[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 47 (Wednesday, March 11, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1690-S1691]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           WASTEFUL SPENDING

  Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, with spring approaching, the days are 
getting longer and temperatures are warming up. Many are hitting the 
gym, trying to get that summer bod before heading to the beach, 
including some turtles. That is right, your tax dollars actually paid 
for a study that put turtles on treadmills.
  So here we have our turtles on a treadmill. To no one's surprise, it 
turns out that turtles are really, really slow. OK. That is what our 
tax dollars went to. In fact, this wasteful study found that turtles 
moved at nearly the same pace as dead turtles on a treadmill. Aren't 
you glad that Washington bureaucrats used your hard-earned dollars to 
conduct this study? Good grief, folks.
  How many of your tax dollars went to this study, exactly? Well, 
folks, your guess is actually as good as mine because there is no legal 
obligation for most Federal agencies to publicly disclose the price of 
government projects, even though the American taxpayers are paying for 
them. Folks, this is your money--your money. Shouldn't you have a right 
to know how it is being spent?
  It has been said before, and I surely believe it: Government 
functions best when it operates in the open. This is the basis of 
Sunshine Week, which begins this Sunday. Sunshine Week is celebrated 
every year in March to remind us of just how important it is to have 
government transparency, especially when it comes to how our tax 
dollars are being spent.
  Transparency really is fundamental to the principles upon which our 
Nation was founded. The people have power to affect the decisions made 
by those of us who are elected leaders, and, in turn, Congress has the 
authority to hold accountable the millions of unelected Washington 
bureaucrats who ultimately write the rules and regulations that impact 
nearly every aspect of our lives and decide how our taxpayer dollars 
are spent.
  This year, I have a couple of bright ideas to shine some light on how 
Washington is spending your money. Let's talk about those darn 
government boondoggles--those Federal projects that are billions of 
dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Frankly, we know nothing 
about them because the government agencies aren't required to report 
this information to you.
  Well, I have a bill to help shed some light on these costly 
monstrosities. My Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act would require an annual 
report listing every single taxpayer-funded project that is $1 billion 
or more over budget or 5 years or more behind schedule. This will make 
it impossible for Washington bureaucrats to continue throwing our tax 
dollars into bottomless money pits without being noticed.
  Unfortunately, it is not just the billions wasted on boondoggles 
being kept secret. It is the cost of the Federal projects. So I have 
proposed a bill that requires every project supported with Federal 
funds to include a pricetag with the amount that is paid by taxpayers. 
That way, when your money is being spent to put turtles on a 
treadmill--the ones I mentioned to you earlier--you, the taxpayer, can 
decide if the price is right.
  Of course, the waste doesn't stop there. Did you know that Federal 
agencies spend over $1.4 billion every year on advertising and public 
relations? This includes--you will love this--more than a quarter of a 
million dollars for costumed mascots like Sammy Soil and Milkshake the 
cow--a quarter of a million dollars. There was nearly $10,000 to 
produce a zombie apocalypse survival guide. Yes, folks, I am not 
joking. And there was $30,000 for a martian New Year's Eve party and 
hundreds of thousands of dollars on tote bags, stress balls, fidget 
spinners, and other trinkets.
  Well, folks, thankfully, the Senate Homeland Security and 
Governmental Affairs Committee is voting today on my bill, which forces 
agencies to disclose exactly how much they are spending on all of these 
government gimmicks. Folks, it is time we bag the swag and end this 
unnecessary taxpayer-funded propaganda.
  With our national debt now exceeding $23 trillion, there is literally 
no better time than Sunshine Week to start shedding more light on how 
Washington is managing or maybe, in this case, mismanaging your money. 
The only reason to keep taxpayers in the dark is that these spending 
decisions can't withstand the scrutiny. And, folks, that is exactly why 
sunlight is the best disinfectant.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, there are a lot of things going on right 
now in DC and a lot of moving targets. A lot of Americans are looking 
closely at what is happening with the COVID-19 virus. We are tracking 
what is happening overseas in Afghanistan and multiple other issues on 
the stock market, as well as what is happening with oil and gas right 
now.
  We are spending a little bit of time, in the middle of all those 
things, to also say that we can't lose track of structural issues in 
government, to see if we can work on those issues that are, right now, 
in front of us, but we also have to look at long-term issues, to look 
at basic government transparency and basic accountability for 
government.
  So I want to highlight--several of my colleagues are here, as well, 
highlighting some of the things that are actually on the floor or have 
moved recently or we think we can move on those. One of those things is 
the GREAT Act. This is a bipartisan bill that deals with basic 
transparency for grants.
  If you go back 20 years ago, the Federal Government gave away very 
few grants. Now, $600 billion a year is just for grants. My colleague, 
Joni Ernst from Iowa, just highlighted some of those wasteful grants 
that are out there that, as we go through them, we say we can try to 
get those one at a time or we can try to get a system in place where 
all grants have to go through a centralized data system where we can 
actually all look at the data and compare it across the government to 
basically look for areas of inefficiency. That is what the GREAT Act 
does. It creates standard data elements so that we can look at how the 
money is being spent--America's money--so we can actually evaluate it. 
That has overwhelmingly already passed. We are grateful to get that 
done this year.
  Another one we were able to get done this year that has passed the 
Senate but has not yet passed the House is providing accountability 
through transparency. Now, this may seem super simple, but let me just 
begin with the most basic principle. No small business owner in America 
gets up every day and reads the Federal Register. It just doesn't 
happen anywhere.
  If you are running a small business, you are running your small 
business. You are not getting up every day and reading the Federal 
Register to see the latest regulation. Even if you did, with the pages 
and pages and pages of regulations there, you can't make sense of it. 
This basic providing of accountability through transparency asks a 
simple question: Can we force the agencies, when they actually do a new 
regulation, to condense it down to 100 words or less in plain English 
so that you can actually figure out what this regulation is trying to 
do, so when you see a regulation come out, you can actually understand 
it without having to hire an attorney to go interpret it for you?
  That has overwhelmingly already passed the Senate, and we are waiting 
for that to pass the House, as well--basic simplification of some of 
the government entities, in trying to be able to help out.
  We passed by a majority--and it has already been signed into law--the 
one dealing with representative payee fraud. Now, again, this was a 
simple piece that was just needed in government. We discovered that if 
someone is a trustee for a Federal retiree for their retirement account 
and, as a trustee, they stole the money out of that person's account, 
we couldn't actually enforce the law on them. We could in several other 
areas, if it was Social Security or if it was disability, but we 
couldn't on Federal retirees.
  So we were able to get a bipartisan agreement to pass this to take 
care of

