Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank Senator Franken for the way he worked with our committee. I will vote for the amendment, and I recommend that others do as well.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my Corps of Engineers fellow, Jen Armstrong, and my Department of Energy fellow, John Rivard, be granted floor privileges through the remainder of the 114th Congress.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on behalf of the Senator from California and myself, I ask unanimous consent that the committee- reported substitute to H.R. 2028 be withdrawn and that amendment No. 3801 remain pending and be considered the committee-reported substitute amendment.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, while the assistant Republican leader is on the floor, I wish to say a word about this chart that I mentioned earlier. He mentioned this is the first bill where we are spending $1 trillion. Most of us on both sides of the aisle, I know especially on the Republican side of the aisle, are concerned about the Federal debt, which is $19 trillion, and we make great speeches about it. But as we begin to talk about the $1 trillion we are about to appropriate in 12 bills, I would like to invite my colleagues to look once again at the bottom line. That is the money we are talking about. This is the $1 trillion that we are working on. It has been flat since 2008. It is going up at the rate of inflation or a little less, but that is $1 trillion. We are spending $4 trillion this year. The other $3 trillion is not what we are working on in these 12 bills; the other $3 trillion is automatic mandatory spending and interest on the debt. If we add interest to that red line, it would be even higher. So I may offer an amendment at some point--maybe not on this bill--to turn the entire budget over to the Appropriations Committee because we are doing our job. We have kept spending down. That is not the problem. I hear that some people may want to say: Well, let's further reduce the blue line. I invite my friends and colleagues to say--we have letters from more than 80 Senators requesting support for projects important in their States, for flood control, nuclear weapons, national labs, deepening harbors, and for inland waterways. We have included in our bill requests from all those Senators. If we cut that blue line by $2 billion, we will need to ask for requests from those 80 Senators about what they would like to cut-- which flood would they like not to clean up, which lock would they like to close, and which nuclear operation needs to be slowed down. We need to be reasonable about this, and we need to be straightforward about it. I want to see us deal with that red line. That is where the real spending problem is. I would like to see us be responsible on the blue line. Senator Feinstein and I have cut a $125 million program. We have control of one big construction project; we are getting control of two others. We are doing our job. As we enter into this discussion, I respectfully ask my colleagues: Let's keep a focus on the two lines. The $1 trillion is the blue line. It is under control; it is not the problem. If that were the debt, we wouldn't have a problem. It is that red line that we are not doing anything about on either side of the aisle. Senator Corker and I have a bill to reduce the growth of that spending by $1 trillion. We are the only two cosponsors. After we do these 12 bills, we can talk about the blue line. But I am going to make sure during this whole process that, if Senators want to talk about cutting spending, they focus on where the problem is. It is the red line--not the blue line--that we are working on, starting with this bill. I thank the Senator for his remarks.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for his leadership and for his comments. He is exactly right. Over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, that red line is projected to increase by nearly 80 percent--nearly 80 percent. The blue line--the one that is reasonably under control--will go up about 23 percent. But the bigger problem is that the blue line, as a share of the Federal budget, will decrease from 33 percent to 22 percent. That is the money for national defense in an unsafe world. That is the money for national laboratories in an economy that needs the job growth that comes from that research. That is the money that cleans up after the Missouri River, the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River flood. It deepens the harbors in Savannah, Los Angeles, San Diego, Gulf Port, and all around. After a big spring flood, I have been to Environmental and Public Works Committee hearings where we have had 17 U.S. Senators come in and ask for more money. Well, we have record levels of funding for the Army Corps of Engineers in this budget for the purpose of locks, dams, flooding, and environmental cleanup, and it is all within the Budget Control Act. We set priorities. We reduced projects. We cut some out that weren't as important. And we have kept that blue line flat. We have done our job on financial oversight. There are a number of advantages to having a full 10 or 12 weeks to deal with appropriations bills. The first advantage is that it allows Senators, such as the Senator from Nebraska, who is not a member of the Appropriations Committee, to have a chance on the floor to offer their amendments if they would like to. The way our system works, Senators may ask us--and, as I mentioned, 77 did ask us--to include some of their ideas and policies in our bill, and we did in every case in some way--in some way. Now we are up in the eighties. Everybody has had a shot at this and will have more of a shot in the next day or two on the floor. So the whole Senate will be involved. That is one advantage. The second advantage is that it will show the American people that we are doing our job, that we are conducting oversight of the government agencies, that we have had four hearings, that we have set priorities, that we have cut out lower priority projects and are getting other projects under