Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from New Mexico and also the Senator from California for her contribution to the debate. Let me begin by saying what we are talking about here. Sometimes we jump into subjects assuming everybody knows what we are talking about and it is not altogether clear. We are talking about bringing natural gas from other countries into the United States to put in our pipelines, which then would be transported to be used in our industries, which use it to make chemicals and cars and other things, such as our industry which makes fertilizers for our farmers, and to use it in our homes so we can heat and cool them. We have a terrific problem with natural gas. There is a lot of talk about gasoline, a lot of speeches being made about the prices at the pump. That is by far not the biggest problem we have in the United States right now in terms of energy. Our biggest challenge is the price of natural gas. Now, why is that? For example, down in Tennessee--I have used this example many times, but it sticks out vividly in my mind--there is a company called Eastman Chemical. They employ 10,000 or 12,000 people-- blue-collar workers, white-collar workers. They have for three generations. Forty percent of their cost is natural gas to make chemicals. There are 1 million blue-collar workers just like that across our country. The price of natural gas in the United States is at a record level. It has gone from the lowest in the industrialized world to the highest in the industrialized world at $7 a unit. If it stays there, more and more of those jobs are going to be in Germany and other places where it is cheaper. So if we do not bring the gas in, the jobs are going out. Now, how can we get a greater supply of gas? The Domenici-Bingaman bill has everything in it to help do that, but most of it is over the long term. New nuclear power would help, but it will be a few years. Coal gasification with carbon sequestration would help, but it will be a few years. Oil savings will help. It will take a little while, too. The only thing that is going to help right now is new supplies--and it is pretty hard to get that in the United States--conservation--that is really where we ought to start--and the only thing left is liquefied natural gas. The experts--the American Gas Foundation--say to us, if we bring in liquefied natural gas, the price of $7 a unit might go down. It might go down to $5 a unit. These jobs might stay here. These farmers might not have such a big pay cut, and the homeowners might get a break. But if we do not bring in natural gas, which is a very small part of our supply right now--2, 3, 4 percent--if we do not bring it in, the price of natural gas may be $13 a unit. That will be a crisis for this country. It will not matter what the price of gasoline is in this country. If the price of natural gas is $13 a unit, we will not have anybody with enough money to buy gasoline because they won't have any money. They won't have a job. Their job will go overseas. Why are we not bringing in more liquefied natural gas? Because we need terminals to store it in before we put it in our pipes. We only have four. We need a few more. We have 31 applications for those onshore and offshore. But we have a process that is broken. It is filled with uncertainty. It is in the courts. If we do not give it some certainty, the jobs will go overseas, the farmers will be taking a pay cut, and the homeowners are going to be paying bills they cannot afford to pay. So what the Domenici-Bingaman legislation does is give it some certainty. Now, there is always the question of, What is the right balance of Federal authority--when you are dealing with foreign commerce and a national issue like this and security and safety--and local input? I find myself usually on the same side of the debates as the Senator from California. She was a mayor. I was a Governor. And I do not think we raise the principle of federalism high enough in our debates. But it does not always trump everything. I happen to think the Domenici-Bingaman proposal is the right balance. First, what it does is it streamlines and makes more efficient the site process. In other words, if you want to file an application for a liquefied natural gas terminal, you go to one place. That would be the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It has the responsibility. Someone needs to have the sole responsibility for siting these plants. Then, what do you do about State and local governments? Well, there were a lot of choices. One choice would have been to cut them out. That is not the proposal here. I would not have supported it if it were. Here is what a Governor can do: A Governor has many rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act in terms of the location of an LNG terminal. If a Governor objects under the Coastal Zone Management Act, it is true the Secretary of Commerce might override them. But in a country that values federalism, if a Governor objects in a strong way, that is a very powerful decision. But even if the Governor were overridden, the Governor has some other tools at his or her disposal, if the Governor objects. There is the clean water certificate, which the State issues. There is the clean air certificate, which the State issues. Nothing in this act changes that. The State still has to do it. So there are three: the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. Now, in addition to that, nothing in this legislation speaks of eminent domain. We do not grant eminent domain. There is no explicit grant of eminent domain in this legislation, and there are local zoning and land use planning rules in almost every community that would have to be respected. So I believe if I were the Governor of a State and I really did not want an LNG terminal, I would have plenty of tools in my arsenal to make my case. We have 31 applications around the country. We only need a few more LNG terminals. It will be better for the regions of the country if they are located in the proper place. I do not know why the people in New York City would want to pay super-high natural gas prices. If they do not, they need a terminal up there so the gas does not have to be shipped up from New Orleans. So all these factors have to be taken into account. But my points are these: I believe the Domenici-Bingaman legislation has achieved the right balance on crisis issues. If there is one thing this legislation does--this whole bill does--that is important, that will affect the largest number of Americans, it is it will lower the price of natural gas. This may be the most important provision in the bill for that purpose because it will permit the bringing in of an immediate supply of natural gas. When the supply comes in, the price should stop going up and, hopefully, begin to go down, especially if all the other provisions in here--for conservation, alternative energy, oil savings-- are used. So I commend the Senator for his proposal. It is the right balance. I believe it is the most crucial part of the legislation we are considering if what we want to do is bring down prices. It gives the Governor a good measure of authority and respects local zoning and land use issues sufficiently to permit us to go forward and find a few more places. My guess is there will not be a natural liquefied gas terminal unless there is some consensus within the community and the State that it should be there.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The answer to the Senator is the reason we are doing this is that he is advocating a national windmill policy instead of a national energy policy, which has spent billions on windmills. We ought not subsidize the destruction of our national treasures, such as the Grand Canyon, the Great Smokies, and we ought to tell people first. This bill doesn't prohibit the building of any wind project, affect anything already going on, or give FERC any new authority. The reason Senators Alexander, Warner, Landrieu, McCain, Allen, Voinovich, Brownback, Burr, and Bunning all support it is because it says and the National Parks Conservation Association says no subsidies to destroy our views of our national treasures and more local controls. Please vote yes. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Virginia. I am glad we have had this opportunity to discuss this issue tonight. I believe, if we had an opportunity to come to a vote, we would likely have a majority vote, more than 50 votes for the idea of giving more individual States the right to drill for natural gas offshore, the same right that four States already have. Why would we do that? It is because the single most important thing that this Energy bill, which is a superb bill as it has been developed, can do for the American people is to lower the price of natural gas. We talk a lot about gasoline at the pump, but by far the bigger problem for millions of American blue-collar workers, for millions of American farmers, and for millions of American homeowners is the high price of natural gas. To lower the price of natural gas, we have a number of provisions in our legislation. One is conservation. We have very strong conservation. One is make electricity in new and different ways. We would like to encourage nuclear power, but new reactors are a few years away. We would like to encourage coal gasification and carbon sequestration, but that is a few more years away. We would like to bring in more natural gas from overseas, but that leads us down the same road on natural gas as on oil. Part of our solution is to increase our supply at home, and we have a lot of it. But here is the price. If we think American jobs are going to stay in the United States when the price is $7 and headed up, when the price in Canada is $5.50, in the United Kingdom it is $5.15, and in Turkey it is $2.65, we are kidding ourselves. We are saying let's don't look for natural gas at home. The Senators from Florida do not want natural gas from Florida, and neither do I, if they don't. And the Senators from North Carolina do not want it off the coast of North Carolina, and neither do I, if the Senators and the people of North Carolina don't. But what we have suggested in the amendments I have proposed, with Senator Tim Johnson in the national gas price reduction bill, and it would be before this legislation, and what the Senator from Virginia has said, is let them do it. That would mean the Governor of Virginia could put a gas rig more than 20 miles out to sea. One gas rig would equal 46 square miles of these windmills that everybody seems to love. One gas rig, that you could not see, out to sea would bring you enough revenue to create in Virginia a terrific reserve fund for the university system and to lower the taxes, and it would bring to us in the United States a supply of gas to lower the price of natural gas so the workers at Tennessee Eastman can work in Kingsport, instead of flying to Germany to go to work, which is what they will have to do, and the farmers will not have to be taking a pay cut, and the homeowners can afford to pay their bills. So we need to have, as part of our solution, an increased supply of natural gas. I believe there are 51 votes in this Chamber for that. We cannot get to a vote tonight, but I think we have made great progress. A year ago, we could not even get this body to agree to take an inventory of the natural gas we have offshore, and we have lots of it. This year we passed that inventory. A year ago, nobody would even speak about the idea of giving a State, such as Virginia or South Carolina or North Carolina, the option of deciding for itself that out on the water, where it cannot be seen, it bring in this resource and use it instead of raising taxes. I think that is an option a lot of Governors and legislatures are going to want. We are contributing to the debate and moving in the right direction. Florida may want to not do it, but I predict there will be a day in Florida, 5 or 10 years from now, when somebody is going to say: We are going to have to have a State income tax. And somebody else will say: Well, maybe we can go 50 miles offshore, where nobody can see gas rigs, and drill for gas and avoid a State income tax and also contribute to the supply of natural gas in a way that would keep jobs in America, lower the cost for farmers, lower the cost for the auto companies, and lower the cost for homeowners. Lowering the price of natural gas is the single most important thing this energy legislation can do right now for the American blue-collar worker, American homeowner, and American farmer. Having some new supplies of natural gas is a part of the solution, and giving States the option would be a good way to do it, in my opinion. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a listing of companies and associations supporting expanded offshore development.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I want to voice my support for the sense of the Senate resolution on climate change offered by Senators Domenici, Bingaman, and myself. I believe that there is a problem with global warming. And I believe that there will be a mandatory national program to reduce carbon emissions sooner or later. I will be prepared to vote for controls on this when it is clear how they will be implemented. For now, I support the market-based incentives approach to reducing carbon emissions proposed by Senator Hagel and passed by the Senate yesterday. I do not expect us to be able in this Congress to put together a mandatory carbon reduction program, but I do expect to be working in hearings as soon as next month on this important issue.