Our Budget Process

Floor Speech

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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 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.

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