[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 39 (Tuesday, March 5, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1642-S1644]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Government Funding
Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, the number 22 trillion should matter to
us. That is our current debt in the United States. Not to be confused,
we have debts, and we have deficits. You will hear those names get
thrown around together. Deficit is the amount of overspending in a
single year--1 year of overspending--and debt is the collection of all
of those deficits.
As a nation, our current debt is $22 trillion. To give some
perspective on 22 trillion, if you were to take the total distance of
22 trillion miles, you would have to fly from Earth to Pluto and back
3,081 times to get to 22 trillion miles. This is heavy debt.
We are used to hearing about debts and deficits in relationship to
things like home mortgages. Many of us think about taking 30 years to
pay off our mortgage. Well, for us to pay off our national mortgage,
this $22 trillion--if we were to balance our budget, which is way out
of balance right now, and then have a $100 billion surplus--so let's
say that by next year, we have a balanced budget and a $100 billion
surplus. That would be a very large surplus for us. How many years of
$100 billion surpluses in total revenue would it take to pay off $22
trillion? The quick math on that is 220 years. That is approximately as
long as we have been a republic. If we had a $100 billion surplus every
single year for the next 220 years, we could pay off our mortgage. Does
anyone think that every single year over the next 220 years, we are
going to both balance our budget and have a $100 billion surplus?
The issue we face as a nation is that we have fumbled a lot in our
past. We fumbled our spending. We fumbled our handling of Federal tax
dollars. We have to work our way out of this. Climbing out of this is
not going to be a 1-year deal. This is not a short-term fix; this is an
intentionally long-term fix.
There are two things we have to have. We have to have economic
growth. If our economy is stagnant, we never catch up. The reason for
that is, when the economy is stagnant, more people in our Nation need
assistance. They need housing support. They need food support. They
need other things to help them in those scarce times. Unemployment
benefits go up significantly during the time period that our economy is
down because people can't find jobs and our safety net kicks in larger
amounts.
When we have economic growth, fewer people need housing assistance,
fewer people need food assistance, and fewer people receive
unemployment benefits. The economy itself grows. As more people have
jobs and make money, more people pay taxes. So economic growth is
essential to the growth of our economy and to working our way out of
debt. That is why the tax reform bill was so incredibly important to
us--to get a growing economy again. Our economy had been stagnant for a
decade. We would literally have never gotten out of it if we had stayed
in a stagnant economy.
Folks called me and said: When the tax revenue changed, when the tax
reform bill happened, it also blew a hole in the budget. I have had
folks throw all kinds of numbers around and say this is the giant hole
that is in the budget.
Interestingly enough, we are now a fiscal year through. Our revenue
for fiscal year 2017--the year before the tax reform--was $3.315
trillion. Our revenue after the tax cut and the tax reform, for fiscal
year 2018, is $3.329 trillion. If you are doing the math in your head,
that is $14 billion more in revenue after the tax cuts. That means our
revenue went up the next year.
Contrary to all the myths that were out there early on saying we were
going to have this giant hole in the budget, our revenue went up after
the tax cuts went into place. Why? More people had more money to
invest. More people invested. As they invested, as they engaged in the
economy, as they had more money in their pockets, they bought more
products, and that stimulated more profits. That meant people got paid
more. In this past year of our economy, wages have gone up--especially
wages for the lowest income Americans. Their wages have gone up.
Unemployment has come down. More people have a job. There are more
opportunities to get a different job.
All those things are great benefits, but that doesn't solve $22
trillion in debt. We need to have economic growth, but economic growth
by itself is never going to solve the issue. We also have to deal with
our spending and our plans.
Each year for the last 4 years, my office has released something we
call ``Federal Fumbles.'' It is ways we believe the Federal Government
has dropped the ball. Each year, we take on different areas. Over the
last 4 years, we identified over $800 billion in ways that we could
save Federal tax dollars. For the specific problems we laid out, there
is a solution. If we want to try to start attacking some of these
things, here is a proposal. Our goal from our office is very simple: We
believe all 100 offices should be looking for ways to save Federal tax
dollars. We believe everyone should look for ways to be more efficient.
