[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 204 (Tuesday, December 17, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7077-S7079]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           GOVERNMENT FUNDING

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, I am glad to finally be here today, 
talking about the final conclusions we have reached on the 
appropriations bill generally but, specifically, the Labor and Health 
and Human Services and Education appropriations bill.
  We are now a bipartisan Congress, with Democrats in control on one 
side, Republicans on another. On this side, of course, we always have 
to have 60 people to go forward on these bills. We generally have had 
to have a bill here that would appeal to enough Democrats or enough 
Republicans to make this happen, but we have come to the conclusion of 
what is normally the hardest bill to negotiate. It is about 30 percent 
of all the spending after you take defense off the table. Defense is 
half of the discretionary spending; then you have 11 other bills that 
have the other half of that spending.
  This bill has 30 percent of that half. It has lots of things that you 
could argue about and, frankly, lots of things that you would just say 
``If we can't all be happy about this, we won't move forward,'' which 
would mean you wouldn't move forward.
  This is a bill where Senator Murray and I and Congressman Cole and 
Chairman DeLauro on the other side had to decide if we were going to 
have a bill or not, and we decided we were going to have a bill. We 
decided at the end of the process, with some help from others, that we 
wouldn't have things in the bill that hadn't traditionally been there.
  This is the place where much of the language that we debate in the 
appropriations bills occurs--what can happen and what can't happen. 
Things like the Hyde amendment have been in the appropriations bill for 
a long time, and it is in this one.
  Other things that have not been there in the past are not there, and 
that was one of the things that allowed us to move forward.
  Again, we had one body controlled by a different party, and we had to 
come to a bipartisan consensus, and I think we have.
  There were lots and lots of competing programs, some of which we are 
all for, but maybe our priorities are different. In fact, it could be 
that we just have more priorities on one side than on the other. But 
these programs range from workforce training to early childhood 
education to infectious disease control. That is a pretty big span of 
things to try to come to a conclusion on.
  Then, from our colleagues, we had 7,800 different requests--not 
necessarily requests that would be considered ``I want you to spend 
this money in my State'' but 7,800 requests that said ``We think this 
program should be increased'' or ``This program should be decreased.''
  So with all of those requests and that broad span, we came together 
with a bill that I am going to vote for tomorrow and look forward to 
voting for tomorrow. It is not exactly the bill I would have done if I 
had been doing it by myself, but by the very definition of both 
democracy and the Congress, you don't get to do these by yourself.
  The bill, which will reflect the priorities of both sides of the 
aisle and both

[[Page S7078]]