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his good example and his leadership in this legislation. I especially salute the Senator from Nebraska for having the unerring good judgment to suggest to us the right next step. This Energy bill we have been debating in the last 2 weeks and working on for the last several months is really a no-carbon, low- carbon energy bill. Since carbon in the air is the principal contributor to the worry about global climate change, this bill is the solution to that problem. There is still a lot of work to do, and there are a lot of minds that are changing, studying, assessing the science, and trying to make certain we make good policy judgments here. But anyone who watches this debate or reads it closely should understand that, in my view, the Senate is developing a clean energy bill. The Senator from Idaho said it was a climate change energy bill. But it represents, to me, a recognition that it is time to take a more significant step toward putting us on a path of transforming the way we create electricity in this country and use energy so that we can produce less carbon. A big part of that is the concern we have about what we might be doing as human beings to cause global climate change. So the Senate is like a big train: it is hard to get started, but once it gets going, it moves steadily down the track. We are moving steadily down the track toward a completely different emphasis on the production of electricity and the use of energy, and the whole focus is no-carbon and low-carbon. Sometimes we elected officials have a way of saying things like that, and they just turn into little programs that don't amount to much. That is not the case here. This is the whole core of this piece of legislation. If you are really trying to create a way to produce electricity in a country that uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world--and that is what we do--you have to start with conservation. This legislation, the Domenici-Bingaman legislation that is before us, begins with provisions about efficiency, and it has in it provisions that will shave off between 20 and 40 percent of the anticipated growth of energy demand by 2015. It would save the equivalent of building 170 300-megawatt plants. So we begin with conservation and we begin with efficiency. No. 2, the bill--before we get to the Hagel amendment of which I am glad to be a cosponsor--puts a focus on the one way today that we create carbon-free electricity far and above everything else, and that is nuclear power. If we are worried about global warming, the solution is nuclear power. Nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity. We know how to do it, we invented it. We have never had a single reactor accident in the dozens of Navy vessels that are powered by nuclear reactors that we have used since the 1950s. We have shipped this technology to France which now is nearly 80 percent in terms of supplying its electricity from nuclear power. Japan builds new nuclear powerplants every year. If we care about low-carbon, no-carbon electricity, after we have aggressive conservation, we should make it easier to produce nuclear power, and in a variety of ways this legislation does that. Waiting in the wings, if we care about low-carbon, no-carbon power, is an example of what the Senator from Georgia talked about. We call that coal gasification with carbon sequestration. That is such a long- sounding title that nobody could possibly imagine what it is. But what it does is it simply takes this hundreds and hundreds of years' supply of coal that we have and turns it, by burning it, into gas, and then we burn the gas. That gets rid of the sulfur, the nitrogen, and the mercury, but it leaves the carbon. The technology of carbon sequestration is to take that carbon and store it in the ground or do something else with it. As the Senator from Nebraska has said, if through his initiative, his incentive program, we are able to encourage the science and technology capacity of the United States and the world to advance through demonstration coal gasification, reduce its costs somewhat, and then to solve the problem of carbon sequestration, that is the single best way, after nuclear power, to create clean air in the world. Many in the environmental community prefer it to nuclear power because of their concerns about storage of spent fuel and about proliferation. So conservation, nuclear power, and coal gasification with carbon sequestration are the ways to solve any concerns we might have about global warming because, especially with the Hagel-Pryor provisions, we are able to accelerate that technology not just for ourselves but for the world. We also have in this legislation important support for solar power which has basically been left out of our renewable production tax credit. It has not gotten any of the money--almost any of the money. Biomass, which is becoming more important, wind power--many of my colleagues know I think we have gone overboard on wind power, but there are substantial generous provisions in here. Add up all those renewable fuels and they are a few percent. They are important, but we have to put them in their proper perspective. There is an oil savings amendment in this bill that reduces the amount of carbon in the air. And then there is the tax title to the Energy bill that we will be considering later this week which Senator Grassley, Senator Baucus, and their committee have produced which--with a couple of exceptions, which I will talk about at another time--I think is a great step forward. It would have to be considered a low- carbon, no-carbon tax title with clean energy bonds for certified coal property, with consumer incentives for hybrid and diesel vehicles. There is an amendment being discussed, of which I hope to be a part, that would add incentives to retooling automobile plants so that we can see that those hybrid cars and advanced diesel vehicles are built in the United States and not in Yokohama. There is in the tax title energy-efficient proposals to support energy-efficient appliances and buildings. There is in the tax title support for investment tax credits for the coal gasification plants I mentioned. There is in the Energy and Natural Resources bill a new financing procedure that Senator Domenici has envisioned which would be loan guarantees for all of these forms of clean energy. There is support for solar deployment, and then there is support for advanced nuclear power facilities so that we can build smaller, less expensive nuclear power facilities. All this adds up to a clean Energy bill that puts its focus on low- carbon and no-carbon electricity. What Senator Hagel has done is say that is a good direction, but let's accelerate it by encouraging technology. It is not a top-down idea. It is to say to someone in Tennessee or Minnesota who might be producing carbon in their business or a utility: Bring us your baseline. Tell us how much carbon you have been producing. Tell us how much less you plan to produce. Then this board would create the incentives for that, and we would see where we go with that. There are other important steps, and we are about to debate one of them. Senators McCain and Lieberman have worked hard to take us to what I would call the next generation or the next step, which would be mandatory caps on carbon. I have supported one version of legislation that has a mandatory cap on carbon. It was the bill introduced by Senator Carper last year. I did it primarily because I care about clean air, and I wanted less sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury in the air, and it had more aggressive standards than the President's proposals. But it also included a carbon cap and that fitted my understanding of where the technology is. The more I have studied this I think the Hagel approach is the better approach because it fits with the low-carbon legislation which we have. It accelerates it, gives it some juice. Then I like what Senator Domenici said last night in his statement about the discussions we have been having with Senator Bingaman about his proposal for the possibility of caps. Senator Domenici said we should begin immediately, in July, holding hearings on the Hagel legislation and on whatever the next steps might be. In other words, this is not just passing an energy bill and then wait 10 to 15 years and pass another one. This is recognizing we have created a completely different direction for production of energy and electricity in the United States; that we are adding to it with the Hagel amendment; that we have serious proposals from Senators McCain and Lieberman, and Senator Bingaman has made some. The National Commission on Energy Policy, many of whose suggestions are a part of this bill, have made some. So my hope is that Chairman Domenici and Senator Bingaman, if we should adopt the Hagel amendment, will take us to the next step in July and August and let us see how we might implement it and where we might go. Speaking as one Senator, this is a significant shift of direction. I am not willing to go further with mandates at this point. I like the concepts, but I am leery of applying such a complex, detailed set of mandates as some have proposed to such a big complex economy as we have today. I prefer the Hagel approach. It is the right next step. It fits easily into this no-carbon, low-carbon Energy bill. I salute the Senator from Nebraska and the Senator from Arkansas for their leadership. I look forward to voting for it.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, we are talking today about whether to find out how much natural gas we have offshore. Let me try to put that in personal terms. In the mountains of east Tennessee, we have a company, Tennessee Eastman. Mr. President, 10,000, 12,000 jobs are there. They have been good-paying jobs for several generations. They make chemicals at Eastman Chemical. Their raw material is natural gas. The cost of that gas has gone from the lowest in the world to the highest in the world. If it stays that way, those jobs will not be in Tennessee; they will be moving overseas. There are 1 million blue-collar manufacturing jobs in America in the chemical industry that depend on natural gas for a raw material. We must lower the price of natural gas. We can do it by conservation. That is in the Domenici-Bingaman bill we are considering. We can do it by nuclear power, which we need to accelerate. Support for that is in the Domenici bill. We can do it someday, we hope, by coal gasification. But right now we have $7 gas, the highest in the industrial world, we are building all our new powerplants for natural gas, and we are refusing to find out how much natural gas we have offshore to supply more and reduce the price. So we have farmers who are taking a pay cut, homeowners who cannot heat and cool their homes, we have blue-collar workers across this country who are going to have their jobs shifted overseas, and what we are saying is we do not even want to know how much gas we have. We can have a later debate about whether to give more States the option, as Texas does, as Louisiana does, as Alabama does, to drill for oil and gas. You can do it today 20 miles offshore. You will never see it. It is environmentally clean. That is not the debate here today. The debate today--and the Presiding Officer brought it up last year-- if we are in a crisis on natural gas, if we have jobs moving overseas, why don't we want to know how much natural gas we have? So I hope we will oppose this amendment and support the Domenici- Bingaman legislation, which puts us on a path toward a low-carbon production of energy plan for our future. It is an essential part of that. I hope we defeat the amendment and support the Domenici-Bingaman legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I have been yielded 4 minutes of Senator Bingaman's time.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I salute today the students who participated in the National History Day national contest that was held last week at the University of Maryland. More than 700,000 students in grades 6 through 12 from all over the country chose topics, researched, and presented their projects at State and local competitions this year. I am proud that 52 students from Tennessee made it to Washington. I especially want to recognize two of those students, Daniel Jordan and Tyler Sexton, eighth graders at St. John Neumann School in Knoxville. Their National History Day project is a documentary on Sequoyah's Syllabary, which they presented at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Sequoyah was a Cherokee warrior who was born in east Tennessee and created a syllabary, which is often called the Cherokee alphabet. He was born in 1776 in the village of Tuskeegee, which was very near Vonore, TN, where the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is located. Daniel and Tyler say the seed for their documentary was planted during a visit to the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum. The two boys got tired and decided to sit on several bales of hay in the center of a field. After a few minutes, two Cherokee approached the boys and explained that they were sitting on a holy prayer circle. The boys apologized profusely and removed themselves, but not before they learned more from Star Medicine Woman and Elk Dreamer about the Cherokee Indians, especially Sequoyah and the relation to present-day culture. The boys were fascinated and appreciated the kindness shown to them. Along with congratulating these outstanding students, I also recognize their teacher, Judy Buscetta, who is the winner of the National History Day in Tennessee's Teacher of the Year award. Daniel said it best in a letter he wrote to me to let me know he was going to be in Washington. He said: Without good teachers, we do not have a chance. I am proud of Judy and Daniel and Tyler. Students and teachers like them are who I had in mind when I introduced legislation along with the distinguished minority leader to put the teaching of American history and civics back into our classrooms, so our children grow up learning what it means to be an American. I am proud that the Presidential academies for teachers and congressional academies for students in American history and civics through the Department of Education are beginning this summer as a result of Congress passing and the President signing that bill into law. I have also introduced legislation with Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to create a 10-State pilot study to provide State-by- State comparisons of U.S. history and civics test data for 8th and 12th grades administered through the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, to assess and improve knowledge of American history. I appreciate National History Day and its commitment to improving the teaching and learning of American history in our schools. I also appreciate Daniel, Tyler and Judy, fellow Tennesseans, who are working to keep history alive.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I will ask the Senator from Ohio a question. I walked in about two-thirds of the way through his remarks. Do I understand that this is legislation that helps reduce sulfur in the air by retrofitting diesel engines so they comply with the new EPA requirements for low sulfur?