Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. PERDUE. Madam President, in 1974, Congress passed a new Budget Act. It was revolutionary and comprehensive. It was supposed to streamline how Congress appropriates money to fund the business of the Federal Government every year.
Unfortunately, now 45 years later, we know that bill was an unmitigated disaster. Only four times in the last 45 years since that Budget Act was passed has Congress funded the government through the appropriations process before the end of the prior fiscal year--four times.
Today is the end of July. We are about to leave Congress today, hopefully--if our Senate today gets these bills passed. Then we will go back to our States, and we will work in August. We heard a lot of people talking yesterday about what they were planning to do in their States. It is a busy month. I wish it were a vacation month, but it is not--nor should it be--given the things we have to do today.
When we come back in September, there will be 10 working days left before the end of this fiscal year, September 30--10 working days.
As I stand before this body today, this is not a partisan observation. As I stand here today, we have not appropriated $1 for next year's budget to run the Federal Government of the United States of America. That is an indictment. It is an indictment of the process, an indictment of the Members, and an indictment of the fact that we have no consequences by not funding the government by September 30--not one.
So today we are about to do something that could cause us to actually use a continuing resolution for the 187th time, potentially, since the 1974 Budget Act passed. We now know how draconian these continuing resolutions are. I will talk about that in a minute.
Hopefully, we will vote today on a bill that is a compromise bill that actually sets the stage. It sets the upper limit. It doesn't do the appropriating at the detail level. It sets the topline number for the fiscal year 2020, which starts October 1, 2019. That number is roughly $1.375 trillion. I have a debt clock in my office. I can watch the national debt spin about $100,000 a second--going up every single minute of every single day. This bill actually begins to address that. President Trump had a couple of priorities here.
Before I talk about that, I want to put in perspective what this bill actually does. We talked before about mandatory spending and discretionary spending. Again, the problem is in our Federal Government. This whole budget drama we have seen this year and every year for the last 45 years only deals with the discretionary budget, which is $1.375 trillion for 2021.
The dotted line here is where we are for the 2019 discretionary budget. Discretionary budget is 30 percent. That is the blue line here.
The green line is the total spending of the Federal Government. Today we spend $1.3 trillion in discretionary spending. We spend $3.3 trillion in mandatory spending. That is a total of $4.6 trillion.
What is in discretionary spending? Military spending and all other discretionary spending is in there: health, education, agriculture, labor, the Attorney General's office, State. All the discretionary spending is in there. Some VA expenses are in there--$1.33 trillion.
In any business, any enterprise, or your personal budget, if you only dealt with 30 percent of what you spend in your budgeting process, wouldn't we all have a good time? It wouldn't matter how much we did on discretionary spending because we could just go borrow more money. That is what the Federal Government does.
Let me remind everybody today that we are also borrowing about 30 percent of what we spend every year--a little less than that, but we are borrowing between 25 percent and 30 percent.
Mandatory is like your home mortgage, car payment, and insurance payment. It is automatically deducted. So all these mandatory expenses that today are 70 percent of what we spend, get spent with no debate in Congress--none, zero. Why? Because it is mandatory. It gets spent like your home mortgage gets automatically deducted. Once that is done, just a few pennies are left to take care of discretionary.
The point I am trying to make is, all this drama we had this year-- and every year--is over a piece of the budget that is totally borrowed. Over 90 percent of what we spend in our Federal Government's military expenses today--our national defense--is borrowed money, by definition.
Right now, what we are talking about is a spending bill that actually reduces spending for discretionary items. We are not even talking about the mandatory side, the 70 percent. If you look at the 70 percent over the next decade or the next two decades, discretionary spending is relatively flat. These are aggregate numbers--total numbers adjusted for inflation.
The orange line is the mandatory expenses. They are projected to skyrocket here, going from about 70 percent today to almost 85 percent of every dollar the Federal Government spends in the next 20 years-- from 70 percent today to well over 80 percent--to almost 85 percent by 2035, 20 years from now. I argue that is the problem. Until we address the mandatory side of our spending and save Social Security and save Medicare, we will never be able to solve this debt crisis we see before us in very real terms today.