control. The third advantage is that maybe we can put a spotlight on the difference between the top line and the bottom line--the red line and the blue line. The blue line is an example of good government. The red line is an example of malpractice. By whom? By us. By which party? By both. By both. So let's be specific. If you are a surgeon, you don't cut off the left arm because your nose is hurting; you work on the left arm. And we don't need to cut off the blue line if the red line is the problem--if the red line is the problem. So as often as I have a chance over the next 2 days, I am going to do my best to remind our colleagues and the American people that we are doing our job on the $1 trillion we appropriate, and Senators will have a chance to help us do our job if they come to the floor with their suggestions. We are not doing our job on the red line, which is mandatory spending, and if we don't do our job, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said it is our greatest national security problem. So maybe it will help over these 12 weeks to have a contrast: the way we should be doing it, the bottom line; and the way we shouldn't be doing it, which is that line that is growing out of control. I welcome the opportunity, and I thank both the majority leader and the Democratic leader for getting things in order so we can have a regular appropriations process for the first time. I remind our colleagues that this is the earliest we have started an appropriations process since the Budget Control Act became law in 1974. The Senator from California has suggested that I remind our colleagues and their staff members that if they have amendments, bring them to our staff, and we will work with them and see if we can include them in the bill, or if Senators would like to offer the amendments, we would like to do that today or tomorrow. There is no need to waste time here. We have 11 other bills we can get to very quickly and other important legislation that is awaiting the Senate's action. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I call up the substitute amendment No. 3801.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 3804.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The senior Senator from Louisiana is here to speak, but I thank Senator Feinstein for her remarks and her leadership. I would remind our colleagues we are open for business, in terms of amendments. Fortunately, 77 of the Senators had made requests that we were able to accommodate in our basic bill. We have talked to maybe a dozen more since then, and are accommodating amendments whenever we can. We would like to begin voting on any other amendments that we need to vote on this afternoon, if possible, so we can move on through the bill and hopefully get to the next appropriations bill. Mr. President, I thank especially the staff of Senator Feinstein-- Doug Clapp, Chris Hanson, Mark Mendenhall, and Samantha Nelson--for the way they have worked with us, whether we are in the majority or the minority. I also would like to thank my own staff--Tyler Owens, Adam DeMella, Meyer Seligman, Jen Armstrong, and Hayley Alexander--for extraordinarily good work. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I rise to thank the Senator from Arizona for his comments. One of the advantages of having a full appropriations process is it puts the spotlight on the money we spend. I am asking to put this chart where the Senator from Arizona can see it. We will be debating 12 appropriations bills hopefully in the next few weeks. This is the first one. It is $37.5 billion. A little more than half of it is defense spending--our weapons, plutonium enrichment, and necessary things for our country--but all of the spending we are talking about in these 12 bills adds up to $1 trillion. The Federal spending for this year is $4 trillion. The money the distinguished Senator from Arizona, Mr. McCain, was talking about is our defense money. It is down here on this blue line. It is in the trillion dollars. It is nearly half of that. As we look back since 2008, this blue line has stayed level. Over the next 10 years it is projected to rise at about the level of the rate of inflation. At the same time, this line, which is the $3 trillion line--mandatory spending, entitlements, all that--is going up. After about 10 years, the end result will be that this will go from about 32 percent of our total spending to about 22 percent. What is that going to do to our defense spending? We have strong speeches made sometimes about let's get the spending under control, but on both sides of the aisle there is not a lot of courage shown when it comes to this red line because this is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, entitlements, and other benefits. It is squeezing out not only our national defense but our cancer research and the other things we need to do as a country. It is important over these next few weeks that we use this as an occasion on both sides of the aisle to recognize what we are doing with money. No one can say this is part of the budget problem. In fact, we have just heard an eloquent speech from the Senator from Arizona, who said we have not spent enough to defend ourselves in an unsafe world. Nobody is doing anything about this.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Of course.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The answer to the Senator from Arizona is, no, it is not. In fact, if it were, this line would be higher. So it is this line plus the interest on the debt.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Yes, it would.