Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. COATS. Madam President, I will not weigh in on this issue, but I might later. I am here for a different purpose. I did serve previously in the Senate several years ago, and this is my second time back. My experience with the amendment process was a pleasant one then. Any Senator at any time could offer an amendment to any bill, and it would be discussed and debated and voted on, and we accepted the fact that it was either a yea or a nay. It was part of a process that sometimes started here, sometimes started in the House, but it is a process that goes through many iterations.

So to determine that something at one step in the process takes the bill down ignores the fact that this bill will go over to the House of Representatives; they will debate it, and they will add things and subtract things; and then we will go to a conference to resolve the differences even before it gets to the President's desk.

Unfortunately, what has happened here is that on anything the President of the United States doesn't like, he simply says: I am going to veto it, so drop it.

So I agree with the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Alexander, in saying that if that is the process and the way this Senate is going to operate, we might as well just close the place down. We can maybe show up just to show people that we showed up for work. But we are not going to accomplish anything on this floor if that is the case.

The responsibility falls not just on us to do the job we were elected to do but also falls on the President to not try to torpedo a bill-- there are multiple dimensions--because one amendment gets passed with the will of the Senate, including bipartisan support, but the President doesn't like it and therefore shuts the whole thing down. Wasteful Spending

Madam President, I am here for the 40th-something week to talk about the waste of the week, and I will do that now. The other issue is being very ably handled by Senator Alexander, who is a veteran here and knows how to work through these conundrums.

With a Federal debt that is over $19 trillion and growing, it is fitting to take a long look at every penny the Federal Government appropriates to ensure that hard-earned taxpayer dollars are not wasted. I have been down here week after week with examples of waste.

Today, for my 41st edition of ``Waste of the Week,'' I would like to bring attention to an app the Transportation Security Administration paid IBM more than $47,000 to develop. ``App'' is a new word in our lexicon. We all carry around these new devices with which we can push a bunch of buttons and, by certain applications, access or do things that make life easier: monitor traffic on the road, getting the latest ballgame scores, checking on the weather. I have a whole bunch of apps on here.

I heard about an app that had been developed for the Transportation Security Administration called a randomizer app, and it does just two things. Very simply, it points an arrow to the right or to the left. Now, we might say, why would anybody need an app--a device--that randomizes an arrow to the right or an arrow to the left? Well, let's take a look at this picture here.

This is obviously a TSA agent. We have all been through this. This is a line at the airport. Those of us who go home every weekend--I go back to Indiana on Thursday night or Friday--are very familiar with these lines because we have to go through the security process.

This is a TSA agent using this app. As we can see, it is a screen and it has a big arrow.

When you walk through Reagan National Airport to go home every week-- as I know the Presiding Officer does to go back to Iowa--there are several lanes you can go down. Almost always there is a transportation security agent or someone associated with the process standing at the beginning of the lines and, with an arrow, saying ``Take this one'' or ``Take that one.'' Well, I don't know about the details, but for some reason, they didn't want that to be an individual decision, so they called up IBM and said: We need to develop an app that will allow us to have a screen that has an arrow pointing to the left or to the right. And it needs to be random; it can't be controlled by this person.

For whatever reason, it needs to be random. OK. Maybe there is a rational reason TSA needs to do that for security purposes, and without divulging what that is or knowing what that is, I won't get into that, but obviously it doesn't take a lot of money to develop a screen that has an arrow to the left, an arrow to the right, and a little bit of software running in the background randomizing so that you can't figure out whether it is going to be left or right. It does it all by itself.

I wondered, how much would this cost? So we did a little research. What we found is that this is such a simple application that it can be developed by a developer of apps within a 10-minute period of time.

So taxpayers paid $47,000 to build an app that had an arrow pointing one way or the other. Now, $47,000 is minuscule compared to what we waste around here, and I have a chart here that shows well over $160 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse tallied up during my 40 visits to the Senate floor to talk about the various ways the government wastes taxpayer dollars. But this one baffles me because something which is so simple and which takes 10 minutes to produce costs $47,000--well above the average income for the average worker in Indiana and in many cases significantly more than the TSA agent who is holding it is paid annually for the work they do.

So here we are once again. People might ask: Well, could we have done this in an easier way? Well, how about flipping a coin? That is random. Tails, go in this lane; heads, you are in this lane. How about drawing from a hat? The TSA person standing at the line can have a hat with a whole bunch of slips of paper in it that say ``left'' and ``right.'' Go ahead, put your hand in, and pull it out.

What does it say?

Left.

That is over there.

What does it say?

Right.

