[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3821-3835]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




 CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT FOR FISCAL YEAR 
                            2009--Continued

  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I am going to spend a little while tonight 
talking about the budget. I have listened to the budget debate all day, 
just like I did yesterday. I came in yesterday and listened to the 
debate. I have heard about tax increases and I have heard about 
spending and I have heard the things going back and forth. But what I 
did not hear was anything that had to do with this: This is the oath of 
a Senator. There are some interesting things. Let me read it first:

       I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the 
     Constitution of the United States against all enemies, 
     foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and 
     allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, 
     without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and 
     that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the 
     office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

  The interesting thing about that oath is nowhere in that oath does it 
mention your State. There was, by design, never any intended part by 
our Founders that we would place parochialism ahead of our duty to this 
country. Yet where do we find ourselves today? With $9 trillion, almost 
$10 trillion, at the end of this fiscal year, in direct debt.
  We have heard all sorts of numbers quoted today. The actual number 
for the obligated unpaid-for liabilities that our next generations will 
face is actually $79 trillion. It is interesting where that comes from 
because that comes from the retirement benefits for our service 
personnel, the retirement benefits for Federal employees, including 
people who work in this Chamber, Medicare payments, Medicaid payments, 
all the various trust funds we have set up through the years, such as 
the Inland Waterway Trust Fund, the trust funds associated with other 
distinct obligations in terms of infrastructure in this country. We are 
stealing all that money every year that is supposed to go to it. As a 
matter of fact, the budget deficit this year will be, in real 
accounting standards--not Enron accounting standards--$607 billion, of 
which about $160 billion of that is going to come from Social Security 
and about another $30 billion to $35 billion from all these other trust 
funds.
  So when you hear a number that comes from Washington, I want us to be 
very suspect because we are much like the CEO at Enron, Ken Lay. We are 
not going to send you the real number. It is not because we do not 
intend to be honest; it is because we have sold out to parochialism.
  Now, I want us to think about that for a minute. Later on, I am going 
to show some examples. I am going to go through $350 billion-plus worth 
of waste that occurs annually in this country. But how is it that we 
have $350 billion--by the way, it is not going to be disputable. There 
is going to be an absolute reference to either a GAO study, a CBO 
score, a congressional hearing or published reports that are out there. 
So it is not going to be Tom Coburn's estimate. It is going to be a 
factual basis of what is occurring in our country.
  But how is it we got to the point where Members of Congress--both of 
the House and of the Senate--have all of a sudden forgotten what their 
oath is; that, in fact, their primary means is: How do I send more 
money home to my State? How is it that we have gotten to where we have 
$79 trillion in unfunded liabilities? We have $10 trillion in true 
debt, at the end of this fiscal year. We are going to have a $600 
billion deficit--real deficit--this year, which we are going to 
obligate our children to pay for.
  I would put forth: We forgot our oath. We forgot what it is about. 
Our State is not mentioned. When I am parochial for my State, there is 
no way I can live up to the oath I took when I came into this body. 
There is no way, if I am parochial for Oklahoma or Ohio, I can possibly 
make a decision that is in the long-term best interest of the country, 
when I am thinking about the best interest of my State in the short 
term.
  So, consequently, what came about from that? Well, here is what we 
saw in terms of earmarks, the growth of earmarks and the growth of 
Government spending. Isn't it interesting, we have heard all the debate 
today about tax increases, but nobody, except Senator Brownback, talked 
about cutting spending. Here we have the earmarks in 2006. In 2007, 
there were another 11,800 earmarks. So it went to 12,000 earmarks. But 
the spending continues to rise. There is a correlation between earmarks 
and spending, and it is this: Earmarks are the gateway drug for 
overspending.

[[Page 3822]]

  Let me explain how it works. If I want something for Oklahoma and I 
submit a request and the appropriators are kind enough to honor that 
request and I do not vote for the bill, regardless of whether I agree 
with the bill, the next time another appropriations bill comes up and I 
have a request, I will not get it. So all of a sudden my earmark blinds 
me on a parochial basis for what is best for Oklahoma, but I do not do 
what is best for the country. So you see this trend going up, and it 
continues to go up. If you had one for debt, you would see that. If you 
had one for unfunded liabilities, you would see the same thing.
  Now, what did our Founders have to say:

       Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the 
     general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically 
     enumerated.

  This is Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic Party. This 
is what he said:

       As it was never meant they should provide for that welfare 
     but by the exercise of the enumerated powers.

  Earmarks are not enumerated powers. The only power they are is how we 
find ways to get ourselves reelected. That is the power they are. Here 
is the founder of the modern Democratic Party who now chastises us with 
his words about what earmarks are.
  Yet what do we do? We are going to have a vote. We are going to have 
a vote on this budget on a moratorium on earmarks. I am very thankful 
to Senator DeMint for bringing that up.
  The argument about earmarks is over everywhere except in Washington. 
If you look at all the polling data throughout the country, in every 
State, it does not matter if you are Democrat or Republican or 
Independent, it is over. They have already decided the issue. Eighty-
five percent of the people in this country say we should not be doing 
it. It does not have anything to do with age. It does not have anything 
to do with party. Do you know what it has to do with? Those people who 
are getting them and are well heeled and well connected to politicians, 
they are the ones who do not want the earmark party to be over. That 
ought to send a warning signal to the rest of Americans that there is 
something wrong with this process.
  Here is what is wrong with the process:

       [T]he principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, 
     under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a 
     large scale.

  This is the same bright man who was very involved in the genesis of 
our country, talking to us from history about what is important on 
earmarks.
  In 1996, there were less than 900 earmarks. How did we go--in 10 
short years--from 3,000 to 15,000? What changed? The argument is: We 
have an obligation not to let the bureaucrats spend the money. Does 
that mean all the time before this, when they were much lower, we were 
not doing a good job? Or could it be that all of a sudden the political 
tool of earmarks became the soup du jour that politicians use to get 
themselves reelected and collect campaign money by accomplishing those 
things?
  So I wish to spend a little time tonight talking about the 
unsustainable course we are on. International markets now doubt our 
ability to pay off our debt. Our AAA credit rating is in jeopardy. The 
dollar is declining. Medicare has hit a trigger for the first time in 
its history that signals we are dipping into general revenues at a rate 
that is unsustainable. By the way, Medicare was never intended to be 
paid for with funds from general revenue. Do we have a moral obligation 
as Members of Congress to do what every other family does in tough 
times and tighten our belts?
  So what I am going to try to do tonight is lay out $388 billion worth 
of things the Congress could do tomorrow that would save us $388 
billion.
  Now, somebody may dispute the fact that if we totally changed the Tax 
Code to either a flat tax or a sales tax we might not have a tax gap--
the amount that is owed that is not paid--of $350 billion or $370 
billion. We may only have one of $270 billion. I will admit that. So 
you can take an arrow at that. But the rest of it you cannot take an 
arrow at. All the rest of it is indisputable.
  As a matter of fact, we had testimony before the Budget Committee and 
before the Finance Committee by the IRS that said if, in fact, you 
funded them properly, they could get between $30 billion and $40 
billion of the tax gap back over a period of 5 years. We know for every 
$1 we give them in terms of enforcement, they get $3 to $4 back.
  The problem in our country is overspending and wasteful spending. It 
is not undertaxation. It is a moral question whether we will ask the 
American people for more money when, in fact, we are terrible slobs 
with the way we control and manage the money they have today, where we 
are wasteful.
  The American people would expect us to get rid of fraud, waste, and 
abuse before we raise their taxes. Calling for higher taxes is akin to 
saying you want a performance bonus for us. That is what it is saying. 
It is absurd to claim the Government is operating at peak efficiency 
and spending cannot be cut anywhere. But yet we do not see it. It is 
not just the Democratic budgets. It is the Republican budgets. I will 
give credit to President Bush. At least he has the PART program and at 
least they have brought forward recommendations of getting rid of 
programs that absolutely are not functioning, absolutely do not come 
anywhere close to meeting the goals. Because they have special 
interests, they are protected by individual Senators. Blocking new 
spending is not about obstructionism. The real obstruction is wasteful 
spending and not going after the wasteful spending at a time when we 
are asking Americans, who are tightening their belts, to give more 
money to the Government. That is the real obstruction.
  Looking for new ways to spend money is not our job. Our job is to 
conduct oversight and eliminate programs that are not working. We are 
not doing our oversight. As a matter of fact, the CRS did a study on 
oversight. If we put this sign right up here and we look at oversight 
hearings, what you will see is: As the earmarks have gone up, oversight 
has gone down. Do you know why? Because the only thing the 
Appropriations staff has time to do is to barely get the bill out and 
then manage all the earmarks. So where is the oversight to see what is 
working and what is not? It isn't there.
  The other assumption with this budget is that we have a blank check--
and with Republican budgets, not just the majority's budgets--to spend 
money however we desire, however we choose. Well, that does not appear 
in the Constitution. We have totally thrown it away when it comes to 
spending. We have totally thrown it away under the concept of either 
the interstate commerce clause or the general welfare clause. We have 
decided that those do not mean anything, even though the significant 
Founders of our country believed they did.
  So let's go back to the oath. Does the oath mean anything? I will 
``defend the Constitution'' is what it says. Oh, that means I will 
twist it to make sure I can do parochial things that make me look good 
at home. Is that what it means? Can I fully represent and do what is 
best for our country when I am worried about doing what is best for my 
State and me? Which one is the more moral position?
  James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was very clear on this 
point. He said:

        With respect to the two words ``general welfare,'' I have 
     always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers 
     enumerated in the Constitution that are connected with it. To 
     take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a 
     metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which 
     there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its 
     creators.

  In other words, when you are starting to fudge the deal, that is not 
what we intended, guys. When you are starting to play games with the 
Constitution, that is not what we intended. And he spoke it in 
anticipation so that he would be on record. And we would know what his 
record was about, what they intended about general welfare. The 
arguments we hear in defense of earmarks would be ridiculed by our 
Founders after they got over their nausea.

[[Page 3823]]

  President Reagan criticized the 1987 highway bill because it had 152 
earmarks. As a matter of fact, the one before that he vetoed and sent 
back, and it had even fewer than that. So this isn't an old phenomenon; 
this is a modern phenomenon. This is something modern that we need to 
change.
  It is interesting that so many in this body seem more interested in 
adhering to the constitutional scholarship of Jack Abramoff rather than 
James Madison, much to our detriment. Why do you think we have between 
an 11 and 22 percent confidence rating from the American people about 
whether we are doing their business in the best interests of the 
country, rather than our business?
  Another argument I hear often is that we know better than faceless 
bureaucrats. Yet if we don't like what an agency is doing, we don't 
have anyone to blame but ourselves. We have the power of the purse and 
the power of oversight. The problem is we only use the power of the 
purse to spend, not to restrict. The last time a rescission bill--and 
for those who don't know what that is, it is a bill that decreases 
rather than increases spending--went through Congress was 1995.
  Overcoming our addiction to earmarks will help us confront the 
massive waste that is in the Federal budget. We have to do a top-down 
review of everything in this country if, in fact, we want to hold to 
the things that are really important, the things that are really worth 
our sacrifice, which is the next two generations.
  Now, it is really interesting that the Government Accounting Office 
says that every family today is responsible for an unfunded liability 
of almost a half million dollars. If we think about what that means in 
terms of carrying that interest, paying your regular taxes and then 
carrying that--the other thing is if you divide the unfunded liability 
by the 200 million kids who are going to come on between now and the 
next 75 years, what we are talking about is $400,000 per child; 
$400,000 per individual child who is born starting today and moving 
forward that we are going to add. Think about carrying the interest. 
Think about what will happen to them.
  Now, let me put up a chart, and we will go through this for a minute. 
This has $383 billion--actually a more recent chart shows $385 
billion--in annual expenditures that are wasted. I would like to spend 
a minute on that, but let me describe what it is. It is $3,000 for 
every American household in this country down the drain. It is a full 
4-year scholarship for two-thirds of all of the college students in 
this country. It is enough money to buy a new home for 2 million 
Americans, based on the average price of a home. It is enough money to 
get the 2 million Americans who are facing foreclosure out of 
foreclosure and pay for their entire mortgage. That is what we are 
wasting in one year. It is enough money to pay for the health care of 
everybody in this country who is either underinsured or uninsured. All 
47 million who are uninsured and the 35 million who are underinsured, 
we can pay for them, just by getting rid of this waste.
  It is more than the gross domestic product of 85 percent of every 
country on Earth. How much we are wasting through fraud and abuse and 
waste is greater than 85 percent of the gross domestic product of every 
country on this Earth. It is more than the gross domestic product of 40 
States in our Union. It is enough to meet the one campaign's annual 
goals to end extreme poverty over the next 10 years, over 10 times not 
enough. More importantly, it is enough to build 1,500 bridges to 
nowhere over every river in the world, times 10. That is how much money 
it is.
  So what are the crises that we face? It is important that we put 
ourselves in the shoes of the typical American family in this time of 
tightening. What do they do? They reassess. They look for waste. Their 
debt is fixed. They try not to get additional debt. They try to spend 
less money. They try to conserve. They try to turn the thermostat down. 
They try to only drive when they have to drive. They try to buy cheaper 
foods. They don't buy the things they would like to buy. They buy and 
spend money only on bare necessities, if they can.
  Well, a $607 billion deficit this year, a $10 trillion debt, and a 
$79 trillion unfunded liability ought to cause us to do the same thing, 
except we have only heard 1 percent in 2 days of debate talk about 
eliminating wasteful spending, and that was Senator Sam Brownback from 
Kansas.
  In the short term, we will get through this economic slowdown. 
Hopefully, energy prices will become more affordable for us. But 
everybody knows in this body, whether we want to admit it or not, we 
are approaching the day of reckoning that we would not get through. As 
David Walker, who is the Comptroller General of the United States, a 
nonpartisan position, said: We are on an unsustainable course. It is 
absolutely unsustainable. The question is whether our kids are worth us 
making the hard choices.
  Economists on the left and the right from groups ranging from the 
Brookings Institute to the Heritage Foundation recognize the course we 
are on. We hear all the time that the only problems are the mandatory 
programs: Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. I am going to show 
tonight that it is not the only problem. It is a lot of the problem, 
there is no question about it. It is not just the demographics of it 
and the growth. There are a lot of management problems that we fail to 
address.
  Each family's share, which I spoke about a minute ago, of the 
unfunded liabilities is over $450,000 right now. By 2040--and this is 
not my number, this is the Government Accounting Office--total Federal 
spending will have to be cut by 60 percent or we will have to double 
Federal income tax rates.
  Now, we heard Senator Hatch talk about how 50 percent of the country 
now pays 97 percent of the taxes. What happens when we double our tax 
rates, or another question is, what happens when we don't have any 
Government programs except Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security? 
No military, no Department of Education, no NASA, no NIH, no CDC. All 
of those are gone in a very few short years. More importantly, in 2012, 
my generation starts heavily hitting Medicare and Social Security, the 
first baby boomers. What happens if we don't address that?
  We would be wise to remember the words of Will Durant:

       A great civilization is not conquered from without until it 
     has destroyed itself from within.

