[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 13823-13830]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           OUR BUDGET PROCESS

  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I rise today and ask unanimous consent to 
engage in a colloquy with my Republican colleagues up through the next 
hour.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I believe what we are going to talk about 
over the next hour is one of the most important issues facing our 
government.
  We sat here today and listened to a lot of very valid pleas for help 
from the Federal Government. The reality is, we don't have the money. 
There are four words I have not heard in the U.S. Senate or Congress, 
actually, since I have been here over the last year and a half, and 
those words are ``We cannot afford it.''
  The problem is that right now we have a budget crisis. We have a debt 
crisis. Let me say this: Fixing the budget process will not solve the 
debt crisis. Let's be very clear about that. But we will not solve the 
debt crisis unless and until we address the dysfunction in our budget 
process.
  The problem is that in the last 42 years, since the Budget Act of 
1974, the budget process has only worked four times.
  This chart explains this fact. We can see the yellow lines show 
that--and I hope my colleagues can focus on this--only four times in 
the last 42 years has this budget process that was enacted in 1974 
actually functioned at all to fund the Federal Government.
  One of the major responsibilities of our jobs here in the Senate and 
the House is to fund the Federal Government, to take care of 
discretionary needs such as those heard today from Flint, MI, 
Louisiana, West Virginia, and Maryland. These are valid needs, but 
every dime we spend in our discretionary spending is borrowed. I will 
talk more about that a little later. We have some speakers today who 
are going to talk about the results of not having a budget process that 
works.
  This chart explains that over the last 42 years, since 1974, there 
were four times that the 13 appropriations bills actually got passed 
and we funded the government the way we are supposed to.
  The blue lines are the actual appropriations bills. Since 1998--
somewhere in there--we went from 13 bills to 12 bills that actually 
fund. These are appropriations bills that fund the Federal Government. 
They fund $1.1 trillion of a $3.9 trillion spend of the Federal 
Government.
  This chart shows that over the life of this law--these are the laws, 
the appropriation bills that have been passed each year, and the 
average is the red line. The average over this period of time is 2.6 
bills of the 12 or 13 bills that have to be passed to fund the 
government.
  Over the last 19 consecutive years, we have used 107 continuing 
resolutions to get past the fiscal year to make sure we fund the 
government on the first day of the new fiscal year.
  This is how serious this is. Next Monday is the first day of the next 
fiscal year, fiscal year 2017. We sitting here today are voting on the 
CR to get us past this day so the government doesn't have to shut down 
next week--those dreaded words of ``irresponsibility'' and 
``intransigence.'' Quite frankly, this is part of the problem because 
what happens is what happened last year.
  The dysfunction in the system is centered around this: The budget is 
not a law, it is a resolution. That means that a majority, with 51 
percent of the votes in this body, can pass a political statement. That 
is exactly what happened last year.
  Let me say this before we go any further: Everything you hear today 
is nonpartisan. This should be about a nonpartisan exercise that we 
have in funding the government. Yes, we are going to have debates based 
on our partisanship and based on what our beliefs and principles are, 
but the basic process should be a politically neutral platform that 
allows us to argue our differences in the budget process, get to a 
budget, move to the appropriations, and fund the government by the end 
of the fiscal year, and we have only done that four times in the last 
42 years.
  The dysfunction is centered around this. If you look at this chart, 
every year we just don't have enough time, basically. And it is not 
just time, it is the process. The budget is based on a resolution, and 
51 percent can vote for it. Last year, as an example, the majority--the 
Republican majority, by the way--voted a political bill that took $7.5 
trillion out of the President's budget over the next 10 years without 
one Democratic vote. Then we got to the authorization process--and the 
authorization process, by the way, is a law and they have to have 60 
votes. So guess what. The people on the other side of the aisle, my 
friends, said: Well, you didn't ask our opinion in the budget process, 
why do you want our help now? So they don't let us get on the 
appropriations. We have some $310 billion that we are funding today 
that is not authorized, over 256 agencies and programs.
  The next thing is we go to appropriation. Again, the minority party 
can stop the process by not letting us get on the bills.
  We have a situation right now--this is nonpartisan, but it is a 
reality. The Defense appropriations bill which funds our military was 
passed unanimously in committee, the way it was supposed to operate. 
Democrats and Republicans got together, worked it out, made amendments, 
and came up with a bill that funded our Federal Government's military. 
Yet we tried six times to get it to the floor. There are political 
reasons why it hasn't gotten to the floor, but it shows the dysfunction 
we have in this process.
  Mr. President, the time has come for us to address this process. I am 
so excited to have various Members of the freshman class here. We have 
the chairman of the Budget Committee coming down. We have some other 
senior Members who have been working on this for years.
  I notice my good friend from the State of North Carolina, Senator 
Thom Tillis, is here, and I will ask him to give us his perspective. 
There is a big military effort in their State, and Senator Tillis has 
been a soldier in this, not only in the Senate but in his time as 
speaker of the house in North Carolina.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Thank you, Mr. President.
  I thank my colleague and friend from the great State of Georgia for 
taking a leadership position to really cleanse the dysfunction and the 
problems that are going on.
  Mr. President, Senator Perdue is only a 2-year politician. His tenure 
in the Senate is actually only 2 years. He has spent all of his time in 
business. He spent time in business, where you didn't keep your job if 
you couldn't balance your budget. You didn't keep your job if you 
couldn't make the difficult decisions year to year--making payroll, 
making strategic investments, and doing the kinds of things good 
business leaders do. That is what he has done all of his life. Now he 
finds himself in the U.S. Senate, where that is almost the exact 
opposite of what we do.
  We just had passage of a continuing resolution today for a few weeks 
because we can't come to terms on long-term spending measures. Over a 
dozen bills passed out of appropriations with strong bipartisan support 
and within the constraints of the bipartisan budget, and now we can't 
get them passed. Why is that a problem? Because when you have the 
world's largest and most complex entity that has ever existed that 
can't figure out how much money it is going to spend or commit on more 
than about a 12-month cycle--and sometimes only a few months--how on 
Earth can you save money and make long-term investments?
  We were in a committee hearing yesterday where we heard that right 
now it takes an average of 15 years from the concept of a new satellite 
to the time we are launching it into space. How on Earth can we make 
those long-term investments when we can't even be clear on what we are 
going to be spending money on but for every 12 months? This is a threat 
to our national security. This is a threat to our economic

