[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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