  For the typical family sitting around the dinner table right now 
across America, the answer is obvious. It is time for some belt 
tightening. It is time for us to do the hard work of eliminating the 
duplication of wasteful programs. From their perspective, if they have 
to tighten their belt, we should too. It is not our money, it is 
theirs. Yet in this body we don't believe we have to live by the same 
set of rules. We have demonstrated that by our behavior. We like to 
pretend that we don't live in the world of credit ratings and scores. 
We ignore economic realities and look for ways to spend money on things 
that aren't necessary--they may be nice but aren't necessary--with 
little regard to how our decisions are going to affect our ability to 
pay for things we must pay for.
  By arguing that Americans aren't taxed enough, Members of Congress 
are claiming that Government spending can't be cut any more in the 
budget because the Government is running so efficiently it deserves a 
raise. I don't think there is hardly anybody out in America's 
midsection, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, south central, 
who believes that. That is a fairy tale that is believed here, except 
we don't confront it.
  Every year we have given Congress a performance bonus that has been 
adamantly unearned. Americans find this absurd. That is one of the 
reasons our approval rating is so low.
  A question we should ask probably is, if our Nation's survival were 
at stake right now, would we be acting any differently? Would we have 
this budget, or the Republican budget, from 2006? Would those have been 
the budgets? No, they wouldn't have been. We would have been thinking 
long term. We

[[Page 3824]]

would have been making the hard decisions. We would have said: Our 
country is worth us irritating some special interest group over some 
item that is no longer efficient or no longer effective. We wouldn't be 
worried about weighing the future of our children and our grandchildren 
against the special interests and monied of this country. We wouldn't 
worry about it.
  Well, the fact is, the future is on the line, and if we don't act in 
the next couple of years, we are going to fall into Will Durant's trap, 
as we will have rotted inside our own excesses of politics, as we 
quietly didn't do the things that we could have done to fix the 
problems that are in front of this country.
  It is called maintenance. It is like when you don't mow your grass or 
you don't pick up the trash in front of your yard. What happens is the 
value goes down, the pride goes down. Well, that is what has happened 
to us because myself and the vast majority of Americans believe 
overspending is a greater moral challenge than undertaxation.
  I want to spend some time now going through what I call 2008, a waste 
odyssey. This waste odyssey is--I am going to be describing a few areas 
of Government, and I am going to go through them fairly fast so we can 
see it, and it will be on my Web site in the next week or so. But I am 
going to outline at least $385 billion, of which I will guarantee $355 
billion of it cannot be legitimately challenged that is not waste; $355 
billion annually that is wasted or defrauded from the taxpayers of this 
country, and we are doing nothing about it. This budget doesn't do 
anything about it; our appropriations oversight committees don't do 
anything about it. The committees don't make the amendments to do 
something about it. We do nothing about it. So we come back to that 
all-important oath. Mr. President, $385 billion listed, $383 billion on 
this one chart, $385 billion of which $355 billion nobody will be able 
to dispute.
  (Mr. Brown assumed the Chair.)
  Mr. COBURN. Here is what we know. Medicare fraud, out and out pure 
Medicare fraud. It is somewhere between $70 billion and $90 billion. I 
picked the middle, which is $80 billion. We have testimony and studies 
and lots of data on that that will show us that at least $80 billion 
worth of Medicare money is being ripped off every year.
  Let me give some examples. I will go through some. Here is one 
company that billed Medicare $170 million for HIV drugs. Do you know 
how much in HIV drugs they did? Less than a million. But they billed 
$170 million. There was $142 million for nonexistent delivery of 
supplies and parts and medical equipment--$142 million.
  How about taking Medicare numbers from seniors and billing Medicare 
for prosthetic arms on people who already have two arms? That came to 
$1.4 billion last year. Think about that--$1.4 billion was billed to 
Medicare for prosthetic arms for people who don't need prosthetic arms.
  How about 80 percent of the drugs billed across the entire United 
States for HIV under Medicare went to the State of Florida, which has 
less than 10 percent of the HIV patients who are eligible for Medicare. 
How is that possible? How about one wheelchair that got billed to 
Medicare? It was never sent, but they billed $5 million to Medicare 
through multiple billings. It is easy to add up to $80 billion.
  I could go on. How about fake Medicare providers for the elderly, 
when they steal their number and send multiple bills to multiple 
locations throughout the country for the same Medicare patient. That is 
$10 billion in improper payments. The actual improper payments were $37 
billion the year before last, and $27 billion last year and of that, 
$10 billion of it is unrecoverable. We paid too much or we paid the 
wrong person. That is $10 billion out the door, which is $250 per man, 
woman, and child in this country in improper payments on Medicare.
  Medicaid is another one. There was $30 billion worth of fraud. It is 
higher than that; that is only the Federal Government's portion of it. 
It is easily documented, but we cannot document it because Medicaid 
doesn't file improper payments like the law says they are supposed to. 
Why? It is because we have not had the guts to put any teeth into 
forcing HHS to have improper payments. Last year, finally we got 6 
months of improper payments on only direct payments to doctors. They 
found $13 billion worth of improper payments. We have a report that 
says there is probably $15 billion worth of fraud in Medicaid in New 
York City alone, of which the Federal Government's share would be about 
$8 billion to $9 billion.
  How about the fact that we paid, in 10 States, over $30 million for 
payments for Medicaid services to people who are dead? Yes, we paid 
that. We have a great system that is working well. How about the fact 
that 65 percent of all Medicaid rehabilitative services are fraudulent? 
So of the rehab bills that are filed with Medicaid through CMS, 65 
percent are fraudulent.
  Why do we continue to let that happen? Where is the oversight? Ninety 
percent of New York Medicaid school-based service claims were 
illegitimate. Case management. CMS reports that in one State, 72.4 
percent of the claims weren't valid in terms of Medicaid case 
management.
  Then we have the infamous drug scandals with the drug companies that 
have been overbilling to the tune of a billion dollars.
  How about Social Security disability fraud? We have that listed at 
$2.5 billion. What we know is the following: There is at least $6.5 
billion in improper payments in Social Security disability. So we have 
paid them a much smaller percentage than we have on any other improper 
payment program throughout the Federal Government and said we will take 
a small percentage of that, less than 40 percent, which is normally 80 
percent, and we will list it at $2.5 billion. It is coming out of 
Social Security every year--totally wrong--and that $2.5 billion could 
stay in the SSI program to fund people who were truly disabled. Yet we 
let $2.5 billion sneak out. Why? That is us. We have not done the 
oversight.
  If you add up all of the rest of the improper payments in the Federal 
Government, you come to $55 billion. That is what is reported. But that 
doesn't include the 18 agencies of the Federal Government that don't 
even report improper payments, even though it is the law, which 
accounts for another $179 billion worth of spending. And if they are 
anywhere close to the rest of it, there is 5 to 10 percent of improper 
payments. So there is anywhere from $3 billion to $7 billion more in 
improper payments.
  DOD performance awards. Here is what we have done. Over the last 3 
years, the DOD paid out $8 billion on average a year to contractors for 
performance bonuses that didn't meet the performance requirements of 
their contract. Think about that--$8 billion a year. That is almost 
twice the total budget of my home State that we are paying for 
performance bonuses for contractors that don't meet the requirements of 
the contract, but we pay them anyway. Why do we allow that? Why do we 
allow that to happen?
  How about DOD maintenance of unneeded properties? We have testimony 
and a report that shows they have 22,000 pieces of property they don't 
want. They are spending about $3 billion maintaining properties they 
don't want. But we put roadblocks in the way so they cannot get rid of 
them. Is that Americans' fault or is that something we should have 
addressed? We didn't do it. Consequently, we are going to throw out $3 
billion more this year to maintain properties we should have sold 5 to 
10 years ago.
  We also know that within the Federal Government, outside of the DOD, 
we have another $18 billion worth of properties we cannot get rid of 
because we cannot go through the hundreds of hoops we have to be able 
to get rid of them. That is a one-time savings. That is not even on 
here. That is a one-time savings we would achieve if we had a real 
property reform that forced the bureaucracy to do what was best when it 
came to real property.
  Going back to the performance bonuses, when GAO looked at it, they 
found no connection between the payment of performance bonuses at the

[[Page 3825]]

Pentagon and performance--not just on this $8 billion they said was 
paid erroneously, but on the rest of it. I think we have an Armed 
Services Committee in the Senate. We certainly have a DOD 
Appropriations Committee in the Senate. You would think this might be 
one thing we wanted to do oversight on. Yet no oversight hearing has 
happened. Why is that? Why haven't we looked at how we are wasting this 
money?
  How about no-bid contracts. This is my favorite. We have seen the 
problems between Boeing and Northrup-Grumman on a new tanker, a $35 
billion new contract--except we know we have needed a new tanker for 12 
years. We have had planning on that for 12 years. We are letting a 
cost-plus contract go through because we don't know what we want. Do we 
not think whoever won that contract ought to have to take some risk, 
development risk? Do we think the American taxpayer ought to pay that? 
We know we lose at least $5 billion a year across the Government in no-
bid contracts. That is probably minor. That is a small estimate within 
the Pentagon. We have not even looked at all the other no-bid contracts 
throughout FEMA, which we know was tremendously wasteful during 
Katrina. We know that at least $3 billion of the money we spent during 
Katrina, from hearings we had on homeland security, was wasted. When 
the average price we pay to pick up debris from Katrina to the guy 
actually picking it up is $6 a yard, and we are paying the Corps of 
Engineers $32 a yard, there is a problem. The taxpayers are getting 
swindled by 500 percent. Yet we did that to the tune of billions of 
dollars after Katrina, with no management or oversight.
  What we know is in homeland security--and especially from Congressmen 
Waxman and Davis in the House--32 Homeland Security Department 
contracts, worth a total of $34 billion in no-bid contracts, have 
experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, and 
mismanagement. Between 2003 and 2005, the no-bid contracts in the 
Department of Homeland Security increased by 739 percent. There is no 
management. We are allowing that to happen. When we argue that we 
cannot let the bureaucrats control it, when we say we have to do 
earmarks, but we don't do oversight, we are letting the bureaucrats 
control it. If there is $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, and abuse 
here, and our earmarks account for $18 billion, what price are we 
paying by not managing the Federal Government and having oversight? We 
are not doing it.
  Emergency spending, another one we won't be critical of ourselves. We 
put emergency spending in on the floor and add from $20 billion to $40 
billion and call it an emergency, and none of it meets the definition 
of an emergency. We do that so we can go outside of the spending 
parameters that we have limited ourselves to either through pay-go or 
the budget. But it looks good at home--or does it? It looks good at 
home until we start talking about the waste, talking about the fraud, 
talking about the mismanagement, talking about the denial of our oath 
we took when we came here to uphold the Constitution. When we allow 
bureaucracies to waste money, when we don't have oversight of those 
bureaucracies, then in fact we have abandoned our oath.
  It is interesting, in emergencies, up until recently, when we had 
emergency spending, we paid for it. In my home State of Oklahoma we had 
the Oklahoma City bombing, a tremendous tragedy. It was the first major 
internal terrorist act we had. All of the money that went toward 
restoration of that was paid for. We didn't borrow it from our 
grandchildren. Let me go back again. When we don't pay for things with 
emergency spending, we charge it to them. When we have a true 
emergency, which we might say we didn't plan for, that is one thing, 
but when we know what we are putting into the bill is not an emergency, 
we are saying they don't matter, we don't care. We care more about 
looking good and getting some constituent satisfied than thinking about 
the future of these kids.
  How about other areas? How about crop insurance? Do you realize that 
for every dollar we pay out in crop insurance, we spend over $3 in 
administrative fees and underwriting to insurance companies? How is 
that a good deal? Regardless of where you are on the farm bill, why 
would we do that? That is at a rate of five times what the rest of the 
insurance industry earns.
  Who has the sweet deal here? Who has the sweet deal? It is not these 
kids. They don't have a sweet deal, when we are paying three times more 
than we should to administer a crop insurance program and not requiring 
farmers to participate. That is the minimum we can save--$4 billion a 
year--by saying you can earn the same amount of money as everybody else 
in the casualty insurance business, and no more. No more sweet deals 
for crop insurance firms. But do we do it? No. I voted wrong on one of 
the amendments for it. It may have been the amendment of the person 
sitting in the chair. But we didn't do it.
  One of my favorites is the United Nations. We sent $5.3 billion last 
year to the U.N. and we cannot get the State Department to tell us what 
our total was in 2007. That was 2006. By law, they are supposed to 
provide that, but they don't comply. The Foreign Relations Committee 
won't make them comply, and the Appropriations Committee won't do it, 
because we don't want to know how much we send. But the American people 
want to know. But the Secretary of State does not want to give it to 
us. Our committees will not force them to do it. What do we know about 
that, of the leaked documents that came out looking at how money is 
spent? What we know is on procurement and peacekeeping that at least 40 
percent of the money that is spent is wasted. Think about that. At 
least 40 percent is influenced through people of influence and does not 
ever get to what it is supposed to be doing. It never gets into the 
peacekeeping field. Only 60 percent of the procurement money actually 
ever gets to where we want peacekeeping, and yet we don't do anything 
about it.
  We have asked for transparency at the United Nations. This body voted 
99 to 1 to condition last year's money on that transparency. It went to 
conference, and all of a sudden for some reason that was dropped. I 
wonder why that happened? We thought the United Nations owed us an 
explanation to tell us where they spent our $5.3 billion but, in our 
wisdom, we did not accede to that because it might have upset the U.N. 
Consequently, about $1 billion a year of what we send to the United 
Nations is pure waste--pure waste. It goes to fraud. It goes to buy off 
people. It goes to not accomplishing the goals.
  If we look at what we are trying to do in Darfur and the new U.N. 
program over there in terms of sending an interdiction force, what we 
know is 40 percent of the money has been wasted. It has been scavenged. 
It has been taken away. It is not going to make a difference in 
somebody's life.
  It is interesting, the U.N. peacekeeping budget this year will grow 
from $5 billion to $7 billion, a 40-percent growth in 1 year. And of 
the top five contributors to the U.N. budget, which is us, the United 
Kingdom, France, Japan, and Germany, all of our budgets are going to 
grow around 6 or 7 percent. But because we do not have any 
transparency, we do not have any management at the United Nations, we 
have a spoil system and we do not have the courage in our body to hold 
them accountable, we are going to throw $1 billion to $2 billion of our 
kids' money away.
  Oh, I know, we shouldn't rock the boat at the United Nations. They 
are the people who care about freedom in the world. It is hard to see. 
If they care about freedom, transparency would be one of the No. 1 
things they would assure themselves.
  How about another $10-billion worth of savings? We have $64 billion 
worth of IT contracts going on right now; $27 billion of those are on 
the high-risk list. In other words, we routinely lose about 20 percent 
of our investments in ITs. They don't ever accomplish their goals. We 
spend the money, and we never get anything for it. Where is the 
management for that program? Where is the accountability for that? It 
is