[[Page 13824]]

security. This is a threat to the security of every man and woman in 
the United States because they can't rely on the government to provide 
businesses or individuals with any kind of certainty whatsoever.
  It is tough to make budget decisions, but they need to be made. I 
know a little bit about this because I was speaker of the house in 
North Carolina in 2011. We had a budget crisis. We had a $2.5 billion 
debt and 6 months to solve it. Unlike the Federal Government, where you 
can run up a deficit every year--it is now almost $20 trillion--most 
States, with the exception of maybe one or two, have a constitutional 
obligation to balance the budget, so we did it.
  What was the result of providing that long-term certainty? Living 
within our means and actually having a transparent and decisive budget 
process. We had one of the greatest economic turnarounds in any State 
in the Nation in the last 5 years.
  Being decisive and making the tough decisions accrues a benefit to 
the business community, accrues a benefit to every man and woman who 
lives in the United States, and it actually settles the global economic 
condition more than most people know.
  At the end of the day, let's start doing our job. Let's not just 
create a budget like we did, a bipartisan budget, set it on the shelf, 
and then pass several appropriations bills and kill them on the floor. 
That is what is going on here, and I think my freshmen colleagues think 
it is time--there are a lot of people who put posters up here saying 
``Do your job,'' but they are failing to do their jobs by preventing us 
from doing one of the most important things we can do--make the tough, 
long-term fiscal decisions that are necessary for this great Nation.
  I say to Senator Perdue, thank you for allowing me to speak.
  I thank Senator Perdue for bringing up this very important subject. 
We need to stay in front of this and recognize that doing our job is 
tackling this budget crisis, tackling the uncertainty that we, by 
failing to do our jobs, are placing on every hard-working American and 
business in this country.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  Mr. PERDUE. I say to Senator Tillis, thank you for coming to the 
floor and talking about this issue. With your experience in State 
government in North Carolina, you know that 44 States have a balanced 
budget law. Guess what States don't have a financial situation, a 
financial problem.
  I thank the Senator for speaking.
  I note that my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, is on the 
floor.
  He has been a warrior on this budget before when he was in the House 
and now in the Senate for the last 2 years. I welcome his comments to 
speak about this as well.
  Senator Lankford.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, this is a long-term issue. This is not 
something new. I am amazed at the number of times I run into people in 
Oklahoma who say: Why can't we seem to get the budget done now? What 
has happened?
  I have said: Let's back up for just a second. Since 1974 we have done 
a budget and done it correctly four times total. The Congressional 
Budget Act was created right after Watergate, in 1974, to try to create 
this more transparent process. What they created was a process so 
incredibly difficult to work with that it has worked four times since 
1974. We have only had 2 years since 1974 when we haven't had a single 
CR. That is a continuing resolution. This body just passed another 
continuing resolution, meaning the appropriations process won't be done 
on time again this year. That was settled today.
  The issues we face with budgeting are not new. It has been 20 years 
since we had no CR at all. This constant issue of putting the big 
budget issues off and trying to figure out how we are going to navigate 
through the Senate procedures and get the budget done has to stop. At 
some point we have to have a determination to say that we can't just 
keep saying: Next year this will improve; next year this will improve.
  We are not going to get a better product until we get a better 
process. We have a very bad process right now, and we need to admit it 
is a bad process.
  What I am proud of is that there are multiple Members of this body--
from the leadership of the Budget Committee through the freshmen who 
are brandnew Senators--who are all focused on the same thing. Let's 
solve how we do budgeting and actually get to a better product by 
improving the process. What do we have? We have almost $20 trillion in 
debt, and everyone argues about what we are going to do on a few things 
to try to do management, but no one is really talking about how we 
actually get us back to balance and paying off the debt.
  It is a common conversation I have with people in Oklahoma.
  This is a conversation where people say: Can we ever get this 
resolved? Is it too late?
  On the whole, Americans believe nothing will get better in 
Washington, DC, dealing with the budget, and their question is this: 
When and how does it get better? I wish I could give them a lot of hope 
on that.
  What I typically tell people is this: Let's just do a ``for 
instance.'' Right now, let's take the balanced budget piece that we had 
and that we put out earlier this year. It actually took 10 years and 
chipped away at the deficit. In 10 years we chipped away at it and got 
back to a balance where we had no deficit that year. It was balanced. 
Then let's say the next year we actually had a $50 billion surplus. It 
would be a pretty good surplus. So we chip away and in 10 years get to 
balance. The next year we have a $50 billion surplus.
  Do you know how long it would take us to pay off our debt if we had a 
$50 billion surplus? If we had a $50 billion surplus every year for 460 
years in a row, we would pay off our debt--460 years in a row of $50 
billion surpluses and we can get on top of this. Everyone says that is 
unreasonable. I would say it is certainly unreasonable if we don't 
change the way we do our process. It just continues to get worse.
  There are some basic things we can do. We can do budgeting every 2 
years. People may say: Well, how does that solve anything? Well, that 
is predictability and planning. It creates greater oversight.
  Right now we do this every single year. In the speed of what has to 
be done, how it has to be done, there is very little oversight on our 
spending. We could actually put all the areas we have in spending--all 
accountable, every year.
  Right now there is about 25 percent to 30 percent of our budget with 
the appropriations process that we actually focus on every year. The 
rest of it is on autopilot, and it is never touched.
  Until we get everything in front of everybody every year to be able 
to look at it for oversight, we are not going to solve the big issues. 
We have to deal with what are called budget gimmicks.
  I have been at war with a budget gimmick called CHIMPS. It is my 
favorite of the gimmicks. There are a lot of them out there. It stands 
for ``changes in mandatory programs,'' or CHIMPS. The changes in 
mandatory programs is a budget gimmick out there that says we were 
planning to spend this much--when we really weren't, but on paper it 
said we were--and then instead we said: No, we are not going to spend 
that much this year so we will spend it on something else.
  But guess what. The next year they come back to the exact same 
dollars again and say: No, we are planning this year to do it, but we 
are really not, and so we will to spend it on something else.
  It just adds debt every year. We will have billions of dollars of 
CHIMPS built into our budget and claim that the deficit is even lower 
than it is. It is not. It is just this budget gimmick, and in real 
dollars it makes it even bigger. We have to deal with those budget 
gimmicks in there and be able to take that away so that when the 
appropriations process is done you get real numbers. The hardest thing 
to get in DC is the real number. So you have to deal with all these 
gimmicks out there to remove those. You get a longer time period to be 
able to plan and create some certainty, but one of the key things we

