Jeff Bingaman

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, many of us in this body have tried to resolve the controversies that surround grazing on public lands. We have been working on it for several years. I also believe, as my colleagues who have already spoken believe, that a healthy livestock industry on the public lands is in the best interests of the country. Furthermore, I believe that the continued uncertainty that surrounds this industry, and the continued controversy that surrounds it, benefits nobody. However, unlike some of my colleagues who support this bill, S. 1459, I contend that the uncertainty and the controversy will not be resolved by this bill. I believe it will not be resolved because the bill, as it now reads, in the substitute form, does reduce public input into decisions related to our public lands. It does elevate grazing into a preferred status as a use of our public lands. And, third, it does unduly limit the ability of the land managers who work for the public to carry out their responsibilities. I believe that the resolution of these disagreements and these controversies can only be achieved when a balance is struck that respects the needs of all public land users, not just the ranchers. For a number of years, I and many of my colleagues have done what we could to ensure that any reform effort that was enacted would be fair to both livestock producers and the American public. My colleague has referred to the drought that we have experienced in the West. Certainly we have in my part of the country, in New Mexico. There has been a severe drought, and we are still in a very severe drought which adversely affects anyone who is trying to make a living in agriculture. He also referred to the low prices of cattle. Again, that is a very real problem for people in the ranching industry in my State. I certainly do not dispute that. I think that is a very real concern and one which we are taking into account in the position that I will advocate here today. But the other part was references to the efforts of the Secretary of the Interior to run these people out of a way of life, and to put in place extremely onerous provisions that will terminate their ability to use the public lands. There I have to disagree with much of what my colleague said. Last summer, after many months of meetings, I think probably the most extensive set of public meetings that I am aware of having had conducted, at least in recent years, since I have been in the Senate, the Secretary of Interior and the President did promulgate regulations that sought to achieve a balance between the various uses of our public lands. If we are serious about providing stability and certainty to public land livestock producers, we need to adopt a balanced solution that, first of all, addresses the concerns of livestock producers; second, respects the need of all public land users--the needs that they have; and, third, provides some reasonable authority to the agencies that we have given responsibility to manage the public lands. If we deviate from the balance in either direction, we are merely inviting continued strife and uncertainty as the aggrieved group, whichever group it happens to be, pursues legislative or regulatory fixes. The Babbitt regulations, which have been referred to by my colleague, create some legitimate concerns for the permittees in my State. In the substitute which several Senators and I intend to offer later in the discussion, we try to fix those specific concerns that have been pointed out to us and restore the balance that needs to be there in our grazing policies. However, if we pass S. 1459 in its current form, as the substitute was sent to the desk, we go beyond fixing those concerns and, in my view, we once again will throw the grazing policy of this country out of balance. This lack of balance will fester, just like the permittees' concerns have been festering, and lead to more instability and more lawsuits and more hard feelings. We will likely be addressing this issue again in future years if we err on the side which I fear this bill will cause us to err on. We cannot afford to let that happen. We owe it to the grazing permittees, to their families and communities that rely on the livestock industry, as well as to other public land users and the American public in general, to resolve the dispute now in a balanced and sustainable manner that will withstand the test of time. Mr. President, I want at this point to go through some of the specific concerns we have with S. 1459. In order to do that, let me put up a couple of charts just to keep track of where I am in the discussion. A first concern which I have repeated numerous times--and let me say by way of introduction, the bill we are now considering is not the bill which was introduced last summer by my colleague from New Mexico. It is an improved bill. I think the designation of the earlier bill, S. 852, in my view, was substantially more lopsided and onesided than this bill is, but significant problems still exist in the legislation. Let me go through those. One of those major problems is that grazing is still given preference as a use of the public land over other uses in the legislation. First, let me talk about conservation use. It is ambiguous in S. 1459 whether conservation use of a grazing allotment is allowed. Conservation use is where the permittee would voluntarily refrain from grazing all or a portion of the allotment in order to improve the health of the range. Sponsors of the bill will claim that such uses would be permitted. However, I will submit for the Record a letter that The Nature Conservancy has sent to me concerning this matter, dated March 16, 1996. That letter states, Mr. President, and I will quote a couple sentences: But our qualification-- That is qualification to be a permittee. has been challenged in a case now before the Interior Board of Land Appeals. Part of the argument was that because we were resting an allotment, we could not be said to be ``in the livestock business'' (as required by the regulations that would be reinstated by S. 1459), despite the fact that at other locations we own, raise and sell domestic livestock and depend on the revenues we get from the cattle business to support our operations. Creating a category of ``conservation use'' of Federal grazing permits would make it clear that The Nature Conservancy could hold a permit and rest it. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this letter from Russell Shay, who is the senior policy adviser to The Nature Conservancy.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that two members of my staff, Charles Hunt and Sharon Miner, be given floor privileges during the entire proceedings on S. 1459.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I think it is clear when you analyze the bill--and I am sure we will have more discussion on this--it is clear that entities that are not engaged in the livestock business under the language of this bill could not hold a permit in their own name, and I think that is something we should correct. We will propose to do that in the substitute that we offer. A second concern, which is on this chart--I hope that people can see this; I am sure most cannot--but a second concern that I have with S. 1459, a second way in which grazing is given a preference is that S. 1459 will, for the first time, allow permittees to hold title to permanent range improvements on forest land. For example, under existing law and regulations, a Forest Service grazing permittee is granted a permit to construct a range improvement and the title to that improvement is in the name of the United States. That has always been the law in our national forests. S. 1459 will allow the permittee to hold title in proportion to the value of the contribution that that permittee has made for the cost of construction, and that is a major change for those who are permittees in the Forest Service. A third way in which grazing is given a preference is that S. 1459 statutorily provides for granting private property rights on BLM land as well as on forest land. The old BLM grazing regulations provided only regulatory authority for granting title to permanent range improvements on