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I commend the Senator from Ohio. He has spent a long time in this session working on clean air legislation. As one Senator, I am extremely interested in that for our country. The Great Smoky Mountains--2 miles from where I live, and on the other side is the Senator from North Carolina, the Presiding Officer--is the most polluted National Park in America. Many of our counties are not in attainment. Our biggest problem is sulfur. But NOX is also a major problem. Of course, a major contributor is the big diesel trucks on the road. One of the President's greatest accomplishments in terms of sulfur is tighter restrictions on the fuel that will be used in these trucks. They also are major contributors to NOX, nitrogen oxide. My understanding from my visits and discussions with people who know about the big trucks is that the retrofitting of these older engines is not as good as a new engine, but it is a very substantial--70 or 80 percent as good as having a new engine. I look forward to reading the legislation. The Clean Energy Act that we are working on is not the Clean Air Act that the Senator spent so much time on, but clean energy is the solution to the clean air problem. I am glad the Senator is bringing this to our attention. I look forward to reading it. It looks like a welcome contribution.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am tempted to ask why we should have to raise electric rates in Tennessee to build windmills in North Dakota, even as much as they like them. I would prefer to send every single one of these gigantic public nuisances to North Dakota if they want them. What I object to is raising our electric rates to build them. That is what we are doing. I want to go back over carefully what Senator Bingaman said earlier about the letter, describing his proposal. The one thing we can be sure about, regarding the Bingaman proposal, is it is a multibillion dollar increase in electric rates on the bills of most Americans. Surely in Tennessee it will be, because here we are, referring to this map. Senator Domenici pointed out the white area on the map. The prior Presiding Officer is from South Carolina and the present Presiding Officer is from Florida. They find themselves here in the white area. There is no wind down there. Now, it is true that under the Bingaman amendment, they might try to make enough electricity from solar or from geothermal or from biomass. But what the letter says is two things. The letter from the Energy Department describing the proposal of the Senator from New Mexico says it will cost an $18 billion increase in electric rates between now and 2025 in order to start making our electricity out of this limited number of ways that we call renewable energy, instead of the way we normally would do it. And if we are not able to do it--if in Tennessee, Florida, or South Carolina we cannot meet the 10 percent with big windmills or solar or biomass or landfill gas or geothermal, then we write a check to the Government. So we pay a tax or we raise our rates or we do both. Now, the Senator from New Mexico did correctly go back to the letter of June 15 and point out I had said that the letter from the Department of Energy says that, over 20 years, the cumulative total cost of the electric power sector is about $18 billion for this amendment. We have been having a big argument down here about the Clean Air Act, whether to take the President's version or, say, the Carper version, which I cosponsored. According to the Environmental Protection Agency analysis, the difference is a $5 billion effect on the economy, and everybody was shooting off rockets about that. This is $18 billion. But the Senator from New Mexico said keep reading the letter. It says: . . . cumulative expenditures for natural gas and electricity by all end-use sectors taken together decrease by $22 billion. That would look like the net increase was almost nothing. The problem with that is that assumes the price of natural gas is $5. That also looks at the year 2020. If you go out to 2025 with no RPS, according to the Energy Information Administration, the cost of natural gas is $4.79 and the cost with RPS is $4.79. What I am saying is, I do not believe we can count on a reduction in the price of natural gas to $5 to offset this $18 billion increase in our electric rates that this amendment will produce. The Senator from New Mexico is perfectly entitled to say: If you do not believe their estimates about natural gas, why do you believe their estimates about the increase in the cost of electricity? And he would have a point. But I think the one thing we can be sure of about the new mandate of the Senator from New Mexico is that it is a multibillion- dollar rate increase of some number. We do know in the area where the Senator from Florida lives and where I live, if the utilities produce what they are more likely to produce, they will produce electricity using nuclear power, which is carbon free, and coal. I am told that today the cost of nuclear, after it is built, is 1 cent per kilowatt hour, coal is 2 cents, natural gas is 4.8 cents, and wind is 4.8 cents, and these preferred methods in the Bingaman legislation all cost more. In other words, this is an order to Tennessee and Florida to not do what we would normally do but do this limited number of renewable fuels and, in the process, pay for it with a big increase in our electric rates. The Tennessee Valley Authority has just announced it is considering a 7-percent rate increase. I recruited a lot of automobile plants to Tennessee. I know that aluminum is made from electricity, an electrolysis process. If these electric rates go up too much, those jobs go overseas. They will be gone by 2020 and 2025 if we put in an $18 billion increase on electric rates. You may assume that natural gas will go down to $5 a unit. It is $7 today. Or it might not go down to $5 a unit. But it looks to me, under this mandate, the only way electric rates can go is up. Also, the EIA letter says there is no appreciable decrease in NOX to clean the air, no appreciable decrease in sulfur dioxide to clean the air, and the price of natural gas does not go down. By the year 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, the price of natural gas is $4.79, with an RPS or without it. What we have before us is a proposal to select out a very few nice sounding ideas and say let's charge the ratepayers of America $18 billion to put them in and hope the price of natural gas goes down over 20 years to offset it. That is what we are saying. We are assuming during all that time there is no growth in nuclear power. Why would we be over here even talking about spending $18 billion to create tens of thousands of new gigantic windmills to run the American economy and spending $11 billion to produce by 2025 one-fifth of 1 percent of our total electricity in solar? That is what this would do. Why don't we do something that we know would create large amounts of carbon-free electricity? I can go to that list. We know that nuclear power produces 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity. For those who care about global warming--and I am one Senator who does--I do not want to rely on windmills and solar energy that produces one-fifth of 1 percent of our total needs to get us where we need to go in terms of carbon-free energy. So why don't we take this money, if we have it, and accelerate advanced nuclear powerplants, accelerate carbon recapture and sequestration, spend a reasonable amount on solar, accelerate coal gasification powerplants, accelerate conservation and energy efficiency. That is the way you have carbon-free air--conservation, nuclear power, coal gasification, and carbon sequestration, not tens of thousands of windmills. I am not anxious to go home to Tennessee and say: We are worried about the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indians taking our jobs and buying up the oil reserves, we are worried about our clean air, gasoline prices are high, natural gas prices are at a record high, and our solution: tens of thousands of windmills. The Senator from New Mexico said there are many things that can be done, but the EIA letter which he cites has an estimate of what the effect of this mandate would be. It could be more or less, but this is what it says. It says we will have 35,100 new gigantic wind mills. That is a lot. We have 6,700 today, and we will have 35,000 new wind mills. Let me take an example of these wind turbines. There is one new nuclear powerplant being opened in America today and that is at Browns Ferry. It is about 2,000 megawatts. If you had 2,000 1-megawatt wind turbines, that would spread over an area two times the size of the City of Knoxville, TN. But 2,000 would not produce the same energy you get from that one nuclear powerplant because wind turbines only work 20 to 40 percent of the time, so you have to have 4,000. So it is an area two or three times the size of Knoxville, TN, and you do not even get to close the nuclear powerplant because people want their electricity all the time, not just when the wind blows. The Senator from North Dakota mentioned he had gotten a nice subsidy for his two big wind turbines in North Dakota. Well, that is terrific. So now they have three subsidies to build these two giant windmills. We committed $2 billion of taxpayers' money--that is such a preposterous number for this purpose, I can barely speak it--$2 billion of taxpayer money over the next 5 years for windmills. The Finance Committee suggested another billion. This mandate would, by causing those who cannot produce enough wind to write a check to the Government, be yet another subsidy, and if you know the Senator from North Dakota, you can get a third subsidy to build windmills. Why don't we get the same amount of interest in conservation, nuclear power, coal gasification, and carbon sequestration and really clean up the air? There is one last point I would like to make, and I will be through. The Senator from Idaho talked about the landscape a little bit. I think solar power is terrific. I have an amendment with the Senator from South Dakota to expand solar-produced power. Production tax credits have gone all to wind and left out solar power. Biomass has a great future. I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I had always thought that the great American outdoors was one of the most essential parts of our character. Egypt has its pyramids, Italy has its art, England has its history, and we have the great American outdoors. I do not think it is right for us to subsidize the building of these gigantic machines which are twice as tall as a football stadium and extend from 10-yard line to 10-yard line that can be seen for 20 miles away and destroy the American landscape when there is no real purpose for it. At the same time, we have unreasonable, massive subsidies to the developers to do it. I hope we will defeat this amendment, and that is a part of the reason. I will not be through looking at these subsidies for wind power before we get through. I do not think any of us should be embarrassed that it is not right to destroy and scar the American landscape by building these what I believe are public nuisances when instead we could be producing carbon-free energy by conservation, nuclear power, coal gasification, and carbon sequestration. This is an $18 billion increase to the ratepayers of America. Maybe you believe that the lower price of natural gas in 20 years will make up for that. I would not count on it. regional capacity

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. While both Senators from New Mexico are in the Chamber, all of us appreciate the way they have brought this extremely important bill together. We know there are a handful of tough issues about which we disagree. Through their leadership, we have a consensus on what is well on its way to being an American Clean Energy Act for 2005, something that will dramatically transform the way we conserve energy, produce energy, and will help us keep our jobs and be more competitive in the world marketplace. That is our goal. I also believe it will lower natural gas prices. And I thank the chairman and ranking member for their contributions. At the end of our committee markup, during which the vote was 21 to 1, there were compliments thrown all around. Senator Bingaman said he couldn't remember a party-line vote in all the votes that we had, that we were voting based upon our own individual views and our regional differences. Senator Cantwell said it was not only a clean energy bill, but it was a clean process. But that doesn't mean that when we disagree, we shouldn't disagree. And we have differences of opinion. That is what the Senate is for. While I respect the other side for what is a high-sounding idea, the idea of a renewable portfolio standard, I believe there is a better way to spend these billions of dollars than the way suggested by Senator Bingaman, if our real goal is to create an adequate supply of low-cost, reliable American-produced energy. It is always important to start from the proposition that this is a big country and a massive economy. We use 25 percent of all the energy in the world, and we spend about $2,500 a year per person to produce that. So when we put up a windmill that only blows 20 or 30 or 40 percent of the time, it doesn't matter much in terms of what we do. When we build a new nuclear power plant, which we haven't done since the 1970s, it matters a lot. A windmill would be one of 6,700, but that power plant would be only 1 of 1,300 or 1,400 power plants we have in the country. So it takes quite a bit to affect our energy policy. There are three reasons I hope my colleagues will vote against the renewable portfolio standard. The first reason is that it is an $18 billion tax. It is a new $18 billion rate increase on the electric ratepayers of America. The second reason is it is an increase in subsidy for a number of people, especially wind developers who already include a huge subsidy of a couple billion dollars over the next 5 years, which the Finance Committee has recommended we increase to $3.3 billion over the next 5 years just for giant windmills. Three, if not technically, it is at least in the spirit of an unfunded Federal mandate, the kind of thing that a lot of us were elected to stop, the idea of coming up with a big idea here in Washington and imposing it on the rest of the country and then sending them the bill. I was thinking about this: We are all going to be going home in a couple of weeks, having debated the Energy bill and hopefully having passed it, feeling good about it. Our constituents are going to ask: What did you do about high gasoline prices? What did you do about high natural gas prices? What did you do about the possibility of blackouts so my computer wouldn't work and so I wouldn't be safe in my home? What did you do about the fact that China and India and other parts of the world are buying up