[[Page S1691]]

that. It was a very simple bill, but it is the way we need to react 
when we see a problem--to actually go to solve that problem rather than 
take forever to do it.
  Speaking of ``forever'' to be able to solve it, what I think is the 
most basic government transparency piece we can put out there to force 
real dialogue on budget issues is a simple bill we have on shutdown 
prevention. If we can end government shutdowns, we can actually have 
more debate on budget issues here in this room, where it should occur, 
and take the pressure off of Federal workers and Federal families 
facing a shutdown and furloughs.
  Maggie Hassan and I have a very simple bill. The bill simply says: If 
we get to the end of the fiscal year and if we don't have all the 
issues resolved on our budget, we continue debating those things here. 
We remain in session 7 days a week until it is actually resolved. But 
in the meantime, Federal workers and their families are unaffected 
because the budget automatically continues at last year's budget level 
until we get things resolved here. But in the meantime, we can't go 
home until we actually solve that problem.
  It is a straightforward solution to say: We are not going to have 
government shutdowns. We are not going to have chaos across the whole 
country. We have had 21 government shutdowns in 40 years. We have to 
stop that chaos.
  So it stops that chaos, and it puts the pressure where the pressure 
needs to be--on us. When we finish our work, then we can move to the 
next thing. But if the budget work is not done, the most basic elements 
of those appropriations bills, if they are not finished, we remain in 
session 7 days a week until they are finished.
  We need to find ways to be more efficient as a government. Government 
shutdowns waste money by the billions. Rob Portman and his team did a 
remarkable study to look and see how much money was wasted in the last 
shutdown, and it was in the billions of dollars, and not even every 
agency turned in all their information to Rob Portman and his team.
  We can't keep losing money that way. We can't keep that chaos going 
for all the Federal workers and their families. We should have 
arguments about the budget. We have big ones that need to be resolved, 
but we should keep it here.
  So, this week, as we pause for just a moment on all the other big 
issues that are pressing on us right now, I am grateful that we are 
also pausing for a moment to say: What are the big issues that we 
should look long term on, and how do we solve some of those issues for 
the future, as well, to make government more efficient and try to make 
government more transparent?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here to join my colleagues in 
speaking on the floor in advance of government Sunshine Week, but 
before I do that, let me commend my colleague from Oklahoma for his 
comments about the need for more transparency in government and 
particularly our grantmaking process.
  We have made some progress on that--most recently, the DATA Act. His 
predecessor in Congress, Tom Coburn, worked on this issue, and we came 
up with legislation when I was on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue 
at the Office of Management and Budget to put all grants and contracts 
online, which was a start. But the DATA Act takes that to the next 
level to make sure there is uniformity in government.
  We still have difficulty with some agencies getting information out 
there, but he is absolutely right. It would make a difference because 
if people know how the money is being spent, it is much more likely to 
be spent wisely, all the way down to the ZIP Code in terms of where 
grants are going and what kind of Federal taxpayer dollars are being 
spent in our communities and whether it is being spent well.
  Government shutdowns, of course--I couldn't agree more with my 
colleague--have not worked to help make our government more 
efficient. In fact, we always spend more after the fact.

  Think about it. People were furloughed, and, then, when they went 
back to work, they got backpay. Well, it would have been much better 
had they been there to provide the services to the taxpayers.
  You also just have a lot of dislocation that is unfair and people who 
have to go to work who are essential employees. Think of our TSA 
employees--for those of you who travel in airports--not getting paid. A 
lot of them had car payments or house payments they couldn't make 
during the last government shutdown. It is just unfair. So we have to 
get at that.
  We have legislation that actually two-thirds of the Members of this 
side of the aisle have supported. Yet we have not been able to make 
that bipartisan. So I appreciate the fact that my colleague from 
Oklahoma has a bipartisan approach to that. We have tried for four or 
five Congresses now to pass legislation that simply says that at the 
end of the fiscal year, if you haven't completed all the bills, then 
the government continues to operate, but 1 percent of spending is cut 
every 120 days, and every 90 days thereafter to give the Appropriations 
Committees here the incentive to get to work and to get the budget 
bills done. That, I think, would work.
  It used to be a bipartisan approach. It is not now. So I am 
interested in looking at other options, including what the Senator from 
Oklahoma was talking about in terms of providing more pressure on us 
here to get our work done because these shutdowns clearly haven't 
worked to help make the government more efficient. They have just had 
the opposite impact.

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