BLM land. This would take what was in the old regulations promulgated under the administration of Secretary Watt and would put that into statute for the first time. A fourth ground for concern is the wording of the objectives in the bill. Here my reading of the objectives is that they favor the stability of the livestock industry over the needs of wildlife. The objectives are extremely important in this, as pointed out in the Congressional Research Service report, which makes the very important point that under section 105(A), management standards and guidelines are to be consistent with the objectives and become directly effective upon plans by operation of law. Under section 134(A), terms and conditions of a permit must be necessary to achieve the objectives of title I. Therefore the objectives have more significance than would be true if they provided only a general guidance unrelated to particular processes. A fifth concern with regard to grazing being a preferred use of the lands, Mr. President, is that S. 1459 provides for cooperative range improvement agreements with permittees and lessees only. Currently, about 17 percent of all BLM range improvements have nonpermittee cooperators, such as Quails Unlimited. The old grazing regulations provided that the Secretary could enter into a cooperative range improvement agreement with any person. This bill goes further in restricting the Secretary, further than the regulations promulgated in the Watt administration or developed in the Watt administration, and says that the Secretary is only able to enter into these cooperative agreements with permittees and lessees. Let me move to the second of the three major points I want to make at this time, and that is this bill does reduce the extent of public involvement. The first way in which it reduces the extent of public involvement is that it denies the right of affected interests, people who are determined to be affected interests, to protest grazing decisions on public land and national forests. S. 1459 allows an affected interest to be notified of proposed decisions and given an opportunity for comment and informal consultation. However, only an applicant, or permittee, or lessee may protest a proposed decision. Further, in the absence of a timely filed protest, the proposed decision becomes final. Again, referring to the Congressional Research Service analysis, it says: A protest, similar to a predecisional appeal that gives the public an opportunity to object to a proposal, gives the agency an opportunity to change or modify its course before commitment of further time or effort. These provisions appear to mean--these provisions being S. 1459-- appear to mean that unless an applicant or permittee protests a proposed decision, comments or other input from other sources will not be taken into account because, absent a protest, the proposed decision does become final. If this is a correct reading, then the opportunity for comment and consultation does not appear to be meaningful. A second way in which public involvement is reduced is, it is possible that only ranchers, under our reading of the bill, would qualify to file an appeal of a final decision affecting the public lands. A person who is adversely affected--and that phrase is a term of art, because it is used in the legislation--a person who is adversely affected within the meaning of 5 U.S.C. 702 is permitted to appeal. This cited code refers back to the relevant statute. In this case, the relevant statute would be S. 1459. On that issue, the analysis by the Congressional Research Service says that the persons included within this provision are not clear. The cited code section refers back to the relevant statutes, thereby setting up a circularity. Since the CRS report was published, new appeals language has been added that further clouds the situation. It states--I will quote this from the bill--it says: Being an affected interest, as described in section 1043, does not in and of itself confer standing to appeal a final decision upon any individual or organization. Mr. President, a third way in which public input, involvement is reduced is that S. 1459 exempts on-the-ground management from the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. As the bill is presently presented, the National Environmental Policy Act, commonly known as NEPA, is going to be the topic of a great deal of our discussion. NEPA is one of the main tools used by land managers to analyze the health of the land and to analyze the potential affect on the land. S. 1459 exempts on-the-ground management from NEPA. In discussing the elimination of NEPA in site-specific situations, this Congressional Research Service report states: An activity could readily comport with a land use plan and yet have many harmful aspects if carried out in a particular area. Therefore, the elimination of site-specific analysis is a significant change in current law and procedures, and could result in significant effects on the conditions of the land. In place of NEPA, S. 1459 proposes a review of resource conditions. Essentially, the bill states that upon the issuance, renewal or transfer of a grazing permit or lease, at least once every 6 years the Secretary shall review all available monitoring data from the affected allotment. The central problem with this provision is that monitoring data usually consists of very specific measures of vegetative attributes. That monitoring data, in many cases, is not available. A fourth reason that I would cite why public involvement is reduced under this bill is, aside from the grazing advisory councils, the public is not given a say in range improvements. The old grazing regulations allow affected interests a say in the development of range improvements. As I read the provisions of this bill, it does not. Let me move to the third major concern that I have, Mr. President. That is that S. 1459, as drafted, and as being considered here, unduly ties the hands of lands managers. It does so in several respects. First of all, the application of terms and conditions needed to protect the land requires the development of a formal allotment management plan under this bill. Currently, less than 25 percent of BLM land and national forest allotments have allotment management plans prepared for them. The old grazing regulations' terms and conditions were attached as needed to protect resources and no allotment management plan was required. A second reason that I believe the current bill, Senate bill 1459, ties the hands of land managers is that the number of animal unit months would be established in land use plans in this bill. The land use plan often covers millions of acres, contains very general language, and S. 1459 would require costly, time-consuming land use plans and amendments to establish and make changes in grazing use for each allotment. In the old regulations, specific grazing use was determined through site-specific analysis, not through amendments to the entire land use plan. A third reason that the hands of land managers will be tied by this legislation is that in conducting monitoring activity, S. 1459 requires the manager to give prior notice, to the extent practicable, of not less than 48 hours. This exception to the notice creates a burden of proof that has never existed before. I also point out this creates a burden of proof when a land manager is dealing with a grazing permittee which does not exist when dealing with any other permittee on our public lands. Someone involved in the oil and gas industry certainly is not entitled to any 48-hour notice prior to monitoring activity taking place. It is inconsistent with the concept of these being public lands, Mr. President, to say that the manager of those public lands has to give notice 48 hours in advance before being able to view the lands and determine the condition. In the old grazing regulations no such advanced notice was required. A fourth way in which the hands of land managers are tied, in my view, in this bill is that S. 1459 would allow a sublease in cases where permittees neither own nor control the livestock. In the old regulations, ownership or control of the livestock was required. As I understand it, that is an appropriate requirement because clearly the BLM or the Forest Service cannot be expected to go around trying to find who is accountable for damage to the public lands. They have a right to assume that the person that has the permit or the lease has control of the livestock or ownership of that livestock and can be held accountable for what happens on the land. Mr. President, let me just conclude this set of initial comments here by saying that I do believe that we need to keep working to get a balance. We will offer later in the debate a substitute proposal which we believe does a better job of striking a middle ground and addresses the specific concerns that have been raised in the current Department of Interior regulations but does not repeal them entirely, as this legislation would. We believe that it gets us much closer to something that looks out for the interests of all those who have a valid interest in the use of the public lands. So I will stop with that, Mr. President. I know there are many others on the floor who wish to speak. I yield the floor. Mr. THOMAS addressed the Chair.