oil reserves and growing their economies and creating constant pressure on the price of oil? What did you do about that, Senator, while you were in Washington over the last couple of weeks? I wonder if what we really want to say to our friends who elected us when we go back to Tennessee or Nevada or New Mexico is: I raised your taxes $18 billion. I put a new $18 billion charge on your electric bill. That is the first thing I did. The second thing I did was I gave an increased subsidy to people who were already getting a lot of money. Windmill developers are making $2 billion over the next 5 years just to put up these giant windmills. We gave them another subsidy on top of that. And then the third thing I did was, since we all get smarter when we go to Washington on the airplanes, we decided that despite the fact that 17 or 18 States are already defining renewable energy sources in their own ways and already trying to meet them and already giving them incentives, we decided we would decide that better. We would decide that from Washington, DC. While I am not sure about this, at least in earlier versions of the proposal, in a number of cases the credit you got for what you were doing according to your State renewable portfolio standard doesn't count towards your national renewable portfolio standard. I don't think I want to go home and say to the people of Tennessee that what I did about the growth of China and India and the threat to their jobs and what I did about high gasoline prices and natural gas prices, what I did about blackouts was to add $18 billion to their electric rates, to give a big subsidy to windmill developers, and to put an unfunded mandate on top of what States ought to be doing for themselves. There are better ways, if our goal is to produce low-carbon or carbon-free electricity, which is what this debate is really all about. This debate is motivated by those who feel most strongly about global warming and about low-carbon and carbon-free electricity. There is a better way to do that, particularly if we have $18 billion. I want to talk about that a little more as we go along. The Senator from New Mexico, as he always does, gave a very careful and well-reasoned explanation of his points of view. His proposal is a little different from his proposal made in 2003. I want to go through why I said what I said and make sure my point of view is understood. Let me begin with the idea of the $18 billion. I didn't just pull that out of the air. This is a letter from the Department of Energy in Washington dated June 15, 2005, to Senator Bingaman. He quoted some of it. It talks about a number of things. It does talk about some places where in the whole economy there might be some reductions in expenditures as a result of the RPS based on their monitoring. But it also says the following: From 2005 to 2025, the RPS has a cumulative total cost to the electric power sector of about $18 billion. . . . This cost includes $700 million in payments to the Government for compliance credits once the price cap is reached and $10.7 billion in payments to owners of customer-sited photovoltaics that are eligible for triple credits. In other words, we are going to spend $11 billion in payments for solar power. Let me start by talking about what we mean when we say renewable energy. Some people get confused about ethanol, renewable fuel, and renewable energy. We are not talking about ethanol. We are only talking about renewable energy, making electricity. There are only a handful of ways to do that that make much difference. Senator Bingaman has defined those very narrowly. Wind is one, giant windmills. Geothermal is another. That is hot water coming out of the ground to heat your home. Hydropower is one, but we exclude hydropower except for very limited new hydropower in this bill. Solar is another, using the sun. And biomass, putting grass and/or other things into coal plants and burning them is yet another. Today, all of those renewable fuels produce a little over 2 percent of the electricity. Since the 1970s and 1980s, we tried very hard to encourage more. I can remember President Carter 20 years ago setting a goal of 20 percent of solar energy. In 1992, the wind developers said: We can make wind electricity out of wind, just give us a little bit of money to help get started, and then we will be off on our own. That was 1992. Billions and billions of dollars later, wind is still not very much because that is not the best way to produce carbon-free electricity for an economy of this size, to compound the problem by putting new taxes and new subsidies on the American people at a time when we are supposed to be talking about lower prices. I haven't heard anybody say: I want higher natural gas prices. I want to pay a higher electric bill. We are talking about higher prices, 18 billion new dollars on your electric rates. And for what? To build tens of thousands of windmills and to spend nearly $11 billion producing what will end up being one- fifth of 1 percent of all of the electricity that we will produce. That would be the solar electricity. I am all for solar power. I have an amendment for solar power with Senator Johnson that we introduced as part of the Natural Gas Price Reduction Act. It would spend $380 million over the next 5 years for businesses and homeowners who want to use solar power. It would help that industry get started and see if it could go on its own without huge higher costs. But this is nearly $11 billion for solar power to produce one-fifth of 1 percent of all the electricity in the United States. After solar, tens of thousands of these windmills is the other major expenditure along with biomass. So what we are talking about to begin with is wind and biomass and solar and landfill gas and geothermal, and trying to take that from 2 percent up to 10 percent. To do that, we are going to put an $18 billion tax increase on. Now, let's go to the second objection I have. That is the size of the subsidy and the people to whom the subsidy is going. I have been doing a little investigating. It is hard to get these numbers down, to try to see how much money we are spending for this kind of fuel, so I could see if we could better spend it some other way. I have noticed that we are spending about 1 percent of our--we have something called the renewable electricity production tax credit. So far, it has been really a tax credit for windmills because solar hasn't had the chance to take advantage of it. It pays you 1.8 cents for every kilowatt hour of wind power that you produce. Now, wind has become--according to many of the utilities who buy and sell wind power--a fairly competitive product where the wind blows. Of course, where it doesn't blow, no amount of subsidy will help it. So we have already committed $2 billion in our Tax Code over the next 5 years to subsidize wind producers. And the Finance Committee, yesterday, said they want to add a billion to that. The Finance Committee also said they not only want to subsidize the production of the kilowatt hours of power, they want to loan money so developers can build these giant windmills. Some people may think I am talking about your grandmother's windmill out by the well somewhere pumping the water. I will have to make one correction in trying to describe these. I have said only one will fit into the second largest football stadium in America in Tennessee. The Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum, reminded me that Penn State is larger than the University of Tennessee, and I stand corrected on that. But even at Penn State, and even at the University of Michigan, which is the largest, or the University of Tennessee, which is third largest, just one of these windmills will fit in the stadium. The rotor blades extend from the 10-yard line to the 10-yard line, and it rises twice as high as the skyboxes, and you can see the red lights from 20 miles away on a clear night. These usually come in groups of 10, 20, or 30 windmills. This proposal would have the effect of increasing the number of these gigantic windmills from about 6,700, which we have in America today, to 45,000. That is the estimate of the Energy Information Administration. Each of these produces about 1 megawatt of power--or to be accurate, is rated to produce about 1 megawatt of power. The wind only blows 20 to 40 percent of the time, so it only produces about a third of a megawatt of power. Also, you have to take into account the fact that since these often are built in remote places or on top of scenic ridges, then you would build large transmission lines through backyards to carry the electricity to places. And you have to take into account the fact that you cannot close down your coal plant and nuclear plant and your natural gas plant when you put up windmills because people don't want to shut off their computers, stop working, or turn off their lights. They have to have their electricity all of the time, and you don't store power from wind in these amounts to use later. So the idea that the United States of America would look to the future to keep its jobs and competition with Japan, with China, and with India--our country that uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world--by taxing its ratepayers $18 billion to build tens of thousands of windmills and, as good as solar power is, to spend $11 billion on solar power, which will produce one-fifth of 1 percent of all of the electricity we need in this country--I don't believe, respectfully, it is the best way to spend our money. The third point is this about the States, and the Senator from New Mexico mentioned about what the States are doing. Someone said, ``Senator Alexander hasn't gotten over being Governor.'' Maybe, in a way, I hope I never do because I don't think you automatically get smarter when you fly to Washington, DC. I know the Presiding Officer goes home almost every weekend. You gain a lot of wisdom while you are at home, and not here. To the extent that it is a good idea for electric utilities to begin to use a variety of different renewable sources, I submit that they are already doing it. They are working hard on it. The Governor of California made a major address the other day about the use of solar power in California. There are 19 States, plus the District of Columbia, that have some form of RPS today. They have all sorts of different approaches to this. Iowa met its standard in 1999. Connecticut increased its standard in 2003. Texas has a well-regarded standard. They use different definitions of renewable sources of energy. Maine defines renewable to include pulp and paper waste and black liquor. Pennsylvania has a clean energy portfolio standard that includes waste coal. Connecticut includes fuel cells. The Western Governors Association includes clean coal. I have a number of examples of how, under Senator Bingaman's 2003 proposal, which I have studied since his new proposal came just today, which I have not studied as closely, but there were a number of cases where the credits at the local utilities would be received under their State plans, but they would not be allowed under the Federal plan. So we would be saying in Washington, DC, we see that in 19 States you have this idea of more renewable energy, but we are going to do that ourselves. We are going to preempt the field, we are going to set the rules, we are going to define it, and we are going to spend $18 billion our way instead of your way. I think that is unwise, Mr. President. So the three arguments that I make against the Senator's amendment are these: One, it is an $18 billion new tax on ratepayers to build tens of thousands of windmills and to spend $11 billion on solar power, which would produce one-fifth of 1 percent of all of the electricity we need by 2025. That is not the wisest use of money, and I don't think that is what we want to say to our constituents when we go home. Second, it adds an unneeded subsidy, especially to wind developers, who we are giving $2 billion already over the next 5 years to build these gigantic windmills, which mars the landscape and only work 20 or 40 percent of the time. The only reason they are being built is because of these huge subsidized incentives. I predict that if legislation like this passes and we go from 6,700 to 45,000 of these big windmills, you are going to have an uprising in every State of people who don't want to see them and wonder why we are taking $18 billion away from their electric bills and subsidizing things like this. Third, I trust the States. Nineteen of the States have an RPS, plus the District of Columbia. These are the green ones on the chart, where you see more capacity for renewable fuel. If you put a 10-percent standard on Louisiana or Arkansas or Florida or Tennessee or Virginia, and we cannot meet that standard, what do we do? Our utility just writes a check to the Government under the RPS. It is a new tax, it is a new rate increase, and that is not the kind of thing we ought to be doing. What should we be doing? Let me go back to my first chart, and then I will conclude my remarks. I like the direction of our bill as it is. You see, I think what our bill, as written, does--and it hasn't been widely noted, and the Senator mentioned this a while ago--it would transform the way we produce electricity in the United States. If we really want carbon-free air, if we want to meet the Kyoto standards, stop the global warming that people are concerned about, you are not going to do it by building tens of thousands of windmills and spending $11 billion on solar panels. Here is how you will do it: conservation and efficiency. The Domenici-Bingaman bill that is here already would save us from building 45 500-megawatt gas plants just because of appliance standards. The hybrid car incentives coming from the Finance Committee will encourage the buying of 300,000 hybrid cars, resulting in more efficiency, less carbon in the air, and encouraging our auto industry to transform, as many of us hope they will do. If we do that, we should spend another $750 million, not on windmills, but on giving tax incentives to auto plants in the United States that retool to be able to produce hybrid cars. If we give incentives to buy those cars, we want them to be built in Tennessee, Michigan, or elsewhere in this country, not in Yokohama. If we spend a new $750 million for that purpose, which is a recommendation of the National Commission on Energy Policy, it will help to create 39,000 new automobile jobs in the United States. Senator Feinstein and Senator Snowe have a proposal for energy- efficient appliances and buildings. The cost, over 5 years, is $2 billion. Some of that is in