[[Page 3826]]

similar to the tanker program: Give me a cost-plus program, I don't 
know what I want now, but I know I want something, and I will tell you 
as we go what I want. And so the bills start adding up. So out of the 
$64 billion we spent last year, $27 billion of it is questionable we 
are ever getting anything out of it.
  Take a conservative estimate of that, which is less than what we know 
historically the IT oversight from GAO has told us, and we are going to 
lose $10 billion on programs that were not asked for right, were not 
managed properly or we just flat did not get what we asked for and 
parted our ways and threw these kids' money away.
  Then there is another $17.5 billion we can save from the National 
Flood Insurance Program. It was created in 1968 by Congress to prevent 
the need for future emergency spending for large floods. It was 
designed to be self-supporting, to pay back any debts with proceeds 
from ratepayers. But what happened was, on the way to the store, the 
politicians got in between them. So now we have a vast majority of 
properties that have been grandfathered in that historically have made 
claims. They were built before the NFIP construction standards, and 
they receive premium subsidies. In the wake of Katrina, we have a one-
time savings of $17.5 billion that we could have had we had that 
program. But where are we? We now have Gulf Coast States lobbying us 
that we should increase that program, except the kids I showed the 
picture of are responsible for that.
  The other item, and I challenge all my colleagues to start talking 
with Federal workers about where they can save money. If you ask them, 
every one of them says, yes, we can save money. As a matter of fact, we 
can save a lot of money, but nobody is asking. As a matter of fact, the 
system is, if we haven't spent the money by the 10th month, we are told 
to spend it, we are told to spend the money because we might not get 
enough money next year, and if we don't spend it, then it looks like we 
don't need it and, therefore, our budgets will be declined. In fact, 
out of the $1.36 trillion we are going to spend this year, we could 
save 5 percent easily, 5 percent efficiency. If we can save it, if the 
Federal employees, the thousands with whom I have talked, are right, 
why aren't we saving?
  Let's go down through a few more, and then I will finish.
  We know if we simplify the Tax Code, either change it to a flat tax 
or straight tax or a value-added tax--whichever one you want, it 
doesn't matter--what we know is if we did that, we could get 
significant savings. Let me tell you how.
  One is we know compliance will be better. But we also know we have a 
$10-billion budget for employees at the IRS that if, in fact, we could 
create a simpler, fairer, straighter system--you pick which kind, I 
don't care, value-added tax, whatever it is--that we would not need 
nearly that many employees and we would not spend $160 billion a year 
paying our taxes, which is what we pay other people outside the IRS.
  We also know the IRS, for every dollar they spend investing in 
compliance, gets between $3 and $4 back. So somewhere between $50 
billion and $100 billion out of the $370 billion that we don't get now, 
we can save. But we tend to want to use it for a political debate.
  How about eliminating outdated and wasteful programs. Let me go 
through some of them. That is $18 billion. Science fiction weapons, 
$431 million, got nothing for it over the last 10 years, nothing for 
it, and we spent $431 million and got nothing.
  The Coast Guard lengthened eight patrol boats through an earmark. It 
cost $100 million. They are all worthless now. We have to buy eight 
patrol boats. Somebody had a good idea.
  How about excessive fuel costs? At minimum, $35 million a year, and 
what we know now looks like in Iraq another $12 million worth of fraud 
occurring in the fuel depots inside Baghdad. Another $40 million, $50 
million on fuel.
  How about improper travel payments at the Defense Department, $4 
million a year? Security clearances--it costs us half a billion dollars 
a year to do security clearances because we are doing it in the Dark 
Ages when, in fact, for almost every other thing around this country we 
have developed modern systems, computer-aided IT to develop how fast 
and how often we can clear security items. Yet we spend half a billion, 
and it takes a year to get somebody cleared. We could cut that in half.
  We had a wonderful earmark for polyester t-shirts for our marines. 
The only problem is, if their MRAP or humvee has a fire, it sticks to 
their skin. But we still spend $3 million on them.
  How about a ferry to nowhere, 84 million bucks? We rejected the 
developmental boat proposed from a defense contractor in 2002, and the 
U.S. Navy was required to accept the project and the bid and deploy it 
to the seas for field engagement, even though it never proved 
economically worthwhile.
  How about a James Bond boat, $4.5 million, three of them?
  A high-altitude airship. The President knows something about this. 
The Missile Defense Agency did not request funding for this program. As 
a matter of fact, they said they canceled the program called the high-
altitude airship because of capability limitations. Yet we continue to 
spend at least $1 million a year every year on that program because 
somebody wants it. Some constituent, some moneyed interest, somebody 
who might employ 20 or 30 people wants it. Somebody wants it, so we 
have to look good.
  How about the American Embassy in Iraq, $592 million? We know a good 
20 percent of it is pure waste. We have seen the fraud. We have seen 
the reports. We know what is going on there. Have we cut back the 
amount of money? Have we limited the amount of money on it? No. We 
offered an amendment and couldn't get it done.
  How about USAID in Afghanistan, $5.68 billion spent for schools. In 
the first snow, the roofs collapsed on them. Did we do anything about 
it? No, we hired the contractor to do more stuff on a cost-plus basis.
  How about hospital clinics that were supposedly built, except after 
we paid for them, the Afghanistan Government told us they didn't build 
them. How do we let that happen? That is us. That isn't the 
bureaucracy; that is us. We are letting it happen. We are allowing it.
  We spend $20 billion on Federal AIDS programs and what we know is 
lots of it gets wasted. We know there is widespread deficiencies within 
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the HIV prevention 
program. Those are not my words; that is the HHS inspector general.
  Two million dollars was embezzled at the San Juan AIDS Institute. NIH 
is spending $120 million right now on a vaccine program. The starter of 
that program and the major scientists who started it said it will not 
work, and they are not contributing, but we continue to spend $120 
million on a program everybody in science knows is not going to work, 
but we are doing it.
  By the way, we spent $300,000 or $400,000 on HIV Vaccine Awareness 
Day, and we don't even have a vaccine. It is important we spend it, but 
we cannot get rid of it because somebody objects.
  AIDS housing, millions of dollars wasted.
  Here is my favorite. How about $1 million paid to dead farmers? A 
billion, I am sorry, a billion dollars paid to dead farmers for their 
crops. They are dead. We are continuing to pay them, up to 15 years 
some of them. It is the only program you can continue to collect after 
you are dead, and yet we have an Agriculture Department that allows 
that to happen.
  How about this--this is great--the National Park Service centennial 
celebration. We are going to spend $100 million in a time when our 
deficit is $607 billion, our debt $10 trillion, and our unfunded 
liabilities are $7 trillion, and we are going to spend $100 million to 
celebrate our national parks? That doesn't pass the smell test. Nobody 
is sitting around their dinner table tonight saying if we are ever in 
the kind of shape we are in, we ought to be doing that.

[[Page 3827]]

  How about $100 million for the conventions that we did under 
emergency funding? We spent $100 million, everybody's money, for each 
city so we could have the conventions in Denver and Minneapolis.
  The other interesting thing about the national parks is it doesn't 
turn 100 until 2016, 8 years from now, but we are going to spend the 
money.
  How about a $30 billion subsidy to Amtrak? Amtrak started with a 
subsidy and was supposed to get better. We continue to not hold them 
accountable. How about a $244 million subsidy for food on Amtrak? Maybe 
we want to continue to have Amtrak. Maybe it is worth it to us to have 
a $1.5 billion subsidy every year on Amtrak. I would agree with that. 
Maybe that is the right priority. But should we be subsidizing a 
quarter of a million dollars a year for people's food on Amtrak? But we 
are.
  Other items--essential air service to small communities that are 
within driving distance of another community, we are going to spend 
$110 million this year. How about the fact that we are going to pay 
Federal employees $250 million to ride the transit? Nobody else in this 
country gets paid to ride the transit. Nobody else gets their transit 
bills paid. But Federal employees, we are going to take a quarter of a 
billion dollars every year, and we are going to say to some of the best 
paid, best benefited workers in the country that we are going to give 
you a quarter of a billion dollars in subsidy so you will ride the 
transit. Well, economics will tell them to ride the transit. The 
American taxpayer shouldn't do that.
  Well, I am wearing thin, I know, my colleagues, and so I will stop 
and enter into the Record the remaining 50 pages of examples I have of 
stupidity for which we are responsible. The real important thing to 
keep in mind, if you have been listening to this, is that we are on an 
unsustainable course, that, in fact, a child born today is going to 
inherit something different from what we did. We inherited opportunity. 
They are going to inherit debt. We inherited a leadership and a 
heritage that says you sacrifice for the next generation. They are 
going to inherit a legacy that says you kick the next generation in the 
teeth.
  Everything I have outlined today is something we could have 
controlled, we as Members of the Senate, but we are so busy doing 
earmarks that we don't do any oversight. Now, what I just outlined to 
this body is what my staff has discovered in 3 years. Think what would 
happen if all of us were aggressively oversighting every agency of the 
Federal Government. Think how efficient it would be. Think how much 
waste wouldn't be there. Think about what a great deal we would be 
doing for these kids.
  America expects us to tighten our belt. They expect us to do what 
they are having to do right now. They are tired of our wasteful 
spending, they are tired of our earmarks, and they are tired of our 
bridges to nowhere. We better listen. There is a rumble, and if we 
don't listen, it is our own fault that we will continue to decline in 
esteem in front of the American people. We will have well earned it.
  So the next time somebody says they want to raise your taxes, ask 
them how much of that they got rid of before they do it. We don't have 
a shortage of money. We have a shortage of courage. We have a shortage 
of character. We have a shortage of intensity to solve the real 
problems that are facing this country. And until we tackle this, we 
should not say one thing to anybody in this country about increased 
taxes. It is morally reprehensible, it violates our oath, and most of 
all, it does great damage to our country.
  I ask unanimous consent that the examples that I referred to be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:
     Homeland Security Funds for Fish Fries and Spaghetti Dinners
       Indiana homeland security officials warned one county in 
     2006 to stop using electronic emergency message boards to 
     advertise fish fries, spaghetti dinners and other events. 
     Homeland Security, which bought the 11 signs for $300,000, 
     said the county could risk losing Federal money. The Newport 
     Chemical Depot, which is considered a potential terrorist 
     target, is located in the same county in western Indiana. In 
     the case of an evacuation, the signs could flash routes for 
     drivers to take. The message boards also could be used during 
     floods or other natural disasters. Using them for ads 
     violates federal rules and could dull the public's 
     attentiveness to the boards, said the executive director of 
     the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.
     Department of Homeland Security Grants
       There isn't a training program out there that DHS doesn't 
     like to fund. Overlap and duplication abounds within FEMA's 
     office of Grants and Training and the multiple grant programs 
     it manages that fund counter-terrorism training for State and 
     local first responders. One of these programs, the 
     Demonstration, Training, Grant Program, has received $63.6 
     million from 2004 to 2007 and has awarded 29 grants ranging 
     from $750,000 to $6.5 million. However, despite this 
     considerable investment by the American taxpayers, as of 
     2007, none of the training programs developed using 
     Demonstration Training Grant funding have been deployed for 
     use. In addition, some of the programs appear to duplicate 
     other training programs provided both within DHS and with 
     counter-terrorism training programs provided through other 
     Federal agencies. Even the Administration saw that continuing 
     to fund this program was a waste of money. The President did 
     not request funding for the Demonstration Training Program in 
     fiscal years 2007 and 2008 yet Congress chose to continue 
     funding the program, giving it $30 million in 2007 and $28 
     million in 2008.
     DHS--Customs and Border Protection Request a Shopping Trip
       The Department of Homeland Security recently requested that 
     a training conference be located within walking distance of a 
     major shopping center. According to a solicitation notice 
     from the Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border 
     Protection (CBP), the federal agency ``desires a hotel 
     located within walking distance of (or short courtesy van 
     trip) a major shopping mall which includes multiple 
     significant department stores and/or the Tanger Outlet mall 
     (near exit 213), for the convenience of the participants/
     guests'' of an upcoming training conference. The notice also 
     states that ``Contractor shall provide/or assist with local 
     transportation to/from local eateries and shopping, within 
     the surrounding areas of Contractor's establishment, to 
     include major mall and/or Tanger Outlet Mall.''
     Interoperable Communications Grant Programs
       There are currently two identical grant programs in the 
     federal government that fund interoperable communications, 
     with one housed at the Federal Emergency Management Agency 
     within DHS, and the other at the Department of Commerce. The 
     Interoperable, Communications Grant Program operated by FEMA 
     was created in 2007 and authorized to spend 3.3 billion, 
     while the Public Safety Interoperable Communications Grant 
     Program at Commerce was created in 2005 and authorized to 
     distribute $1 billion. Both programs are identical in every 
     possible way except for their authorized funding levels and 
     the Departments in which they are located. To further 
     highlight the duplication, it should be noted that the 
     Department of Commerce contracted with FEMA to administer its 
     program, meaning both identical programs are being 
     administered by the same agency. Various public safety 
     organizations commented that having two identical programs 
     simply created confusion and wasted resources. A Coburn 
     amendment was filed last year to combine both programs by 
     eliminating the Commerce program and adding it's funding to 
     the FEMA program, but the amendment was voted down by the 
     full Senate.