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I intend to support the small business regulatory fairness bill, S. 942, as modified by the managers' amendment. This bill is a testament to the good work that occurred at the White House Conference on Small Business organized here in Washington last June. This national conference was the final step in a grassroots public discourse about small business needs and concerns that involved more than 21,000 small business people participating in 59 State conferences across the country. Starting with more than 3,000 issue recommendations at the State level, regional groups shaved the list to a set of 293 concerns. And finally, the White House Conference focused on 60 specific recommendations that might substantially improve the environment for the growth and success of small business activity. I think that the work of the White House Conference has given us a good roadmap of items to debate and discuss which directly impact our Nation's economic health. One of the major concerns of small business owners today is simply complying with Federal regulations, being able to understand the regulations--which are often extraordinarily complex, and not falling subject to arbitrary enforcement and penalties. It is important that our Government be accountable to those it governs and must avoid arbitrary and ad hoc enforcement. Mr. President, this legislation requires that Federal agencies produce small entity-compliance guides that outline in simple, understandable language what is required from small businesses. This is a commonsense adjustment in which both Federal regulators and small firms win. Furthermore, this act creates five-person regional citizen small business review boards in each of the 10 Government regions covered by the Small Business Administration. This measure gives small business a voice at the table when Federal guidelines are discussed, and this is as it should be. Also central to this act is the creation of more cooperative and less punitive regulatory environment between agencies and small business that is less threatening and more solution-oriented than we have achieved in the past. And equally important are provisions in this legislation making Federal regulators more accountable for enforcement actions by providing small businesses a meaningful opportunity for redress of excessive or arbitrary enforcement activities. As our Nation's larger firms continue a process of downsizing, restructuring, and outsourcing, our small business sector will continue to grow rapidly and will continue to be the major jobs generator for the country. It is crucial that the Federal Government do what it can to help small businesses thrive in a regulatory environment that is well defined and user friendly rather than to suffer because of uncertainty and unclear codes. I am frequently visited by small business people and groups from my own State of New Mexico and am very much pleased by their attention to the debates that occur in Washington about legislation that might impact them and their companies. These firms typically don't have a staff section designed to study the tax implications of everything we do here in this Chamber; nor do they have the time and personnel to devote to close monitoring of our legislative activities. But still, tens of thousands of small business people in the Nation do invest time and become personally involved with the legislative process and have committed themselves to improving the interaction between Government and the small business sector. I would like to mention one example from New Mexico, a person who demonstrates well a combination of entrepreneurial excellence, community concern and strong civic involvement. Ioana McNamara, the president and founder of an Albuquerque-based small business called Wall-Write, was one of those who participated from New Mexico in the White House Conference on Small Business. I want to publicly commend her for getting involved and working on these issues. She and others from the New Mexico small business delegation, including another small business person--Diane Denish--who served as the delegation chair for the White House Conference--have done a great deal to make sure that small firms in New Mexico do their part to achieve a more productive relationship between Government and business. Clearly, people like Ioana McNamara and Diane Denish have more than enough to do in growing their businesses without paying attention to whether this Chamber is about to do something that harms or helps their businesses--but they have decided to do what they can to help implement the measures decided on at the White House Conference. I think our Nation should express its gratitude to these people and the thousands of others who participate in the making of good policy.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize Sandia National Laboratories for its communication coordination of the hands- on/minds-on technologies [HMTech] program in New Mexico. This program enhances the study of science and technology in the African-American student population and further encourages these students to enter technology related careers. Mr. President, this year the HMTech program reached a milestone--its 10th year of operation. The HMTech project has touched the lives of more than 1,000 New Mexico students. The project began in 1986 as a program to promote academic achievement in the African-American student population and provide activity based science and engineering activities. HMTech's primary goal is to support the development of a scientific and technically trained student base with hands-on technology opportunities. HMTech's class activities include drafting, ecology, health, medicine, physics, computer science, electronics, chemistry, math, and communications skills. Mr. President, providing a child-centered approach to instruction, HMTech is an intensive 6-week evening program offered each fall and spring at no charge to students grades 5 through 12. African-American instructors, including scientists, engineers, and technicals, staff the project, volunteering their expertise and their time to the HMTech program for classroom instruction. The HMTech also has a very exciting and extensive tutorial program. HMTech provides students after school tutorials in math and science, a multidisciplinary homework hotline, scholastic aptitude test [SAT] tutorials, college preparatory classes, parent involvement workshops, and workshops for the instructors and volunteers. Mr. President, for its outstanding accomplishments, sincere interest in expanding the minds of young people, and its outstanding service to New Mexico and our Nation in education and technology, I would like to commend those who make the HMTech program a success.