-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PAUL. 4470, which seeks to extend the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program.

How could anybody be against that? I am actually for it. We should have terrorism standards. But--you know what--we always had these before 9/11. How did it work before the government got involved?

Well, companies had to insure things. If you had a $100-million electric plant and it was at risk for sabotage or a fire or a disruption to the community, you had insurance, and insurance required that you have a fence. I mean, these things happen. It is not as if safety for our utilities and public chemical plants didn't exist before 9/11. So there are ways that the marketplace would take care of this.

This measure, though, which would reauthorize this regulatory program for another 2 years, I think is being rushed through the Senate without due consideration or, really, any consideration at all. The Homeland Security Committee has jurisdiction over the program, yet we have not had any hearings to discuss this program or its effectiveness.

This is part of the problem of government is we tend to reauthorize things without ever examining whether they work, what works, what doesn't work. Some programs might need more money; some programs might need less money. And we might ask ourselves: Do we have any money?

We are $31 trillion, $32 trillion in debt. We borrow about $1 trillion every year. It is easy to be for stuff. Everybody has got something good. Everybody is for something, but where does the money come from? We haven't really had any hearing to discuss this program or its effectiveness since the last time it was authorized, nor has the committee considered any legislation to reform the program.

This program is a regulatory program. It is hundreds of regulations, and it was established to prevent the misuse of hazardous chemicals. But it also fails to understand that every company has a self-incentive to protect hazardous chemicals that is built into the nature of the way they do business.

Facilities that store certain quantities of designated chemicals of interest, though, under this legislation, must undergo a risk assessment inspection every 2 years.

If it is not reauthorized? It has been going on for 20 years. My guess is that the vast majority, if not all, of the utilities and chemical plants in this country have undergone this. My guess is, if the program didn't exist, they would still all have fences and barbed wire and protections against terrorism because they want to protect their investment.

The requirement, though, through government places a burden on business, impeding their potential growth and creating unsurmountable barriers to entry for those who find the regulatory compliance too cumbersome and expensive to even attempt to break into the sector.

This is why, a lot of times, big businesses like regulations. Regulations become a formidable barrier to new companies coming into the business. Why not have a ton of regulations, sort of like banks. All the banking regulations--guess who likes the banking regulations: the big banks, because they can hire more compliance officers. Your local bank in your town can't afford to do it. So the local bank gets gobbled up by the bigger bank because of regulatory burden.

The monetary resources required to implement and maintain these standards are substantial, and the cost implications impact not just private companies but also the Department of Homeland Security.

The United States is trillions of dollars in debt. We cannot continue to just pour money into nonessential government programs. We should have a discussion of what are the private incentives for people to protect their chemical plants, to protect their utilities. There is a long history of this. In fact, it was the history of our country until fairly recently.

The Department of Homeland Security has a consistent track record of creating duplicative programs. Over the past 12 years, the Government Accountability Office--the GAO--has documented over 1,100 cases of duplicative programs created by Congress.

Everybody has a great idea--we are going to fix this--but they don't ever take time to look up and find out that somebody had the idea 3 years before, and they already created a program to fix this. So sometimes we have as many as 80 different programs to fix a problem that has already been fixed previously 80 times.

It should come as no surprise to any of us that our government has grown into a $6.5 trillion leviathan, and this body seems more interested in passing bills than understanding the contents of the bills, the programs, or whether the programs are working.

We saved, though, over $550 billion by removing just half of GAO's identified duplicative programs. Five hundred and fifty billion dollars was saved by taking the time to find out that we already have other programs doing what the new program proposes to do.

I have already expressed a number of concerns about this program, but what should alarm us the most about this reauthorization is that GAO already found much of this program to be duplicative of other Agencies in a report from 2021. That is why I will be introducing and attaching to this bill and letting the bill go, frankly, if we can agree today to attach a small bill, but I think it could have profound implications over government.

This is called the Duplication Scoring Act. What would happen is, every time someone gets a genius idea how they are going to fix your life or fix your business with another law, there would have to be a duplication score, and government would come forward and say ``Well, we have 32 programs that already do the same thing'' or ``We have 32 programs that aren't working that do the same thing.'' It would be what a government should normally do before creating a new program--find out if we already have existing programs.

So I will be asking consent to pass this bill. I will let the program continue, even though I think it has many problems, if we will add a duplication scoring system to all programs in government so we can review whether they already exist and are working. This program would be produced for each bill.

I think all of us can agree that there is no point in passing a bill that already exists in another fashion or already has Agencies that do the same job. Before we unknowingly pass a thousand more of these duplicative, fragmented programs, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment, which would continue the program, allow it to be reauthorized, but at the same time begin having a duplication score on every new proposal.

So I would ask the Senate to modify the current request; that my amendment, which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PAUL.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source