the legislation. But more could be spent on it to great effect. Coal gasification powerplants. We have talked about nuclear, so I will go to nuclear; $2 billion for deployment of advanced nuclear power plants. Mr. President, if we want carbon-free air, we know how to get it. We get it from nuclear power. Twenty percent of all of our electricity in this massive economy of ours that uses 25 percent of the energy in the world is from nuclear power today. So why would we subsidize windmills and solar panels instead of spending $2 billion on advanced nuclear power plants? France does it. They are 80 percent nuclear. Japan has one new nuclear plant a year. We have not started one since the 1970s, although we have dozens of Navy ships docking at our ports around the country with nuclear reactors that have never had a problem. So $2 billion for advanced deployment of nuclear power. Right behind that, waiting in line--and I know both Senators from New Mexico agree with this--is coal gasification in powerplants, along with carbon recapture and sequestration technologies. If this could work, this would back up nuclear power and produce the large amounts of low- carbon or carbon-free energy that not only we need in the United States but that the world needs. If we do it here, they will do it there. If we don't do it, they will not, and they will produce so much pollution and junk in the air that it won't matter what we do because the air will blow around on top of us. I mentioned solar energy development. I think there should be a substantial increase for solar energy development. The production tax credit, since 1992, has done nothing for solar power. It virtually all goes to wind. But an appropriate amount of money would be, over 5 years, $380 million. That is even more than the Finance Committee recommended. Under the RPS, we are talking about $11 billion collected from increased rates and spent to produce one-fifth of 1 percent of the electricity we need in 2025. Mr. President, I want low-carbon air. I want to transform the way we produce electricity. But I also want lower electric rates. The Tennessee Valley Authority just raised our rates 7 percent. That is a high rate increase. That means there are some manufacturing plants in Tennessee that are going to think twice about whether the jobs stay here or the jobs go somewhere else. If we start putting new taxes and new rate increases on homeowners and manufacturing plants in Tennessee and around this country in order to build tens of thousands of windmills and this extent of solar power, we will not be taking the wisest course. I suggest we support the bill as it is written, and to the extent we have dollars, let's spend it on hybrid vehicles, auto jobs, energy efficiency, coal gasification, modest, reasonable solar energy, carbon recapture research, advanced nuclear, and cogeneration projects. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. So he has the longest lineage--his family does, I believe--of anyone in the territory we now call the United States of America. He has made a terrific contribution on energy. I appreciate his remarks. We have come a long way in our work on energy over the last couple of years, and while we still have some important differences of opinion-- we saw some of those expressed today--they are differences of emphasis, important differences of emphasis. I don't want to minimize that. For my part, I see us moving toward a different way of thinking about how we produce energy in this country. We have gone from having the lowest natural gas prices in the world to the highest. Gasoline prices are too high. We see that despite all of our efforts to reduce our use of oil, we are still importing more oil than we should. So we need to do things differently. My formula for doing that is largely representative of the bill that was reported 21 to 1. First, conservation and efficiency. I heard the Senator talk about that. Second, new supplies of natural gas, as well as oil try to get the price of natural gas down for farmers, for homeowners, and for businesses. To do that, unfortunately, we will have to import liquefied natural gas for the next few years. Otherwise, we will be exporting jobs. We can either import some gas or export the jobs, one or the other--that is going to be our choice--so we have an adequate and substantial supply of low-cost American-produced clean energy. We then need to aggressively move on nuclear power, and we aggressively need to--and I believe there is a consensus on this--we aggressively need to explore the best technology for clean coal gasification and to make that work best to see if we can find a way to capture the carbon that is produced and put it in the ground. If we are able to do that, we then will have enough clean energy to run this economy and keep our jobs here as well as set an environmentally good example for the rest of the world. I hope that is the path we are on. I salute the Senator for his contributions.

Mr. ALEXANDER. That is my understanding.

Mr. ALEXANDER. That is true. In the case of wind power, it was suggested to the Senators in the early nineties, give us a wind power production credit for a few years and then it goes away. If it goes away and it costs more, the ratepayers will end up paying for that higher cost power.

Mr. ALEXANDER. That is my understanding.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Yes, that is correct.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, when I go home on the Fourth of July and my constituents ask what I did about high natural gas prices, high gasoline prices, about our competition with China and Japan and India to keep our jobs, I am going to tell them I voted no on the Bingaman amendment to order utilities to make 10 percent of their energy from a limited number of renewable fuels, because it is an $18 billion electric rate increase over 20 years. At a time of high natural gas prices, high gasoline prices, the last thing we should do is an $18 billion electric rate increase over 20 years. The distinguished Senator from New Mexico will tell us that it will be offset by natural gas reductions, but that is only if there is a $5 natural gas rate in 2025. One thing we know is, it is a big electric rate increase when we should be reducing prices.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado for his remarks on energy and for his work on the Energy Committee this year. The Senator from Colorado is new to the Senate. I have not been here that long myself, but it is refreshing to see him here. I loved it when someone asked, How long have you have been in the United States--12 generations or 13?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Jeff Muhs, a science fellow in my office, be granted the privilege of the floor during the pendency of the energy.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary of the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in case the President may be wondering, and I asked consent about this, these are 7,000 regulations. We have 6,000 autonomous institutions of higher education in the United States, colleges and universities. The Presiding Officer comes from the State that has some of the finest colleges and universities anywhere in America. I will not begin to name them because there are so many of them I might leave one out. Every single college or university, public or private, in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Colorado which has students with Federal grants or loans gets all of these boxes this year. These are the Federal regulations under title IV of the Higher Education Act that somebody at the smallest college or the biggest university must wade through in order to help students have Federal grants and Federal loans. The Federal grant and Federal loans are one of the great success stories of the United States of America. I will talk more about that. Mr. President, 60 percent of our college students and university students at those 6,000 public and private and profit and nonprofit institutes of higher education, 60 percent of them have a Federal grant or loan to help pay for college. That has increased over the last 4 or 5 years about 10 times faster--9 times faster--than State funding for higher education. But my goal today, in my remarks and in the bill I am introducing, is to make it easier for boys and girls and men and women who attend our colleges and universities--and many of them are mature, older students--to make it easier for them to go through these documents. And then, on the other hand, to make it easier for our colleges and universities to comply with all these rules and regulations. I would like for them to be spending their time and their money helping our students learn instead of spending their time and their money reporting to us what they are doing. That is the purpose of what I want to do today. I am introducing the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005, a bill that does what I just described. It will help students get access to available financial resources. Second, it will reduce the burden on colleges and universities imposed by Federal regulations so they can devote more of their time doing what they are meant to do: provide the highest quality postsecondary education in the world. And third, it will ensure that the autonomy and independence of our 6,000 institutions of higher education are preserved. I am delighted I am able to interrupt the energy debate to talk about higher education because I think while it sounds like we are shifting gears, they really go together. If I am looking at our country today, and I had to take an exam this minute about the two greatest issues facing the United States of America, I would say, No. 1, terrorism, and, No. 2, competitiveness. ``Competitiveness'' a big word, meaning: How are we going to keep our jobs? How are we going to keep our standard of living in this country when we have 5 or 6 percent of the people in the world, and yet we produce a third of all the money, consume 25 percent of all the energy? And China and India and Singapore and Malaysia, not to mention Japan and Europe, are saying: Wait a minute. Our brains are as good as those American brains. A lot of our students have been going to the United States, creating jobs for those Americans. In fact, 572,000 foreign students are in this country today, basically improving our standard of living by their work here. So we are in a very competitive time. Just as we have been saying in energy, here comes China, here comes Malaysia, here comes India buying up the oil reserves, driving up the price. Here comes Germany and other parts of the world with lower natural gas prices than we have. And our jobs are going toward them. The other thing we could do to ensure our good jobs and to keep our higher standard of living is to focus on our brainpower. The great advantages the United States of America has had since World War II have been our low cost, reliable supply and access to energy, our science and technology edge, and our educational institutions. There are so many examples of that. Mrs. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior Senator from Texas, and our majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, had a little session in the leader's office last year. They invited the former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He was concluding his residency at the Library of Congress. I remember after he had said what he had to say, we asked our questions. Senator Hutchison asked of President Cardoso: Mr. President, what is the one thing you are going to remember about the United States from your stay here at the Library of Congress that you will take with you back to your country of Brazil? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: The American university, the greatness and the autonomy of the American university. I will tell you another story. A few years ago, I was asked to be the president of the University of Tennessee. It was 1988. I was glad to do it. I had been chairman of the board of the university for 8 years as Governor, and I appointed a lot of the trustees, but I was not a skilled university president. So I sought out David Gardner, the president of the University of California, which I regard, with all respect to North Carolina, at least at that time, to be the outstanding public university in America and perhaps one of the best in the world. I said to David Gardner: Why is the University of California so good? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: First, autonomy. When California created the university--they created four branches of government, really: legislative, executive, judicial, and then the University of California. He said: Fundamentally, they give us the money, and then our board and we decide how to spend it. Our autonomy has permitted us to do the second thing, set very high standards. And then he said the third thing was the large amount of Federal dollars that follows students to the educational institution of their choice. So autonomy, excellence, and choice--Federal dollars following students to the schools of their choice. That is how David Gardner explained the California model for excellence in higher education. That model has worked for our country since the GI bill for veterans was enacted in 1944. I have wondered many times how we were fortunate enough to have decided to do it in the way they did it. This was for the veterans. It was the end of World War II. There were college presidents who were very upset about the idea of giving the veterans money and just telling them to go wherever they wanted to go to college. The president of the University of Chicago said it would make the University of Chicago a hobo's jungle. But we know what it did. We had veterans coming back and taking their GI bill. Many of them took it to Catholic high schools and other high schools because they had not finished high school. But they went wherever they wanted, to any accredited institution. They went to Yeshiva. They went to Vanderbilt. They went to the historically Black colleges and universities across America--Harvard. It did not matter. If it was accredited, they chose the institution. The same formula was applied when the Pell grants were created by this Congress in honor of Senator Pell, who was a former Member of this body; as is true with Senator Stafford and the Stafford loans. Instead of giving those grants and loans to the University of North Carolina and the University of Tennessee, they went to the student. The student then said: Well, I will decide where I want to go. I may want to go to Rhodes College, or I may want to go to Lenore Rhyne or I may want to go to the University of Florida or Yeshiva or Howard. They go where they want to go. Because of that, we now have 6,000 autonomous institutions around the country. Many of them are nonprofit. Many of them are for profit. Eighty percent of our students go to public institutions, but 20 percent go to private institutions. Because it is a marketplace of 6,000 institutions, and some are, of course, better than others, because it is a marketplace, we have been able to adapt to a changing world that now has different subjects, different standards, a more global environment, and students who are, by and large, much older and have different needs than they did before. If we had not had that kind of marketplace of colleges and universities, we would be stuck in the mud, and we would not have former President Cardoso of Brazil talking so well about our colleges and universities. We do not just have some of the best colleges and universities in the world; we have almost all of them. And the rest of the world knows that. We do not have 572,000 foreign students studying in our country this year because we made them come, or even because we give them scholarships. They pay to come for the most part. They are the brightest students in most of these countries. And 60 percent of our postdoctoral students are from overseas. Half our students in computer and engineering graduate programs are from overseas. They are here for that reason. So we attract these students. The Federal Government has continued to be generous. So there are two things I am introducing today with this bill. Number one, this legislation would simplify the financial aid process and expand access for students. We do it in these ways: (a) streamline the forms for Federal grants and loans, making access to student financial aid easier; (b) provide students who want to expedite their education and study year-round the Federal support to do so; (c) provide students with financial information about colleges and universities in a clear and concise manner that does not require additional reporting from institutions. The second purpose of the bill is to protect that autonomy, that one word, that independence, that autonomy of these 6,000 institutions. That is, in my view, a critical element of why we have the best colleges and universities in the world. What I mean by that is we did not order them to be good from Washington. That is not how they got to be great. They were autonomous and independent. We allowed them to be, and then we gave them students, followed by money, who created a competitive marketplace. And they became the best in the world. So this legislation eliminates, streamlines, and evaluates regulations currently imposed on institutions of higher education with the goal of lessening the burden on schools. That way, universities can focus more on teaching and researching and less on maintaining reporting requirements for the Federal Government. The bill, No. 1, appoints an expert panel to review Department of Education regulations and to recommend how those regulations might be streamlined or eliminated. Two, it accelerates the ``negotiated rulemaking process'' whereby universities negotiate new rules with the Department so that an end result can be reached without costly delays. And three, it develops a compliance calendar so that universities know what requirements they have to meet and when they to have meet them. What I mean by that is, it will be up to us in the Federal Government to send to the University of North Carolina or Maryville College in Tennessee a list of the rules they have to comply with so they don't have to hire a whole team of people to try to wade through and read everything. This is just one title of the Higher Education Act. It has several titles. So a compliance calendar would help deregulate. These changes build on the successful model for American higher education. By making the financial aid process more user friendly and more accessible, more students will have Federal funds following them to the college or university of their choice. And by relieving some of the Federal regulatory burden, we are restoring university autonomy so they can spend more time teaching and researching and less time filling out paperwork. I have two major purposes. The first is to simplify and expand access to financial aid, to make it easier for the 60 percent of our college students who fill out a form to get a Federal grant or loan; and second, to reduce the burdensome paperwork on the colleges and universities. In terms of simplifying access, we need to remember that the faces and needs of our college students have changed. More typically these days, when I go to a graduation--this has been true for a number of years--the cry you hear from the audience is: Way to go, mom. It is the mom who is getting her degree, or the dad, going back to school, college, community college, trade school, university to get the skills they need to get a better job or another job in a rapidly changing world. In 1970, we had 7.4 million students, 28 percent of whom were enrolled part time and 38 percent at two-year colleges. Only 28 percent were 25 or older. By 1999, enrollment had grown to 12.7 million, a 7.2- percent increase with 39 percent enrolled part time and 44 percent in two-year colleges. Nearly half our students in 1999 were in two-year colleges. Our financial aid system needs to catch up. The first thing we can do is to simplify what we call the Free Application Federal Student Aid. As one might expect, it is known around here as FAFSA. Imagine that. You go out and try to talk to a family of someone who might be going to college for the first time and that family says let me talk to you about FAFSA. I think we ought to change the name. I think we ought to make it easy for people to understand what we are talking about. I recently met a chief financial officer of a company who said she found the form challenging when helping her high school daughter fill out a form for financial aid. I can only imagine the challenge to a high school student, or a working mother, when trying to answer over 100 confusing questions, the vast majority of which are only applicable for the State of California. So a second thing we can do is make sure students can use the Federal aid for education they need year round. Flexibility for year-round Pell grants is a part of this legislation so students can have the flexibility they need to go and continue their education in the summer. There is a disincentive for that. Not only is that inconvenient for students and working students, it tends to encourage institutions to waste the resources in the summertime, which they should be putting to better use. The third thing we can do is make sure there is more information. That is why I suggest the ``best buy'' list--a list of the 100 schools with the lowest tuition and required fees, with the greatest availability of scholarships and grants. In other words, this would help parents and students decide where they could get the biggest bang for their buck. Many of the ideas that are in our legislation came from the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. Senator Gregg, when he was chairman, and I invited them to work on this. They did a terrific job and they came up with 10 recommendations, 8 of which are in this bill, and I believe they have no cost to the budget. The other area and my final comments have to do with the other side of the ledger. While we are making it easier for students to have access to financial aid, we should work to relieve the regulatory burden on colleges and universities represented by these boxes of 7,000 regulations that contain all the forms any college or university in Florida or Tennessee or North Carolina would receive this year to fill out. Thanks to the last two rounds of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, there are today more than 7,000 regulations associated with the title IV student aid program. With the exception of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, every Federal agency is involved in regulating some aspect of higher education. That is incredible and it is absolutely ridiculous. In 1997, Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University, said Stanford spends 7 cents out of every tuition dollar on compliance with Government regulations. This has only gotten worse in the last 9 years. We need to ease the burden. For example, under the Higher Education Act, universities are required to report how many full-time employees have dental insurance, whether the university is a member of a national athletic association, and the number of meals that are in a ``board'' charge. Colleges are required to hand every student a paper in-State voter registration form and cannot use modern technology such as Web registrations, which would actually reach more students. We are giving university staff busy work to do when they ought to be helping students. Here is another example. When a major chemical company such as DuPont produces 55-gallon containers of a potentially hazardous waste, we require Dupont to report on how all that waste is disposed and ensure that it is done in a certain manner. This is a good regulation and idea. Right now, we are applying the same regulation and paperwork to a chemistry class at a college that might produce half a test tube of the same substance. Mr. President, I don't know about the presiding officer, the Senator from Florida, and I now see the Senator from Virginia; I suspect that when we all go back to our States and speak to our Lincoln Day dinners, or when the Democrats go to the Jefferson Day dinners, we all say the thing we need to do once we pass these laws is to have more oversight and ease the burden of regulation. When I say that, I get a big round of applause, because at home people don't think we get any smarter when we fly to Washington, DC, each week. They think it would be absurd to know there are 7,000 regulations governing college grants and loans, and that Stanford University spends 7 cents out of--and this is a private university--every tuition dollar paying for the cost of Government regulations. One reason we have an increased interest in regulating is because there are a great many Members of Congress, as well as people in the country, who worry about rising tuition costs. I worry about those, too. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we used to have a deal with the students. The State will pay 70 percent of the cost, and you pay 30 percent, and if we raise your tuition, we will raise the State contribution. That has changed, I am afraid, and I think it is important for us to know that. Tuition is not going up because the Federal Government is failing to do its job. Over the last 4 years, Pell grants, work-study, scholarships all gone up about 30 percent. At the same time, over the last 4 years, State spending for higher education is up 3.6 percent. I will say that again. This is according to various educational institutions, including the Center for Study of Education Policy, Illinois State University. In fiscal year 2001, there was a 3.4 percent increase in State funding for higher education. In 2002, there was a 1.2-percent decrease; in the next year, a 2.4-percent decrease. This is State funding for higher education. Last year, there was a 3.8-percent increase--3.6 over the 4 years. So what our colleges and universities are feeling, and what our students are feeling, is decreased State support for higher education. One reason they are feeling that is because we have not given States the tools to control the growth in Medicaid spending. So in Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, our colleges and universities are hurting because the Governors and legislatures are spending the dollars that ought to be going for excellence in universities. They are spending it on huge increases in Medicaid costs. That is part of our responsibility, too. So I come to the floor today to introduce the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005. I invite my colleagues to join me in it. We will be marking up a Higher Education Authorization Act next month. It affects 60 percent of the college students in the United States. I am sure we are going to continue to fund those grants and loans, as we have from here, but we also need to do two other things. One of them is in here, and that is not to get busy regulating more colleges and universities. We should be deregulating. The other thing we should do, which is not a part of this bill, is to keep our commitment to the Governors that, by about the fall of this year, we should give them the legislative tools they need--and I believe also relief from Federal court consent decrees, which are outdated--so they can manage the growth of Medicaid spending, so that in turn we can continue to support higher education. Our energy bill and our higher education bill are at the forefront of our policies to keep our jobs and our competitiveness. Here's one more example: If you grab a pint bottle of rubbing alcohol from your bathroom and take it to a university laboratory, it will immediately fall under the regulation and scrutiny of six different regulatory agencies: (1) the air quality management district, (2) the sewer district, (3) OSHA, (4) the local fire department, (5) the county environmental health department, and (6) the state hazardous waste agency. While all of these are not directly governed by federal regulations, many are responding to them, and we should do our part to reduce this type of burden. In one instance, a prestigious institution in the Midwest was visited by the EPA and a bottle of dishwashing soap was found in a lab near a sink. The institution was fined for improper management of hazardous waste because the label was not still attached to the bottle. Even worse, the institution had to pay to have the soap analyzed to document that it was not hazardous. Colleges are in the business of teaching students, not sending meaningless paperwork to the federal government. To fix this problem, my legislation would establish an expert panel to review federal regulations applicable to colleges and universities and make recommendations to the Secretary of Education and the Congress on how some of these regulations could be streamlined or eliminated. The bill also would assist institutions in complying with all these requirements by requiring the Department to develop a compliance calendar outlining specific deadlines for paperwork submissions. In those cases where there is already clarity about how to deal with regulations, the bill