[[Page 13825]]

have to have is an actual deadline. This town doesn't function on 
anything other than deadlines and pressure points. When it is time that 
it actually has to be resolved, we get it resolved. But if we don't 
have to resolve it right now, this town just says: Tomorrow. We will 
get it done next week. We will get it done next session.
  The focus is how do we actually create those pressure points? How 
about a simple idea that says that if we don't get the budget done on 
time--the appropriations bills done on time--then it goes to an 
automatic CR so we don't have a government shutdown, because government 
shutdowns just waste money on the whole? It automatically kicks in to 
last year's budget amount. But here is what changes. All of the Members 
of Congress, our budget, our staff for how we function, our operating 
expenses, all of our committees, and the Executive Office of the White 
House--that is the three groups. From both the House and the Senate and 
the White House, all of our budgets drop immediately. Let's say 4 
percent, 5 percent, 6 percent the first day and then it does that for 
30 days. Then, if you still don't have the appropriations process, it 
cuts again another big percentage. It puts the pressure where the 
pressure needs to be. It is not the fault of the agencies or the 
American people that the job wasn't done. It lies squarely in the 
House, the Senate, the White House, and our negotiations for not 
getting it done on time.
  It is a simple mechanism to say: If the task has not been done, put 
the pressure where the pressure needs to be--the cuts in the House, the 
Senate, and on the White House. Push all of us to the table and get it 
resolved.
  The goal is to do appropriations in a transparent process so the 
American people can see how their money is being spent and to be able 
to do it wisely and to be able to create a process where you can 
actually solve the problem.
  Currently, we don't have a process that solves the problem. This 
magically doesn't balance the budget. It still takes hard decisions, 
but it at least creates a format where we could solve the problem. 
Right now, we don't even have that.
  In step one, like an AA group, let's at least admit there is a 
problem. There is a problem.
  In step two, let's get to work on fixing it and actually resolve the 
process. Then let's actually get to work balancing this and paying off 
our debt.
  I appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk about this issue.
  Mr. PERDUE. I say thank you to Senator Lankford.
  I think my colleagues can see the passion and history he has had here 
and a lot of great thoughts.
  I note that the chairman of our Budget Committee in the Senate, 
Senator Mike Enzi from Wyoming, is here on the floor. I am going to 
turn it over to him and ask him to give us his comments. He has been 
fighting this for years. As chairman of the Budget Committee last year, 
he managed to get a budget out of our committee that actually took over 
$7 trillion out of the President's budget at that point in time.
  I say to Senator Enzi, thank you so much for joining us.
  Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for his comments. I 
don't get invited many places to speak because I talk about what the 
Senator has been talking about. It depresses people, but it is about 
time we got depressed over the budget and made some changes. I 
appreciate everybody on the committee and those who are not on the 
committee who have been working to solve this problem. I know that most 
of you ran on getting a balanced budget, getting to a balanced budget, 
balancing it now if we could.
  I get real frustrated because I know we are $20 trillion in debt and 
heading to $29 trillion. Then I hear people say: Yes, but we cut the 
deficit in half.
  That is not the debt.
  I don't like the word ``deficit.'' I call it overspending. That is 
what we are doing.
  We just got the report that we are going to be $590 billion overspent 
this year. As Senator Lankford pointed out, 70 percent of the budget is 
on autopilot. So that 30 percent that we get to make a decision on is 
$1,070 billion.
  We have to worry a little bit because interest rates might go up. But 
on $20 trillion, if it is 1 percent, that is $200 billion a year that 
we are throwing into a rat hole. But if that goes to 5 percent, which 
is the norm for the Federal Government, we are out $1,000 billion a 
year in interest.
  Let's see. We get to make decisions on a $1,070 billion and $1,000 
billion of that would go to interest. We better solve this pretty 
quick. I think we could be at 5 percent within 3 years. The defense is 
over $500 billion, and that is not enough.
  We definitely have a problem, as has been pointed out by the chart. 
In the 40 years since the Congressional Budget Act was passed, we have 
only completed all 13 bills four times. We have been holding hearings 
in the Budget Committee. This group of people have been holding other 
meetings to see how it is done in the private sector, how it is done by 
other countries, and how it is done by the States. Nobody does it like 
the Federal Government.
  When I was trying to figure out first budgets, I found out the format 
we use is not the same as the one the Appropriations Committee uses and 
definitely not the same format the President uses. Then I found out 
that is intentional. That is so you cannot follow the dollars.
  But there are a lot of problems besides that in following the 
dollars. For instance, we have 120 housing programs administered by 20 
different agencies. That is not seven per agency or one having more 
than the others. That means that the 120 programs are administered by 
all 20 of the agencies. Nobody is in charge. There is no goal set. We 
don't know if they completed what they set out to do, and there is no 
way to make a correction if they did.
  I pointed out a lot of times how far behind we are on actually 
approving the things that we do. We don't ever go back and look at the 
old stuff. We are paying for a program from 1983 that has expired, 
another one from 1987, and a whole bunch of them from before 2006. We 
have to get off this auto pilot and get to a new format.
  I congratulate this group and particularly Senator Perdue. The first 
time we had a Budget Committee meeting I remember introducing him, and 
I said: Senator Perdue knows how to balance a budget. He has been 
working in the private sector.
  He said: No, in the private sector you have to show a little bit of a 
profit.
  Well, we are going to have to show a little bit of a profit around 
here if we are ever going to get rid of the debt. We better do that or 
our kids are really going to suffer.
  In fact, in the private sector we are having some pension problems, 
but we have been making the private sector put money away for the 
pensions, invest the money so they would be able to meet the promise 
that they made.
  The Federal Government doesn't do that. We just take it out of this 
budget.
  If we spend $1,000 billion on interest and there is only $1,070 
billion, what do you think is going to happen to Federal employees who 
are expecting retirement? That could be in worse shape than the 
multiemployer plans.
  We are going to have to come up with some solutions, and I appreciate 
this approach where we are looking at what the private sector does, 
what the States do, and what other countries do--and they have had 
success.
  It is a little difficult because it causes some reorganization in 
what we are doing. Maybe we can wind up with one or five housing 
programs, and they would all be under one agency so we could have 
goals.
  We are going to have a portfolio method of budgeting so that we know 
what we are trying to do and whether we get it done. There are already 
some laws on the books that say that we do that, but we don't.
  I congratulate you for doing this. I am so pleased that we have 
Senator Perdue heading up this effort because, as I mentioned, he has 
saved some businesses before. They took his advice and reorganized. I 
think a lot of us have looked at this and said it could be done. It is 
going to be difficult because