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Arizona. I have heard there might be an effort to commit our bill back to the committee in order to reduce spending to a lower level. If we do that, someone needs to say which division needs to lose troops, which country do we not want to defend, which airplane do we not want to fly, and which pilot do we not want to train. We are talking about real decisions, and we are talking about not setting priorities. I don't think most of the American people know that when we talk about the Federal debt, it is not national defense that is driving up the Federal debt. It is in the blue line. It is our unwillingness on both sides of the aisle to confront this. One statistic that I was reminded of by my colleague the Senator from Tennessee is an American family today--think of an average age couple, 50 years of age, would pay about $140,000 into Medicare. They will get back about $430,000 in Medicare. We can understand how people who pay into Medicare would want to get their Medicare back, but we can also understand how that is not a sustainable program, and I think all of us as Americans can see that. One of the things I hope we do over the next several weeks is talk honestly about that problem. We are not solving that problem in this debate. We are talking about this $1 trillion. What are we going to do about the other $3 trillion that adds to our $19 trillion debt? Thank you. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request so we can call the amendments up?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Maryland. Amendments Nos. 3802 and 3803 to Amendment No. 3801

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in the next few minutes, Senator Feinstein and I will submit for the Senate's consideration the first appropriations bill of the year. This will be the Energy and Water appropriations bill. It will be the earliest that any appropriations bill has been submitted since the Budget Act was passed in 1974. This is a good sign for the Senate. It means we are serious about our most basic constitutional responsibilities, which is the oversight of the spending of money, the setting of priorities, and doing it in a way that allows every Senator to participate. I am privileged to be able to work with Senator Feinstein, who is able to come to a result after we have examined an important piece of legislation. She has a background as a manager, as a mayor, as a chairman of important committees, and I am very privileged to have the chance to work with her, whether we are in the majority or the minority. Before I talk about the bill specifically, since this is the first bill, I wish to say a few words about the money we are spending. This year the Budget Control Act, which the Senate adopted in 2015--which was the law passed by the Senate by a vote of 64 to 35, October 30 of last year. This year the Budget Control Act sets the amount of money we are to spend at $1.07 trillion. Our bill, the Energy and Water bill, will be $37.5 billion of that approximately $1 trillion. However, the entire Federal budget is a lot more than $1 trillion. In fact, it is four times as much. The entire Federal budget this year is $3.9 trillion--nearly $4 trillion. We are talking about appropriated dollars of about $1 trillion, plus about 3 trillion other dollars we will spend this year through the Federal Government. Those dollars are what we call mandatory or automatic spending, plus interest on the debt. Federal health care spending, as an example, is about $1 trillion. It is about the same amount as all of the 12 appropriations bills that will be considered. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services head, Mr. Slavitt, is in charge of spending about $886 billion every year-- almost all mandatory spending. The part of the budget we are talking about, and we will be talking about for the next 12 weeks, is one- fourth of the total Federal spending. I thank Senator McConnell, the majority leader, for making this a priority. I thank Senator Reid, the Democratic leader, for suggesting to Senator McConnell and to all of us on behalf of the Democrats that they, too, want to see us move through the process. This gives the American people a chance to see how we spend their money. The American people care about how we spend their money because we have a big debt. There is a lot of talk about that debt, which is $19 trillion. This year, the total revenues of the Federal Government are about $3.36 billion, but the spending is about $3.9 trillion. Elementary school mathematics will show we are adding about $534 billion more to our $19 trillion debt this year. It is important to point out that the spending we are talking about in this bill and the other 11 discretionary bills is not the problem. I would like to ask the Chair to look at the bottom line, the blue line. That is what we call the discretionary spending. That is the money the Appropriations Committee works on. That is the trillion dollars we are appropriating in these bills. It has been flat since 2008, and it is rising at about the rate of inflation over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If the entire budget had followed the path of that blue line on the bottom--that is the money we are in charge of in the Appropriations Committee--we would not have a debt problem. Look where the debt problem is coming from. That is the automatic mandatory spending, that red line. That does not even include the interest on the Federal debt. I have suggested in our conference that maybe what the Senate would want to do is turn the entire budget over to the Appropriations Committee because we are doing our job, and apparently the rest of the Senate--or all of us as a whole--is not doing its job and is running up a big Federal debt. Senator Feinstein and I have been presented an amount of money by the committee and by the Senate that we allocate. We have done that through four hearings. I will be talking about that. We have set priorities, we have cut wasteful spending, and we are beginning to get big construction projects under control. We have eliminated funding for an infusion project in France. That saves $125 million in a year, which we can then put on other priorities. We have the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, TN, now on a project where it will be 90 percent designed before it is built, and it will be on time and on budget before it is finished. We are working with the Armed Services Committee to try to do something similar with a mock facility in South Carolina. We have a red team--the kind of red team