takes action. The bill will accelerate the ``negotiated rulemaking process,'' a process whereby university representatives negotiate new regulations with the Department. Today this process can drag on for years, imposing unnecessary costs along the way due to uncertainty over a final outcome for the rule. Under my bill, that process would have a one year deadline. To give schools a chance to adjust to newly agreed regulations, institutions of higher education would be provided with a minimum of at least 270 days between the publication of any final regulations or guidance and the initiation of data collection related to new disclosure requirements. The bill also reinstates provisions to allow schools with a low ``cohort default rate,'' meaning that less than 10 percent of their students fail to pay all their loans back on time, the option of distributing loan money to students right at the beginning of the year rather than waiting a month or spacing the money out over the period of a year. This is important since students incur many expenses up front during their education and need the flexibility to pay for fees, books, and other costs. Mr. President, since the end of World War II, our system of higher education has been unmatched around the globe. According to the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai University, more than half the world's top 100 universities are in the United States. But our lead is slipping. During a trip to Europe, I discovered that Chancellor Schroeder of Germany is putting a strong emphasis on reforming his country's university system to mirror--and perhaps even eclipse--our own. British prime minister Tony Blair is overhauling his nation's system because he sees a growing gap between the quality of American and British universities. Authorities in India and especially China are working harder than ever to improve the quality of education in their own countries and keep their brightest minds from leaving their countries. Australia and Canada are making strides as well. And, for the first time, we have witnessed a decline in graduate student enrollment. The Council on Graduate Schools estimated that foreign applications to graduate programs in the U.S. were down this year by five percent. This greater competition means that not only do we find it harder than ever to attract foreign students, but our graduates will find it harder to compete for top-paying jobs in the global economy since they will be competing against talented, well-educated individuals from around the world. Now is the time to fine-tune our own system of higher education and restore its greatest strengths: generous financial assistance for students, autonomy, and high standards. Generous support is most effective when students can access it with a minimum of hassle and with maximum flexibility to apply it to their accredited program. Freedom from over-regulation or control by government allows colleges and universities to quickly adjust to the needs of their students and focus on teaching and research. High standards are the natural result of a competitive system where schools compete among each other for dollars and students. My bill restores the pillars of our higher education system and gives us the ability to move forward with confidence in the twenty-first century. I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary of the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in case the President may be wondering, and I asked consent about this, these are 7,000 regulations. We have 6,000 autonomous institutions of higher education in the United States, colleges and universities. The Presiding Officer comes from the State that has some of the finest colleges and universities anywhere in America. I will not begin to name them because there are so many of them I might leave one out. Every single college or university, public or private, in North Carolina, Tennessee, or Colorado which has students with Federal grants or loans gets all of these boxes this year. These are the Federal regulations under title IV of the Higher Education Act that somebody at the smallest college or the biggest university must wade through in order to help students have Federal grants and Federal loans. The Federal grant and Federal loans are one of the great success stories of the United States of America. I will talk more about that. Mr. President, 60 percent of our college students and university students at those 6,000 public and private and profit and nonprofit institutes of higher education, 60 percent of them have a Federal grant or loan to help pay for college. That has increased over the last 4 or 5 years about 10 times faster--9 times faster--than State funding for higher education. But my goal today, in my remarks and in the bill I am introducing, is to make it easier for boys and girls and men and women who attend our colleges and universities--and many of them are mature, older students--to make it easier for them to go through these documents. And then, on the other hand, to make it easier for our colleges and universities to comply with all these rules and regulations. I would like for them to be spending their time and their money helping our students learn instead of spending their time and their money reporting to us what they are doing. That is the purpose of what I want to do today. I am introducing the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005, a bill that does what I just described. It will help students get access to available financial resources. Second, it will reduce the burden on colleges and universities imposed by Federal regulations so they can devote more of their time doing what they are meant to do: provide the highest quality postsecondary education in the world. And third, it will ensure that the autonomy and independence of our 6,000 institutions of higher education are preserved. I am delighted I am able to interrupt the energy debate to talk about higher education because I think while it sounds like we are shifting gears, they really go together. If I am looking at our country today, and I had to take an exam this minute about the two greatest issues facing the United States of America, I would say, No. 1, terrorism, and, No. 2, competitiveness. ``Competitiveness'' a big word, meaning: How are we going to keep our jobs? How are we going to keep our standard of living in this country when we have 5 or 6 percent of the people in the world, and yet we produce a third of all the money, consume 25 percent of all the energy? And China and India and Singapore and Malaysia, not to mention Japan and Europe, are saying: Wait a minute. Our brains are as good as those American brains. A lot of our students have been going to the United States, creating jobs for those Americans. In fact, 572,000 foreign students are in this country today, basically improving our standard of living by their work here. So we are in a very competitive time. Just as we have been saying in energy, here comes China, here comes Malaysia, here comes India buying up the oil reserves, driving up the price. Here comes Germany and other parts of the world with lower natural gas prices than we have. And our jobs are going toward them. The other thing we could do to ensure our good jobs and to keep our higher standard of living is to focus on our brainpower. The great advantages the United States of America has had since World War II have been our low cost, reliable supply and access to energy, our science and technology edge, and our educational institutions. There are so many examples of that. Mrs. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior Senator from Texas, and our majority leader, Senator Bill Frist, had a little session in the leader's office last year. They invited the former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He was concluding his residency at the Library of Congress. I remember after he had said what he had to say, we asked our questions. Senator Hutchison asked of President Cardoso: Mr. President, what is the one thing you are going to remember about the United States from your stay here at the Library of Congress that you will take with you back to your country of Brazil? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: The American university, the greatness and the autonomy of the American university. I will tell you another story. A few years ago, I was asked to be the president of the University of Tennessee. It was 1988. I was glad to do it. I had been chairman of the board of the university for 8 years as Governor, and I appointed a lot of the trustees, but I was not a skilled university president. So I sought out David Gardner, the president of the University of California, which I regard, with all respect to North Carolina, at least at that time, to be the outstanding public university in America and perhaps one of the best in the world. I said to David Gardner: Why is the University of California so good? Without a moment's hesitation, he said: First, autonomy. When California created the university--they created four branches of government, really: legislative, executive, judicial, and then the University of California. He said: Fundamentally, they give us the money, and then our board and we decide how to spend it. Our autonomy has permitted us to do the second thing, set very high standards. And then he said the third thing was the large amount of Federal dollars that follows students to the educational institution of their choice. So autonomy, excellence, and choice--Federal dollars following students to the schools of their choice. That is how David Gardner explained the California model for excellence in higher education. That model has worked for our country since the GI bill for veterans was enacted in 1944. I have wondered many times how we were fortunate enough to have decided to do it in the way they did it. This was for the veterans. It was the end of World War II. There were college presidents who were very upset about the idea of giving the veterans money and just telling them to go wherever they wanted to go to college. The president of the University of Chicago said it would make the University of Chicago a hobo's jungle. But we know what it did. We had veterans coming back and taking their GI bill. Many of them took it to Catholic high schools and other high schools because they had not finished high school. But they went wherever they wanted, to any accredited institution. They went to Yeshiva. They went to Vanderbilt. They went to the historically Black colleges and universities across America--Harvard. It did not matter. If it was accredited, they chose the institution. The same formula was applied when the Pell grants were created by this Congress in honor of Senator Pell, who was a former Member of this body; as is true with Senator Stafford and the Stafford loans. Instead of giving those grants and loans to the University of North Carolina and the University of Tennessee, they went to the student. The student then said: Well, I will decide where I want to go. I may want to go to Rhodes College, or I may want to go to Lenore Rhyne or I may want to go to the University of Florida or Yeshiva or Howard. They go where they want to go. Because of that, we now have 6,000 autonomous institutions around the country. Many of them are nonprofit. Many of them are for profit. Eighty percent of our students go to public institutions, but 20 percent go to private institutions. Because it is a marketplace of 6,000 institutions, and some are, of course, better than others, because it is a marketplace, we have been able to adapt to a changing world that now has different subjects, different standards, a more global environment, and students who are, by and large, much older and have different needs than they did before. If we had not had that kind of marketplace of colleges and universities, we would be stuck in the mud, and we would not have former President Cardoso of Brazil talking so well about our colleges and universities. We do not just have some of the best colleges and universities in the world; we have almost all of them. And the rest of the world knows that. We do not have 572,000 foreign students studying in our country this year because we made them come, or even because we give them scholarships. They pay to come for the most part. They are the brightest students in most of these countries. And 60 percent of our postdoctoral students are from overseas. Half our students in computer and engineering graduate programs are from overseas. They are here for that reason. So we attract these students. The Federal Government has continued to be generous. So there are two things I am introducing today with this bill. Number one, this legislation would simplify the financial aid process and expand access for students. We do it in these ways: (a) streamline the forms for Federal grants and loans, making access to student financial aid easier; (b) provide students who want to expedite their education and study year-round the Federal support to do so; (c) provide students with financial information about colleges and universities in a clear and concise manner that does not require additional reporting from institutions. The second purpose of the bill is to protect that autonomy, that one word, that independence, that autonomy of these 6,000 institutions. That is, in my view, a critical element of why we have the best colleges and universities in the world. What I mean by that is we did not order them to be good from Washington. That is not how they got to be great. They were autonomous and independent. We allowed them to be, and then we gave them students, followed by money, who created a competitive marketplace. And they became the best in the world. So this legislation eliminates, streamlines, and evaluates regulations currently imposed on institutions of higher education with the goal of lessening the burden on schools. That way, universities can focus more on teaching and researching and less on maintaining reporting requirements for the Federal Government. The bill, No. 1, appoints an expert panel to review Department of Education regulations and to recommend how those regulations might be streamlined or eliminated. Two, it accelerates the ``negotiated rulemaking process'' whereby universities negotiate new rules with the Department so that an end result can be reached without costly delays. And three, it develops a compliance calendar so that universities know what requirements they have to meet and when they to have meet them. What I mean by that is, it will be up to us in the Federal Government to send to the University of North