That is over here.

Maybe we can do what I do with my grandkids. I put my fists behind my back, and I will have one or two fingers extended. They all get excited and so forth. The brother is elbowing his little sister so she won't win, and the third child is crying, maybe, because they are not letting her play.

So I say: OK, Charlie, is it a one or a two?

Two.

Charlie: Yay, I won.

His sister starts crying.

No, no. You are going to get your chance.

All right, Maggie, you pick a one or a two.

Anyway, we may go through each. I have 10 grandkids, so this takes a long time when we have family reunions.

Any one of those processes could be used, and I don't think it would cost $47,000. It wouldn't be $4.70. It is just something we could do.

I used to serve as the lead Republican on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. I know how difficult it is for the Homeland Security Subcommittee to fund the critical elements they need to fund and the programs they need to fund in order to keep us secure. Every penny counts, and every dollar counts in this regard.

This type of egregious waste has got to stop. Perhaps it is time for TSA to precheck--we are all familiar with precheck, another thing we have to go through--these programs before we fund them. As we continue to determine funding levels for various government programs and agencies, we must remember projects such as TSA's randomizer app. This is yet another example of why minimizing waste, fraud, and abuse will go a long way to restore trust in government decisions as to how our tax money is spent.

I just realized I missed out on naming one of my grandchildren who I play this with, and that is Avery--the sister of Charlie--who wants to make sure that she is in the game also. I will not go through the other seven. I will save those for another time.

Let me note that we add more money--ever more money and examples of taxpayer waste. We are up to $162,277,955,817. This is big money. It is nothing to laugh about. This is a small example. We have had examples in the billions of dollars. We owe it to the taxpayer. We owe it to the hard-earned tax dollars that are earned by hard-working taxpayers to be as efficient and effective with the spending of their money as we possibly can. Once again, this is the waste of the week.
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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, we haven't discussed foreign policy issues on the floor for a while. It is not because all is quiet on the eastern front. It is not. As we know, what is happening in the Middle East and in Europe--the migration issue, Syria, across Northern Africa--is that there are major issues that are ongoing and that affect the United States in a number of ways, not only economically but strategically, and leave us vulnerable to threats to ``take down America'' in one way or another.

Obviously, we are in the middle of a heated campaign, which hopefully will be resolved in terms of our nominees in a short amount of time. But we do have to recognize the next President, whoever that President might be, is going to be facing some extraordinary challenges relative to foreign policy and national security issues. Making America great again--whatever it is that defines phrase--a new leader will have to deal with a number of very difficult challenges.

This past Monday, President Obama delivered a speech in Germany in which he discussed the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. He said that NATO must be prepared to carry out its traditional missions while at the same time meeting the newly emerging threats to the alliance.

That was revealing to me and, frankly, welcoming because we have not heard anything from the President along those lines in my memory, but his recognition and his statement in that regard defines where we are; that is, we need to be prepared to carry out traditional missions through NATO while at the same time meeting the newly emerging threats to the alliance. We see these newly emerging threats to the alliance we are in almost every day.

The President also noted that Europe has been complacent about its own defense and called on our allies to do more. I welcome this renewed attention to NATO. It also gives us the opportunity to respond to those who believe NATO has outlived its usefulness, is too expensive, and should be done away with. Such a view needs a rebuttal.

It is not necessary nor correct to claim that NATO has no problems or its role has not changed or its future is clear. NATO does face challenges and has--in defining its mission, securing its resources, and providing the leadership that the world requires. But to deny that alliance's obvious value is, in my opinion, a major mistake. Such a judgment surely cannot be based on any real understanding of what NATO is or what it has accomplished, much less of what it can become and, candidly, what it must become, given the level of crisis and conflict so present in Europe, the Middle East, and in Africa.

I have been a strong supporter of the alliance and the transatlantic security relationship throughout my public life. NATO's proud past and enduring importance were a constant presence during my service as a U.S. Senator and as U.S. Ambassador to Germany for 4 years following 9/ 11. Since returning to the Senate, the alliance has remained a keen interest to me.

Contrary to the notion that NATO has served its purpose and is no longer needed or is no longer a viable organization, NATO has survived and thrived for half a century because it has proven itself to be an adaptable, flexible, and effective organization.

I think many of us know the alliance began all the way back in 1949 with the principle motive of protecting Western Europe from the threat of Soviet aggression. But many forget that the founding document, the Washington treaty of 1949, does not mention the Soviet Union. Instead, its founding treaty laid out the core values of the West, which values the alliance was designed to protect.

