Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2017--Motion to Proceed--
Floor Speech
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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, it is time once again for the waste of the week. This is ``Waste of the Week'' No. 48. For 48 weeks I have been coming to the Senate floor during this Senate session, a 2-year session, talking about the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money. The ever-growing need to tackle our soaring debt has been brought to our attention once again this week by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
On Tuesday, the budget office released its long-term Federal budget update, and it is not pretty. Once again, CBO bluntly told Congress that we need to reduce the Federal debt as soon as possible. How many times do they have to send a report here saying: Look, the house is on fire; you have to do something about it. I say, once again--but I can say once again, once again, once again, once again, once again--the Congressional Budget Office is nonpartisan. It is not Republican; it is not Democrat; it is not liberal; it is not conservative. These guys deal with numbers, and the numbers don't lie. You don't have to be a math genius to figure out that we are spending far more than we take in, and we have to borrow against that.
Just under this administration, we have nearly doubled from $10.7 trillion of national debt to almost $20 trillion of national debt. This is the legacy the President wants to carry? You never hear him talk about this. You never hear this mentioned.
Oh, ObamaCare is the best thing that has ever happened in the world. If you have been listening to the disaster that is rolling out under ObamaCare and the premiums that have doubled and the copays that have tripled and the exemptions that have been lost and all kinds of things happening to people in America here today under this flawed Federal program, you would understand this. We are talking about a budget out of control, spending out of control.
I have been a part of efforts to deal with this on a macro basis. All of those have failed, and they failed because the President of the United States has refused to come to a conclusion in working with us. Oh, he made some attempts to do it. He made some nice statements, but in the end it was always: Can't go there.
I decided I would at least try to point out documented issues of waste, fraud, and abuse. The very least we can do is stop this kind of spending. We have totaled up a pretty good total here. We are approaching $250 billion of documented waste, fraud, and abuse.
CBO projects that the combined Social Security trust funds will be exhausted by 2029--5 years earlier than the Social Security trustees estimated a little bit ago--forcing automatic benefit cuts on seniors and people with disabilities. Let me repeat that: forcing automatic cuts to seniors and those with disabilities.
Do you hear Senators talking about the fact that we are going to have to do this? No, I don't hear this on the floor. Do you hear the President talking about this? No, let's pass this on--2029, I mean, that is way in the distance. Why do we need to worry about that now?
That is what they were saying when the debt was $10.7 trillion. That is what they were saying when the debt was $5 trillion: We can do this later. Well, the clock is ticking. Is anybody out there listening? Hello, hello. We are on the road to insolvency, and your elected representatives and your President aren't doing anything about it.
As you can tell, I get pretty worked up about this. I am down to some of the small stuff, pointing out: Can't we at least do this? Can't we at least come together as a Senate and as a House of Representatives, and can't we at least eliminate the waste, the documented fraud, the abuse of programs?
I am now on week No. 48. I have a card here that details all of the issues we have done. It keeps adding up and adding up, and I am only scratching the surface. I can be down here every day, maybe every hour of every day the Senate is in session, talking about a waste of the week.
What the CBO puts out, what the Government Accountability Office puts out, what independent agencies put out--we can do 24-hour filibusters and just rack one up after another. This is your Federal Government in action. The tragedy is these are the tax dollars that you work hard for every week and that you send to Washington, and you want them responsibly used.
Yes, of course, we have to fund the military. Yes, we want to take care of the veterans. We want to take care of our national security. We are a threat now from ISIS; we are a threat from terrorists around the world, some of them domestic. We want police forces, we want intelligence, and we want all those entities that are involved in keeping us safe. We need to fund those agencies.
What about medical research? What about disease control? We are talking about Ebola. We are talking about Zika. We are talking about a number of things that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deals with in Atlanta.
How about education? How about roads? How about sewers? How about waterlines? How about the raft of things that require spending in order to keep our Nation healthy, in order to keep our Nation functioning, in order to make us competitive in the world?
All of that is at risk. All of that is at risk because our entitlements keep growing out of control. No one is saying there is a fire on the way. It is growing, not diminishing, and you are not calling the fire department out to deal with this issue.
Let me get to the essence of this recent issue here. Remember the Lifeline program? That is the program that provides people of lower means, perhaps some in rural areas, a lifeline so that they can call 911. There has been some documentation that some people can't afford this. The President came along, and they call it the Obama Phone program now. It is advertised--I think it is a private advertisement, but it is a government-sponsored legislative program, and it is contracted out. Free cell phone--the government pays for your wireless service--free phone, free minutes, free enrollment, no payment ever.