Carolina or Maryville College in Tennessee a list of the rules they have to comply with so they don't have to hire a whole team of people to try to wade through and read everything. This is just one title of the Higher Education Act. It has several titles. So a compliance calendar would help deregulate. These changes build on the successful model for American higher education. By making the financial aid process more user friendly and more accessible, more students will have Federal funds following them to the college or university of their choice. And by relieving some of the Federal regulatory burden, we are restoring university autonomy so they can spend more time teaching and researching and less time filling out paperwork. I have two major purposes. The first is to simplify and expand access to financial aid, to make it easier for the 60 percent of our college students who fill out a form to get a Federal grant or loan; and second, to reduce the burdensome paperwork on the colleges and universities. In terms of simplifying access, we need to remember that the faces and needs of our college students have changed. More typically these days, when I go to a graduation--this has been true for a number of years--the cry you hear from the audience is: Way to go, mom. It is the mom who is getting her degree, or the dad, going back to school, college, community college, trade school, university to get the skills they need to get a better job or another job in a rapidly changing world. In 1970, we had 7.4 million students, 28 percent of whom were enrolled part time and 38 percent at two-year colleges. Only 28 percent were 25 or older. By 1999, enrollment had grown to 12.7 million, a 7.2- percent increase with 39 percent enrolled part time and 44 percent in two-year colleges. Nearly half our students in 1999 were in two-year colleges. Our financial aid system needs to catch up. The first thing we can do is to simplify what we call the Free Application Federal Student Aid. As one might expect, it is known around here as FAFSA. Imagine that. You go out and try to talk to a family of someone who might be going to college for the first time and that family says let me talk to you about FAFSA. I think we ought to change the name. I think we ought to make it easy for people to understand what we are talking about. I recently met a chief financial officer of a company who said she found the form challenging when helping her high school daughter fill out a form for financial aid. I can only imagine the challenge to a high school student, or a working mother, when trying to answer over 100 confusing questions, the vast majority of which are only applicable for the State of California. So a second thing we can do is make sure students can use the Federal aid for education they need year round. Flexibility for year-round Pell grants is a part of this legislation so students can have the flexibility they need to go and continue their education in the summer. There is a disincentive for that. Not only is that inconvenient for students and working students, it tends to encourage institutions to waste the resources in the summertime, which they should be putting to better use. The third thing we can do is make sure there is more information. That is why I suggest the ``best buy'' list--a list of the 100 schools with the lowest tuition and required fees, with the greatest availability of scholarships and grants. In other words, this would help parents and students decide where they could get the biggest bang for their buck. Many of the ideas that are in our legislation came from the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. Senator Gregg, when he was chairman, and I invited them to work on this. They did a terrific job and they came up with 10 recommendations, 8 of which are in this bill, and I believe they have no cost to the budget. The other area and my final comments have to do with the other side of the ledger. While we are making it easier for students to have access to financial aid, we should work to relieve the regulatory burden on colleges and universities represented by these boxes of 7,000 regulations that contain all the forms any college or university in Florida or Tennessee or North Carolina would receive this year to fill out. Thanks to the last two rounds of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, there are today more than 7,000 regulations associated with the title IV student aid program. With the exception of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, every Federal agency is involved in regulating some aspect of higher education. That is incredible and it is absolutely ridiculous. In 1997, Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University, said Stanford spends 7 cents out of every tuition dollar on compliance with Government regulations. This has only gotten worse in the last 9 years. We need to ease the burden. For example, under the Higher Education Act, universities are required to report how many full-time employees have dental insurance, whether the university is a member of a national athletic association, and the number of meals that are in a ``board'' charge. Colleges are required to hand every student a paper in-State voter registration form and cannot use modern technology such as Web registrations, which would actually reach more students. We are giving university staff busy work to do when they ought to be helping students. Here is another example. When a major chemical company such as DuPont produces 55-gallon containers of a potentially hazardous waste, we require Dupont to report on how all that waste is disposed and ensure that it is done in a certain manner. This is a good regulation and idea. Right now, we are applying the same regulation and paperwork to a chemistry class at a college that might produce half a test tube of the same substance. Mr. President, I don't know about the presiding officer, the Senator from Florida, and I now see the Senator from Virginia; I suspect that when we all go back to our States and speak to our Lincoln Day dinners, or when the Democrats go to the Jefferson Day dinners, we all say the thing we need to do once we pass these laws is to have more oversight and ease the burden of regulation. When I say that, I get a big round of applause, because at home people don't think we get any smarter when we fly to Washington, DC, each week. They think it would be absurd to know there are 7,000 regulations governing college grants and loans, and that Stanford University spends 7 cents out of--and this is a private university--every tuition dollar paying for the cost of Government regulations. One reason we have an increased interest in regulating is because there are a great many Members of Congress, as well as people in the country, who worry about rising tuition costs. I worry about those, too. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we used to have a deal with the students. The State will pay 70 percent of the cost, and you pay 30 percent, and if we raise your tuition, we will raise the State contribution. That has changed, I am afraid, and I think it is important for us to know that. Tuition is not going up because the Federal Government is failing to do its job. Over the last 4 years, Pell grants, work-study, scholarships all gone up about 30 percent. At the same time, over the last 4 years, State spending for higher education is up 3.6 percent. I will say that again. This is according to various educational institutions, including the Center for Study of Education Policy, Illinois State University. In fiscal year 2001, there was a 3.4 percent increase in State funding for higher education. In 2002, there was a 1.2-percent decrease; in the next year, a 2.4-percent decrease. This is State funding for higher education. Last year, there was a 3.8-percent increase--3.6 over the 4 years. So what our colleges and universities are feeling, and what our students are feeling, is decreased State support for higher education. One reason they are feeling that is because we have not given States the tools to control the growth in Medicaid spending. So in Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, our colleges and universities are hurting because the Governors and legislatures are spending the dollars that ought to be going for excellence in universities. They are spending it on huge increases in Medicaid costs. That is part of our responsibility, too. So I come to the floor today to introduce the Higher Education Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005. I invite my colleagues to join me in it. We will be marking up a Higher Education Authorization Act next month. It affects 60 percent of the college students in the United States. I am sure we are going to continue to fund those grants and loans, as we have from here, but we also need to do two other things. One of them is in here, and that is not to get busy regulating more colleges and universities. We should be deregulating. The other thing we should do, which is not a part of this bill, is to keep our commitment to the Governors that, by about the fall of this year, we should give them the legislative tools they need--and I believe also relief from Federal court consent decrees, which are outdated--so they can manage the growth of Medicaid spending, so that in turn we can continue to support higher education. Our energy bill and our higher education bill are at the forefront of our policies to keep our jobs and our competitiveness. Here's one more example: If you grab a pint bottle of rubbing alcohol from your bathroom and take it to a university laboratory, it will immediately fall under the regulation and scrutiny of six different regulatory agencies: (1) the air quality management district, (2) the sewer district, (3) OSHA, (4) the local fire department, (5) the county environmental health department, and (6) the state hazardous waste agency. While all of these are not directly governed by federal regulations, many are responding to them, and we should do our part to reduce this type of burden. In one instance, a prestigious institution in the Midwest was visited by the EPA and a bottle of dishwashing soap was found in a lab near a sink. The institution was fined for improper management of hazardous waste because the label was not still attached to the bottle. Even worse, the institution had to pay to have the soap analyzed to document that it was not hazardous. Colleges are in the business of teaching students, not sending meaningless paperwork to the federal government. To fix this problem, my legislation would establish an expert panel to review federal regulations applicable to colleges and universities and make recommendations to the Secretary of Education and the Congress on how some of these regulations could be streamlined or eliminated. The bill also would assist institutions in complying with all these requirements by requiring the Department to develop a compliance calendar outlining specific deadlines for paperwork submissions. In those cases where there is already clarity about how to deal with regulations, the bill takes action. The bill will accelerate the ``negotiated rulemaking process,'' a process whereby university representatives negotiate new regulations with the Department. Today this process can drag on for years, imposing unnecessary costs along the way due to uncertainty over a final outcome for the rule. Under my bill, that process would have a one year deadline. To give schools a chance to adjust to newly agreed regulations, institutions of higher education would be provided with a minimum of at least 270 days between the publication of any final regulations or guidance and the initiation of data collection related to new disclosure requirements. The bill also reinstates provisions to allow schools with a low ``cohort default rate,'' meaning that less than 10 percent of their students fail to pay all their loans back on time, the option of distributing loan money to students right at the beginning of the year rather than waiting a month or spacing the money out over the period of a year. This is important since students incur many expenses up front during their education and need the flexibility to pay for fees, books, and other costs. Mr. President, since the end of World War II, our system of higher education has been unmatched around the globe. According to the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai University, more than half the world's top 100 universities are in the United States. But our lead is slipping. During a trip to Europe, I discovered that Chancellor Schroeder of Germany is putting a strong emphasis on reforming his country's university system to mirror--and perhaps even eclipse--our own. British prime minister Tony Blair is overhauling his nation's system because he sees a growing gap between the quality of American and British universities. Authorities in India and especially China are working harder than ever to improve the quality of education in their own countries and keep their brightest minds from leaving their countries. Australia and Canada are making strides as well. And, for the first time, we have witnessed a decline in graduate student enrollment. The Council on Graduate Schools estimated that foreign applications to graduate programs in the U.S. were down this year by five percent. This greater competition means that not only do we find it harder than ever to attract foreign students, but our graduates will find it harder to compete for top-paying jobs in the global economy since they will be competing against talented, well-educated individuals from around the world. Now is the time to fine-tune our own system of higher education and restore its greatest strengths: generous financial assistance for students, autonomy, and high standards. Generous support is most effective when students can access it with a minimum of hassle and with maximum flexibility to apply it to their accredited program. Freedom from over-regulation or control by government allows colleges and universities to quickly adjust to the needs of their students and focus on teaching and research. High standards are the natural result of a competitive system where schools compete among each other for dollars and students. My bill restores the pillars of our higher education system and gives us the ability to move forward with confidence in the twenty-first century. I urge my colleagues to join me in this effort.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I also ask unanimous consent that I may bring in a few boxes of regulations about which I am going to speak on higher education.