I want to state that again. What was trying to be accomplished through this alliance of NATO, all the way back to 1949, was a values- based organization that enabled the alliance and gave the alliance those values which the alliance was designed to protect. It is exactly because the alliance was and remains values-based that it has been able to adapt to a changing strategic environment with newly defined missions and membership. The vital and permanent need to protect our shared values survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the threat it represented and has enabled the alliance to define and confront the major threats and modern threats that we face today.

As NATO adapted to the post-Soviet world, the clearest proof of its foundation as a community of values was the process of enlargement. At the beginning of that process, few in the administration or Congress saw NATO enlargement as having very much to do with actually enhancing the military capabilities of the alliance. When the first countries were proposed for membership via the Partnership for Peace program, it was not only because of the military contributions those newly democratic nations could bring; rather, the most explicit motivation for extending the prospect of membership to the countries of what we then called Eastern Europe was to persuade them to make the political and economic changes that would make them worthy and complimentary allies. We were trying to cement in the democratic revolutions that occurred in these former Soviet-controlled states and make those changes permanent.

We were extending NATO's democratic values--along with its security umbrella--and we required prospective members to accept them and institutionalize those democratic values. That process continues today. NATO was and remains a political instrument of enormous persuasive power with historic consequences.

But are shared values enough to maintain the vitality and the relevance of a military alliance? For those new member countries themselves, the appeal of alliance membership was the vast military capabilities of the club they were about to join. They sought actual enhanced security in a still dangerous world, not just a political partnership of values.

Now, in the wake of renewed Russian aggression, most especially in Ukraine and its illegal annexation of Crimea, the objective military capabilities of the alliance have become even more relevant. This renewed threat resulted in NATO, in effect, hitting the pause button on redefining NATO's post-Soviet missions. For many alliance members on Russia's periphery, it was ``NATO--Back to the Future.''

Russian behavior has once again provoked profound anxiety among our allies on Russia's periphery, especially the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania. In response, NATO has taken on new missions intended to reassure our allies, discourage Putin's aggressive designs, and renew NATO's urgent relevance. All of this has a heritage for NATO's founding in the Soviet era, but it also is a new and, in many ways, more complicated response. While Russia is not the enemy it once was, it certainly is no friend to the NATO nations. It is perhaps a necessary partner in some places, but it is a dangerous obstacle in others.

In restating and reinforcing NATO's role in opposing Russian aggression, NATO needs to be creative and firm, active and present. It cannot be done on the cheap. This renewed mission emphasizes again the persistent issue of lagging resources. It has long been a problem that the great majority of NATO membership countries do not meet the alliance standard of the 2 percent of their GDP, gross domestic product, for defense.

Although it is true that robust defense of the transatlantic region does require a greater commitment of resources than most European countries have been willing to accept in the past, it is not true that U.S. taxpayers have simply been required to make up the difference.

The Department of Defense says that the direct U.S. contribution to NATO is about $500 million a year, the largest share of NATO's budget, clearly, but not out of line with our comparative gross domestic product--compared to other European nations. It is true that NATO relies on the national assets of its members for operations, and in that regard, our portion is the largest. But our portion reflects our spending for the entire military, which has global responsibilities. In other words, if there were no NATO, those military expenditures presumably would be the same, if not larger, since our allies are contributors to our collective security as well.

In any case, the growing anxiety about Russian behavior seems to be generating some real progress on this resources front. Secretary General Stoltenberg said this week that five NATO members now meet the 2-percent requirement, while it was only two countries just a few years ago. Further, defense spending has increased in real terms in 16 of the 28 countries since 2014. Clearly, it is a wake-up call for NATO. What has happened on their borders, the periphery of Russia, has awakened NATO to the belief that it needs to strengthen our military, strengthen NATO's resources, and for those countries to live up to their obligations in providing the necessary resources.

Nevertheless, and having said this, we cannot be relaxed about meeting the resources gap. Despite the recent uptick, there has been a long and dramatic decline in European defense budgets for two decades before 2014, not to mention a significant absence of constituent support for defense expenditures in most NATO countries.

It is a battle of these nations who are dealing with slow or no growth--GDP stagnant--to come to the decision to meet the 2 percent obligation that they have under the NATO treaty. They have other issues at home, migration simply being one of them, and a number of other domestic issues that have restrained them. But now the threat has become more real, and now the realization of how to address the threat has become more vital and necessary.

In his June 2011 farewell speech on NATO's future, Defense Secretary Bob Gates famously said that our European allies were and had been ``apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.'' He declared that NATO faced ``the real possibility of a dim, if not dismal, future.''