What we are doing is not unique to our team; every team can do it. In
fact, we believe that everyone wants to see the debt and deficit go
down, but now there is the next step of actually identifying how to do
it.
In the last 4 years, we have identified $800 billion in ways to save
Federal tax dollars. That is a start. That is a beginning point of how
to actually get us there. That would get us back to balancing our
budget, but we still have a ways to go to get to a surplus and paying
off our debt and deficit.
We just released our ``Federal Fumbles'' report. It is actually out
today online. People from any office or anyplace can go to
lankford.senate.gov and download the free report. This report is a
little bit different for us. We want to identify the major problems we
have not only in overspending and blowing our deficit, but we want to
identify ways that we are actually being inefficient in how we operate.
We begin by talking about government shutdowns, as I think we should
begin with. We just experienced the longest government shutdown in
American history. It is not the first by far. People have short
memories when they forget the government shutdowns that happened during
the Carter administration, the three times Tip O'Neill shut down the
government on President Reagan in the 1980s, or the multiple shutdowns
that occurred on almost every Presidency in the modern day. But that is
not solving the problems we have.
Last year, eight Republicans and eight Democrats met almost the
entire year and talked about how to reform the budget process. I am a
firm believer that we will never solve the problem with our budgeting
until we solve the problem with how we do budgeting. We don't budget in
a way that actually determines more efficient spending. We determine
how to spend more but not how to spend less. That is an issue we have
to solve.
The 1974 Budget Act has only worked four times since it was written
in 1974. It is not gospel. It is not the Constitution. It needs to be
redone. There are proposals we put into place specifically on how we
can fix the budgeting process. Again, until we get a better budget
process, we will never get a better budget product. We identified some
simple things--how we can do a 2-year budgeting system; how we can
avoid government shutdowns. There are simple solutions we put into
place that I think would actually be effective.
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We released a bipartisan bill in the last couple of days on ending
government shutdowns that I hope we can actually get momentum toward
and solve the issue of government shutdowns.
We deal with the issue of the President's budget--not just this
President's but every President's budgets. It has been a problem. There
has never been a time since the 1974 Budget Act that the President's
budget has ever been implemented. It is an informational document.
Let's turn it into what it should be.
Let's figure out how we can start reducing our deficit. We have 12
bills we put out every single year for spending. There is no mandatory
bill for savings. As simple as this sounds, why don't we add a 13th
bill to our appropriations process? There would be 12 bills that are
designed for spending and 1 that is designed for savings. For every
single Congress, there would have to be a savings bill. Now, that
Congress can choose how much it wants to save, but every single
Congress would have a mandatory savings bill to figure out what it is
going to do to actually pull our deficits back. With our being $22
trillion in debt, I don't anticipate anytime soon that we are not going
to need that 13th bill.
We could do this. We could fix the way we actually make the law
regarding the budget, which currently is not law but is a suggestion
made by Congress that has been blown past every single year. There are
all kinds of budget games that are out there that make the budget
actually look better than it is. Some of them are great, cute names,
like CHIMPS, or Changes in Mandatory Program Spending. They sound
adorable, but what they actually do is to make the budget look like it
is closer to balancing when it is actually even further from balancing
but has a budget gimmick. We need to end some of those.
We lay out proposals on how to resolve the debt ceiling. Process
reforms will make a big difference in our being able to get on top of
the big issue. They may not be exciting and they may not be headline-
grabbing, but until we fix these things as a body, they are never going
to get better.
We deal with Senate rules on how we are actually going to work
together to solve these issues. The Senate has stopped working together
on a lot of these things. So we lay out some of the internal aspects as
to how to solve them. We lay out some bills that are out there that we
have proposed. One is called the Taxpayers Right-To-Know Act.
We don't have great transparency in our spending. If taxpayers wanted
to find out how many government programs there were that were similar
in function, they couldn't find out. The hard part is, as Congress, we
can't find out either. The only way that we can get a programmatic list
or get the details of different programs from different Agencies is to
make the request through an entity called the GAO. Usually, between 12
and 18 months later, it will give us back a report just to say what
programs are out there and what those programs do.
