[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.

[[Page S1643]]

  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.