But the response to this danger, now especially in the wake of Russian invasion and annexation of a neighbor--this is not the time to call for NATO's abandonment, but to press ahead in validating NATO's relevance, then finding the necessary resources. I believe that process is under way, as I have just described.

Given the new threats to NATO's eastern border states, our allies are finding greater support for making larger commitments to their own security. Another pressing reason to solve the resources problem is the host of new requirements this modern alliance needs to face.

Since the period of enlargement and the euphoria of democratic revolutions, NATO has made repeated attempts to define its new missions. The most recent strategic concept of January 2010 makes the alliance's newly global and political roles more explicit. It has identified numerous new transnational threats that a modern military and political alliance must confront. These include nuclear proliferation, cyber threats, terrorism, political instabilities, and missile capabilities.

No one can argue that these global threats are not the core of modern security challenges. Similarly, no one can dispute that the most effective and powerful alliance in world history should and must organize itself to confront them. And most certainly, no responsible leader should look at these threats and conclude an alliance built to confront them should be abandoned. Let me restate that. No responsible leader, now or in the future, should look at these threats and conclude that an alliance built to confront these problems and challenges should be abolished. Modern NATO activities extend well beyond Europe. These include combating piracy off the Horn of Africa, operational and training support for the African Union in Ethiopia, air policing of Europe's borders against Russian incursions, growing cyber defense alliance capabilities, expanded special operations capabilities and activities, development of a NATO response force for rapid reaction operations on land and sea, expanded joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, and expanded joint exercises to improve the alliance and member-state readiness. That is a big challenge, but that challenge is one that needs to be addressed.

In terms of more traditional warfighting, NATO has taken on missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya, and continued challenges will need to be addressed. It is not yet clear to me whether ISAF, the Afghanistan mission, will go down as a success or not, but it is clearly in the balance and needs to be carefully monitored.

It is clear that the Libya operation revealed numerous alliance shortcomings and was not a model of alliance coherence and cohesion. Rather, Libya was an example of failure at the political level to define the new NATO. The correct response to both, new challenges and admitted failure, is better leadership, better vision, and creative new thinking, along with the resources to carry out those goals.

I have suggested that these could be best applied in response to the Syria disaster, especially with the humanitarian catastrophe and the migrant crisis. I proposed that NATO could have helped member-state Turkey get control of its Syrian border to stop the flow of jihadists into and out of Syria.

It is clear to me that the uncontrolled flood of refugees from Syria could best be handled by creating safe areas in and near Syria so that the Syrian people can remain there under safe and humane conditions. Building on NATO's Bosnia experience, the Alliance could be critical to providing the security for such areas on the ground and in the air. This would not be fighting the war in Syria but protecting the populations of U.N. designated areas. Difficult? You bet, but it has been done before, and NATO is the only possible organization that is in a position to do it.

Although I emphatically believe that NATO continues to have enormous value to U.S. interests and global stability, I do concede that it needs a new vision of its role. That is clearly a work in progress and will have some false starts and failures along the way. How it turns out will not only be a function of resources, as I have discussed, but also an issue of leadership. On that score, I have some concerns. Frankly, I am worried.

The Obama administration seems to be guiding us toward a dangerous deference to others to address emerging global security challenges that are and will be threats to our own national security. The most alarming example is our acquiescence to Russia's vigorous engagement in Syria. Russia basically hijacked our paltry efforts to bring the Syrian disaster under control, inserted its military forces to change the dynamic on the ground, and guided the political process toward their ends. It has all been a sad display of American incompetence and impotence. The United States and its allies are paying the price for this failure of engagement.

After reading President Obama's recent and lengthy interview on foreign policy that was published in the Atlantic Monthly, I can tell he has not drawn the correct conclusions from the foreign policy failures in recent years in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere. For me, we have abdicated America's traditional leadership role. For the alliance, I fear this could be the beginning phase of our disengagement from Europe, which, if it continues, will be at our peril. Without firm U.S. leadership of NATO, we will begin to see the commitment of our allies weaken. They simply do not have the muscle or the financial capability to support a NATO coalition without U.S. leadership. Without the right kind of leadership, the importance of the transatlantic security relationship and the continued robust presence of U.S. forces in Europe will begin to lose advocates, as perhaps has already occurred among those who do not support our efforts.

If Americans come to see NATO's value in financial terms--bang for the buck--we will lose sight of its real value in the proper terms of national security, American reliability, and the eternal appeal of our community of values--in other words, the values beyond price that must be preserved if we are to prevail against our adversaries.

With that,

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