                                Katrina

     Katrina Waste
       FEMA's Individuals and Households Program (IHP), provides 
     direct assistance (temporary housing units) and financial 
     assistance (grant funding for temporary housing and other 
     disaster-related needs) to eligible individuals affected by 
     disasters. A September 2006 Government Accountability Report 
     found that management of the IHP program in response to 
     Hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in as much as $1.4 
     billion in improper and potentially fraudulent payments due 
     to invalid registration data. In addition, duplicate payments 
     were made and FEMA lacked accountability for the debit cards 
     (each with a $2,000 spending amount) that were given to 
     disaster victims. Examples of abuse included the purchase of 
     a $200 bottle of Dom Perignon champagne at a San Antonio 
     Hooters restaurant, payment for divorces, a sex changes 
     operation, luxury handbags, a Caribbean vacation, 
     professional football tickets, and adult entertainment. And 
     because of FEMA's notoriously bad financial controls and 
     reporting after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, these are likely 
     only a fraction of the total cost of mismanaging this 
     program.

                             Miscellaneous

     Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission
       The Commission was authorized in FY 2002 to create 
     education programs, public forums and arts projects to 
     provide an opportunity to re-examine what it means to be 
     American

[[Page 3828]]

     in the 21st century finding unity in our diversity. ``The 
     Bicentennial commemoration of his [Lincoln's] life and legacy 
     will be a bright beacon to completing our nation's 
     `unfinished work.''` The Bicentennial celebration will 
     culminate in a Washington DC ``Bicentennial Birthday Gala'' 
     with a ``world class concert and entertainment special'' in 
     DC with ``nineteenth century popular and patriotic music'' 
     being performed by ``outstanding military bands.'' The 
     Birthday Gala will be followed by a Lincoln Memorial 
     Rededication with a ``memorable public program.'' 
     Additionally, a Joint Meeting of Congress will take place in 
     the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall. After a keynote address by 
     a political leader or ``senior Lincoln historian'', guests 
     will proceed to lunch at the library. So far, all the 
     planning and arranging of these and other national activities 
     has cost the American taxpayer $2.95 million.
     Inspector General Investigation of an Employment Training 
         Grant
       The inspector general for the Department of Labor issued a 
     scathing report in February 28 highlighting more than $11 
     million in improper expenditures by the Consortium for Worker 
     Education (CWE). The grant for CWE was issued to provide 
     employment services to participants and employers impacted by 
     the events of September 11, 2001. According to the inspector 
     general, ``CWE reported it registered 24,195 enrolled 
     participants, but only documented 20,513 registered 
     participants of which 366 were ineligible and 115 were 
     missing support documentation.'' Labor department 
     investigators also found that ``Federal requirements were not 
     followed when charging costs to the grant'' and that four out 
     of five of the program's reported outcome measures could not 
     even be audited. The inspector general also noted that it may 
     be forced to recover $13 million from the grant if CWE does 
     not adequately justify its expenditures and accounting 
     methods.
     NOAA's Totally Bogus Taxpayer Funded Birthday Bash
       In June 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
     Administration (NOAA) announced that it planned to spend 
     scarce taxpayer resources on a ``200 year anniversary 
     celebration.'' The announcement was especially odd given that 
     NOAA was only 37 years old at the time. According to the 
     department's website, ``[T]hroughout the year, NOAA will be 
     hosting an array of events around the country to celebrate 
     the agency's 200-year history.'' Events listed included a 
     Washington, D.C. gala, a reception for .members of Congress, 
     a festival and concert at Hawaii's Waikiki beach park, 
     outreach at the Iowa State Fair, and other activities. Oddly 
     enough, the department's website also stated that ``during 
     2000, NOAA celebrated its 30th anniversary as a federal 
     agency[.]'' A series of costly celebrations were also held 
     that year in honor of the ``anniversary.'' According to NOAA, 
     the total cost of the bogus 200th birthday bash was nearly 
     $1.6 million.
     Low-Income Legal Aid Wasted on Chauffeurs, Lavish Meals and 
         Foreign Trips
       A 2006 investigation of the Legal Services Corporation by 
     the Associated Press found that the agency's executives 
     wasted taxpayer money on chocolate desserts, $400 chauffeured 
     rides to locations within cab distance from their offices, 
     and luxury office space in ``Washington's tony Georgetown 
     district.'' Although the Legal Services Corporation, which 
     was created to provide legal assistance to low-income 
     Americans, turns away half its applicants for lack of 
     resources, it still found plenty of ways to spend money on 
     lavish items. In one instance, the agency's board members 
     even gave themselves meal allowances that doubled the amounts 
     given to other staff. Other extravagant expenditures found by 
     the Associated Press include a $59 three-entree buffet, an 
     $18 breakfast featuring scrambled eggs with chives, a $28 
     deli buffet, and $14 ``Death by Chocolate'' desserts. Total 
     cost?
     EPA Grant for a Caribbean Shopping Trip
       In 2007, the inspector general for the Environmental 
     Protection Agency (EPA) found that the agency spent $356,012 
     to send Philadelphia high school students on a shopping trip 
     to the U.S. Virgin Islands. According to the trip agendas, 
     the U.S. students were to take a kayak tour, attend a 
     lecture, and visit a camp in the Virgin Islands. The agency 
     spent $261,590 to pay for students in the Virgin Islands to 
     travel to Philadelphia. The inspector general wrote in its 
     report on the grant that ``[t]he U.S. students also visited 
     Coral World Ocean Park and resort locations, while both 
     groups took shopping trips.'' Although the grant was supposed 
     to promote environmental stewardship, a majority of money for 
     the grant (52 percent) was spent on travel, and less than 
     half the time of the trips was spent on environmental-related 
     activities. The grant was also used to purchase 128 computers 
     that met only general education needs that were not even part 
     of EPA's mission.
     Smithsonian Director
       According to an investigation by the Washington Post, the 
     director of the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian 
     spent $250,000 in taxpayer money on ``first-class 
     transportation and plush lodging in hotels all around the 
     world, including more than a dozen trips to Paris.'' A 
     separate investigation found that another top Smithsonian 
     official accumulated nearly $90,000 in unauthorized expenses 
     between 2000 and 2005. His expenses included ``charges for 
     jet travel, his wife's trip to Cambodia, hotel rooms, luxury 
     car service, catered staff meals and expensive gifts.'' The 
     Smithsonian inspector general found that a few months after 
     this Smithsonian head took office, he stopped filing the 
     required monthly documentation ``for administrative ease.''
     Government Printing Office, Daily Printing of the 
         Congressional Record
       The Government Printing Office prints approximately 5,600 
     copies of the Congressional Record for each day Congress is 
     in session. This cost the American taxpayer over $6.5 million 
     annually. Of the 5,600 copies printed daily, over 1,400 are 
     distributed to House offices, Committees and post offices, 
     over 1,500 are distributed to Senate offices and Committees, 
     and the remaining copies are distributed to various sources, 
     including federal agencies and federal depository libraries 
     all at the taxpayers' expense. The daily Congressional Record 
     is available online and previous Congressional Records are 
     available online dating back to 1989. Instead of accepting 
     that we live in an increasingly paperless world and stopping 
     the wasteful printing of the Congressional Record, we would 
     rather just continue big spending as usual by throwing 
     millions of dollars and tons of paper in the waste basket.
     ECHO Center
       $97,000 was appropriated in the 2008 Omnibus for the ECHO 
     Center in Burlington, VT, for education regarding the Lake 
     Champlain Quadracentennial. According to its Website, the 
     ECHO Center, also known as the Ecology, Culture, History, and 
     Opportunity at the Leahy Center, is a lake aquarium, science 
     center, and community resource. Its purpose is to ``educate 
     and delight people about the Ecology, Culture, History, and 
     Opportunities for stewardship of the Lake Champlain Basin.'' 
     To complete the ECHO center, a $14.5 million ten-year 
     fundraising campaign was necessary. According to its Website, 
     more than half of the funds for this campaign came from the 
     federal government. The Lake Champlain Basin Science Center--
     the non-profit organization that runs ECHO--listed a total of 
     more than $12 million in assets at the close of the 2005 
     fiscal year and has received more than $4.4 million in 
     federal grants since 2000--including more than $600,000 last 
     year. It is expected that the quadracentennial will bring in 
     revenues of up to $133 million. In light of these estimates 
     why is further federal investment outside of the competitive 
     bidding process for an educational exhibit regarding this 
     special event necessary? The fact that numerous other 
     educational and heritage-related initiatives already exist, 
     or are being pursued on the state and local level makes this 
     request for additional federal funds unnecessary and 
     duplicative. Given that the ECHO center has already spent 
     over $7 million in federal taxpayer funds on national 
     priorities such as becoming the first LEED-certified building 
     in Vermont, and offering a water-play space for kids to build 
     dams and float boats, and that its net assets total more than 
     $12 million, the federal taxpayer may be forgiven for 
     thinking this is a poor investment of federal funds.
     DOT--Museum of Glass
       In FY 2006, Congress gave $500,000 to the Museum of Glass 
     in Tacoma, Washington. The mission of the museum is to 
     provide a dynamic learning environment to appreciate the 
     medium of glass through creative experiences, collections and 
     exhibitions. The museum showcases works by internationally 
     known artists who illuminate trends in contemporary art, 
     highlighting glass within a full range of media. The Museum 
     of Glass has featured exhibits in Mining Glass, which 
     showcases the work of eight internationally distinguished 
     contemporary artists working with glass, as well as Czech 
     Glass from the 1945-1980 period. The museum also features 
     live glassmaking in the Hot Shop Amphitheater and dining in 
     the Gallucci's Glass Cafe.
     Beach Nourishment for Imperial Beach and other Beaches
       An earmark included in the Water Resources Development Act 
     of 2007 authorized $8.5 million for current beach nourishment 
     for Imperial Beach in Southern California and federal funding 
     for periodic beach nourishment every ten years for a period 
     of 50 years for an estimated cost of $20,550,000 in federal 
     funds. Such ``nourishment,'' however, is not essential and 
     does not merit siphoning funds away from higher priority 
     Corps projects, such as protecting the thousands living in 
     the Sacramento valley who are still at risk of catastrophic 
     flooding. The White House Statement of Administration Policy 
     urged eliminating funding for beach nourishment in WRDA and 
     President Clinton also sought to discourage federal beach 
     nourishment projects. Adding sand to beaches, at best, 
     provides a temporary fix to local erosion concerns that could 
     potentially lead to property damage and encourages risky 
     development and construction along shorelines at federal 
     taxpayer expense. The $1.2 billion wasted through beach 
     restoration federal appropriations from 1995-2005 could have 
     been

