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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I was pleased to come over here early before I spoke and listen to my colleague from Ohio. We have the same issues in Indiana. I think probably the Presiding Officer's State and every State has serious opioid addiction issues, particularly with our young people. We cannot solve all of the problems here. We have passed a piece of legislation. Hopefully we can reconcile with the House shortly and put it on the President's desk. In a number of ways, that will provide the support for dealing with this problem.
It is a national issue, it is a State issue, it is a city issue, it is a smalltown issue, and it is a rural America issue. It is all hands on deck here. We are losing precious lives through this scourge of addiction that is sweeping through our country. Wasteful Spending
Mr. President, today I am back, as I have been every week for now 43 weeks for the waste of the week. The ``Waste of the Week'' is where I highlight waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government system that is using hard-earned taxpayer dollars that ought to be able to be used by the taxpayer to pay the mortgage, pay the bills at the end of the week, to put aside some money hopefully for the children's education as they grow, or for any number of needs out there.
We have the responsibility and the duty to be carefully managing the tax money that is assessed to our public. ``Waste of the Week'' has pointed out some significant examples, yet drop-in-the-bucket of expenditures that have not been successful, have not been used for the purpose they are supposed to be used, part of the waste, fraud, and abuse category of now nearly--well, nearing $200 billion. That is not small change.
This week, I am highlighting a Federal program that has a lousy track record and over $7 billion in leftover money--funds Congress has appropriated for this program. Let me explain the program. In 2008, shortly after the economic recession began, Congress created something called the Home Affordable Modification Program; in short, HAMP. This is a new emergency program established to help homeowners facing financial distress to avoid foreclosure by reducing their monthly mortgage payments.
All this occurred at a time when our country truly was in distress--a serious recession. People were working less hours or no hours. Those who owned homes were finding it difficult if not impossible to pay the monthly mortgage payments.
So the HAMP program, which is a voluntary program for homeowners and mortgage lenders--if the two of them get together and agree to restructure their home loan payments, they can stay in their home, and it doesn't have to go through foreclosure. It is a sensible program at a time of real need. Lenders work through the Treasury Department to reduce those monthly mortgage payments to no higher than about one- third of the homeowners' income.
Historically, if you are telling your kids about buying a home or you are graduating from school and you want to buy a home, the solid advice has always been, don't commit yourself to more than 25 percent of the income you are earning to pay on your mortgage. You are going to need the rest of that money to pay the rest of your bills--all the utilities, food, transportation, buying a car, and so forth and so on. Well, this program said all the way up to a third. If you qualified on that, we would use 33 percent instead of 25 percent and restructure your mortgage so that you had a lower payment you had to make each month on that mortgage.
The Department of Treasury put this program in place. It was scheduled to expire at the end of 2012. In 2013, after the program had technically expired, an inspector general found that the number of participants who ended up redefaulting on their new modified mortgage was ``increasing at an alarming rate.''
What is this word ``redefaulting''? Look, if you don't pay your mortgage payments, you are in default. If you are in default long enough, the bank or the mortgage company that is holding your mortgage says: We are going to foreclosure and take your house back because you are not making payments. This program was designed to help people avoid that catastrophe.
Redefaulting is the process by which the person, having already agreed to--with the mortgage company and with the support of the Federal Government, the person agreed to a program to lower the payments so they could keep their house. They defaulted again, so the technical term is redefaulting, but it is two defaults. So if Joe Smith has problems and he gets with his lender, he gets a new program, but then down the line, he defaults again.
According to the inspector general, this became something that needed to be addressed because we simply cannot continue to proceed with this program with the taxpayers' dollars if the participants aren't doing their share.
Despite the poor performance, the administration unilaterally--and how many times have we seen this happen during the Obama administration?--bypassing Congress, they unilaterally extended the program beyond its December 2012 expiration date. Interestingly enough, even with this extension, the number of applicants steadily declined. People either couldn't meet the measures or they didn't need it. The economy was improving, and they didn't need to do this. According to the Treasury Department, the number of HAMP participants declined because there was a shrinking number of eligible mortgagees.
Given that the outcomes of those receiving help were largely subpar and the number of applicants was declining, you would think we would come to the conclusion that the program needed to be terminated. It was already extended past the deadline, but on the basis of what was happening with the program, essentially we should terminate that.
When HAMP was created, the goal was to help about 4 million homeowners. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the program ended with only 1.3 million homeowners making it through the trial phase and ultimately being accepted into the program. Of those people, about one- third ultimately redefaulted, costing taxpayers an additional $1.5 billion.
We had a broken program. What was left in the fund with the Treasury was $7 billion. Some people call these slush funds. This is money that has been appropriated, put into a program--not expended in the program but sits there. How many times have we heard about government agencies with excess taxpayer money saying: Don't give it back.
Now, of course, this is the Treasury. Sometimes we say: Give it back to the Treasury. This is the Treasury itself. Well, don't terminate this and give it back; we might want to use it for something else.
That is a classic way of describing how Washington often works. Spend all the money that is appropriated to you, or they will reduce the money they give you next year. I previously sat on the Appropriations Committee, and this is not a one-off proposition. Every year, we have to scrub through these agencies' expenditures, and we find that there is excessive spending at the end of the fiscal year so that they don't get a reduced amount of funds sent to them for the next fiscal year.
Think of the ways this money could be used if it was put back into the Treasury. No. 1, it could be used for essential Federal functions. Wouldn't NIH like to have $7 billion to be able to hopefully break through on a wonder drug that would address Alzheimer's or diabetes or something else? Wouldn't the Department of Defense want to have this money for the shortcomings they have had because of the drastic reduction in expenditures for our national defense and security? Wouldn't any number of Federal agencies that produce essential programs that have to be addressed financially want to use that money for the right purposes? Most important of all, wouldn't the taxpayer want to get that money back or not have it spent at all or use it? Wouldn't the Treasury want to use it to reduce our ever-deepening national defense? So there are a lot of uses for this money that is sloshing around in a trust fund--not a trust fund, but sloshing around in the fund held by the Treasury Department.
This is a waste because it is sitting there. It is going to be spent on something that it was not intended to be spent on. For that reason, it becomes the waste of the week. As the waste of the week, we add $7 billion to our ever-growing total of waste, fraud, and abuse, taking our total overall to $170 billion. This is not small change. We have people struggling in America to make ends meet. They live paycheck to paycheck. They want their hard-earned dollars that are taken from their paycheck used for the right purposes. If the money is not used for the right purposes, they don't want to send it; they want it back.
We have an accountability to the American people, the people we represent, to do the best we can to provide the most efficient, effective use of their tax dollars. If we can't provide that--this is just, as I said, a drop in the bucket. I could be standing here every day with a waste of the day. I could be standing here every hour with a waste of the hour. We have a responsibility to be accountable to the people whose money is taken by the Federal Government and used. They don't mind using it for the right things. Maybe a veterans program needs that $7 billion to treat more veterans better than the way they are treated now.
In any event, we add this, and we have $170-plus billion in documented waste, fraud, and abuse.
I will be back next week with the next version, and we will continue to expose funding that is unnecessary and is putting a real burden on our hard-earned tax dollars being paid to the Federal Government.
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