[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 6]
[Senate]
[Page 8485]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     SOCIAL IMPACT PARTNERSHIP BILL

  Mr. CORKER. Mr. President, I am pleased to be a cosponsor of S. 1089, 
a bill to encourage and support partnerships between the public and 
private sectors to improve our Nation's social programs, and for other 
purposes, known as the Social Impact Partnership Act, SIPA. This 
legislation would facilitate the creation of public-private 
partnerships that have the goal of improving the outcomes from our 
Nation's social services spending in order to benefit both the people 
intended to be helped by those programs and the U.S. taxpayer. It would 
do so by creating the Federal Interagency Council on Social Impact 
Partnerships, which would recommend to the Treasury Secretary that the 
Federal Government enter into agreements with State and local 
governments and private investors to pay for successful social 
improvement programs funded by private investors out of savings those 
programs create for the Federal Government.
  The bill appropriates $300 million for this purpose and aims to 
ensure that the savings to the Federal Government from the projects 
selected will exceed that $300 million. If a social services program is 
not successful, the Federal Government will not pay for it. In this 
way, SIPA helps to reorient Federal social spending towards measurable 
improvements in the lives of those served.
  While I am supportive of the bill, I do want to note for the record 
that this bill could benefit from further assurances at a committee 
markup that the funded projects will result in governmental savings.
  The appropriations for the legislation should be offset with spending 
reductions in other areas, as has been done in the companion 
legislation in the House of Representatives.
  There should be a specified role in the legislation for CBO and OMB 
to certify for taxpayers that the Federal performance payments 
authorized in the bill for successful projects do not exceed actual 
programmatic savings and that this bill provides better social outcomes 
for equal or less total money spent.
  Finally, the bill should ensure that there is no way for any program 
stakeholder, government official, or member of the Federal Interagency 
Council on Social Impact Partnerships to unduly influence the measured 
outcome of these funded projects, which is required to receive federal 
payments. As part of these protections, there should be strict conflict 
of interest rules in place to prohibit those involved in selecting and 
measuring the projects from having a financial interest in their 
outcome.
  The purpose of the Social Impact Partnership Act is to establish 
funding for innovative social service projects that work and ending 
funding for those that do not. If there is any evidence that such 
innovation is not occurring and SIPA is becoming yet another wasteful 
and politically influenced government program, I will work to end it.
  I thank Senators Hatch and Bennet for their great work on this bill, 
and I look forward to its markup in the Finance Committee and passage 
in the full Senate.

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