February 10, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 27 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
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BUDGET PROPOSAL; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 27
(Senate - February 10, 2020)
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[Pages S967-S969] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] BUDGET PROPOSAL Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I suspect I couldn't have come to the floor at a better time. The President's budget did come out today. It consists of a set of documents a foot high. In my opinion, the whole pile should be replaced with a list from the President of what he thinks are pretty good ideas to do this year. I want to encourage people, including the Senator from Ohio, not to waste any time searching out the President's budget cuts. Nobody has listened to the President in the 23 years that I have been here. Congress doesn't pay attention to the President's budget exercise. I don't know why we put him through that. That is all it is. Congress holds the pursestrings, according to the Constitution. Congress is very protective of that constitutional authority. If you don't believe me, watch all the rhetoric that comes out on the President's budget. I am hoping that I hear something positive on it, but it is pretty hard to find anything positive with the funding situation that we are in. I do have to take issue with something that was just said here, that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act hasn't worked. It has worked. Now, a very important thing for everybody to know: The problem that we are in right now with our deficits doesn't have to do with the dollars that are coming in. The first year after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, we took in more revenue than ever before. More people had jobs. More people were paying taxes. Companies were paying more taxes. They were doing more business. That results in more taxes. So, that first year, we got more money than we had ever had to spend before. The second year, we had more money than the first year. We keep getting more money to spend. The problem is we have no control over our urge to spend. Since CBO's June 2019 Long-Term Budget Outlook, Congress has passed and the President has signed legislation that would add more than $2 trillion to our national debt over the next 10 years. That is how we are spending. The increased spending caps from the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 are responsible for $1.7 trillion of that $2.1 trillion. It does include interest costs, but that is what we have to pay any time we have a debt. That $1.7 trillion passed with no debate. There was a budget point of order. I had established a budget point of order, which takes 60 votes. I missed by four being able to stop that. We can't spend that way. But that isn't the President's budget. That is our budget. Over the next few days, you will hear lots of complaints about the President's budget. Seldom will anybody mention anything good, and it has been that way for every President. You will [[Page S968]] hear lots of terrible things about the President's budget. You won't hear anything positive. In the present political atmosphere, you probably will not learn anything from the comments. Little of a positive nature is getting any coverage in Washington these days. Recently, I went to a hearing on the dangers of youth vaping. It turned into a diatribe about President Trump. Presidents' budgets, regardless of what President, are a chance for Members not in his party to beat up verbally on whoever is President. For that reason, I didn't hold a hearing on President Obama's last budget, and I will not be holding one on this President's budget for that reason. Let me repeat that. Because it turns into a diatribe against the President, I did not hold a hearing on President Obama's last budget, and, for that same reason, I am not going to hold a hearing on this President's budget. If you want the animosity of a budget hearing, the House of Representatives will have the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, for a hearing this Wednesday. You can take that in and get your dose of animosity if you want. It will be a chance for the House to ask loaded, venomous questions of the Director. The budget process is not working. The only thing of real value in any President's budget is our history of spending. That is what has already been done. We ought to look at that. We ought to see the mistakes that we have made, the way that we have piled up this debt. If Congress, for once, could spend a portion of the scrutiny they give to the President's projected cuts and, instead, look at the history of our spending, we might be able to gain ground. Yes, only cuts will be blasted, even though we never make cuts; we just keep spending. The official budget is done in the Senate and separately in the House and is only official if the House and Senate can reach agreement. When the two Chambers of Congress are opposite majorities, there is little chance for agreement. From history, I can assure you cuts will not be made. I can also assure you that seldom does any program get as big of an increase as the participants request, but that is changing. There is no spending constraint. There is seldom an attempt to find money to cover the costs, especially on new services that are dreamed up. I will do a budget. I will ask the Democrats to help put together a responsible budget, working with Republicans. That is really the only way it can work responsibly. What do I mean by ``responsibly''? The Budget Committee only sets limits on spending. A lot of people think that we dig into every detail and decide how much everybody is going to get. No. We set limits in a broad number of categories. It is the Appropriations Committee that allocates the specific dollars, but we always wind up spending beyond the limit set by the budget, even if a budget can be agreed on. How can that happen? When a spending bill or a spending idea comes to the Senate floor, the bill technically needs 60 votes to pass. To bust the budget limits also only takes 60 votes, so any idea or spending bill that is able to pass already, it already has the votes to bust the budget and put us deeper into debt. Congress also doesn't meet spending deadlines. If Congress passes a continuing resolution, which means we couldn't agree by the end of the fiscal year, the government stays open with permission to spend each month 1/12 of what it was allocated the previous year. That is what a continuing resolution does; it allows them to keep operating at what they had before. Continuing resolutions continue until both sides are able to negotiate what they want, but the new method of compromise is you can have everything you want as long as you will let me have everything I want. What kind of negotiation is that? Well, as I mentioned before, it is $1.7 trillion and one vote with no debate. Yeah. How would your Christmas shopping for your family work under those circumstances where everybody could have whatever they wanted? Wouldn't it even be worse if you were spending someone else's money for those Christmas presents? What if it appeared to be an unlimited supply of money? How long would that last? Of course, if a continuing resolution doesn't pass, the government is shut down. The employees are sent home. Federal public places are shut down and closed to the public. When agreement is finally reached, the employees come back. They are paid for the time they were off. They are way behind in their work, which hurts the economy when permits aren't released--and other things. We also have to pay lots of overtime to catch up for the time they were off. There are several proposals out there that could stop shutdowns and put pressure on Congress to get the spending job