[[Page 3829]]

     spent on other federal priorities or gone to pay off our 
     growing national debt.
     Wake Ferry, WA
       $1.54 million was appropriated in the 2008 Omnibus for the 
     Kitsap Transit, Rich-Passage Wake Impact Study. ``[This] 
     study . . . is working to finalize the design plans and 
     specifications for a high speed passenger ferry service 
     between Bremerton and Seattle. The funding will be used to 
     study the response of the sands and gravels on the beaches 
     along the route through Rich Passage, biological monitoring 
     and analysis, financial feasibility analysis and public 
     outreach including a website and newsletter. The funds will 
     also include the use of an existing foil assisted catamaran 
     to simulate actual operating conditions of a designed boat so 
     that potential impacts, if any, can be assessed and 
     appropriate measures can be taken to protect the shoreline.'' 
     In total $7.79 million has been appropriated for this study 
     along with $4 million for earmarks for a ``low-wake, 
     passenger-only ferry.'' Both of these projects have been 
     almost entirely federally-funded during a time when the 
     Kitsap Transit Authority moved into a new 45,000 sq. ft 
     office and retail complex that offers stunning water and 
     mountain views. Not to worry, though, they can be assured 
     that their taxpayer dollars have created the ``lowest-wake 
     boat in the world'' when it hits the water. While 
     environmentally-friendly high-speed ferries may be convenient 
     and provide greater economic opportunities for certain 
     communities, they are not national priorities and should not 
     be funded by federal taxpayer dollars until more pressing 
     national infrastructure concerns are addressed.
     Bangor Waterfront, ME
       $262,500 was earmarked in the 2008 Omnibus for development 
     of the Bangor Waterfront Park on the Penobscot River for the 
     city of Bangor, ME. Federal funding for developing this 
     waterfront exceeds $4.5 million through various earmarks, 
     grants, and contracts. ``The park will be the centerpiece of 
     Bangor's waterfront destination for local and regional 
     populations and out-of-state tourists alike. It will provide 
     several venues for outdoor performances including the 
     American Folk Festival. The park will complete long-term 
     efforts to acquire, clear, remediate, and redevelop Bangor's 
     historic waterfront.'' Playgrounds, a fitness area for 
     adults, a trail system, and a picnic area are things that the 
     community is expecting to see on the waterfront. These 
     regional desires, however, should not be prioritized over 
     national infrastructure needs like deficient federal bridges.
     Chesapeake Buoy
       $446,500 was appropriated in the 2008 omnibus for an 
     interpretive buoy system along the Captain John Smith 
     Chesapeake National Historic Trail. The purpose of the buoys 
     is to ``promote awareness of the Bay's condition, and to 
     support the stewardship efforts of educators, trail users, 
     government, and civic organizations dedicated to the 
     preservation of the Bay and its natural environment.'' This 
     buoy system will ``mark'' the newly created John Smith 
     National Water Trail on the Chesapeake Bay. The ``water 
     trail'' is the first entirely water-based National Historic 
     Trail. The recipient of this earmark is the Conservation Fund 
     of Arlington, Virginia; and other partners of this project 
     include the National Geographic Society, the Chesapeake Bay 
     Foundation, Sultana, Verizon, and others. The Conservation 
     Fund is listed as having net assets totaling more than $275 
     million and has received over $23 million in federal funds 
     since 2000, according to FedSpending.org. The Chesapeake Bay 
     Foundation, which has encouraged the creation of this NPS 
     trail, boasts just under $70 million in net assets and had a 
     revenue surplus of $7 million in 2005 alone. The National 
     Geographic Society reported an income of $531,595,929 with 
     over $45,000,000 in profits and total assets of 
     $1,127,705,462 in 2005. Promoting tourism in the Chesapeake 
     Bay and increasing understanding of the historic voyages of 
     Captain Smith are well intentioned goals but are clearly not 
     urgent, federal priorities. Likewise interactive buoys may be 
     innovative ways to educate tourists and visitors about the 
     Bay and Captain Smith's voyages, but they are inessential 
     extravagances. Fortunately, the organizations that are 
     heading up this effort, including the recipient of the 
     earmark, have sufficient financial assets to ensure the 
     continuation of this project.
     Earmarks for relatives
       According to a recent investigation by USA Today, in 2006 
     ``lobbying groups employed 30 family members to influence 
     spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House 
     and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped 
     write.'' 2006 appropriations bills contained $750 million for 
     projects championed by these lobbyists. Of the 53 relatives 
     or former top aides to lawmakers on the powerful 
     appropriations committees working at lobbying firms last 
     year, 30 lobbied the legislator or the legislator's top aide 
     for appropriations that the Member oversaw. Of those 30, 22 
     succeeded in their quest to insert specific earmarks in 
     appropriations bills. That incredible rate of success--almost 
     75 percent--explains why lobbyists with personal ties to 
     Members have been in high demand. Projects procured with the 
     help of such lobbyists have included $1.5 million for an 
     underground facility in a cavern that would be used to 
     protect financial information, $2 million for an earmark not 
     requested by the Department of Defense for a company that 
     produces armor products that gave nearly $11,000 to the 
     sponsor of the earmark, $1.28 million to widen a road near an 
     upscale shopping center the earmark's sponsor helped to 
     develop, and the creation of a fish marketing board that has 
     received tens of millions in federal earmarks and whose 
     initial chairman was related to the earmark sponsor. Ethics 
     rules that do not prohibit this clear conflict of interest 
     that borders on the corrupt enable such wasteful and 
     inappropriate spending to occur at the cost of the American 
     taxpayer.
     ITBC
       The InterTribal Bison Cooperative's (ITBC) bison 
     restoration program has received $8.2 million in federal 
     earmarks since 2000. ITBC seeks to ``restor[e] buffalo to 
     Indian Country, to preserve [the Indian] historical, 
     cultural, traditional and spiritual relationship for future 
     generations.'' ITBC members also claim that ITBC enables 
     Native Americans to eat more buffalo meet, which is healthier 
     than other forms of meat. President Bush has repeatedly 
     attempted to eliminate this program because it is not central 
     to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) core missions or 
     responsibilities. BIA has concerns with the management of the 
     program, as of the roughly $4 million in funding appropriated 
     in 2006, less than $1 million was directed to individual 
     tribal projects. Specifically, out of the almost $4 million 
     funded by taxpayers, only $859,180 was distributed to 15 
     tribes for bison projects. A total of $3,127,782 was left for 
     ITBC administration and technical assistance; meaning that 
     for every one dollar allocated to the ITBC, 27 cents went to 
     bison projects. Furthermore, despite an increase in funding 
     of $1,786,962 in for fiscal year 2006, only an additional $30 
     was allocated to bison projects (previously spread among 21 
     tribes). These funds would be better spent on providing 
     necessary Indian health services. More than $8 million has 
     been wasted on this program.
     HUD--International Peace Garden
       The Fiscal Year 2008 appropriations bill for the Department 
     of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) included a provision 
     directing $450,000 to renovate facilities at the 
     International Peace Garden in Dunseith, ND. The International 
     Peace Garden is a 2,339 acre botanical garden on the U.S. and 
     Canadian borders of North Dakota and Manitoba, created in 
     1932 as a symbol of friendship between the two nations. 
     According to the garden's website, ``Reflecting pools and 
     dazzling colorful floral displays of over 150,000 flowers 
     splash across the grounds of the Formal Garden's terraced 
     walkways.'' While the International Peace Garden center may 
     stand a symbol of the friendship between the United States 
     and Canada, renovation is not essential, especially when it 
     is estimated there are 700,000 homeless persons living in the 
     U.S. According to HUD's website: ``HUD's mission is to 
     increase homeownership, support community development and 
     increase access to affordable housing free from 
     discrimination.'' Nearly half a million dollars for facility 
     renovations to the International Peace Garden does not appear 
     to advance this mission.
     Cleveland-based Head Start provider accused of pocketing $7.5 
         million for poor children it did not serve
       Head Start is a national program that promotes school 
     readiness by enhancing the social and cognitive development 
     of children through the provision of educational, health, 
     nutritional, social and other services to enrolled children 
     and families. A recent state audit accused a Cleveland-based 
     Head Start provider of pocketing $7.5 million for poor 
     children it did not serve. The audit, says the Ministerial 
     Day Care Association was paid for 5,162 children in 1998 
     through 2000, but could only document serving 3,415 
     youngsters. It's the second major finding against the 
     Ministerial Day Care Association, which was accused in a 2002 
     state audit of wrongly collecting $3.8 million in taxpayer 
     dollars. The State no longer funds the agency, but the group 
     still collects Federal Head Start money as well as funding 
     from the Council for Economic Opportunity in Cleveland, Ohio.
     Duplication--Early Education
       In 2000, the Government Accountability Office published a 
     report titled, ``Early Education and Care: Overlap Indicates 
     Need to Assess Crosscutting Programs.'' The report identified 
     duplicative programs providing education or care for children 
     under the age of 5. The GAO report found 69 early education 
     programs administered by 9 different agencies. GAO revisited 
     this report in 2005, and found that the landscape of federal 
     programs remained largely the same as in 2000. Five years 
     after the original GAO report warned that a large number of 
     programs creates the potential for inefficient service and 
     difficulty accessing services, GAO found 69 early education 
     programs exist, the same number as in 2000, but the programs 
     are now administered by 10 different agencies. During the 5 
     years between GAO reports, 16 programs were removed from the 
     list, and 16 were added back.

[[Page 3830]]


     HHS--Four Federal Agencies Sponsor Conference at Walt Disney 
         World
       A three-day, expense-paid trip to Walt Disney World Resorts 
     sound like a dream vacation--but it's not. It's research, 
     according to four federal agencies who sponsored a conference 
     in Orlando, Florida. The 2007 Academy Health Research Meeting 
     was held at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin resort in 
     Orlando, Florida. The posh resort boasts ``an environment of 
     elegance and opulence'' featuring ``the beauty and 
     tranquility of waterways and tropical landscaping.'' Federal 
     sponsors included the Agency for Healthcare Research and 
     Quality (AHRQ), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid 
     Services, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the 
     Health Services Research and Development Service of the 
     Department of Veterans Affairs.
     USDA--Goose Poop Cleanup
       For 3 consecutive years (Fiscal Years 2004 through 2006) 
     Congress has appropriated money for the ``Goose Control 
     Program.'' The Goose Control Program uses humane methods to 
     stop Canadian geese from ruining parks and fields in New 
     York. Canadian geese in Long Island, NY pose a year- round 
     problem, destroying golf courses, parks and fields at 
     important public facilities. The Goose Control Program 
     partners with ``GeesePeace,'' an organization using 
     environmentally-safe and non-lethal methods to reduce the 
     number of geese and redirect them away from public places.
     USDA--Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hawaii
       Last year, Congress gave NASA $1.5 million to fund the 
     Imiloa Astronomy Center. The Imiloa Astronomy Center is 
     located on a nine-acre campus above the University of Hawaii-
     Hilo, and according to the website, features interactive 
     exhibits, planetarium shows, group tours, a store and a cafe 
     for visitors to explore the connections between Hawaiian 
     cultural traditions and the science of astronomy. The center 
     was formerly called the ``Mauna Kea Astronomy Education 
     Center'' and has received more than $30 million in federal 
     funding since FY 1999.
     USDA--Subterranean Termite Research
       The Department of Agriculture gives funding to scientists 
     to develop and implement alternative methods to control and 
     prevent termite damage to homes and other structures. The 
     scientists devise and test control methods that are 
     consistent with public health and environmental safety in 
     warm weather states. Supporters argue that with increasing 
     environmental concerns, especially ozone depletion due to 
     fumigation control methods, as well as concerns for public 
     health and safety, there is a continuing need to develop safe 
     methods to control this devastating pest.
     The National Science Foundation
       The National Science Foundation is an independent federal 
     agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of 
     science. With an annual budget of about $6.06 billion, NSF is 
     the major source of federal backing in many fields such as 
     mathematics, computer science and the social sciences. The 
     NSF website features the ``Discoveries'' made possible with 
     NSF funding and support, including:
       Helpful Robot Alters Family Life: Robotic vacuums are 
     warming their way into homes and even taking on a personality 
     for some families.
       The Smell of Money: Research suggests an absence of 
     metallic chemicals in the strong metallic odors that result 
     from people handling coins and other metals.
       Company Name Influences Stock Performance: Easy to 
     pronounce names perform better in stock markets.
       Monkey Business: The discovery of capuchin monkeys in the 
     wild using stones as nutcrackers may tell us something about 
     the monkeys' ingenuity, and more about ourselves.
       The Implications of Making Care-Giving Robots Lifelike: 
     Robots designed to help the elderly may be given the ability 
     to interact in human-like ways but what are the implications 
     of doing this?
     Advanced Technology Program
       The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) was created in 1988 
     to increase our country's global competitiveness by investing 
     in businesses and ideas that could not attract private 
     investment. Instead of promoting successful business 
     initiatives, however, the program quickly became a vehicle 
     for wasteful corporate welfare. For example, such struggling 
     small businesses as GE, IBM, and Motorola have received 
     hundreds of millions of dollars from this federal program. A 
     Government Accountability Office study of the program even 
     found it ``unlikely that ATP can avoid funding research 
     already being pursued by the private sector[.]'' And 
     according to the Program Assessment Rating Tool developed by 
     the Office of Management and Budget, ATP does not address a 
     specific need and is not even designed to make a unique 
     contribution. Between 1990 and 2004, the program spent over 
     $2 billion on various investments of dubious value. Last 
     year, instead of addressing the core problems within the 
     federal program, Congress just chose to tinker around its 
     edges and give it a new name.
     HHS--Head Start
       The Head Start program was established in 1965 to promote 
     the school readiness of low- income children. In 2005, GAO 
     issued a report that raised concerns about the effectiveness 
     of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 
     Administration for Children and Families' (ACF) oversight of 
     about 1,600 local organizations that receive nearly $7 
     billion in Head Start grants. The report found that among 
     other program risks, ACF made limited use of financial 
     reports and audits to ensure that all grantees effectively 
     resolved financial management problems. ACF had also made 
     little use of its authority to terminate grantees that did 
     not meet program requirements and fund new grantees to 
     replace them. A GAO report released just last month found 
     that ACF has not undertaken a comprehensive assessment of 
     risks to the federal Head Start program, despite the 2005 
     recommendation. The report stated, ``In light of federal 
     budget limitations and increasing expectations for program 
     accountability, ACF's ability to demonstrate effective 
     stewardship over billions of dollars in Head Start grants has 
     never been more critical.''
     Working for America Institute
       The Department of Labor's Working for America Institute 
     (WFA) was originally funded through the Workforce Investment 
     Act in 1998 which revised job training laws and set up 
     systems of local and state ``Workforce Investment Boards.'' 
     WFA and other organizations were funded across the country to 
     help the new Boards develop their capacity to implement WIA. 
     The Department of Labor phased out the capacity building 
     programs in 2003 after they determined that the Boards had 
     enough capacity and experience with WIA implementation and 
     that funding should instead go to actual service delivery for 
     job training programs. DOL also found that the assistance 
     provided by WFA was duplicative and less effective than 
     similar programs already funded through DOL's Employment and 
     Training Administration which has the primary mission of 
     administering federal job training programs. Despite the 
     duplication and ineffectiveness, WFA received $3.5 million in 
     Congressional funding from 2004-2007.
     Small Business Child Care Grants
       This brand new program directs the Secretary of Health and 
     Human Services to establish grants to assist states in 
     providing funds to encourage the establishment and operation 
     of employer-operated child-care programs. The program is 
     unnecessary and duplicative. HHS already administers the 
     Child Care and Development Fund which consists of two block 
     grants totaling more than $5 billion annually available to 
     States for providing child care to low income workers. 
     Additionally, states can transfer funds from their TANF block 
     grants for child care assistance. In FY06 States transferred 
     more than $1.8 billion from TANF for child care and could 
     have transferred even more since States left $2.15 billion 
     unspent in their TANF accounts. Another HHS program available 
     to states for various purposes including child care 
     assistance is the Social Services Block Grant. Child care 
     assistance routinely ranks in the top 5 uses for the grant 
     with states spending about $1.7 billion annually on child 
     care assistance. Despite the billions of HHS grant dollars 
     already available and utilized by States for child care 
     assistance, the Small Business Child Care Grant program was 
     funded by Congress at $5 million in 2007.
     Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission
       The Commission was authorized in FY2000 to create an 
     enduring Eisenhower National Memorial in the nation's 
     capital. The Commission selected a site for the Memorial and 
     won Congressional approval in 2006. The memorial site is near 
     the Department of Education which was originally created by 
     Ike within the ``Department of Health, Education and 
     Welfare'' which later split into HHS and Department of 
     Education. The Commission's next step is to select a design 
     for the memorial. Since 2000, Congress has allocated $6.35 
     million to the still unfinished project.
       Community Development Block Grants. The Community 
     Development Block Grant, or CDBG, program is a $3.87 billion 
     program housed at the Department of Housing and Urban 
     Development. CDBG transfers federal funds to certain local 
     governments for broad uses such as housing, so-called 
     ``economic development'' activities, social services, and 
     infrastructure. CDBG has insufficient accountability, 
     ambiguous goals, untargeted funding and no standardized 
     outcome indicators. The CDBG formulas used to disperse the 
     funding have not been updated since the late 1970's. As a 
     result, many wealthy communities receive 3-4 times more CDBG 
     funds per capita than many poor communities. As one example 
     of unfair targeting, in 2005, Temple, TX had an average 
     $20,000 per capita income and received $15 per capita in CDBG 
     funds. Meanwhile, wealthy Oak Park, IL averaged $36,000 per 
     capita income and received $39 per capita from the program. 
     Portions of CDBG are used by Appropriators to carve out 
     earmarks for things like aquariums, speed skating rinks, ski 
     chalets, whitewater rapid training centers, boat houses and 
     parking garages. Since 2005, the total cost of these earmarks 
     ranged from $180 to $350 million. During the past 3 years, 
     the Inspector General has audited a miniscule

