one is saying that anybody has to draw certain
conclusions from the facts that would be on this website. We are only
asking that the facts be put on the website. It is not nefarious. There
is no plot here. I don't want to hurt CDBG, and neither do all of the
House Members who voted for this. Not one Democratic House Member
objected to this bill.
So I have to respectfully say that Senator Schumer is wrong about
this legislation. He is wrong about what it would do. It is the right
thing for good government. It is the right thing for transparency. I am
going to keep working at it until hopefully we can either convince
every Member to let this go by unanimous consent or until we get an
opportunity to get a vote on it on the floor, where I am confident it
would win by an overwhelming number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Toomey). The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I could not more wholeheartedly agree
with my colleague from Missouri.
What is surprising to me is that Senator Schumer's objection to the
taxpayers right-to-know bill was that the taxpayers would actually find
out information that he doesn't want them to find out. That is the
surprising part.
I am grateful to be able to get his answer because over the last 6
months, our staff--Senator McCaskill's and my staff--has worked with
his staff every month. We have made 27 changes and 6 revisions over the
last 6 months. In the last month, we have gotten radio silence--nothing
from Senator Schumer's staff. So we finally brought it to
[[Page S2414]]
the floor and said ``What is the problem?'' because we can't seem to
figure out what the problem is. We learn today that the problem is that
he doesn't want the program inventory to be public because if the
American people and the Congress and the Office of Management and
Budget see the programs, they might actually do things with efficiency.
That seems surprising to me, but if you read the transcript, that is
what he just said. The fear is that they will actually find out what
the Federal Government does in the programs.
Surely that is not his objection. Surely no one in this body would
say: I hope the American people and the Office of Management and Budget
never find out what the Federal Government does.
Here is what this bill does. The reason we could not have a good
listing--Senator Schumer mentioned that there is no way to do a list
right now--is because there is no definition for a program. The Federal
Government has struggled with that simple definition, so this bill
fixes that. The reason that inventory doesn't exist gets solved with
this. So literally Senator Schumer's objection as to why we shouldn't
do this is nonsensical.
The second issue with this is the fear of OMB and Mick Mulvaney
actually trying to slash programs. OMB and Mick Mulvaney have no
authority to take down a program. Congress does that, and Senator
Schumer knows that better than anyone in this body. While OMB can make
recommendations, Congress has to actually vote to act on those
recommendations. He can't just slash programs. He can recommend it. He
can say: Here is an issue of inefficiency. It is the exact same as the
Obama administration could have done, the exact same as any future
administration could do, but Congress must act on that.
It seems exceptionally shortsighted to say: I don't want the American
people to know what the government is doing, because of the current
administration and someone I don't like.
In a few years, there will be a different administration. That may be
in 7 years, or that may be in 4 years, but in a few years, there will
be a different administration, but this problem will still remain.
Agencies can't see what other agencies are doing, this Congress can't
see what the agencies are doing, and the American people cannot see
what the agencies are doing.
I would say that for the benefit of the taxpayers--not the benefit of
Washington bureaucracies but for the benefit of the taxpayers--we
should allow this information to go public. I hope we can continue to
work with Senator Schumer's office, after making 27 changes that his
staff recommended, to finish this document.
Yesterday, Senator Schumer was caught in the hallway and was asked
what the problem is in the Senate, and his response to a reporter was
that the Senate needs more comity. I would agree.
The House approved this unanimously. Our committee approved this
unanimously. It has come to the floor and has but one person who
believes that the American people should not have access to the
information on the programs they pay for.
I would love to see more comity in this body and for us to work this
out.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.