[[Page 13826]]

we don't even go back and look at old programs--let alone reorganize.
  I hope people will pay attention to this and see if they have some 
other ideas to throw in. But listen carefully to what is being said 
here today because this has to be fixed.
  I was hoping we could fix it before the elections because we were 
getting cooperation from the other side of the aisle and a lot of good 
suggestions. One of the reasons we were able to participate in a very 
bipartisan way, I think, is because none of us knew who was going to be 
in the majority in the Senate, nor did we know who the President was 
going to be. I think that made all of us a lot more reasonable. I hope 
after the elections we can still be reasonable and do something that 
will save this country.
  I thank the Chair.
  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank the chairman for his comments, but 
more importantly I thank him for his heart in terms of running the 
Budget Committee and leading us into this observation and recognition. 
As this chart says, we have a dysfunctional system, and we don't have 
an alternative but to find a better plan.
  With that, I note my good friend and esteemed colleague from 
Tennessee Senator Corker is here. He is chairman of the Foreign 
Relations Committee, but more importantly he lets me sit next to him on 
the Budget Committee.
  I want to say this about the Foreign Relations Committee. It is a 
very bipartisan committee. Under Bill Clinton, just 16 years ago, we 
spent about $20 billion on the State Department and USAID. Currently, 
we are spending about $54 billion. That is just one department. Those 
are constant dollars to show you how government has sort of exploded in 
the past 16 years--both under Republican leadership and under 
Democratic leadership.
  I am so glad Senator Corker is here, and I look forward to his 
comments.
  Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I am thrilled to be here. I thank the 
Senator for his leadership on this issue. I also thank Senator Enzi for 
the way he conducts committee business, as the Senator just mentioned.
  We are on a committee where basically the way it is set up, it binds 
both his arms and his legs behind his back, meaning that just the 
process we have in place makes it impossible for us to deal with our 
country's fiscal issues. With the Senator from Georgia joining the 
committee, having been a person who has dealt with businesses 
throughout the world, and quickly seeing these frailties that Chairman 
Enzi has to deal with, the Senator has thrown himself into trying to 
deal with those issues, and I admire him for it.
  I think the Senator from Georgia and I both know this is going to 
take a while because, in essence, we are talking about a total reorder. 
We really don't have a budget process. To even call what we do a 
budget, for most human beings' understanding of what a budget is, is 
obviously not realistic. So I thank my colleague for that.
  I am an advocate for what Senator Perdue and Senator Enzi are trying 
to do. We have to, in essence, get a process in place that actually 
works. That is impossible with the process we have today, and today is 
the perfect example of that, right? We passed a CR through December 9, 
and, by the way, we make no policy changes.
  Now, think about an entity the size of our Federal Government, where 
we spend $4 trillion of the American people's money each year, and yet 
we don't do the authorization process which lays out policies. If you 
can imagine IBM or Apple or Google or any company like that just 
continuing each year to do things exactly the same way and thinking 
there is going to be a different result, that is not possible.
  Worse than that, in spending the $4 trillion we spend each year, we 
only have a budget over $1.2 trillion, $1.3 trillion, and the rest is 
on autopilot. It is the part that is on autopilot that is the greatest 
threat to our country's national security.
  So I actually think we need to do two things at once. One is we need 
to continue working through the processes that Senator Perdue and 
Senator Enzi are working on. It will take a while to get that done. We 
are going to have a total reordering of how we do business. That 
affects Senate careers and staff, and we understand how difficult that 
is. We are dealing with human beings. We are dealing with people who 
have an investment in what they have been doing for years, and it is 
going to take us a while to overcome the culture that has been 
established here.
  Simultaneously, as my good friend Senator Gregg from New Hampshire 
had laid out, we also need to begin putting in place policy changes 
that begin saving our Nation.
  One of the problems with the budget process is, we pass a budget that 
makes assumptions, but those assumptions never become reality. So we 
say the budget balances over 10 years, but we never do the tough things 
it takes for those policies to actually be put in place. So a forcing 
mechanism--I know several thoughts have been put forth--to force us to 
do that, to force us to do that and to keep government open and 
functioning is something that has to occur.
  I am proudly a part of this effort as a wingman. I appreciate all the 
meetings that are taking place. I hope we are going to get to a result. 
I agree with Senator Enzi that it would have been good to have done it 
when we didn't know who the President was going to be or who was going 
to be in the majority. That is not going to happen, but things like 
this that matter, that save our Nation, take years to happen.
  Senator Perdue is a young Senator here by tenure. These things take a 
long time. I look forward to working with him to ensure we get the 
right outcome to save our Nation and to keep us from this moral 
depravity that is taking place where, in essence, every day that goes 
by, we are involved in generational theft because we are not doing 
this. We are really laying a huge burden on future generations.
  I yield the floor, and I thank my colleague for his effort.
  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank Senator Corker very much.
  Moral depravity is so prevalent here, and it is no more present and 
no more important than in the area of funding our military.
  I notice Senator Ernst from Iowa is here, and I appreciate her 
leadership as a fellow freshman in the Senate, but let me highlight one 
thing very quickly. Senator Corker just mentioned that about one-third, 
30 percent of what we spend--35 percent over the last 8 years--is 
borrowed, and it is projected that over the next 10 years about 35 
percent will be borrowed. About 30 percent of what we spend is 
discretionary. That means every discretionary dollar we spend as a 
Federal Government is borrowed. Let me say that again. Every dollar we 
spend in our discretionary budget is borrowed. That means our military, 
our Veterans' Administration, our military construction, our domestic 
programs, all the things we are talking about are borrowed. That means 
we have to get serious.
  We have disinvested in our military because of this budget crisis, 
and it is just another reason to get at this budget process.
  I can't tell Senator Ernst how much I appreciate her being here, and 
I look forward to her comments.
  Mrs. ERNST. Mr. President, I would like to thank my colleague from 
Georgia for spearheading this very important effort. We have heard 
discussions about getting back to regular order. We have heard 
discussions about the difference between the debt and the deficit and 
where do we go as America. So I am glad my colleague is investing his 
time in this effort, and we look forward to walking through that 
process.
  It is good to see so many of us here today, engaged and very active 
in this effort, and so I would like to thank all my colleagues. I know 
a number have already spoken.
  Truly, our Nation faces some very serious challenges and challenging 
budgetary times and all of that coming at us in the future. If we 
aren't honest about where we are right now and where we are headed in 
the future and fix it, our children and grandchildren are going to be 
handed a very heavy burden.