[[Page 3831]]

     number of CDBG grantees and yet found more than $100 million 
     in waste, fraud and abuse of CDBG funds. If the Inspector 
     General had the resources to comprehensively audit the 
     program, the total waste and abuse of funds could be many 
     times greater.
       TV Converter Box Coupon Program. The Department of Commerce 
     TV Converter Box Coupon Program was established in 2005 to 
     help people pay for the equipment they would need to keep 
     their televisions working once all broadcast signals convert 
     to a digital format next year. Starting in January of this 
     year, every household in America became eligible to request 
     up to two $40 coupons from the Dept. of Commerce to pay for 
     converter boxes for their televisions. Columnist George Will, 
     outraged by Congress' willingness to turn television into an 
     entitlement, dubbed the provision that created this program 
     the ``No Couch Potato Left Behind Act.'' Ironically, the $3 
     billion that was authorized for this program came out of the 
     ``Deficit Reduction Act,'' though it will do nothing but add 
     to the deficit. Even though the administration is only 
     requesting $130 million for FY2009, this program is wasteful 
     in any amount because it uses taxpayer money to pay for 
     private television use at a time of deficit spending.
       Official Time for Unions. Federal employees are allowed 
     under current law to do union work while on the clock for 
     their federal government job--this is known as ``official 
     time.'' Between 2002-2004 federal employees consumed 13.6 
     million hours of official time to do union work, which is 
     equivalent to more than 6,500 full-time work years over that 
     time. Incidentally, there are numerous reports of federal 
     employees who do no work for their employing agencies at all, 
     but are paid entirely to work on behalf of their union. The 
     estimated cost of paying federal employees to do union work 
     over just those three years is about $300-$400 million. This 
     means that taxpayers who might not support the political aims 
     of federal unions are being forced to subsidize their 
     operations on a massive scale. While the Administration 
     started collecting government-wide statistics for official 
     time in 2004, official time has remained stubbornly in place 
     and is badly in need of being addressed by the Congress. 
     Ideally, federal employees would be limited in their ability 
     to do union work no more than 10% of the time, though even 
     that seems far higher than is reasonable.
     Additional Examples of Fraud Waste and Abuse of Taxpayer 
         Dollars 2008
       National Science Foundation grant money misspent to 
     purchase Waverunner, Wide-screen TV, season tickets to 
     football games, a $1,900 frozen-drink-machine, and 
     holographic lighted palm trees. Federal agents recently 
     searched the home of a former Georgia Tech employee who is 
     accused of ringing up more than $316,000 in personal charges 
     on her state-issued credit card, using grant money from the 
     National Science Foundation, federal documents charge. The 
     former administrative coordinator bought more than 3,800 
     items, including a Waverunner personal watercraft, a wide-
     screen television, and items ranging from season tickets to 
     Auburn University football games in Alabama to a $1,900 
     frozen drink machine and holographic lighted palm trees. She 
     also bought an electric double wall oven, dishwasher and high 
     priced Henckel knives for her kitchen. She charged air 
     conditioning units for her RV and had hundreds of packages 
     shipped to her Marietta home, charging thousands of dollars 
     at Web sites such as Amazon.com and Nordstrom. The staggering 
     number of purchases went unnoticed until August 2007, when a 
     tipster contacted the Georgia Tech Department of Internal 
     Auditing, according to the search warrant.''
       Local and national taxpayers suffer due to poor oversight 
     over DC Health Safety network $129 million annual program. 
     The District of Columbia launched the DC Healthcare Alliance 
     in 2001. The program, which faced a $40 million deficit last 
     year, provides free care to DC residents who earn too little 
     to afford private insurance but too much to qualify for 
     Medicaid benefits, and has a budget this year of $129 
     million. Lax oversight over the program has opened the door 
     to costly fraud, critics of the program have said. A new 
     audit details the complete failure of the DC government to 
     prevent outsiders from ripping off a health care program 
     financed by city taxpayers that is designed to provide a 
     safety net for the city's poorest. One audit finding showed 
     that eleven District addresses, not including homeless 
     shelters, accounted for 271 Alliance members, and another 216 
     addresses accounted for 1,866 members. The auditor also found 
     that 16,720 of 63,167 Alliance data records contained no 
     Social Security number, which may be explained by a large 
     number of illegal immigrants in the program. The alliance 
     costs the District $212.21 per member per month, meaning 
     local and federal taxpayers are out 1 million a year for 
     every 400 people who scam it. In 2008, $3.9 million come from 
     federal tax dollars.
       Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police unit told to halt 
     spending association misspent tens of thousands of Homeland 
     Security grant dollars on services such as lawn care, window 
     washing and pest control. Taxpayers have a right to expect 
     that the millions of dollars from their pockets spent to 
     bolster state's homeland security efforts will have concrete 
     results. Instead, one state agency misspent more than 
     $182,000 in 2005. According to a recent Inspector General 
     report, ``A state agency has ordered the Ohio Association of 
     Chiefs of Police to stop spending homeland security money 
     while a federal auditor reviews allegations of misspending.'' 
     A state audit found the chiefs association has misspent tens 
     of thousands of federal dollars on such services as lawn 
     care, window washing and pest control, and has continued to 
     fail to document hundreds of other costs. The chiefs 
     association was awarded $7 million a year in 2004, 2005 and 
     2006, tripling a budget that had been used to train officers 
     and develop crime-fighting programs. The state Emergency 
     Management Agency found incomplete records and irregularities 
     for each of the three years the unit was awarded funds.
     2007
       Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can't find $22 million in 
     equipment. More than $22 million worth of scientific 
     equipment and other items is missing from the CDC, raising 
     ``troubling issues'' about the Atlanta-based agency's ability 
     to manage its property, according to members of a 
     congressional oversight committee. There were 5,547 items of 
     property, worth more than $22 million, unaccounted for at CDC 
     as of February 22, 2007.
     CDC funded Hollywood to help write TV Shows with millions 
         from taxpayexs.
       CDC has spent $2.01 million--and plans to spend up to 
     $250,000 in FY08--to fund a Hollywood liaison to help TV 
     shows like ``General Hospital,'' ``The Young & The 
     Restless,'' and ``24'' with their fictitious storylines. CDC 
     used $51,500 in CDC terrorism funds for the Hollywood liaison 
     program. Based on CDC data, the agency spent approximately 
     $6,000 per TV episode consultation. CDC's media affairs 
     office could field questions from the entertainment industry 
     and free up millions in CDC funds for health and biosecurity 
     needs.
       NIH paying $1.3 million monthly for unused lab as 
     vibrations still an issue at new Baltimore facility. The 
     federal government has begun paying millions of dollars in 
     rent for a new medical laboratory facility in Southeast 
     Baltimore, but federal scientists, who were supposed to 
     relocate there a year ago, are still months away from moving 
     in. The National Institutes of Health expects it will take 
     three more months to determine whether vibration problems 
     with the building have been fixed and whether all scientists 
     who were supposed to transfer there will be able to. The Sun 
     reported last year that the agency and many researchers 
     feared the vibrations would skew results of sensitive 
     microscopes and other lab equipment. The $250 million 
     building, called the Biomedical Research Center, is on the 
     Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center campus. The building has 
     been promoted as a state-of-the-art facility for research 
     programs on aging and drug abuse, and is a cornerstone for 
     redevelopment in the Southeast Baltimore neighborhood. Last 
     month, NIH began paying more than $1.3 million a month in 
     rent and upkeep.
     Feds Spending Thousands of Taxpayer Dollars on Social 
         Networking Sites.
       Most federal agencies maintain websites publicizing their 
     mission, work and outreach. Some press reports estimate the 
     number of federal websites to be in the range of 20,000. 
     Apparently the proliferation of websites promoting U.S. 
     government federal agencies and their work is not enough. 
     Some agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 
     at the Department of Health and Human Services, the National 
     Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the National 
     Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the 
     Department of Commerce are looking towards social networking 
     sites as a new publicity front. NOAA has spent 25,000 for 
     publicity on Care2 networking site to promote 2008 as the 
     ``International Year of the Reef'' and hosts ``virtual 
     island'' on the Second Life site.
     Over $100 million in fraud is found in the Federal Employee 
         Health Program.
       The Inspector General for the Office of Personnel 
     Management (OPM), the federal agency that administers health 
     benefits for government employees, found that the health 
     benefits program was defrauded of $106 million by 
     participating providers. According to the OIG report, the 
     fraudulent spending came as the result of medical companies 
     overcharging the government or arranging kickback schemes to 
     promote the use of their products. OPM recovered $97 million 
     from a large settlement with one such company, and the 
     largest case resulted in a $155 million settlement from Medco 
     Health Solutions, which provides mail order prescriptions and 
     related benefits to federal employees. The company settled a 
     complaint that it paid kickbacks to health plans to gain 
     their business, took money from drug manufacturers to favor 
     their drugs and destroyed prescriptions to avoid penalties 
     for delays in filling them.
       NASA's 4-Star parties cost taxpayers millions as agency 
     pays $4 million a year for resort parties to honor some 
     employees and lots of NASA contractors. On the same day NASA 
     got an emergency $1 billion in extra appropriations from the 
     Senate, and former