Let's move to this bill we have today. I ran for the Senate because of the debt crisis and because of the global security crisis. This debt issue is real. I have been working on it for 4\1/2\ years. Yet this bill today actually lowers spending as a percentage of our economy. This bill proposes $54 billion increases in discretionary spending over 2 years--2 percent per year for the next 2 years. That actually lowers spending as a percentage of our economy. As a matter of fact, since 2011--the last 10 years--what we have seen, if we do this budget, is Federal spending on discretionary items goes from 8.7 percent of our total economy down to 6 percent.
When I ran a business, I looked at my overhead. That is what this is. Overhead is declining on discretionary items as a percentage of what we spend totally and a percentage of our total economy.
President Trump had two goals. One is he wanted to continue to reduce discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP. Check that box. This bill does that. All the so-called debt hawks out there and all the budget hawks who say: I am voting no to any new spending, need to recognize that this bill actually lowers spending as a percentage of the economy.
The second objective the President had--and the Senate is just now coming to realize how draconian these 186 CRs have been over the last 45 years. The Obama administration reduced spending in the military by 25 percent. So readiness had been reduced to a point by January 1, 2017, when President Trump was inaugurated--readiness in the military had been devastated. Two-thirds of our F-18 lead fighter jets could not fly. Only three of our Army brigades could go to war that night. I saw that. I am on the Armed Services Committee. You can see when you travel the world how absolutely gutted our military had been. For the last 2 years, we have been rebuilding that, getting readiness back. In the month of June, the FA-18s got back to 80 percent readiness.
The second thing this bill does is it continues, in the second and third year, to rebuild the military after it had been gutted by the prior administration. Focus of the military today is readiness and recapitalization, which means rebuilding burned-out equipment and absolutely rationalization.
We had the first DOD audit--thanks to President Trump--in the history of the United States. Last November, President Trump, after telling the DOD we would have that--by the way, there was a law that passed in 1981 that said we would have a DOD audit. President Trump is the first President in U.S. history that provided that. We now have that and understand opportunities to rationalize our spending.
When you look at this vote, you look at making decisions in life. There are two choices--two votes--that lead to three potential outcomes today. A ``yes'' vote continues to support the military and defend our country at a level that meets the near-peer competitors' level of volume. When adjusted for purchasing power parity, China, today, is actually spending the same amount on their military as we are. They can get there quicker because they don't have the regulatory overhang that we have in the United States, but a vote yes means that we continue to do that; we continue to lower discretionary spending as a percentage of our economy; and we set the stage to, then again, begin to have the hard conversation of how we save Social Security and save Medicare. The major thing it does is it avoids the drama around not funding the government. It gives us a chance, anyway, to fund our government before October 1. Remember, September 30 ends this fiscal year.
A ``no'' vote has two potential outcomes. A ``no'' vote could lead to a sequestration. People say that cuts 10 percent out of all spending. That sounds good to me. The reality is that happened over the last decade. We see now the draconian impact that had on certain parts of our discretionary spending like military--veterans and so forth--so we had to come back and rebuild. When you come back and have to rebuild it, it costs dramatically much more. That is the point.
If we take a long-term view of this, we have to end up voting yes to this. The second outcome of a ``no'' vote is actually more of the same.
Well, we will avoid sequestration, but we will pass a continuing resolution and kick the can down the road again for the 187th time. It sounds easy. Everybody gets to go home. We pass a CR. Yet the military gets gutted again--devastated. It disrupts the supply chain and keeps our vendors from hiring people.
Imagine if you are a midcareer military officer or noncommissioned officer--imagine what that tells you about what we think of our military and our men and women. I hear people on both sides beat their chest: ``I love our military.'' ``We have to support our military.'' Then they vote no on a bill like this. We cannot let that happen.
Ironically, because of the two alternatives, a ``no'' vote is actually a vote to increase spending dramatically--not just a little bit but dramatically--over the next decade or so.
This bill is a compromise. People back home tell us to come here and work with the other side and compromise and make decisions and get to a result. We just did that. President Trump and Speaker Pelosi just did that. That is what this is reflective of. I am here to tell you today that it is our job to back that up.
In closing, it is imperative that we get this bill passed, allow our appropriators to get busy and start appropriating, so by September 30-- the end of this fiscal year--we have a chance to get the government funded. We know a ``no'' vote leads to more spending. It is our responsibility to be fiscally responsible, and I think a ``yes'' vote here does just that.
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