[[Page 13827]]

  We are already over $19.5 trillion in debt and a level that is 
growing rapidly every single day. I am from Iowa, and back home in Iowa 
we generally don't talk about things in trillions of dollars or even in 
billions of dollars. So when you break it down, that debt load 
represents about $60,000 per person in this great country. That is 
quite a number, and one that all of us should be concerned about.
  The American people are concerned, and they are frustrated with 
Washington for a reason. Washington doesn't seem to be serious about 
stopping the reckless spending habits this town has. That is why I 
think this proposal is a very interesting one and one that could 
provide opportunity as we move into the future.
  As we stop and look at the reckless spending habits--and most 
Americans agree we have reckless spending habits here in Washington, 
DC. I tend to agree with those Americans. I agree. Since coming to the 
Senate last year, I have worked to cut down wasteful and duplicative 
spending. Let me give just one example of taxpayer money that has been 
wasted.
  Earlier this year, I introduced a bill that would limit the perks 
that wealthy former Presidents receive. In 2015, taxpayers spent $2.4 
million on travel, office space, communications, personnel, and other 
expenses for past Presidents--I might add, wealthy past Presidents. At 
a time when they receive well-compensated book deals, speaking 
engagements, and all kinds of activities, hard-working Americans 
shouldn't foot those bills, and they shouldn't be expected to.
  We passed that bill in the Senate and in the House with bipartisan 
work on that effort. Unfortunately, President Obama decided to veto it. 
While we are still working on a path forward, it leaves me just as 
frustrated as all the other Iowans who know we can't continue spending 
money we don't have on things that aren't necessary.
  Washington can't even do the basic business of balancing our own 
budget. Plain and simple, we should. Families in Iowa do it every day, 
and they expect us in Washington, DC, to do the same. After all, it is 
their tax dollars that are being spent, and it deserves to be spent 
wisely. Unfortunately, it might just take a complete overhaul of 
Washington's ways to help us solve this problem.
  Again, I thank my colleagues for joining us in this effort. While 
some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have certainly 
made it very difficult, if not impossible, to conduct business in any 
sort of regular manner, the reality is excess spending in this town 
seems too often to be bipartisan.
  I know my colleague from Georgia mentioned earlier our debt has 
ballooned under both Republican and Democratic administrations. We are 
far too often unable to take a good hard look at the money that is 
being spent because we often will get a 1,900-page bill at the last 
minute, and we are given the choice of either taking it or leaving it. 
Normally, that is for funding most of our government. That kind of 
practice doesn't show us a good way forward. It forces us to make 
difficult choices about how we are spending taxpayer money, and it 
certainly doesn't give us the opportunity to cut wasteful spending. We 
have to do better by our taxpayers.
  I thank my friend from Georgia and my other colleagues joining us 
today to help us start thinking about how we solve this crisis and how 
we can do it in a creative way. I again thank Senator Perdue for 
leading this effort, being at the tip of the spear, and hopefully we 
are moving toward a smarter way of doing business in Washington. If we 
don't do better, I am afraid the future of this great country will be a 
lot dimmer.
  I thank the Senator and I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I thank Senator Ernst. I enjoy her 
leadership in the Senate.
  With that, I notice Senator Rounds of South Dakota is here. He was a 
Governor who dealt with this budget issue in an executive and 
legislative body in South Dakota, and I am looking forward to his 
comments. I thank him for being here.
  Mr. ROUNDS. Mr. President, first, I want to start by thanking my 
colleagues here today, particularly Chairman Enzi, who leads the Budget 
Committee, as well as Senator Perdue for not only being the only 
freshman who serves on the Budget Committee but for leading us on the 
floor in the discussion of this very important topic of our Federal 
broken budget system.
  Once again, today, Congress has just met our deadline to fund the 
government past the end of the fiscal year. While many of us in the 
Chamber, as well as the American people, are rightly frustrated by this 
requirement for a last-minute reprieve, it is a reminder of our broken 
Federal budget process and why we can no longer afford to continue down 
this dangerous path.
  I spent a great deal of time holding different meetings across South 
Dakota during August, meeting with folks all over the State. During 
that time, our soaring national debt and runaway spending has continued 
to be a concern to me. What I relayed to them about our country's 
fiscal future and what I would relay to you now is that it is just not 
very pretty.
  I shared with them a report from the Congressional Budget Office, 
which, in January of this year, released an indepth analysis of our 
debt and our deficit. It found that, by 2026, annual deficits will 
double the share of GDP to 4.9 percent--more than tripling in dollar 
terms to $1.37 trillion, or $1,370 billion, as the chairman of the 
Budget Committee likes to put it.
  It also found that in 2026, just 10 short years from now, 99 percent 
of revenue that comes into the Federal Government--income taxes, both 
personal and corporate, all the gas taxes, all the fees--will go back 
out in mandatory payments and net interest spending, leaving no room to 
pay for roads, bridges, health care, our Armed Forces, and other vital 
needs within our Nation. That 99 percent number, as they projected in 
10 years, is a crisis. I would suggest to my colleagues that crisis is 
not in 10 years. That crisis is now.
  Earlier, we heard Senator Corker explain very, very eloquently the 
fact that it takes time to move things here. I suggest that time is of 
the essence, and we no longer have a 10-year cycle in which to make 
these changes. We have to begin the process of fixing this broken 
system, and we need to begin now.
  In 2026, our country turns 250 years old. Wouldn't it be a marvelous 
goal if, by that time, we not only had this process fixed, but it was 
actually working once again?
  The CBO report concluded that the driver for this rising debt is 
largely from growing mandatory payments, as we heard our colleagues 
say. That is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, as well as 
interest on our debt. Yet here in the Senate, when we work through the 
appropriations process to determine the best way to spend Americans' 
hard-earned money, we don't even vote on mandatory payments, which are 
mandatory payments on mandatory programs. Today, those mandatory 
payments account for nearly three-quarters of all Federal spending. 
That means the continuing resolution we just did is based upon about 28 
percent of the total amount we will spend next year. It is simply not 
acceptable that we continue to look at and try to balance yearly 
deficits of $500-plus billion every single year when we only look at 28 
percent of the total spending that goes on.
  Let me suggest this. In order to fix this, as my colleagues have said 
today, we have to begin a process with expectations that the process 
actually works once again and that there are timelines established well 
in advance of the end of the fiscal year. But even more than that, any 
process we use in the future also has to bring in accountability, 
authorization, and appropriations together. Why is it that when we talk 
about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--well, we just don't talk 
about it. There is no place in which we can actually sit down in a 
committee assigned specifically for Social Security, a committee 
assigned specifically for Medicare, or one for Medicaid. Why is it 
that, in States like South Dakota,

[[Page 13828]]