[[Page 3832]]

     astronaut and Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) said, ``Right now 
     we're at a critical point because NASA has been starved of 
     funds,'' NASA put out a bid request for a four-star hotel for 
     its December awards ceremony that will cost taxpayers between 
     $400,0001 and $500,000. A NASA spokesman sat down with CBS 
     News and didn't think the event was frivolous or extravagant. 
     In fact, instead of asking taxpayers if the resort parties 
     should be a priority, he told CBS, ``I think what I would do 
     is ask the people who we have honored to give me an idea if 
     they think this thing was reasonable, if they felt they were 
     honored properly.'' NASA holds such a party every time 
     there's a shuttle launch, for what CBS estimates is about $4 
     million a year. This December's event will be the third of 
     2007. Amazingly, when asked by CBS News if NASA was told to 
     cut their party money in half, its spokesman said, ``If we 
     were told that we had to reduce it I think we would reduce 
     the number of honorees rather than trying to go to a poor 
     place or a place that doesn't have good service.''
       Snacks Take Big Bite Out of DOJ Budget.--``double-dipping'' 
     for meal reimbursement by DOJ employees increases cost to 
     taxpayers. An internal Justice audit showed the department 
     spent nearly $7 million to plan, host, or send employees to 
     10 conferences over the last two years. This included paying 
     $4 per meatball at one lavish dinner and spreading an average 
     of $25 worth of snacks around to each participant at a movie- 
     themed party. The report, which looked at the 10 priciest 
     Justice Department conferences between October 2004 and 
     September 2006, was ordered by the Senate Appropriations 
     Committee. It also found that three-quarters of the employees 
     who attended the conferences demanded daily reimbursement for 
     the cost of meals while traveling--effectively double-dipping 
     into government funds. The audit did not compare Justice's 
     conference costs to those at other government agencies.
       Pentagon paid $998,798 to ship two 19-cent washers as 
     little oversight lead to blatant abuse of system. A small 
     South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million 
     over, six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping 
     costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to 
     an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said. The company also 
     billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws 
     costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and 
     $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force 
     Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.
       Untold Millions, Spent on Repetitive ``Bullying'' Programs 
     in Multiple Federal Agencies? One program, HRSA's ``Stop 
     Bullying Now'' was estimated to cost $6.5 million in 2 years. 
     In 2004, the Health Resources and Service's Administration 
     (HRSA) through the Health and Human Services Administration 
     (HHS) launched the program Stop Bullying Now. The extensive 
     website includes a ``stop bullying now jingle,'' 12 games 
     (``Bully-wood Squares,'' connect the dots to reveal the 
     bully, (etc), 12 ``animated webisodes'' featuring characters 
     that ``just might remind you of people you know.'' (see 
     illustration) along with a promise to ``post a new one every 
     couple of weeks,'' along with advice and letters from HRSA's 
     bullying ``experts,'' Senorita Ortega and Mr. Bittner. CNN 
     reported in 2003 that HRSA's bullying program would cost $3.4 
     million. However, in a response to a July 2006 congressional 
     request, HRSA reported that $6.2 million had been spent since 
     the establishment of the program, almost double the amount of 
     the original estimation. The program was not enumerated in 
     HRSA's 2007 or 2008 budget justifications submitted by the 
     agency to Congress.
       Comic Capers at NIH. Congress doubled funding for the 
     National Institutes of Health (NIH) over the past decade. 
     While we haven't discovered a cure for cancer yet, the agency 
     does provide you the opportunity to create and print your 
     very own Garfield comic strips.
       $61.7 million in federal AIDS funds went unspent that could 
     have been used to treat patients on AIDS drug waiting lists. 
     An HHS OIG report reveals that bureaucratic inaction at the 
     Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), not a 
     lack of federal resources, has contributed to the patient 
     waiting lists for AIDS drugs. ``HRSA did not use the offset 
     authority provided by the CARE Act and HHS grants policy to 
     manage States' unobligated balances. . . . By doing so, HRSA 
     would have had available a larger amount of current-year 
     funding to address program needs. For example, the offsetting 
     option might have been useful in grant year 2002, when 10 
     States had unobligated Title II balances totaling $61.7 
     million and 8 States had no balances or small balances and a 
     documented need for additional resources. HRSA stated that it 
     had opted against using the offset authority provided by the 
     CARE Act.
       Over $45 million in Title I Ryan White CARE Act funds 
     unspent over 5 year period while AIDS patients wait for drug 
     assistance. The Health and Human Services Inspector General 
     issued a review of unspent Ryan White CARE Act Title I funds 
     (AIDS care grants provided to 51 metropolitan areas in the 
     U.S.) and found that 46 eligible areas carried over more than 
     $45 million in unspent federal funds from two to five years 
     beyond the original budget period between 1999 and 2003. 
     During this period, there were hundreds of patients on 
     waiting lists for AIDS Drug Assistance Programs throughout 
     the country. A number of patients on these waiting lists died 
     in South Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia.
       The Washington Post reported that NIH was paying an 
     employee $100,000 a year to do nothing. According to the 
     article, ``NIH Scientist Says He's Paid To Do Nothing: Agency 
     Denies Administrator's Surreal Situation of Collecting 
     $100,000 Salary for No Work,'' every weekday at 6.30 a.m., 
     Edward McSweegan climbs into his Volkswagen Passat for the 
     hour-long commute to the National Institutes of Health. He 
     has an office in Bethesda, a job title--health scientist 
     administrator--and an annual salary of about $100,000. What 
     McSweegan says he does not have--and has not had for the last 
     seven years--is any real work. He was hired by the National 
     Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1988, but 
     says his bosses transferred the research grants he 
     administered to other workers eight years later, leaving him 
     with occasional tasks more suitable for a typist or 
     ``gofer.''
       Letter for Stimulus Rebate Checks. The recently passed 
     stimulus package will provide rebate checks to 130 million 
     households. Before those checks are issued, though, the 
     Internal Revenue Service will send a letter out to each 
     household that will get a rebate check to inform them that 
     the check is on the way. Unfortunately, the cost of sending 
     these pre-rebate letters will be $42 million once the costs 
     are tallied for postage and printing. The letter will not 
     contain the actual rebate, but will merely explain that the 
     stimulus package was passed and what a citizen should do with 
     the check once they receive it. It is not clear why this 
     information could not be provided with the actual check at 
     its time of arrival, leading some to think that the letter 
     serves no higher purpose than to give Congress and the 
     President a pat on the back. Surely, there could be a better 
     use for the $42 million--like giving it back to taxpayers.
       Senate Restaurants. The Senate Restaurants, which is 
     overseen by the Architect of the Capitol, operates the Senate 
     cafeterias, catering services, snack shops, vending machine, 
     and the Senate Members Dining Room. A recently GAO audit 
     found that the American taxpayers have covered the Senate 
     restaurants' $2.36 million operating losses during the last 
     two combined fiscal years. The operating loss rose from $1.02 
     million in 2006 to $1.34 million in 2007. After taking in 
     just over $10 million of revenues in 2007, being $1.34 
     million in the red translates into a 13.4% operating loss for 
     the Senate Restaurants. No business could operate in the 
     private sector with these kinds of losses but this is the 
     kind of waste that we are seeing all throughout the federal 
     government. Prompted, the recent GAO audit, the Senate 
     Committee on Rules and Administration is now seeking an 
     outside vendor to take over operations of the Senate 
     Restaurants.
       Unneeded Federal Buildings. The federal government 
     currently owns 21,000 buildings that it says it no longer 
     needs, which are all together worth $18 billion. At the 
     Department of Energy alone, the unneeded property is 
     equivalent to three times the amount of square footage in the 
     Pentagon--the largest building in the world. Unfortunately, 
     the rules and regulations in place make it nearly impossible 
     for federal agencies to sell these buildings in a timely 
     manner on the open market. According to the rules, before an 
     agency sells a property it is required to conduct extensive 
     reviews to determine if the property could be used to meet 
     some public benefit, such as a homeless shelter, school, 
     airport runway or path for telephone wires. If a 
     determination is made that the property could be used in this 
     way, after a process that can take years, it is then 
     available to be given away at no cost to an applicant. In the 
     years that these rules have been in place, 30,000 properties 
     have been required to undergo these reviews, but only a 
     fraction of a percent of have ever been given away. 
     Unfortunately, because all properties are required to undergo 
     this process there is a tremendous bottle-necking effect, 
     preventing agencies from selling unneeded properties. This 
     hurts agencies in two ways: first, it means that agencies are 
     deprived of the money that they could earn by selling the 
     property, and second, it means that agencies are required to 
     pay for upkeep of buildings they don't need. Instead of 
     allowing these properties to be sold on behalf of taxpayers, 
     Congress has chosen to keep the rules in place and wasted the 
     opportunity to make $18 billion.
       2010 Decennial Census. The 2010 Decennial Census will use a 
     six-question survey to count every person in the country, as 
     required by the Constitution for apportioning the House of 
     Representatives. The Census Bureau has recently estimated 
     that the overall cost of the census would be $11.8 billion, 
     which is nearly double what was spent to conduct operations 
     in 2000. More recently, though, we have found out that the 
     Bureau has so grossly mismanaged a $600 million contract for 
     handheld computers that cost overruns as high as $2 billion 
     are possible. Most of this cost would be the result of 
     needing to abandon the handheld computers in

[[Page 3833]]

     favor of conducting the census entirely by paper. Due to the 
     recent revelations, the Government Accountability Office has 
     placed the 2010 Census on its High Risk List, which is 
     reserved only for the most problematic programs in the 
     federal government.

  Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont is recognized.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, let me begin by commending my friend from 
Oklahoma, who I think makes some very important points. There is no 
question that there is an enormous amount of waste and fraud and abuse 
in this Government. There is no question, in my mind, that Congress has 
not been vigilant enough in rooting out that waste and fraud to the 
tune of billions and billions of dollars.
  I would simply say that while it is absolutely appropriate to condemn 
the Congress, it is also important to note that we have an 
administration in this city, in Washington, DC, and the function of an 
administration is to administer. That means that when there is waste 
and fraud, you have an administration that should also be on top of 
that situation. And I think of the many failings of the Bush 
administration, which, in my view, will go down in history as one of 
the worst in our country's history--clearly their overall incompetence 
will be one of those areas people will focus on.
  The second point I would make--and I see my friend from Oklahoma has 
left--is that he is absolutely right that a $9.2 trillion national debt 
is unsustainable. But one of the areas I don't believe he mentioned in 
terms of driving up that national debt is the war in Iraq.
  Now, we can have a great debate about the wisdom of that war. I voted 
against it when I was in the House. I think we should bring our troops 
home as soon as possible. But right now, we are not on the war, we are 
on the budget. And the question regarding the budget is, For all those 
people who support the war, why don't you pay for the war now rather 
than forcing our kids and grandchildren to pay to the tune of $150 
billion a year? And some say the cost of this war eventually will run 
into the trillions of dollars. So all of those people who talk about 
fiscal irresponsibility refuse not to pay for the war.
  I was reading a book about Dwight David Eisenhower, and in the book 
it points out that during the Korean war, Truman imposed a surtax on 
people's personal income tax and an excess-profits tax in order to pay 
for the war. I don't see the advocates of the war in Iraq coming 
forward and saying: We don't want to leave that burden of $150 billion 
a year to our kids and grandchildren, so we are going to come up and 
pay for it now. I didn't hear my friend from Oklahoma raise that issue.
  I hear other people coming to the floor and they say: Well, we have 
this tremendous national debt, and they have pictures of the kids, and 
yet they propose to completely eliminate the estate tax, which over the 
course of 20 years will cause us a loss of $1 trillion. How is that 
going to be paid for? Oh, I guess we don't have to pay for it. I guess 
we can just pass that on to the kids. So I think that some of our 
friends who talk about fiscal responsibility might, in fact, want to 
pay for this war today, not pass it on to future generations. And when 
they are talking about giving huge tax breaks to the wealthiest people 
in this country, let them understand that is all they are doing, is 
driving up the national debt so that our kids and grandchildren will be 
forced to pay for that.
  We are in the midst of a debate about the budget, and as you know a 
budget is a lot more than just numbers; it reflects the values and the 
priorities of our Nation. And when we look at what is going on in this 
country, as important as a $9.2 trillion national debt is, it is not 
the only issue of importance. What is also important is to understand 
today what is going on in terms of the needs and the lives of middle-
class and working people.
  One of the realities we do not talk about very much today is that 
poverty in America is increasing. In fact, since President Bush has 
been in office, almost 5 million more Americans have joined the ranks 
of the poor. That is part of the Bush economy. We now have almost 36.5 
million Americans who are living in poverty. Many of these people are 
working, and they are working 40 or 50 hours a week, but they are 
making 8 bucks an hour, they are making 7 bucks an hour, and they are 
just not making enough money in order to lift themselves out of 
poverty. In fact, the United States of America today has the highest 
rate of poverty of any major nation on Earth, and that is an issue 
which we should address here in the Senate.
  When we are talking about Americans living in poverty, we are not, of 
course, just talking about adults. Tragically, we are also talking 
about children. I know our President and many others talk about family 
values. Well, this is not a family value. Under President Bush's 
administration, since he has been in office, 1.2 million more children 
are now living in poverty, and we have almost 13 million kids in this 
country who live in poverty. That is not a family value. That is a 
national disgrace. As a matter of fact, the United States has the 
dubious distinction of having the highest childhood poverty rate in the 
industrialized world.
  I hear some of my friends coming to the floor to compare this or that 
aspect of American society or our tax policy with Europe and other 
countries. Well, I think it is important that we look at this chart--
how we treat our children.
  What this chart shows is that Finland, Norway, and Sweden all have 
childhood poverty rates of less than 5 percent. Switzerland, Belgium, 
Austria, France, Denmark, and Germany all have childhood poverty rates 
of less than 10 percent. The Netherlands has a childhood poverty rate 
of slightly more than 10 percent. But in the United States of America, 
the childhood poverty rate is 21.9 percent, or more than double that of 
France, Germany, Austria, or the Netherlands.
  Now, why is that an important fact? It is important, obviously, that 
the children are vulnerable; that as adults, we are responsible for the 
children and we are failing those children. But it is also important to 
note that we have, as a nation, more people behind bars, incarcerated, 
than any other nation on Earth, including China. And if anyone thinks 
there is not a direct correlation between high poverty rates for kids 
and kids who mentally drop out of society, get involved in self-
destructive activity at young ages, and then end up in jail, you would 
be kidding yourself. And the issue here is whether we address this 
crisis of 21 percent of our kids living in poverty, whether we provide 
for those kids or, 15 or 18 or 20 years later, whether we lock them up 
at $50,000 a pop.
  There have been recent discussions about the economy, whether we are 
in a recession or entering a recession. But the truth is, despite 
President Bush's assertions, this economy has been a disaster for 
middle-income and working families from day one. Since President Bush 
took office in 2001, median household income for working-aged Americans 
has declined by almost $2,500. That is what we call the collapse of the 
middle class. Over 8\1/2\ million Americans have lost their health 
insurance. That is what we call the disintegration of the health care 
system in America. Three million workers have lost their pensions. And 
the idea of a defined pension program is increasingly becoming ancient 
history. More and more workers are wondering what is going to happen to 
them when they retire, and the idea that there will really be a defined 
pension program for them when they retire, that is not something most 
workers, especially younger workers, believe.
  The annual trade deficit since President Bush has been in office has 
more than doubled, and over 3 million good-paying manufacturing jobs 
have been lost. The price of gas at the pump and home heating oil has 
more than doubled, while ExxonMobil made $40 billion in profits last 
year--more than any company in the history of the world. That is $3.20 
for a gallon of gas, which working people in Vermont can't afford. 
Workers in Vermont often travel long-distance to and from work. And $40 
billion in profit for ExxonMobil. Home foreclosures, of course, are now