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Hollings technology programs amendment. I want to commend the Senator from South Carolina for his consistent advocacy of these programs for the entire 13 years I have had the honor to serve in this body. It is disheartening for some of us to find all of these programs so out of favor with many of our majority colleagues. Mr. President, as we prepare for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, these technology programs are among the last programs we should be sacrificing to balance the budget. I have given many speeches over the last year about how misplaced our priorities are when we prepare to slash our civilian research and development programs by one-third by 2002. And we are doing this at the same time the Pentagon is planning to slash research and development spending by 20 to 25 percent in real terms in the same time period. These next few years will be the first time since World War II that this Nation will simultaneously cut both civilian and defense research. Four years ago this body knew that that was the wrong thing to do. We expected cuts in defense research spending as a result of the end of the cold war. But both the Rudman and Pryor task forces and the Bush administration in 1992 advocated increases in civilian research spending to compensate for the declines in defense research and to keep pace with the investments other nations were making in civilian research. There was a consensus then that the Advanced Technology Program was a program that needed to be expanded to provide opportunities for firms to do precompetitive research, a term that President Bush coined, in a cost-effective manner. The reason that we had that consensus then was that the Senator from South Carolina had designed the ATP Program with the help of Republican Senators like Warren Rudman. He had ensured that awards would be made on the basis of merit pursuant to competition and that industry would play a major role in selecting areas for competition. He had ensured that there would be cost sharing from industry, so it was not just Government saying these technologies were worthy of further development. The firms themselves were putting their money at risk. Out of these Government-industry partnerships the Senator from South Carolina expected to see real innovation. He expected these partnerships to bridge the gap between basic research at which we excel as a nation and product development which the private sector should fully fund. All the reports we have received tell us the program is doing just that. And yet it is on the chopping block. The same could be said for the other programs supported by the Hollings amendment. All had bipartisan origins. All are designed to provide real leverage for Federal funds by fostering partnerships and requiring cost sharing. They are precisely the sort of programs we should be expanding as we approach the 21st century. Instead, we are forced into a debate on terminating them. Mr. President, I am going to close by displaying two charts which I have used before over the past year on the Senate floor. The first shows Federal civilian research as a percentage of gross domestic product. In the next few years that spending is headed toward a half- century low. Is that how we should be building a future for our children and grandchildren? The second chart compares our Federal civilian research spending with that of the Japanese Government. Very soon, if not this year then in the next few years, Japanese Government research and development investments will exceed our own. That is a nation with half our population and half our wealth. How long will we as a nation be able to live off our previous research investments? Mr. President, study after study has shown that Federal civilian research investments since World War II have paid for themselves many times over. We need to sustain that investment as we head into the 21st century, particularly since we will continue to cut defense research investments in light of the end of the cold war. The Pentagon is planning to make greater use of our civilian research programs to meet its needs at the same time we are cutting civilian research. The Senator from South Carolina is making a stand for some of our best civilian research investments. He stands in a bipartisan tradition of supporting civilian research that goes back to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and clearly included President Bush. He stands against what one columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., in today's Washington Post called the ``smash-the-state'' revolutionaries, who want to demolish essentially all Government programs. Government can work and has the capacity to make investments that do great good for this country. Our research investments have been in that category for decades. They are Government at its best, building a better future for our children. I urge my colleagues to stand with the Senator from South Carolina in support of these research programs. Please vote for the Hollings amendment.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise in support of the Harkin education amendment. This amendment aims to restore funding for the Department of Education, and for all education and training to fiscal year 1995 levels. This amendment is fully paid for. It adds back funds to the fiscal year 1996 appropriations with offsets scored by CBO. This amendment, unlike the Republican addbacks, do not depend on future contingencies at an unspecified time in the future of a congressional-Presidential agreement on an overall budget. This will allow schools, now in the process of planning their budgets for next year, to know the funding level for which they can budget. The amendment represents addbacks that both parties agree to: $151 million for education reform; $1,279 million for title 1; $208 million for school improvement programs; $82 million for adult and vocational education; and $10 million for education research and statistics. This will provide funds for Goals 2000; title 1; safe and drug-free schools; charter schools; vocational and adult education; education technology; Head Start; dislocated workers; adult training; school-to-work; summer jobs for youth; and one-stop career centers. The Harkin amendment would maintain the fiscal year 1995 level of $18.4 billion for Department of Education funding except Pell grants, and funds for Pell grants, including the fiscal year 1995 surplus carried forward to fiscal year 1996, would also remain level. This amendment maintains fiscal year 1995 levels of funding for education by identifying offsets, not by adding anything to the deficit. These addbacks support programs needed by everyone, and especially those in New Mexico. Title 1 supports teaching basic reading and math skills to disadvantaged students. Every school district in New Mexico would be hurt if these funds are not restored. Albuquerque public schools alone would lose almost $2 million if House cuts are not restored. Education reforms funds support school-industry cooperation in developing programs that teach students going directly to work from school those skills they need to perform a job; and Goals 2000 supports professional development and raising standards of literacy to internationally competitive levels. The grant awards in New Mexico for these programs have provided great local control and pride and initial signs of success. Vivian LaValley of Bernalillo High School was here last Thursday describing her School-to-Work Program and it was very impressive. The need for such Federal support is sorely felt both by my constituents and other leaders across the country. In 2 weeks Lou Gerstner of IBM and Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin will host the Nation's Governors and business leaders in an education summit to discuss the need for education standards and technology. The addbacks provided in this amendment provide States and communities the resources they need to pursue these efforts as they see fit. For the last 6 years the Federal Government, on a bipartisan basis, has increased funding for education each year. Congress was right to do so. As our future depends increasingly on the competitiveness of our work force in the global economy, improving our education performance and investing in education should be top U.S. priorities. Unfortunately this amendment does not increase funding for education. But it does provide at least level funding for education.