where we have the South Dakota Retirement System--a retirement system 
which is one of the best funded and best run in the entire United 
States, and it has been there since the 1970s--it gets looked at every 
single year. Yet, as to Social Security, which is such a huge and 
important part of a lot of people's lives in the United States, we are 
afraid to touch. It is not a matter of cutting it. It is a matter of 
managing and making it more efficient and delivering the services and 
actually keeping it up to date--revenues and expenses--so that the 
people a generation from now can count on it being there.
  It is irresponsible for us to sit back here and to say that we are 
going to balance our budgets this year and make a commitment without 
looking at all of the programs that are out there because we simply 
can't balance a budget. We can't take care of those programs--Social 
Security, Medicare, or Medicaid--unless we actively participate in 
managing them and in making good decisions. Again, the buy-in from the 
public is that what we are trying to do is to make it better for them 
long term and that we have their best interests at heart.
  With that, I say thank you. I think this is a critically important 
thing for all of us. Last year, we did an omnibus bill at the end of 
the year, and a group of us got together and said no more. In our 
freshmen bear den, as we call it, we said: It is time we have a meeting 
with our leadership. I cannot tell you how pleased I was with the 
reception that we received from our leadership, who said: Look, we 
agree. You guys work together and put this through. I give Senator 
Perdue huge accolades for actually doing the hard work to get this 
done. This is important to our country, and this is one way in which we 
can begin to build credibility once again with the citizens of our 
Nation. I thank the Senator for the work he is doing, and I certainly 
look forward to working with our colleagues to fix a broken budget 
system--not only in the Senate but in Congress--and to get on with 
actually sending back to the American people on a regular basis a 
budget they believe in and they can count on.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  Mr. PERDUE. I thank Senator Rounds for his comments. I appreciate his 
leadership as an ex-Governor in this body.
  I note that Senator Sullivan from Alaska is here, and he has been 
very outspoken about this since he got here last year--another freshman 
Member. I look forward to Senator Sullivan's comments.
  Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Perdue for his 
leadership on this important colloquy.
  As some of us have seen down here, as Senator Rounds mentioned, there 
are a lot of Members of the Senate who are very concerned. But what we 
are seeing here are a lot of the new Members--12 new Republican 
freshmen. It is good to see the Presiding Officer, who is one of them. 
We are very concerned about this. We were concerned because a lot of us 
ran for office--a lot of us for the first time--because we saw what was 
going on with this budget process. With all due respect to my 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle, they didn't even attempt to 
pass a budget for a number of years. They didn't even try.
  Think about that. You are back home, in a State government such as 
Senator Rounds was talking about or in a household or a business, and 
you are not even going to try to pass a budget. That was what was going 
on in the Senate--remarkable. So what we are trying to do is to fix 
that.
  The first thing we did--and Senator Enzi was on the floor a little 
bit ago--is we came here and we passed a budget. It hadn't happened in 
years. We passed a budget resolution. That was an important start. Then 
we started to pass appropriations bills. As a matter of fact, this 
year, to the majority leader's credit, we started working on 
appropriations bills at an earlier time than at any time in decades. We 
got 12 appropriations bills passed out of the Appropriations Committee. 
Then what happened? We tried to start bringing them to the floor to 
vote on them, to move them. The vast majority of those bills--all of 
which were very bipartisan--were filibustered by the minority leader of 
the Senate.
  Again, I am new here. I still don't understand why they did that. A 
lot of us who came down to the floor were really upset when the 
minority leader of the Senate filibustered the Defense appropriations 
bill--the bill that funds our troops--six times in the last year and a 
half--six times. That is a disgrace, in my view.
  So what are we doing here? More delay. More delay. We just got 
through a continuing resolution, which is not how to run the 
government, and they were looking at opportunities for more delay. For 
example, at the very end of this discussion, there was the idea of 
maybe adding additional funds for Flint, MI. Well, nobody cares about 
clean water as much as I do. My State has huge challenges with 
communities that not just have aging infrastructure, like Flint, MI, 
but no infrastructure. I have over 30 communities in the great State of 
Alaska that don't have clean water and sewer and don't have flush 
toilets--Americans--if you can believe that. So I certainly wanted to 
focus on that. That is what we did in the regular order through the EPW 
Committee with the WRDA bill--for Flint, MI, the State of Alaska, and 
other communities that have challenges with clean water. We are going 
to address those through the regular order.
  That is what Senator Perdue is leading on right now in the Senate--
the regular order and getting back to a budget process that can handle 
the enormous challenges that we have heard about on the floor here--$20 
trillion in debt and exploding deficit. That is what we need to do, and 
I commend Senator Perdue for his leadership. What he did is something 
that takes a lot of courage here--a whiteboard approach. We just need 
to look at everything anew. With his leadership and his experience, a 
number of us lead by Senator Perdue have been working on this for 
months. This is what we need to do to finally get ahold of these 
enormous budget challenges.
  I encourage all of my colleagues--Republicans and Democrats--to join 
in this process, to bring their ideas to fix what is clearly, clearly a 
broken process that is not helping our Nation, that is driving up the 
deficit, that is saddling the next generation with trillions of dollars 
of debt. We have the beginning of a way to start fixing this.
  Again, I thank Senator Perdue and Senator Daines for their hard work 
on this. I am certainly going to be part of their important efforts as 
we look to put our country on a fiscal path of sustainable economic 
growth and budgets, which we are not on right now.
  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, Senator Sullivan is a warrior. I am glad 
to be here with him. It gives me hope that we are going to persevere 
and get this done.
  Now to help us close this out, we have our good friend from Montana, 
Senator Daines, who has real world experience--both as a consultant but 
also starting and running a high-tech company. He understands what 
profit is about, but, more importantly, he understands what meeting 
needs is about. I am so glad that he can help us close this out. I have 
a few remaining comments when he finishes, but I thank Senator Daines 
for being here.
  Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, I thank Senator Perdue for his leadership.
  What an honor it is to be down here on the Senate floor surrounded by 
freshmen--the freshmen Republican class. We have the Presiding Officer, 
Freshman Cory Gardner from Colorado; Lt. Col. Dan Sullivan, U.S. 
Marines, from Alaska; and David Perdue, who was the CEO of a company 
before he came to the Senate. We have LTC Joni Ernst from Iowa. I am 
proud to serve with Joni here and thankful for her service to the 
country, both in the military and now in the Senate. There are others. 
Mike Rounds is a former Governor from South Dakota who had to balance 
his budget there or he would lose his job.
  As Senator Perdue mentioned, when I first came to Washington, I did 
come equipped with a skill that was familiar to Montanans, like hunting 
and fishing are, and that is how to balance a budget. Before I came 
here, I spent 28 years

[[Page 13829]]

