National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I was sorry to hear the supercommittee is in trouble, that they might not be able to agree. Then this morning's Washington Post front page headline was ``Debt Panel Failure Won't Cause Catastrophe.''

Every day we do not find a solution, every day we spend is a catastrophe. We have maxed out our credit cards. Here is one way that came to my attention. I was traveling in Wyoming and I checked into the hotel for the night. The person checking me in, very embarrassed, said: I am sorry, but it will not take your credit card. It was a Federal credit card.

I said: Goodness, we are in more trouble than I thought. I gave them my personal credit card and that went right through so I am not sure where we are. But I know we have maxed out our credit cards and not just that but also the symbolic credit cards that we have. We have as much debt as we probably can sustain and as debt comes due across the world for other countries, it is going to be tougher and tougher to be able to sell more debt.

We are kind of in the same situation as Greece and Italy, except for two things. No. 1 is we are a big, flexible country that has pulled itself out of terrible situations time and time again, and we will do it this time too. We also own our own money supply. That helps.

When constituents ask what can they expect, I always start the conversation by saying you should expect to get no more than what the 2008 level was. We increased things considerably after that with the stimulus bill and that increased some bases. We have to get back down to 2008, just as a beginning.

I have to say the President has had a chance to change direction. I have to congratulate the President for naming a deficit commission. I even like the people he named to it, with Senator Simpson from Wyoming and Erskine Bowles heading up that committee. I think they did some tremendous work. I think we should pay more attention to what they had to say.

I had a little disappointment when the President did his State of the Union speech following their report. He had an opportunity to repaint the same bleak picture that committee painted and America would have understood better. Although from traveling across our country, and particularly in Wyoming, I know the people there understand it better than Congress does. But he could have changed it by repainting that picture and then he could have followed it up with a solution which would have been his budget. Instead, his budget was another stimulus plan. It has been voted on by Congress. It was not voted for by Congress, it was voted on by Congress, and it was voted 97 to nothing--it was defeated. I think the deficit commission report would have done much better.

Congress has also had the chance to change direction--and in some cases we have. We have kind of eliminated earmarks. There are still some of them that are slipped in, but we kind of eliminated them. We have a couple new problems. Now we add demonstration projects. We have always had demonstration projects, but now we do it as a substitute for earmarks and that is where we allow maybe five States to have an opportunity to do a particular program to see if it works. So we fund it in a minimal amount--that still is millions. The difficulty is that at the end of the period of time for that demonstration project, they all work. They are all spectacular. They all would save America if we just put it in every single State and funded it from the Federal Government.

It can't happen. We are out of money. There are lots of good ideas out there, lots of good ideas that would help. When those ideas are proved--the idea with the demonstration is that it would demonstrate well enough how good it is that somewhere at the local level that project would be picked up and done or forgotten. But, no, we do make them a national program and we do fund them forever in chunks of time.

Another thing we are doing is that we propose a project and, because we like the word ``pay-for,'' because we should pay for whatever we are doing, we put up a project, we put a 2-year limit on the project, and then we pick a pay-for by showing some program that, if it were eliminated for 10 years, might bring in that amount of revenue. We cannot pay for a 2-year program with 10 years' worth of revenue because somebody is going to spend the rest of that anyway and it may never be collected. A Congress can change its mind all the time. We have to quit using gimmicks and we have to quit adding new programs. What part of maxed out credit cards don't we understand? We have to quit buying votes with dollars we do not have.

We do have to address mandatory spending. Social Security and Medicare have been a problem for a long time. I remember when I first came to Congress, President Clinton was the President and he called for a special conference on Social Security. We had 1 day where we got to be initiated into what all the problems were--fantastic speakers. We

had a second day where Members of the House and Congress met in smaller committees to work on pieces of the Social Security problem. We came up with a plan and President Clinton looked at the plan and met with us as a group and said: If all of you are willing to put your fingerprint on this, we will do it. We can only do it if everybody puts their fingerprint on it so both parties are responsible for it, and everybody in the room agreed to do that.

Unfortunately, we were distracted a little bit by something called Monica Lewinsky, and that bill never came up anywhere.

The situation we are in right now is passing bills to fail. Each side has a tendency to put up a bill that has something good in it, packaged with something they like but the other side doesn't like. It is going to get defeated on the basis of what each side doesn't like and the good part is left out. That is not going to get anything done for us.

We have tried the stimulus bill. We got negligible effects on jobs. It did escalate the basis for budgets and it was the use of one-time money. That has created some problems for it. We hear that 30,000 teachers and firefighters are going to be laid off. That comes from safety money and education money that went to the States. It was one-time money. They cannot use one-time money for a continuing contract. If a State did, yes, they are having to lay off people because the stimulus is not being repeated each and every year.