I have met multiple times with the director of the GAO regarding a
bill proposal called the Taxpayers Right-To-Know Act, a bill that
passed unanimously in the House of Representatives during the last
session. Then it came to the Senate and stalled. This bill does
something very simple. It tells lawmakers and taxpayers what their
government actually does. It is not trying to hide anything. It is
trying to list every program that we have and how much we spend on that
program. If it is evaluated, how is it evaluated? How many employees
are dedicated to it? There is no gimmick to it. It is just that simple.
It is transparency. The great gift to our democracy is transparency in
how we spend dollars.
Just this basic bill would allow every single person in the country
to ask questions of its government. Why do we have four programs that
seem to do the same thing? Why do we have 18 programs in another area
and 16 different entities that seem to do something similar? Why can't
we combine that? Why can't we crowd-source ideas? The reason is that we
don't put transparent information out. We could crowd-source the ideas
of how to fix our government if only we allowed the taxpayers to see
their government. The Taxpayers Right-To-Know Act allows us to do that.
We deal with our grant reforms. It is one of the areas in which we
have pushed pretty hard in the last several ``Federal Fumbles'' books,
but we lay out a set of ideas. There is a bill called the GREAT Act,
which passed in the last House of Representatives overwhelmingly. By
the way, the House of Representatives in this session, led by the
Democrats, has also passed the GREAT Act and has sent it over to us in
order to reform the grant process and how that information gets out.
Now, it is a first step in getting information. I think there are more,
but it is a great first step for that.
Grants always seem to be our issue. Some $600 billion a year is spent
by the Federal Government just on grants. There is a great need for
greater transparency in that. Some grants are very large, and some of
them are small. We can't figure out why we do some of them at all as
Federal taxpayers. For instance, last year, the National Endowment for
the Humanities gave a grant to a California professor to use Federal
tax dollars to study Soviet winemaking--not current Russian winemaking
with Federal grant dollars but historic Soviet winemaking.
Now, I can kind of understand why California winemakers may want to
do a study of Soviet winemaking for some reason, but why are Federal
taxpayers being asked to pay for a study on Soviet winemaking? Yet we
did.
Since 2001, we have given a Federal grant for a mariachi program in
California. Now, I kind of understand how a successful mariachi program
that works with children and youths may be something we would do for a
couple of years to get it started as a community program. That makes
total sense. Yet we have done it every year since 2001. At some point,
shouldn't the local entities pick that up? Why is that a Federal
program that has to be done year after year after year?
The grant issues don't have a lot of transparency, and there is a
reason for that. It is that people don't want to be seen. They don't
want anyone to know that the program is out there. We want just to ask
a simple question. Let's do the grants, but let's make sure they line
up with Federal priorities. Let's make sure they actually line up with
strategic things that actually help our economy and help expand our
Nation and protect our national security.
There are basic things that we can do, and we lay some of those
things out. We lay out some questions that we think are practical
questions on renewable fuel and, in particular, on ethanol. The ethanol
program was designed to reduce emissions, but when it was designed to
reduce emissions, it also grandfathered in all of the entities at that
time that had produced ethanol, and none of those were required to
reduce emissions--only new ones.
What has happened? Practically no new ones have come on board because
it is a lot more expensive to limit emissions than it is to be an old
facility that doesn't limit emissions. You can't be competitive in
limiting emissions. So really what the ethanol mandate does is to
protect the old ethanol companies to make sure they never get
competition. As a Congress, why aren't we looking at that?
If you are not in the Midwest, you pay more at the gas pump every
time you fill up because of the ethanol. If you are in the Midwest, it
may be a little cheaper for you, but if you are on the east or the west
coast, your gas prices are higher because of the ethanol mandate. Are
you happy with that? As a government, we need to look at that. We think
it is a legitimate question to ask about not only our debt and deficit
but just about basic consumer spending for our GDP and the growth of
our economy.
We deal with a lot of issues with regard to the Federal workforce. We
deal with regulatory reform. We walk through some of the hardest issues
about how we are taking care of our veterans and what is happening with
regard to taking care of things like healthcare and transitioning them
into vocational work. We feel it is important.