that helped us at Oak Ridge and South Carolina--working on the New Mexico construction projects. Working together, our oversight is saving the taxpayers money, staying within the budget, and I am glad to say we are not part of the debt problem. Sometimes we as a full Senate will start working on that top line. Senator Corker and I have a bill that would reduce that top-line growth by $1 trillion over the next 10 years. The problem is, Senator Corker and I are the only cosponsors of the bill, so we will not be talking about that much today. I understand there may be an attempt to change the level of funding that we make, and I will talk about that at the time this afternoon when the amendments come up. So everybody is thinking about that beforehand, No. 1, we are following the law. That is where our budgeting is. No. 2, the Budget Committee of the Senate has begun to start its budget process based upon the number that the law sets. No. 3, our appropriations bills are not the debt problem. The problem is the mandatory spending and interest on the debt, and sooner or later we need to deal with it. Last Thursday Senator Feinstein and I and the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the fiscal year 2017 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill by a unanimous vote of 30 to nothing. Thirty of the 100 Members of this body who are on that committee all voted for it. This bill includes some items very familiar to the American people, things that they would like for us to fund properly, such as flood control; navigation on our rivers; deepening harbors, whether it is in California, Mobile, Charleston, or Savannah; rebuilding locks, whether they are in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, or in inland waterways; the 17 National Labs, which are our secret weapon in job growth across our country; and supercomputing. We seek to lead the world in supercomputing, and it is another great source of job growth. A big part of our budget has to do with nuclear weapons and national defense. At a time when our world is so unsafe, Americans are hoping we can deal with that. We worked together in a fair and accommodating manner under challenging fiscal strengths to create a bipartisan bill. As I said earlier, the sum is $37.5 billion, $355 million more than last year. Reaching a bipartisan consensus wasn't easy. We received an allocation for defense spending that was higher than last year by $1.163 billion but $808 million lower for the nondefense parts of our budget. The funding includes several Federal agencies that do important work, including the U.S. Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Appalachian Regional Commission. We also started with an unrealistic budget proposal from the President, which cut the Corps of Engineers by $1.4 billion and proposed $2.3 billion in new mandatory funding for the Department of Energy. The bill Senator Feinstein and I negotiated supports our waterways and puts us one step closer to doubling basic energy research, helps to resolve the nuclear waste stalemate, cleans up hazardous material at Cold War sites, and maintains our nuclear weapons stockpile. We also conducted intensive oversight of the President's budget request and the Department of Energy. As I mentioned earlier, we eliminated at least one low-priority program which will save about $125 million to reduce waste. That program, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, is located in France and started in 2005 with an initial cost of $1.1 billion, but we have already invested that much and the project will not likely be completed until after 2025. As I mentioned earlier, we worked together to keep the big uranium projects on time and on budget. It is now on time and on budget. It will be 90-percent designed before it is constructed, and we are also working together to control the MOX facility and the facility in New Mexico. Mr. President, 77 Senators submitted requests to us, and we worked hard to accommodate the request of every Senator. We have had many other Senators who have come to us since then with amendments they would like to offer. Most Senators--I would say in the eighties--have something they think is important in this bill. If Senators decide we need to spend less money, I guess they need to be prepared to send us letters suggesting what they would like to take out of the bill, since we put letters into the bill based upon the amount of money the law said we should spend. The last time the Senate passed this bill, the Energy and Water appropriations bill, under regular order was 2009. I look forward to a regular appropriations process. At this time, I will briefly highlight a few parts of the bill. No. 1 is waterways infrastructure. The bill restores $1.4 billion that the President proposed to cut from the Corps of Engineers. It sets a new record level of funding for the Corps in a regular appropriations bill. Many Senators have urged us to do this. There is not a funding line in the bill that has more support than the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps rebuilds locks and dams, dredges our rivers and harbors, works to prevent floods and storm damage, and builds environmental restoration projects. If we had simply approved the President's request, the Corps would have received less than what Congress appropriated in 2006, setting us back more than a decade. In Tennessee, we provided enough funding to continue building a new Chickamauga Lock in fiscal year 2017. Up to $37 million will be available to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to continue work on the Chickamauga Lock. Only last month the Corps reiterated its most recent study that the Chickamauga Lock continues to be the fourth highest priority of essential American waterways to be rebuilt. We included $1.3 billion for the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. This is the third consecutive year we funded the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund consistent with the funding level that Congress recommended in the Water Resources Development Act. This will permit