sides of the Capitol, invests in those priorities. We expand medical 
research--something that has been one of the things at the top of my 
list as the chairman of this committee. This is a moment when medical 
research is so critical, when we know so much more than we did about 
the human genome, so much more than we knew about immunotherapy just 5 
or 6 years ago. This is a topic that wasn't on the radar screen of 
treatments. Now, for many cancers, it is one of the first things you 
think about: Does it work if we get this person's body focused in a way 
that it fights back this cancer that is trying to overcome it? Often, 
that produces a great result now that wouldn't have been happening 5 or 
6 years ago.
  The opioid epidemic is one that we deal with in this bill.
  Investing in high-quality early childhood care and early childhood 
education and education generally are in this bill--trying to make 
college more affordable with things like Pell grants that not only work 
for people who don't have the income to do this without some help, our 
government has decided, but also now work year round for about the 
third year, when, once you get started, you can keep on going if you 
have a pattern that is working.
  We spent a lot of time in the last year talking about what to do in 
this growing economy, where more jobs are available than people looking 
for work. What do we do to better match the people looking for work 
with the jobs available? More importantly, how can we anticipate that 
that will happen in the future?
  For the fifth straight year, after 12 years of no increase, the 
National Institutes of Health in this bill will get a significant 
increase, an additional $2.6 billion, which increases them in the last 
5 years over 40 percent--again, at a time when this investment can mean 
so much to so many people.
  We specifically targeted the investment toward Alzheimer's disease. 
Alzheimer's and dementia are the things that taxpayers pay the most on 
in order to help, and taxpayers don't pay nearly all of the costs that 
families have with Alzheimer's and dementia.
  The President's Childhood Cancer Data Initiative is here. Precision 
medicine, combating foreign threats to research, addressing the 
facilities backlog on the campuses, all of those are here.
  Our investments in NIH are making a difference for families and 
making a difference, we hope, for the future. That NIH-based research 
has helped raise life expectancy. It has vastly improved the quality of 
life for many Americans. It has lowered healthcare costs. It has very 
dramatically decided, in some healthcare situations, either how 
invasive you need to be or how much pain has to be involved in getting 
you headed in another direction but also, by the way, on the opioid 
front, understanding that the complete elimination of pain is not 
necessarily a good thing unless you are sure you are going to be able 
to deal with that pain medicine and that moment later.
  The bill fully funds the President's request to do everything we can 
in the next 10 years to eliminate the HIV epidemic. It would have been 
hard to imagine 5 years ago or 10 years ago saying that we would be in 
sight of a vaccine and eliminating HIV as an epidemic problem in our 
country.
  We spend money on that, but we have fully funded what the President 
and others believe would be necessary to achieve that goal. We spend 
$20 billion a year right now on direct health expenditures on HIV 
prevention and care. Our goal in the next 10 years will be to reduce 
the number of new infections of HIV by at least 90 percent every year.
  Third, this bill, the fiscal year 2020 bill, continues our commitment 
to the opioid epidemic, providing money to do that, providing money for 
prevention, for education, for research, and for treatment, as well as 
recovery programs.
  In this bill we put new flexibility in for the opioid epidemic to 
where those things you may go to after you have become addicted to 
opioids, like meth, can also qualify for the kinds of help that people 
need if they are trying to escape their addiction to pain medications 
or other things that they have become critically linked to.
  This bill includes new and substantially expanded investments in Head 
Start, in high-quality early childhood care; programs that provide more 
flexibility to school districts to use the limited resources they have, 
whether that is title I, if you are a school person and know what that 
means, or title II, supporting effective instruction State grants; 
IDEA, the ability to help people with disability education issues; 
Impact Aid in communities that have significant Federal investments in 
military bases or a national forest or things like that. These are all 
things we deal with in this bill. We also target STEM education, 
including the focus on computer science.
  We are also trying to bring focus for young people to make them more 
quickly understand what the options are out there. Clearly, the college 
path that has been so pervasive in the last two decades isn't the right 
path for everybody. And even if it is the right path for everybody, if 
it doesn't hurt to go to college--I am the first person in my family to 
graduate from college. If it doesn't hurt to go to college, it might 
not necessarily get you a job unless you know what job it is you are 
thinking about as you put your college life together. Even that might 
not give you the job that you really would like to do. So part of what 
we are trying to do here is to connect people earlier with the 
opportunity to do that. If they do go to college, we are increasing 
Pell grants for the third year in a row by about 2.5 percent. We are 
increasing programs--the so-called TRIO Programs--for people who 
haven't had members of their family go to college before, to help them 
get ready for college, get them thinking about what they need to do to 
be the first person in their family to go to college, to help them 
figure out how to stay in college, because nobody in their family can 
give them the exact advice they might need on how to stay in college, 
and how they can get prepared to get a job out of college and avoid the 
kinds of loans they cannot afford to pay back.

  There is something I call lost equity. I have talked to so many 
people in the last 2 years who are about 28 years old, and over and 
over again, the story was so similar. They went to college for a year 
or a semester and then held a series of jobs that were not too hard to 
get but didn't lead anywhere. They were landscapers or Uber drivers or 
bartenders or whatever else, with no sense that that was a career and 
not the underpinnings they would like to have. Then finally, in their 
midtwenties, somebody tells them or they figure out on your own that 
they have to have something that can support them the way they would 
like to be supported and help them with a family, might have retirement 
and certainly has benefits. We are trying to do what we can to be sure 
that focus comes earlier as they begin to think about what they like to 
do and what they find fulfilling.
  Let's talk about the jobs that are out there, whether it is STEM 
education or health services. Let's talk about the difference between a 
nurse practitioner and being a doctor. Let's talk about the difference 
between being a doctor and a specialist. Let's talk about where the job 
opportunities are in physical therapy, occupational therapy, or health 
tech. All of those things are a way to a great career if you know what 
you are doing.
  If you missed that launching point, if you missed those 10 years, 
that lost decade, it is pretty hard to ever catch up to your 
schoolmates who understood what they wanted to do and maybe had no more 
resources or capacity than you, but they had an extra 10 years on you 
in preparing for the career they would like to have and the work they 
would like to do and where that might lead them.
  The President really has been focusing on apprenticeship programs. An 
apprenticeship is a good way to learn firsthand and see firsthand what 
you want to do, whether it is an apprenticeship program or community 
college or traditional college or skills you learn in the military that 
you should be able to immediately transfer into a private sector, 
nonmilitary opportunity. We need to spend some time and some money on 
that, and this bill does.
  The bill continues to try to do what we can to be looking carefully 
at reducing fraud, reducing waste, and seeing that tax dollars are 
being spent properly, and a lot of them are spent right here in this 
bill. We prioritize

[[Page S7079]]

programs that really will provide benefit to, we hope, large groups in 
our country.
  The bill reflects compromises on both sides. The people of this 
country send 100 different people to the Senate and 435 different 
people to the House to vote and to make decisions that reach 
conclusions. This bill does that. All 12 of these bills we will vote on 
sometime in the next 3 days do that. They allow us to defend the 
country and to meet the obligations that people have asked the 
government to look at for them and hopefully do that in a way that 
produces real results.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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