We have dug into small programs--for instance, an IT development
program for veterans in Muskogee, OK--because if you are in the
veterans service center in Muskogee, which is one of the largest
veteran service centers in the country, you handle a lot of different
documents. As you go through
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that process for those great employees who are there--and there are
really some solid people who are there--they have to log in multiple
times and use a whole list of workarounds in their system, which gets
bogged down. Each employee there spends 45 minutes a day just going
through the logistics of logging in and changing around the system to
make it work. There are 45 minutes a day of lost productivity for every
single person there.
The good news is that Congress allocated $30 million to fix the IT
problems there. The bad news is that the problems are still there. So
we are asking the simple question: Where did that money go? How come
the problem wasn't fixed?
We can go on and on with regard to these issues. In page after page,
we have tried to lay out sets of solutions--things that we see as
problems and inefficiencies in the way our government is working and in
the way our Congress is working--and establish what can be done. Our
goal is simple. Laying out ``Federal Fumbles'' is a to-do list for us.
This is what we are working on right now along with a lot of other
issues.
We encourage every office to glance through it. Ask your staff
members to glance through and see the things that they are working on
in their offices, and see if we are not laying out some ideas. Let's
find ways to work together. Of all of the things to agree on, we should
be able to agree that our $22 trillion of debt needs to be addressed.
Let's strategize as to how we are going to solve it. Let's find ways
that our government is inefficient and find ways to fix it.
Let me give you one more number.
We met in a bipartisan group last year--eight Republicans and eight
Democrats--and tried to solve this issue on budgeting. Unfortunately,
it was unsuccessful. Those with the Congressional Budget Office visited
with us, and we asked them a very specific question as to our current
level of debt. If we were to just try to stay at our current level of
debt--not grow any more, not get any worse--how much would we have to
tax or cut? Their response was $400 billion a year, every year, for the
next 30 years. To just not make the problem worse, we have to either
tax more or cut $400 billion a year, every year, for the next 30 years
to keep it from getting worse. That is because, as the CBO stated,
Federal outlays, which is how we are spending, are projected to climb
from 20.8 percent of the GDP in 2019 to 23 percent by 2029.
The aging of the population and the rising healthcare costs
contribute significantly to the growth of spending for the major
benefit programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, and the rising
debt and higher interest rates drive up the Federal Government's net
interest cost.
We have reached a tipping point in interest. Last year, our interest
payments were $325 billion just in the interest on our debt. The CBO
estimates that within 10 years our interest payments alone will be $928
billion. We have crossed over that tipping point we talked about
before. Now, just to stay at the status quo, because of the rising
interest rates and interest payments, we have to find $400 billion a
year, every year, in new taxes or new cuts.
We are fumbling on the biggest issue that Americans have handed us.
It affects our national security. It affects the future of our
children. It affects how we take care of those who are in poverty. It
affects those who are in the most vulnerable moments of life. It
affects those with disabilities, and it affects our transportation.
We have to have a real dialogue about this. We are doing our part. We
are trying to get the word out. Let's have a dialogue and together
figure out what we can do next in order to solve this because none of
us have plans for a $400 billion cut next year. That means that next
year it will again get worse, and it will keep getting worse until we
solve it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks of my good
friend, the Senator from Oklahoma. I look forward to working with him
on ways that we can try to come together and solve some of these big
problems.
In a minute, I am going to talk about the Affordable Care Act, which
is probably the signature accomplishment of a Democratic Senate and
Congress. It is notable that the Affordable Care Act, for all of its
controversy, reduced the deficit. It did not increase the deficit. It
is also notable that the signature accomplishment of the Republican
Congress and the Republican Senate was a tax reduction bill that has
dramatically spiraled the deficit out of control. There is $2 trillion
of additional deficits in that provision.
I share the concerns about the deficit, and I find it curious that
this Congress, under Republican control, has chosen to dramatically
increase deficits, making us on pace for having the biggest deficits in
our legislative history--with enormous additional new elements of debt
as well.