us to deepen harbors, including Gulfport, Charleston, Mobile, Texas, Louisiana, Anchorage, Savannah, and harbors on the west coast. Doubling basic energy research is a goal I have long supported and is one of the most important things we can do to unleash our free enterprise system. Senator Durbin and I worked together on an amendment to the Energy bill that increases the authorized funding levels for the Office of Science by about 7 percent per year, which would double the budget of the Office of Science from a little over $5 billion today to more than $10 billion in 10 years. That is basically the money that the U.S. Government spends on energy research. The Senate adopted our amendment by a voice vote, which demonstrates how much support there is for this goal. The President proposed to spend even more on energy research, including the Mission Innovation proposal, the pledge launched by the United States and 19 other countries at the climate summit in Paris, to double Federal clean energy research over the next 5 years. The problem is that President Obama's budget request proposed $2.259 billion in new mandatory funding for the Department of Energy. However, his commitment to doubling Federal clean energy research with mandatory funding comes at the expense of other resources and other agencies, which is at best unhelpful and at worse misleading. It is wishful thinking, and everyone knows it is not going to happen. Instead, we focused on priorities for discretionary funding annually approved by Congress. That is the bottom line that is under control, and it is not the source of our Federal debt problems. Our top priority was the Office of Science, which includes $5.4 billion to support basic energy research--$50 million more than last year. This is the second year we have been able to increase funding for the Office of Science, which sets a new record level for funding for that office in a regular appropriations bill. This puts us one step closer to doubling funding for Federal basic energy research. The bill includes $292.7 million for ARPA-E, an agency that invests in high-impact energy technologies. The funding is a little more than last year's $1.7 million. The bill also supports the Department of Energy's continued efforts to advance exascale computing and includes a total of $285 million to produce these next-generation computers. Nuclear power provides about 20 percent of our country's electricity and 60 percent of our carbon-free electricity. If we are going to have the abundance of clean, cheap, reliable energy that we want and need, we need to unleash nuclear power by removing obstacles in its way. Our legislation sends a strong signal about our support for new technologies in the next generation of nuclear powerplants. We included $94.5 million for advanced reactors, $21 million more than the President's budget request. We included $95 million for small modular reactors, $32.5 million over last year. One way our bill helps is by taking important steps towards solving our country's stalemate over what to do with nuclear waste--a bipartisan issue and a goal that Senator Feinstein and I agree on and have been working hard to accomplish. Our legislation, therefore, includes a pilot program, which was Senator Feinstein's suggestion 3 years ago, for consolidated nuclear waste storage. She and I introduced that over the past 4 years. The new sites we are seeking to establish will not take the place of Yucca Mountain--we have more than enough useful fuel to fill Yucca Mountain to its legal capacity--but it would rather complement it. We also provide funding for the U.S. Department of Energy to store nuclear waste at private facilities approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, such as the one proposed in West Texas. We are also supporting research in this bill that will help continue the work that is necessary to safely extend nuclear power operating licenses from 60 to 80 years. In my view, that is the simplest, easiest way to have a large amount of new carbon-free electricity in the near term. Finally, this legislation provides a total of $12.9 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration and fully funds the warhead life extension programs recommended by the Nuclear Weapons Council in the design of the Ohio-class replacement submarine. It also supports crucial weapons facilities related to our national security. The bill provides $575 million for the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge, TN. It keeps the project on track to be completed by 2025, at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. The legislation also advances our efforts to clean up hazardous materials at Cold War sites. A total of $5.4 billion is provided to support cleanup efforts, which is $144 million above the President's budget request. This bill adequately funds our Nation's energy and water priorities and fully complies with the spending limits established by the Budget Control Act. The Budget Control Act continues a line of spending for the appropriated dollars, which is the bottom line on the chart. The blue line on the chart, which has been flat since 2008 and only grows with the rate of inflation for the next 10 years according to the Congressional Budget Office, is not the source of the Federal debt problem. The rest of the line spends three times as much as the amount of money we are spending in the 12 appropriation bills we will be addressing for the next 2 weeks. I thank Senator Feinstein for her leadership and cooperation. I urge Senators to support the bill. We are already working on amendments with Senators that they seek to offer. We hope to begin voting on some this afternoon in an open amendment process and thereby proving that the appropriations process works.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask consent that I be permitted to make some remarks followed by the Senator from California, after which the Senate would go back into a quorum call. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Feinstein and I be allowed to speak, me first and Senator Feinstein second.