in the private sector, 13 years with Proctor & Gamble and then 12 years 
with a startup company, and in between that, 3 years in our family 
construction business. I know what it takes to make a payroll. I know 
what it takes to make a family's household budget work. Yet balancing 
the budget is a skill this body has not embraced for nearly 20 years. 
As Senator Perdue mentioned, four times out of 42 years has this 
process worked. That is broken.
  Think about this. It is September 28. On Saturday, it is October 1, 
the beginning of the next fiscal year of the U.S. Federal Government, 
on which we will spend about $4 trillion this next fiscal year. We 
begin the next fiscal year in 2 days without a budget.
  We were all here last year at this same point in time--the last week 
of the fiscal year, the last week of September--and we moved into this 
fiscal year without a budget. It is no wonder that we are $20 trillion 
in debt when you don't have a budget.
  There is an old saying in business: If you aim at something, you will 
hit it. We do not have a budget here, and that has created $20 trillion 
in debt.
  When the Congressional Budget Office issued its August 2016 report 
last month, it shared that this year's projected budget deficit now has 
increased from an already staggering $439 billion in a January report. 
They have raised it now to $590 billion--an increase of 34 percent.
  If I were running a business, I could not get away with this. I would 
be out of business. Serving on a board of a publicly traded company, we 
would be firing the CEO and we would be firing the board with results 
like this.
  Here is something to think about. Deficit spending is nothing short 
of age discrimination because this excessive spending is at the cost of 
our children and grandchildren. That is what we are passing down. We 
are racking up the credit card debt, figuratively speaking, and passing 
it on to our kids. The American people are asking themselves: Why 
aren't the people they have elected able to ensure the future for our 
children? How can balancing the budget be so difficult?
  Being here for 2 years in the Senate, I have come to realize that the 
biggest hurdles to balancing the budget are the very rules, the very 
process that guides this institution. They are broken. Unless we fix 
the process with the leadership of Senator Perdue, who is getting out 
in front of this issue--unless we fix that--we will continue to repeat 
the growing deficits because this process is yielding the results it 
was designed to deliver. It is unacceptable. It must change.
  We are now approaching $20 trillion, which is 105 percent of GDP. The 
first bill I introduced when I came to Congress--in fact, I walked down 
to the Chamber, laid the bill on the desk of the clerk--was called the 
Balanced Budget Accountability Act. It said simply this: If Members 
don't balance the budget, they shouldn't get paid.
  Let's bring some real-world accountability to this institution. Let's 
put the pain on the Members of Congress instead of the American people. 
I thought perhaps if our pay was on the line, it would force us to be 
held accountable to not only balance the budget but get on track to 
long-term responsible spending.
  If we do nothing, we know what will happen. We will be right back 
here--mark it on your calendars--the last week of September, and we 
will be here debating a CR, pushing it into December with some big 
omnibus vote. It will happen again, guaranteed, unless we change this 
process and change the people who serve in this institution. We need 
action, we need accountability, and we need it now.
  In conclusion, I will say this. I have one distinction, perhaps; that 
is, I am the only chemical engineer who serves in the U.S. House or the 
U.S. Senate. When you are trained as an engineer, you are trained to 
take a look at a problem and identify a solution. We have a solution 
with Senator Perdue's leadership. You see, the freshmen Members of the 
Republican class of 2014 came here not to accept the status quo but to 
reject it and to change the way this country operates; truly, to save 
the future of our kids and our grandkids.
  I look forward to working with my colleagues to reform the budget 
process. Let's get this country back on the right track.
  I say to Senator Perdue, it is an honor to serve with you. Thanks for 
getting in front of this very important issue.
  Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, I say thank you to Senator Daines. His 
leadership means the world here. With that, I have hope we are going to 
get there.
  In light of the time and the hour and the other business that is 
before this Senate body tonight, I will abridge my closing comments. I 
want to say this. There is a four-letter word missing in Washington 
today--H-O-P-E. People sent this class, 12 members of the Republican 
caucus--that is almost 25 percent of our caucus--are freshmen this 
year. We ran on this topic, as you heard several Members say, but we 
had the chairman of the Budget Committee here. We had the chairman of 
Foreign Relations here.
  These people are very concerned about this topic. We are not just 
complaining about the status quo. Again, we are not complaining about 
the other side. There are no innocent parties when it comes to this 
debt crisis. If you look at the last 75, 80 years, this country has 
lived and benefited from the greatest economic boom in the history of 
mankind. Yet here we are today, $20 trillion of debt, over $100 
trillion of future commitments already made by this Federal Government. 
It is basically $1 million for every family in America.
  We don't need to talk about the need anymore. What we need to talk 
about is what do we do. That is what we came up here for. We need to 
focus on results. This is what we are proposing. We put it in language 
now. We are moving to put it into a bill on the floor. We have 
Democratic input.
  Again, let me say this. The goal is not to solve the debt crisis. 
That is the need. The goal in this process is to create a politically 
neutral platform where both sides--whether they are in the majority or 
the minority--can make their points during a budget process, move to an 
appropriations process, and get the government funded every year 
without all this drama. That is what the people of America want.
  It will protect our military. It will protect our national security. 
It will let us take care of the domestic needs we need, and it will let 
us invest in our infrastructure to get this economy going again. 
Without this exercise, we will not start down the path that may take 30 
or 40 years to bring this debt under control. It is that large.
  Let me emphasize one more thing. If this debt is not addressed soon, 
the rising interest rates that we all know are coming--we are living in 
a false world today of zero interest rates. If we just get back to our 
30-year average of about 5 percent, we will be paying $1 trillion in 
interest. That is not possible. It simply is not workable. All things 
come into the conversation.
  This is what is going to happen. We are going to start debating this 
on the floor, hopefully soon. It may run into next year. It may go to 
the following year. My commitment to my people at home is, we are not 
going to give up on this fight until we get something done about this. 
We proposed a couple of things.
  Three guiding principles were developed by a small group of people, 
and it has been welcomed by a growing number of people in this body. 
No. 1, the budget needs to be a law. No. 2, everything we spend--all $4 
trillion of it--needs to go into the budget. They need to be debated 
and covered in the budget by both sides. No. 3, if we don't fund the 
government by the end of the fiscal year, there has to be serious 
consequences.
  You heard one proposal tonight by Senator Lankford. There may be 
others, but we are going to put on the Senate and the House, for that 
matter, real consequences if we don't get the Federal Government budget 
done. Again, this is an exercise that we hope will be bipartisan. We 
want no advantage in this. We want a process that

[[Page 13830]]

doesn't advantage either party. It gives both equal standing in the 
budget process, leading to a reasonable and effective funding of the 
Federal Government. A politically neutral platform, that is our goal.
  I will close with this. If not now, when? If not us, who? I thank the 
forbearance of the Presiding Officer tonight. Thank you for allowing us 
to do this.
  I yield back my time. I see we have other speakers on the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The Senator from New Mexico.
  (The remarks of Mr. Heinrich and Ms. Collins pertaining to the 
introduction of S. 3458 are printed in today's Record under 
``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.

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