Are there solutions? Yes, there are solutions. I am optimistic about the solutions. I do recognize everything has to be on the table and we should all reread the deficit commission report. We have to ask constituents to suggest their own programs to reduce.

In the spring, we will be inundated by a whole lot of people who will be ready to have us support the program that makes a difference in their life and the life of the community. I always ask them how we are going to pay for it? They always suggest somebody else's program to cancel. There are never any suggestions of how to consolidate within their own program and do it. They have to do it and each of us in Congress needs to evaluate our own programs. Not all of them can be sacred cows. I wish to congratulate Senator Rubio and Senator Coons for a jobs creation bill they have put together. They have taken the diverse bills from both sides of the aisle and several others and looked to see if there was any common thread. All they did was pick out the common thread from each of those and put them into a bill. If both sides and others in Congress like it, why would that not pass and pass quickly?

I congratulate our Congresswoman Lummis, from Wyoming. She is on the Appropriations Committee. I think that is the first time we have ever had anybody on the Appropriations Committee. She gets into the details of the budget. In fact, she has gotten into details of the budget down to very small

amounts, so much that she has been told she is not going to be invited on any trips with any of the rest of them. That is probably what we need right now, and I congratulate her on her attention to detail.
Another thing we have to do is make sure the bills go to committee.

I have been a committee chairman. I have been a ranking member. I know when a bill goes to committee, that is where we can get into the details of the bill, and we can do nuances. When a bill comes to the floor of the Senate, and it came from the President to the leader and then to us, the amendments we put in are not very workable as far as reaching agreement from both sides. They are kind of an up-or-down vote. They are very political, and that kind of stymies what we are trying to do.

We have to quit doing comprehensive bills. We can do them in stages. We can do parts of them. They can be very major parts, but they can be done in parts.

I remember reading a book about the compromise of 1850. Henry Clay put himself in the hospital trying to pass this huge compromise. When he did, some of his friends took the bill, broke it into parts, four parts, and got all the parts passed. Now, there were only four people in all of the Senate at that time who voted for all the parts, but all the parts passed. There should be a lesson in there for us. I do follow an 80-percent rule; I found we can agree on 80 percent of the issues. If we stick to that 80 percent, we can pick any one issue and we can solve 80 percent of that problem. We can solve 100 percent if we can get everybody to think of an alternative way to do that, one sticky part that we have polarized for years.

Another thing we need to do is eliminate duplication. Senator Coburn and I took a look at the primary department that comes under the jurisdiction of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. We found $9 billion in duplication. Because it is duplication, we cannot eliminate $9 billion because there are some who would stay and do the same thing the other group was doing. It stimulated Dr. Coburn enough that he looked at all the programs. In all of the programs he found $900 billion worth of duplication.

Duplication is not like fraud, waste, and abuse. Fraud, waste, and abuse, we don't know how much is out there. We catch a piece at a time, and we speculate on how much there is. But duplication is specific because it is already in the budget.

We can look at what they are paid right now, and if we eliminate that, it is a specific amount. When he talks about $900 billion worth of duplication, it is $900 billion worth of duplication. We ought to be able to get rid of at least $450 billion of that. Half of it could be duplication. It is twice as much of what we effectively need.

Why did we find $9 billion in one agency and $900 billion by looking at all of them? When we go outside the jurisdiction, we find--this one always kind of interests me--financial literacy programs in virtually every department and agency in this Federal Government. If we really have financial literacy, would we be in the position we are in now? I don't think so. So that is a whole lot of duplication. It is duplicating each and every agency. If we have only one jurisdiction over one agency, that is the only place we can eliminate it.

When I got here there were 119 preschool programs. I took a look at them, and there were quite a few of them that were failing according to their own evaluation--not my evaluation, their own evaluation. We were able to get that down to 69 programs. There are 69 preschool programs at the present time. Here is the interesting part of that: Only eight of those are under the Department of Education. Sixty-one of them are in other departments. It seems like we could have consolidation and maybe some elimination of duplication.

Also, we have the States and the local governments coming to us and saying: We are out of money. We need money, and we don't have any money. We cannot afford to help them that way.

I have put in a bill to help them collect the sales tax already due them, and this is the marketplace fairness bill that would take care of their infrastructure and their jobs. So I hope everyone will take a look at that.

Finally, another solution would be the Buy Back America Bonds that I spoke about just a little while ago. If everybody bought some bonds, that could reduce the amount of debt held by foreign countries; that would help us and then that would reduce the amount of spending by an equal amount. There are solutions out there. It is time we got busy on them.

I thank the supercommittee for their work and ask everybody to pay attention to whatever they come up with.

I yield the floor.

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