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I commend my colleague from Kentucky for that eloquent statement about the problem, and also the Senator from North Dakota for his eloquent statement about the extent of the problem and our efforts to find at least some partial solutions to the problem. As both of my colleagues have said this morning, there are millions of American working families that are scrambling to pay the bills each month. They are working longer hours. They are taking home less money in real spendable money. Yet what they are having to pay for education and for health care is going up, and many of these same families are afraid of being laid off from their jobs. So we do have a problem and the problem is twofold. The problem is that our economy has grown too slowly in the last couple of decades. And, second, the people who are doing the work in our economy, whether they are working for large companies or small companies or nonprofit organizations--the people who are really doing the work in our economy are getting a smaller part of the benefit from the work that they do and from the profit that is being realized. Last spring I went to our Democratic leader, Senator Daschle, and urged that he set up a working group of Senators to explore options for dealing with this problem of stagnant wages. This is not, I should say, a recent problem. This is a problem that has been with us, now, since 1973. I think all economists would agree that it is a new era in our Nation's economy. Senator Daschle, of course, agreed. He was enthusiastic about the idea and appointed me to chair that group. We turned out a report entitled ``Scrambling To Pay the Bills, Building Allies for America's Working Families.'' Mr. President, I think this report summarizes very well the recommendations that we found and that we came up with that we believe seriously address the problem in a variety of areas. What I want to do this morning is to first describe the problem in some detail but then go on and describe at least the broad outlines of the recommendations that we have made. Many people deserve credit for participating in the preparation of our report. My own chief of staff, Patrick Von Bargen, took a lead role in it; Virginia White and Steve Clemons in my office deserves special thanks, as well as Paul Brown, with the Democratic Policy Committee, and many other Senators and staff people here in the Democratic side of the Senate. I also want to thank all the experts that we consulted with, many of whom made major contributions to what we were doing. First, let me talk about the problem. The economy in this country is growing too slowly. It has been growing too slowly for at least 2 decades now. This issue, as I said before, has been recognized by economists. But I believe the best summary of the problem was made by Jeffrey Madrick in a recent book that he published called ``The End of Affluence.'' That book has in it a chart which I have reproduced here so we can make the point very readily. It points out that the long-term annual rate of growth in this country from 1870 until 1973 averaged 3.4 percent. That is a good rate of growth, and it was one that is discounted for inflation. That is a rate of growth that we had been able to maintain--at least that average rate of growth--through wars, through depressions, and through a whole variety of economic circumstances. Since 1973, the rate of growth has slowed. That slowing of the rate of growth is a major part of the problem that we face. There has not been enough investment in productive capacity in the country. There has not been enough job creation, nor good-paying, high-wage jobs in the country. So the rate of growth of our economy has slowed to 2.3 percent during the period from 1973 until the present. That slowing of the rate of growth is a serious issue that we are trying to address with some of these recommendations. The second serious issue that we are trying to address is that the people who are doing the work in this economy are sharing less in the benefits from the growth that is occurring. Again, we have some charts to try to make the point. The first of these charts is a chart that shows what has happened to real hourly earnings between 1967 and 1995. These hourly earnings, as you can see, for a period from about 1967 to perhaps 1976 were going up and were reasonably high. Since the early 1970's, or the mid-1970's, they have been dropping. Clearly we are in a situation today where we are almost back--not quite, but almost back--to the same real hourly earnings that people in this country were realizing in 1967. This shows part of the problem that American working families are struggling with. Let me show another chart. This is the drop in real average income. It is a slightly different measure, but, again, it makes the very same point. This chart shows that from 1978 until 1995 there has been almost a continuous decline in real average income for American workers. The next chart shows the share of workers that have pension coverage in the country. By ``pension coverage'' I am not talking about just Social Security. I am talking about a pension in addition to Social Security. In the period from 1979 to 1989--that is just the 10-year period--you can see a dramatic dropoff in the total number or the total percentage of workers with pension coverage which dropped from 50 percent in 1979 to 43 percent in 1989. When you break that down according to the level of education of workers, you can see a much more dramatic impact on people who have not had the education. For those with less than a high school diploma, the number of those workers with pension coverage was 44 percent in 1979. It dropped to 28 percent in 1989. The next chart is full-time male workers with health insurance. We spend a lot of time around here talking about health insurance coverage and the importance of that. Again, taking the period from 1979--this chart goes from 1979 to 1992--it shows that the total figures are that 87.3 percent of full-time male workers had health insurance in 1979. That 87.3 percent dropped to 70 percent by 1992. Again, just to show the way that breaks out by education level, for people with less than a high school diploma, 87.7 percent of those people had some type of health insurance in 1979. That had dropped in 1987 to 53.8 percent, a mere 14 years later. The next chart shows the job insecurity in the 1970's and 1980's. This is a very interesting chart, in my view, because it shows what is happening to a lot of families. This shows the percentage of workers that are age 24 to 58 who changed employers at least four times during the decade. That is a lot of change. In the 1970's, you can see that something around 13 percent of all workers aged 24 to 58 had to change jobs four times in that decade. When you look in the 1980's, that number, the percentage of workers who had to change jobs four times, doubled and is nearly at 30 percent. This is twice as many workers changed employers at least four times during the 1980's as changed employers during the 1970's. The final one of these charts that I want to show on the problem is trying to point out what is called ``the mean time to financial failure.'' By ``financial failure,'' we essentially mean if a person loses their job, how long will it be until they have exhausted their financial resources? This is broken down by fifths, or quintiles, according to family income. For the lowest fifth of all families as far as their income level, of course, they have no time. If they lose their job, they are facing financial failure immediately. For the second fifth, it is half of 1 month until they face financial failure; the middle fifth, 3.6 months; the fourth fifth, 4.66; and even the top fifth is only a little over 18 months from financial failure. On average--that is this final column--it is 3.64 months from loss of job to total financial failure for American families. Mr. President, I think this makes the case that there is a problem. This is not a manufactured problem. This is not a rhetorical problem. This is a real life problem that many working Americans are faced with. The debate, unfortunately, about this problem has not been particularly productive. The debate which the public hears on the issue sort of veers from those who are surprised to discover that there is a problem