This well-intended program was to provide people a lifeline in case of an emergency--the ability to dial 9-1-1. This lifeline is important to low-income earners who couldn't afford a phone. That program has some benefits and is something that maybe we ought to do, but we ought to put controls on it to make sure the program is not abused.
Initially, this program helped low-income families pay for landline phone service, but landline, as you know, is out of date. I doubt if any of these pages even know what a landline is since they have grown up in the cell phone era. It happened just a few years after I came to the Senate. This program--like almost every other program the government sponsors--is well-intended but runs amok because of mismanagement, misuse of the law, misinterpretation, abuse, waste, and people taking advantage of it.
Under the Obama administration, the cost and number of beneficiaries in this program have skyrocketed, and with this increase came a number of issues.
The inspector general for the Federal Communications Commission, which is called the FCC, which administers this program that they contract out, did a study. They noted that prior to 2012, it was, as they said, ``well known'' that some individuals were receiving duplicative benefits or receiving benefits despite their eligibility for those benefits.'' For instance, there was supposed to be one phone made available per home, one per family, if they couldn't afford one. They found home addresses with dozens of phones and handing them out. There were posters like this that said: Get your free phone. People were grabbing them up as fast as they could. Word got out on the street that you can get a free phone line and the government will pay for it-- yet another program the government is going to take care of. Well intended, yes, but there was a public outcry when stuff like this came out here. People said: What is the deal? I thought the phone was for emergency purposes. I thought we needed one per household to give them the opportunity to call 9-1-1 when needed, or if it was a single person--or a couple who needed a phone, maybe they should share it.
The inspector general said that the one-per-household rule wasn't working very well, and so the FCC apparently implemented a policy that basically said subscribers could override the eligibility for this because maybe these people need more than one cell phone.
The IG has learned that abuse within this program is more widespread than anybody previously believed.
First, the IG learned that, as I said, the FCC instructed employees to override the computer system that prohibits more than one applicant per household.
Second, the FCC--on the form that you have to send in--basically said: All the subscribers need to do is provide a check in the box that says the applicant is eligible. But multiple applications came in from the same address, and no one asked, as the law required, applicants to provide any supporting documentation. The IG found that this override option was also enabling subscribers to use fake names and fake Social Security numbers to avoid detection. How many times have I been down here talking about fake names, stolen IDs, and stolen Social Security numbers that were used to obtain Federal benefits with no oversight?
The IG noted that between October 2014 and April 2016, nearly 4.3 million people enrolled in the Lifeline Program by overriding the internal eligibility controls. That is more than 35 percent of all subscribers and accounts, and that rivals the population of the entire State of Oregon. These aren't people who needed phones; these are people who overrode it so they he could get as many phones as they wanted.
Obviously our Washington bureaucrats have not been good stewards of our taxpayer dollars. Sadly, this is not the end of the story. It is important to note that the IG is still in the process of reviewing these egregious actions to determine just how widespread the problem is.
In the meantime, what I am calling for here on the Senate floor is that the FCC stop allowing people to enroll in the Lifeline Program through the override process and to verify every single beneficiary so that we can weed out the bad actors. Whether you are in private business or the government, is that what you would expect? If you are selling or distributing a product--and in this case, distributing a product based on taxpayer dollars--don't you think you would want to, No. 1, adhere to the law, and No. 2, adhere to the regulations and not have some kind of arbitrary override, especially when you have stuff like this on the street and people are gobbling up free service on cell phones by the millions? What is the total? The total we can project for unverified Obama Phone beneficiaries is $4.76 billion over the course of unverified Obama phone applicants.
I am not here to say this program should be abolished. I understand why people need to have a phone in their household for an emergency purpose. If they qualify under the eligibility criteria, I am OK with that, but if they are abusing the program, I am not OK with that at all, and I guarantee that the American taxpayer is not willing to accept that. They did not send us here to stand by, as responsible U.S. Senators, and watch this kind of abuse go on and on and on, and this Senator has barely scratched the surface in an effort to document waste, fraught, and abuse.
We now have $239-plus billion of documented fraud, waste, and abuse by accountable government agencies, and it is totally unacceptable.
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