done on time. How long can we overspend? Well, interest, I think, is currently in the area of 2\1/2\ percent. If people lose confidence in the Federal Government, we will have to pay a higher interest rate in order to get the money to cover the debt. Yes, we have to pay the interest. If we default on the interest, the country defaults. If that interest rate were to go from the current 2\1/2\ percent to the normal 5 percent, we would only be able to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You didn't hear me say anything about defense. You didn't hear me say anything about education. You didn't hear me say anything about infrastructure. You didn't hear me say anything except Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. That is what happens if people lose confidence in this, if they think we are overspending continually and that we don't intend to get control over it. I will tell you a few other things that you might not be aware of. Did you know that most Federal dollars are spent without Congress ever voting on it a second time? Those are called mandatory programs. Once a program is approved in the mandatory category, that spending is never voted on again. Worse yet, no one hardly ever looks at the program to see if it does what it was supposed to do. Nothing should be mandatory that doesn't have a source of revenue--that is, money--sufficient to fund it into the future. Do you know what that would amount to if we had that kind of rule on mandatory? Social Security no longer brings in as much money as we pay out. Medicare doesn't bring in the money that we pay out. Medicaid doesn't bring in the money that we pay out. In the mandatory programs, there are probably only about four that have a source of revenue to fund them. The rest all take money from the general fund, which means that the general fund doesn't really have any money for the discretionary things that we vote on--you know, that big fight we have once a year come October 1 to fund the rest of government--and mostly defense is in that category. I don't get invited to speak at many places. It is kind of depressing. But once the program is approved, mandatory spending is never voted on again, and no one looks at the program to see what it is supposed to do. They still get their annual money, even though some of these programs have expired. They had an expiration date, and we went past the expiration date, which means the program shouldn't exist anymore, but it does, and we continue to fund it, not only at its previous, expired level. We keep adding cost-of-living increases for it. Yes, it is probably needed, but what is the money really doing? No business would be in business if they didn't check even more than annually to see what is working effectively and eliminating those that aren't. We should be doing that task. When was the last time you saw a program eliminated around here? I have been here 23 years. Nope. Then there is the problem with program duplication. When I got to Washington, there were 119 preschool children's programs. Those are really important. If kids get the learning they need before they go to kindergarten, it makes a difference in the rest of their life--but 119 programs? Senator Kennedy and I worked together and merged quite a few of those. We eliminated some--so there are some programs that got eliminated--and we got that down to 45 programs. Five would probably do the job. We did pass an amendment to a bill that said that those had to be pared down to five programs, and that all of them had to be under the Department of Education. The reason we weren't able to get [[Page S969]] below 45 is because we didn't have jurisdiction over those in Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Those were all in other groups. In the area of housing, we have 160 programs--160 programs--and they are administered by 20 different agencies. So really, nobody is in charge. So nobody is setting goals. So nobody is checking to see if it is working. Nobody is checking to see if the program over here in one of those 20 is the same as the program over here in another one of the 20, which would allow them to be merged. Merging saves money. If you merge, you only need one director, instead of two, and you don't need all the assistants there were. You only need the assistants for one program, and the money that would be stuck in Washington can actually go to what we thought was going to get done. Every merger results in savings. Elimination results in more savings. How much better would it be to move the money to where the results are? The proposed budget reforms that Senator Whitehouse and I have worked on would provide for portfolio reviews. Here is how that works. Each committee would have to look at all of the programs, of the type that would be in their jurisdiction if it weren't handled in a bunch of other places. So those other places would have to look at the ones under their jurisdiction. If we can get that portfolio review, I think we would find that some of those areas where we are doing it time after time, mostly by just adding to Washington bureaucracy. We want the money out there where the problem is. We think we are solving problems, but we are not solving problems. We are just hiring more people in DC. We used to have a policy that the last person hired would be the first person fired and that resulted in an increase in government, too, because as soon as you got hired, you could expand your workload so you needed an assistant, and now you weren't the first in line to be fired. That has resulted in a lot of people working in Washington. How much money actually makes it to the problem? We ought to see if the money makes it to the people or if we are just increasing Washington bureaucracy. Over the next few weeks, I will be going into some detail on each of these problems with budgeting. I will also be promoting the budget reforms that Senator Whitehouse and I and the Budget Committee have put out favorably. I think that is the first budget provision in about the last 2 two decades that has come out of the committee in a bipartisan way. Now, I could tell you that the reforms that we proposed will not solve all of the problem. You can't take that big of a leap when you have that big of a problem. But while those reforms will not solve the problem, they should help to make the solutions more noticeable. We are having trouble getting that on the floor, too. I really came to the floor to eliminate some of the concerns about the President's budget. I want people to know that they don't all have to fly to Washington to make their case to the Budget Committee for their program. Once the Budget Committee sets the parameters, then, the detail comes into play with the Appropriations Committee. Talk to your appropriators. They spend the money--the exact dollars. Do your work there, but be sure your program is as effective as it can be. Also, take a little look at how many similar Federal programs there are. See if there can be a savings by merging some, thus getting more money out in the field where you are and getting more money on the problem. Once again, the President's budget came out today. It consists of a set of documents a foot high. In my opinion, the whole pile should be replaced with a list from the President of what he thinks are pretty good ideas to do this year and, hopefully, there will also be a little piece in there that says how you can pay for it. So don't waste any time searching out the President's budget program cuts. Congress doesn't pay any attention to the President's budget exercise. That is all it is--an exercise. Congress holds the purse strings, according to the Constitution, and Congress is very protective of that constitutional authority. Now we need to do the work that goes with that authority. I yield the floor. ____________________
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