on the one hand to those who recognize that there is a problem but have no plan to deal with it other than giving speeches, attacking corporate management, or attacking foreign companies or foreign countries for unfair trade practices. There is no set of proposals that has been put forward so far in the public debate to try to come to grips with this very real problem. What we tried to do in the report that I referred to earlier was to come up with that set of recommendations and get this debate on to a serious plain. In putting these recommendations together, we have tried to move the debate past the blame game and name calling and on to thoughtful consideration and policy options. First, what can we do to stimulate the growth, going back to the first chart I referred to. And second, what can we do to ensure that America's working families fairly benefit from the growth that does occur? In the report that I referred to, we have some 80 specific recommendations. I am sure that no single Senator supports each, but each is a proposal that deserves to be seriously considered on its merits. I hope that this debate we are beginning now will result in that. Let me describe the three broad areas in which we have made recommendations. First, we have made recommendations to encourage businesses to become better allies of American families, because they have a tremendous impact. And that is in this column here on the left. Second, we have made some recommendations to make financial markets better allies for America's working families, and that is the center column. And third, we have made recommendations on how Government can become a better ally for America's working families. Let me just describe briefly the major recommendations in each area. Businesses, how do we help businesses to be better allies with America's working families? We concluded fairly early in our discussion that the present corporate income tax is a jumble of complexity that does not serve the best interests of any of us. In our view, we should repeal the present corporate income tax and replace it with something like the business activities tax that was proposed by Senators Boren and Danforth in the last Congress. We believe that would be a major improvement in many respects. Let me cite some of the ways that would improve the situation. First, it would eliminate the existing preference in the tax law for debt over equity. Second, it would incentivize investment in this country rather than overseas, an issue that the Senator from North Dakota spoke about several times. Third, it would apply the tax as other countries apply their taxes, on imports and not on exports, so that it would encourage more exports and it would see to it that imports coming into this country pay their fair share of tax. Fourth, it would impose the tax more equitably across all types of firms than the present income tax does. Fifth, it would dramatically simplify the Federal corporate tax. And finally, it would allow us to reduce by half the payroll taxes that are paid by businesses. That is a very major expense to U.S. business today, and the shift to a business activities tax would allow us to dramatically reduce the payroll tax. We would make up any lost revenue to the Social Security trust fund from revenue that we received through the business activities tax. But we believe that would be a major step forward. One other major advantage to adopting this proposed business activities tax is it would allow us to give better tax treatment to corporations that invest in their workers and invest in America. We designated such businesses as ``A-Corps,'' suggesting that they were allied with America's working families, and we provide that the business activities tax would be imposed at two different rates, one rate for any business with receipts over $100,000, which does not qualify as an A-Corp, a second rate for a business that does self- qualify as an A-Corp. Let me briefly describe what we intend as the criteria for determining qualifications as an A-Corp. To qualify as an A-Corp and thereby qualify for a lower tax rate, a business would self-certify that it is, first of all, investing in its workers, that it is investing in pensions and profit sharing, investing in training and education, investing in their health care, making some contribution to help them acquire health coverage; second, that they are investing in plant and equipment in the United States, and that a reasonable proportion of their new employment created for meeting the demands of this market is in fact made and produced here in this country; third, that they are doing at least 50 percent of their research and development in this country. Then there are several other items. Let me mention one. We do have a provision in there indicating that there should be some multiple of the compensation of top management as compared to the salary of the lowest paid worker. Now, this is controversial, Mr. President, and I do not know that the specifics of what we recommended will be embraced by everybody, but I think it is an issue that needs to be discussed. What we basically said was that to qualify as an A-Corp, a company would demonstrate that the compensation of its top executives did not exceed the salary of the lowest paid full-time worker by more than 50 times. That may not be the right figure. I will tell you how we arrived at that. It is somewhat arbitrary. We basically said that if you are paying the lowest paid worker in your company, say, $15,000, which I think may be a low figure for most corporations, but if you are paying the lowest paid worker $15,000, if you want to pay your top CEO 50 times that, you can pay him $750,000 a year. That did not seem like an unreasonably low number to me at the time we were putting the report together. Since then, the new information out makes me doubt whether that is the right number. As the Senator from North Dakota referred to it, this article in the Washington Post of March 5 says CEO's at major corporations got a 23 percent raise in 1995. It says that the average compensation for chief executives of major companies is now $4.37 million. Obviously, 50 times the lowest paid worker does not get you up to $4.37 million. So maybe it should not be 50 times. Maybe it should be 100 times. At some point, however, I do think it is appropriate for the taxpayers of this country to say we want to give the best tax treatment to corporations that have some sense of equity and some reasonable commitment to help their own workers and do not just pay top executives exorbitant salaries at the same time that they are refusing to share any of the profit with the people who are doing the work down in the trenches. So that is another part of the issue which needs to be discussed. Let me go on to the second column in our earlier chart which was how do we make financial markets become allies of working families as well? The concept here is very simple. Much of the action that corporate management has to take these days which adversely affects the workers in that corporation is brought about by pressures imposed from financial markets. There is a constant pressure to look at the short- term profitability of the company. There is an inability to invest adequately in research and development, an inability to invest adequately in investments of various kinds that will have a long-term payoff. So what we are trying to do is to get something in the law to discourage the short-term focus and encourage the long-term focus. So what we have done here is to come up with some recommendations to reduce the financial market pressure for short-term decisionmaking, to reduce financial market pressure for short-term speculation in securities by imposing a security transfer excise tax on sale of securities that occurs within 2 years of the purchase of the securities at issue. That is the recommendation. This excise tax, this transfer tax would be similar to the ones that are now imposed in Japan and Switzerland, in Sweden, in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and various other countries, with one major exception, that the tax goes away at the end of 2 years. We are not discouraging investment in securities. We are discouraging