[[Page 3834]]

the highest on record. Meanwhile, while the middle class is shrinking 
and poverty is increasing, the wealthiest people in this country have 
not had it so good since the 1920s.
  My friend from Oklahoma mentioned that there are issues we just don't 
talk about, and he has a point. But one of the issues we don't talk 
about in this body--for pretty obvious reasons, to my mind, because who 
pays for the campaigns around here--is the growing disparity, the 
outrageous disparity of income and wealth in this country.
  What this chart shows is that the wealthiest 1 percent of the 
population now owns 34 percent of the Nation's wealth, while the bottom 
90 percent owns only 29 percent of our wealth. That is here.
  So what you see is the richest 1 percent owns more wealth than the 
bottom 90 percent. Is that what America is supposed to be about? Is 
that the kind of society we want? There is a lot of discussion that 
takes place on the floor of the Senate, in the House, about the 
economy. But at the end of the day, when you look at the economy, what 
is important, most important, is not economic growth, not GDP, what 
really is most important is what is happening to the average person.
  You can have all of the growth you want, and you can see ordinary 
working people experiencing a decline in their real wages. You can see 
a lot of wealth being created, but it does not mean a whole lot to 
ordinary people if most of that income and wealth is going to the 
people on top.
  The bottom line is that in the economy there are winners and losers. 
It is very clear that in the economy today, the middle class is losing. 
Lower income people are being decimated while the upper income people 
have never had it so good.
  I know my friends in the Senate on both sides of the aisle--I speak 
as an Independent--hesitate to talk about that issue. But it is 
imperative that we do talk about it. Let me go to another chart.
  This chart talks about the economy in terms of how different groups 
are doing. This chart shows that the wealthiest 1 percent saw its total 
income rise by $180,000 in 2005 or more than what the average middle-
class family makes in 3 years. This is the rise in income, not what 
they make; this is just their increase.
  So the wealthiest 1 percent are doing phenomenally well. That is on 
average. That is a pretty good year, on average, seeing an increase of 
$180,000 in the year 2005. This is according to the Congressional 
Budget Office.
  Meanwhile, the average middle-class family received a $400 increase. 
That is that small little box down here, an increase in annual income 
in 2005.
  CBO also found that the total share of aftertax income going to the 
top 1 percent hit the highest level on record, while the middle-class 
and working families received the smallest share of aftertax incomes on 
record.
  So when people understand in their gut that what is happening is the 
middle class is shrinking and the rich are getting richer, well, that 
is what it is about. That is the fact. That is precisely what is 
happening in America.
  In addition, according to Forbes magazine, the collective net worth 
of the wealthiest 400 Americans--400 Americans, that is not a lot of 
people--increased by $290 billion last year, increased by $290 billion 
to a total of $1.5 trillion. Not only have the wealthiest 400 families, 
the richest 400, seen an increase in their wealth, their combined 
income has more than doubled from 2002 to 2005.
  At the same time, the average income tax paid by the wealthiest 400 
Americans has fallen from 30 percent to 18 percent. That is not Bernie 
Sanders, that is according to the Wall Street Journal. The reason the 
average income tax for the wealthiest people who are making 
astronomical sums of money, why that has been cut in half, is mainly 
due to Bush's tax cuts, according to the Wall Street Journal.
  The middle class is shrinking, poverty is increasing, and the 
wealthiest people have not had it so good since the 1920s. That is an 
overview of the state of our economy.
  Now, why do I raise these issues? I raise these issues because if we 
truly do not understand what is going on around our country in the 
lives of ordinary people, people who cannot afford to fill up their gas 
tank, cannot afford a college education for their kids, cannot afford 
childcare, cannot afford to take care of their parents, if we do not 
understand that reality, it is pretty hard for this body to make good 
public policy.
  The question then is, what do we do? What do we do? Well, President 
Bush gave us his answer in his budget. What President Bush, in his 
budget, said is, at a time when the richest people in America are 
becoming richer, what should we do? Well, let's give them even more tax 
breaks. That makes a lot of sense to the richest people in America and 
George W. Bush.
  And what did he say to the poorest people in America? Well, poverty 
is increasing. There is a level of desperation going on in this country 
that we have not seen in many years. So at a time when poverty is 
increasing, what do we do? Well, according to George W. Bush, you cut 
back on the aid and programs that help low-income and middle-income 
people. That is precisely what Bush's budget was about; one of the more 
absurd documents that I have ever seen in my life.
  Fortunately, that budget has been placed where it belongs; that is, 
in the garbage can. We are now debating a much different budget, a 
budget that is far better, the budget that we have before us. I am 
proud to be a member of the Budget Committee, working with Chairman 
Conrad, on a far better budget than the President's budget.
  But, in my view, we can make improvements on it. We can do better 
than the budget we are now debating. To that regard, I will be 
introducing an amendment, and I want to thank the Presiding Officer for 
being one of the cosponsors of that amendment.
  Let me very briefly talk about that. It seems to me, as we look at 
some of the trends that we should be addressing in this budget, at 
least three come to mind. No. 1 is the middle class is declining, No. 2 
is our children are suffering, and No. 3 is that we have, among other 
things, a major infra-structural crisis in this country.
  It is my view that we need a budget which will address some of those 
issues. I am very proud I will soon be introducing an amendment which 
is being cosponsored by Senators Clinton, Durbin, Kennedy, Harkin, 
Schumer, Mikulski, and Brown.
  This amendment is a pretty simple one. It puts the needs of our 
children, it puts the needs of our working families and people with 
disabilities and senior citizens ahead of the wealthy few.
  At a time when our Presidential candidates in both parties are 
talking about change, change, and change, at a time when the American 
people overwhelming understand that it is imperative that we move this 
country in a different direction, this amendment can begin the process 
of change right here in the Senate, and, in fact, change our national 
priorities.
  The choice the Senate will have in terms of this amendment is a 
pretty simple one: Do we continue to give tax breaks to the very 
wealthiest people in this country, people who have never had it so 
good, or do we invest in our children, our working families, and those 
people who are in need?
  What this would do is restore the top income tax bracket to 39.6 
percent for households earning more than $1 million per year. Those are 
the only people who would be affected. And we would use that revenue to 
begin to address some of the most urgent, unmet needs of our children. 
We would address the issue of job creation; we would address the issue 
of deficit reduction.
  Now, 99.7 percent of Americans would not be impacted by this tax 
change, only the top three-tenths of 1 percent would see their income 
tax rates go back to where they were during the Clinton Administration 
when few would deny that the economy was far stronger than it currently 
is.
  According to the Joint Tax Committee, restoring the top income tax 
brackets for people making more than $1 million to what it was in 2000 
would

[[Page 3835]]

increase revenue by about $32.5 billion over the next 3 years, 
including $10.8 billion in 2009 alone.
  So here is the choice. We can continue over a 3-year period to give 
$32.5 billion in tax breaks to the top three-tenths of 1 percent, 
people who economically are doing phenomenally well today, or we can 
invest it in the people in our country and use some of that for deficit 
reduction.
  What could we do with $32.5 billion? Well, let me tell you. We could, 
as our amendment does, expend $10 billion for the Individuals with 
Disabilities Education Act; that is, special education.
  Over 30 years ago, the Federal Government made a promise that it 
would fund 40 percent of the cost of special education. Unfortunately, 
today we only spend about 17 percent of the cost of special ed. I know 
in Vermont--I do not know about Ohio, but I can tell you that in 
Vermont, in school district after school district, property taxes are 
going up. And one of the reasons is the very high cost of special ed. 
You are seeing more and more kids coming into the system who have 
special ed needs.
  Educating those kids is very expensive. The Federal Government has 
not kept its promise in adequately funding special ed. So it is the 
local property tax payers who have to pick up the cost. By putting $10 
billion more into special ed, not only can we help people stabilize 
their property taxes, but we can pay more attention to the kids with 
special ed needs. And both of those goals, to my mind, are goals that 
we should strive for.
  This amendment would also increase Head Start funding by $5 billion 
over the next 3 years. After adjusting for inflation, Head Start has 
been cut by over 11 percent compared to fiscal year 2002. Meanwhile, 
less than half of all eligible children are enrolled in Head Start, and 
only about 3 percent of eligible children are enrolled in Early Head 
Start. This amendment would begin to correct this situation.
  What Head Start is about is what its title indicates. What we have 
known for a very long time is the most important intellectual and 
emotional years of a human being's life are their earliest years. If 
kids are not exposed to books and they are not exposed to ideas and 
they are not learning how to socialize and they do not have good 
emotional development, those kids are going to go off in a bad 
direction. And what Head Start was about, and what Head Start has been 
successful about, is giving kids the opportunity so that when they get 
into kindergarten and first grade, those kids will then be in a 
position in which they can learn effectively and can socialize well 
with their peers.
  Head Start works. The problem right now is that it is inadequately 
funded, and millions of families simply cannot get into this very good 
program.
  In addition to funding special education and Head Start, my amendment 
would also provide a $4 billion increase for the childcare development 
block grant. One of the issues that we very rarely discuss in the 
Senate but that every working family with young children knows is a 
major crisis in America is the lack of availability of childcare, 
affordable, quality childcare.
  How many millions of kids are now being minded by untrained people 
and being stuck in front of a television set for 8 hours a day? And 
what an unfortunate circumstance that is for our little kids, 
especially at a time when most women work and are entitled to good 
quality childcare. This amendment would provide funding to help do 
that.
  This amendment would also provide a $3.5 billion increase to the Food 
Stamp Program. Hunger in America--I know you know, Mr. President, 
because you and I are working on an issue to address this--is 
increasing. Food pantries are running out of food. That should not be 
taking place in this country. So what we do is add $3.5 billion more to 
the Food Stamp Program.
  In my State of Vermont, it gets pretty cold. That is true in many 
other States. Meanwhile, the price of home heating oil is soaring. You 
have many people who are having a difficult time paying their heating 
bills. This amendment would increase the very successful Low-Income 
Home Energy Assistance Program, often called LIHEAP, by $4 billion.
  The bottom line is nobody in America should go cold in the winter.
  Furthermore, this amendment would provide $3 billion for school 
construction. There are kids who are going to schools that are 
outmoded. They are decrepit. They are not energy efficient. We can 
create a lot of good jobs. We can improve the quality of education by 
building modern schools and upgrading the schools that currently exist. 
We put $3 billion into that.
  Finally, at a time of record-breaking deficits, this amendment would 
reduce the deficit by $3 billion.
  I am happy to inform my colleagues that this amendment has been 
endorsed by over 50 groups, including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the National 
Education Association, Children's Defense Fund, the American Federation 
of Teachers, Easter Seals, the YWCA, the National Head Start 
Association, the SEIU, and the National Organization for Women.
  Let me quote from a letter I received from all of these groups:

       The economic downturn is creating crisis for parents who 
     work hard but struggle to afford nutritious meals as food 
     prices escalate; to pay for energy for their homes and fuel 
     for their cars; to pay for child care so that they can work; 
     and to assure that their young children receive the building 
     blocks of a solid education to prepare them for the future. 
     Programs that assist in meeting these needs have been cut 
     significantly in recent years, while tax breaks for 
     millionaires have soared. Your amendment addresses these 
     needs. . . . We are urging the Senate to adopt your fiscally 
     responsible amendment to address the pressing needs of 
     working families while restoring greater progressivity to the 
     tax system.

  The choice is clear. We can provide $32.5 billion in tax breaks to 
millionaires and billionaires who don't need it or we can begin to meet 
the unmet needs of our children. That is what this amendment is about. 
I look forward to the support of my colleagues, not just in passing 
this amendment but in beginning the process of moving this great 
country in a very different direction.
  I yield the floor.

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