National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. COATS. Madam President, I come down here every week, as the Presiding Officer knows. She is usually in the chair when I am here, listening to my ``Waste of the Week''. I am a little bit later this week than I normally am. But the issue of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government continues. We have covered a lot of ground on serious issues such as tax fraud and misplaced death records, to the more absurd, such as the federally funded rabbit massages and marketing support for pumpkin doughnuts. Each of those has a pricetag. That pricetag is paid for by the American taxpayer.

I am happy today to be able to announce that one of the items which I highlighted in a previous ``Waste of the Week'' speech has been addressed. In May, my 11th ``Waste of the Week'' speech examined ways to improve compliance measures for higher education tax benefits. I outlined how Congress can fix this problem to achieve $576 million in taxpayer savings.

So that is a former ``Waste of the Week''. It is a great benefit to universities, colleges, and educational institutions across the country because previous laws required them to provide information even when those applying for the particular aid refused to provide certain information. It created a nightmare of paperwork and a nightmare of compliance for those colleges and universities.

So that provision that we brought forward was incorporated into law that has now been passed, signed by the President, and is operative. We not only have saved the taxpayer $576 million, but we have provided universities relief from an unnecessary procedure that consumed an extraordinary amount of time.

Today I want to talk about software licenses. The Federal Government needs to purchase literally millions of these licenses. In order to get the IT, the information technology, working right you have to have the right equipment. In fact, the government spent $80 billion last year on information technology, including these software licenses.

Now, the Office of Management and Budget and the 24 Federal agencies that are covered by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 have very key roles and responsibilities for overseeing IT investment management. Federal law places responsibility for managing investment with the heads of these agencies and establishes chief information officers to advise and assist agency heads in carrying out this responsibility.

Now, there are two Executive orders that have been issued that provide information for these Federal agencies regarding the management of how they go about procuring and managing these software licenses. Executive Order No. 13103 specifies that agencies must adopt procedures to ensure that they are not using this computer software in violation of copyright laws.

Additionally, Executive Order No. 13589 states that agencies must ensure that they are not paying for unused or underutilized IT equipment, software, and services.

Now, the Government Accountability Office has conducted a study, an evaluation of how well this is being managed and implemented. What they found is that in many, many cases it is not happening. Specifically, the Government Accountability Office found that the Office of Management and Budget and the vast majority of Federal agencies lacked adequate policies for managing their software licenses. Of the 24 major Federal agencies that I mentioned before, only 2--only 2 out of 24--had comprehensive policies that included the establishment of clear roles and central oversight authority by managing enterprise software license agreements.

Only 2 out of 24 have lived up to their requirement to manage in the way that these executive orders have ordered. An additional 18 agencies had some type of policy in place, but the Government Accountability Office determined that this simply was not comprehensive enough and effective enough. Four agencies were found to have no policy at all. They totally ignored the mandates of the executive orders.

So these weaknesses in the system result from principally a lack of priority in establishing software license management. Now, this is kind of a technical thing. I certainly admit that I am not fully comprehensive in terms of how all of this IT stuff needs to work. But we hire people who are talented and have the skills necessary to oversee this kind of management. Now, the key here is that the result of not effectively managing this has racked up a cost estimated at $10 billion over a 10-year period of time.

So this is just complying with the executive orders, complying with the procedures that are done by every business in America. But the Federal Government has not complied with the necessary steps to achieve the right kind of management and oversight, and that is costing the taxpayer up to $10 billion. So today we add more to our ever-increasing amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that has been found within the Federal system, and we are moving toward our goal of $100 billion.

There will be more ``Wastes of the Week'' in the future. We hope to reach that $100 billion before we leave here for the August recess, with 3 more weeks before that happens. We are way ahead of schedule. We had hoped to reach the $100 billion by the end of this Congress. But we have determined and found so many examples of waste, fraud, and abuse, that our gauge is climbing much faster than we thought it would.

Look, we have major fiscal problems in this country. It is going to take major decisions relative to how we structure how we spend taxpayers' money. We have had numerous efforts to deal with this in a macro way. All of those have come up short. While I was engaged in all of that before, I have turned my attention to this: Let's see at least if we cannot find savings for the taxpayer in the areas of waste, fraud, and abuse, and document it.

I am pleased, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, that one of those has just been implemented, saving the taxpayers $576 million and saving our colleges and universities and institutions of higher education from a nightmare of paperwork and compliance requirements that they will no longer have to engage in. So we will continue. We will do serious issues. We will look at some absurd things that cause people to say: Why in the world would we ever spend that money in the first place? It is just not responsible leadership and governing.

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