speculation in short-term trading in the securities. In our view, the country will be benefited, working families will be benefited, corporate management will be benefited if the owners of the corporations have a community of interests with the corporate management and want to help them by focusing more on the long term. We would use the revenue from the transfer tax on short-term speculation to create an A fund to create long-term investments in working families. The A fund would be dedicated, first, to funding deductions for higher education and work-skill training. Those higher education deductions--that is the $10,000 deduction the President has talked about--would be used, the resources would be used, to fund a tax credit for dependent children. They would be used to fund programs to accomplish work force training, school-to-work, efforts to achieve education goals, technology research and development, and export promotion. All of these activities, we believe, do help promote more job creation and more high-wage job creation in this country. We also recommend a whole range of proposals to reform the securities regulation and accounting area to promote greater attention to long- term investment and performance of business by those who do invest in corporations. Finally, one of these areas I want to talk about just briefly, Mr. President, is the issue of how we make Government a better ally of America's working families. We propose, as part of this overall package of recommendations, to reduce the tax burden on working families in several very specific ways--to cut in half the payroll tax paid by employees. I referred earlier to the fact that the adoption of the business activities tax would allow us to cut in half the payroll tax paid by employers. We believe we should also cut in half and can also cut in half the portion of the payroll tax paid by employees. I point out to people that this is not a small item. Something over 70 percent of all taxpayers in this country pay more tax under the payroll tax than they do under the income tax. We are suggesting that the payroll tax, which is the biggest tax burden on most working Americans today, be reduced in half. Second, we are recommending that we reduce individual income tax by increasing the standard deduction very substantially. Third, we are suggesting--and I referred to this before--we permit the deduction of up to $10,000 for investment in postsecondary education and training--this is the President's proposal--and that we provide a $500 tax credit--a $500 tax credit--for each dependent child. We believe that all of these actions can be taken. All of them will benefit working families. In addition to that, we can use some of the funds raised by the shift to the business activities tax and by the establishment of the A fund that will be established with the use of revenues from the securities transfer tax to increase efforts to improve education and training. We would support skill standards and academic standards for students. We would support school-to-work transition. We would support more work force training. Let me finally say that Government, we also believe, needs to be a better ally for the self-employed worker and for small business. As part of what we recommend here, we would reduce in half the self- employment workers' payroll tax, which is presently 12.4 percent. We reduce that to 6.2 percent. We would exempt all small businesses with less than $100,000 in annual receipts from Federal business tax. Corporate tax returns today indicate that there are about 24 million people filing some type of corporate tax return. With this change, with this single change of exempting all businesses with less than $100,000 in annual receipts, we would reduce the number of people who have to file a business return from 24 million down to 9 million. So there are 15 million businesses that today file business returns that will be exempt from filing such a return or paying a business tax after this set of recommendations are adopted. Mr. President, let me just step back from the specific recommendations. I have gone through some of the major ones. I have not tried to give an exhaustive description of all of the recommendations in our report. But the important goal is to begin this national debate. The important goal is to recognize the centrality of this issue of how we stimulate economic growth and to recognize that we all benefit from those Americans who do the work in this country, we share in the benefits from the growth that occurs. It is not enough to continue to give speeches about the problem. It is not enough to continue to ignore the problem. In my opinion, Mr. President, those of us in the Government need to participate in a very real and important debate at this time in our Nation's history. Our report ``Scrambling to Pay the Bills'' is an effort to move that debate forward and to get us down to some concrete steps that can be taken to help working families in America to do better in the years ahead. I hope very much that the report has that effect. I hope very much that the report does stimulate this debate. I hope that, during the remaining days and weeks and months of this Congress, we can get off of some of the things that, unfortunately, take up too much of our time here. Today, I understand we are going to spend a substantial amount of time debating the Whitewater Committee again. We debated the Cuban shootdown yesterday. We have a whole range of things that we debate around here that are not directly impacting upon the welfare of the people we are sent here to represent. These recommendations try to bring that debate back to the issues that matter to people in our home States. I hope very much that we will seriously debate these issues between now and the end of this Congress. I hope very much that we can adopt some of the recommendations in here so that we begin providing some relief to those who are in fact doing the work in this country. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for their attention, and I yield the floor.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I wish to add my voice to those who have expressed their outrage about the Cuban Government's reckless and calloused shooting down of two small, unarmed civilian aircraft flown by the exile humanitarian group, Brothers to the Rescue. These shootings, which took place on the 24th of February, are deplorable, and I endorse the President's efforts to console and aid the families of those who died in this tragedy. But as heinous as this shooting was, it does not justify the passage of wrongheaded legislation. Everything that was wrong with the Helms- Burton legislation before the incident remains wrong today. I am reminded of the words of former Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who, in a dissenting decision, stated as follows: Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment. These immediate interests exercise a kind of hydraulic pressure which makes what previously was clear seem doubtful, and before which even well settled principles of law will bend. Mr. President, the shooting of these planes have created, in Justice Holmes' words ``overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.'' We in the Senate are feeling that ``hydraulic pressure'' to which Justice Holmes referred. Senator Helms and others who have stated that the message of this bill is ``Farewell, Fidel,'' are ignoring the utter failure of 35 years of our embargo against Cuba. Rather, the Helms-Burton legislation is now being adopted and embraced by both parties and, unfortunately, by the President in a bid to curry favor with the Cuban-American community. As I have argued before on this floor, the passage of this bill will harm rather than help American interests in Cuba. It will restrict this President and any future President's hand in conducting foreign policy with an important neighboring nation and in responding to events quickly when the need arises. And it will codify in law an Executive order imposing an economic embargo on Cuba that has clearly failed. Our Nation's foreign policy is rife with anachronisms, and I cannot support helping to reinforce and entrench in our foreign policy such an outmoded and regressive policy as is reflected in this bill. In October of last year, the President announced a plan that received much bipartisan praise. The President promised to more vigorously enforce laws against unlicensed travel to Cuba, but to broaden support for cultural, intellectual and educational exchange in a way that the people of Cuba could encounter more frequently and broadly the fruits of democracy at work in the United States. The President stated that he would license non-Government organizations to operate in Cuba, to provide information and to provide emergency relief when needed, to provide the necessary infrastructure to help guide Cuba and its people toward democracy in the future. The President also noted that Cuban-Americans with relatives still in Cuba would be permitted to visit Cuba to tend to family crises and that these one-time-per-year licenses to visit would not be stymied by the delays and management problems that frustrate American citizens attempting to get to Cuba when a family emergency hits. These steps were important ones and they did not strengthen Castro's hand. What these provisions did was to help bond the people of Cuba to the people of the United States. For 35 years, we have tried to bring Fidel Castro down with heavy-handed tactics. One would think that during such a long period of time, we might have figured out that our policy had completely failed. We need a new direction, and it must involve building bridges with the Cuban people. The Helms-Burton legislation will only injure and alienate ordinary Cubans, weaken Cuba's civil society, and retard Cuba's democratization. And the unprecedented effort to impose United States policies on other countries will make it more difficult for the United States Government to cooperate with its allies in fashioning a joint approach towards Cuba. The problems with the bill before us are summed up well in an article this week by Walter Russell Mead in the New Yorker. Let me just quote a couple of sentences from that article. He says: Now President Clinton has agreed to sign the so-called Helms-Burton bill--a piece of legislation that will cement the embargo into law and deprive the President of the option of modulating it for diplomatic purposes. It will also permit lawsuits in American courts against Canadian, Mexican, European and other foreign companies whose Cuban investments involve the use of expropriated property--a category broad enough to include virtually every activity in Cuba. Moreover, the officers of these companies will be ineligible for American visas . . . . . . Fidel Castro has survived the enmity of nine American Presidents. In concert with his enemies in South Florida, he retains a hypnotic ability to induce stupidity in Yankee policymakers. That seems unlikely to change until the United States Government gets around to taking control of its Cuba policy away from a small, self-interested lobby group. Mr. President, this bill is an anachronism that ties America to a past from which it needs to move on. America is the only industrial power in the world maintaining an economic embargo against Cuba. It is time we consider a new course. The shooting down of two civilian aircraft was a great tragedy that we all should mourn, but as Chief Justice Holmes warned, we need to stand strong against the ``hydraulic pressure'' of momentary events that evidently will cause this Congress to enact this very misguided law. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to cosponsor S. 953, the Black Revolutionary War Patriot's Commemorative Coin Act. This legislation, sponsored by Senators Chafee and Moseley-Braun, would allow the minting and sale of commemorative coins to finance the construction of a memorial in our Nation's Capital, honoring those African-Americans who fought for our Nation's independence. Mr. President, our Nation owes those African-American patriots who fought in the American Revolution a deep debt of gratitude. All together, over 5,000 African-American men and women served as guides, spies, teamsters, and sailors in pursuit of a free nation. These African-Americans accounted for over 2\1/2\ percent of the total American force. They served with distinction and honor. In this month, designated as Black History Month, it is appropriate to remind ourselves of the service African-Americans have given to this Nation's armed services. African-American service men and women have left an indelible mark upon our Nation's history. In researching the role of African-Americans in the American Revolution, I was surprised to learn that many of those patriots who served were, indeed, slaves. How ironic it is that many of the patriots serving to found a nation based on the ideals of freedom were unable to enjoy this very freedom. We as a nation have struggled, and continue to struggle today, to ensure that all Americans can enjoy the fruits of living in a nation dedicated to democracy and freedom for all. We have a long way to go to meet that ideal. It is my sincere hope that the construction of the memorial to be built from the proceeds of the sale of these commemorative coins, will inspire us to continue this fight for democracy and equality. We owe the patriots who fought in the American Revolution no less.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the outstanding achievements of Taylor Middle School in Albuquerque, NM. On February 8, 1996, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley named Taylor Middle School a blue ribbon school, the highest honor for a school in our Nation. One of 266 recipients nationwide and the only recipient in New Mexico, Taylor Middle School deserves to be commended. Taylor Middle School, a charter school, uses an interdisciplinary team approach in which both the teachers and the parents are catalysts for the educational development of their children. The school is using a revolutionary middle school philosophy in which the students are learning and the teachers are being taught. Taylor is using both special education and regular education teachers to work with the entire student body enabling a more supportive learning environment. Secretary Riley recognized that Taylor Middle School offers a challenging and rigorous academic approach to learning in a safe, disciplined and drug-free environment. This school is an outstanding example of an academic institution that is using its own resources to work toward the National Education Goals. Taylor Middle School is an outstanding model for New Mexico's schools and schools across our Nation. Mr. President, I would like to commend Taylor Middle School, its students, its staff, and the parents who have formed a partnership to create a healthy and effective learning environment.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the collaborative efforts of the libraries of the University of New Mexico and the U.S. Government Printing Office to make important Federal Government documents more accessible to the public. On February 29, 1996, the University of New Mexico will officially open a gateway site that will allow online access to the U.S. Government Printing Office. This online feature will allow students, constituents, and the public equal and timely access to Government documents including the Federal Register, the Congressional Calendar, congressional bills, public laws, and the United States Code. UNM has long been a leader in education and research in both New Mexico and our Nation. This initiative reaffirms the University of New Mexico's commitment to building and maintaining a world class research library. The university offers outstanding programs that promote the use of invaluable documents that are included in the GPO's data base. The GPO has chosen UNM to be one of seven libraries in the country that will provide World Wide Web access to the GPO. With the Internet connection, individuals all over the world will have the opportunity to search and access some of the most important documents in our Nation. Built on an existing campus and a public network, this gateway depository will serve as a model to the electronic library depository system nationwide. Mr. President, for its outstanding accomplishments, sincere interest in opening the information superhighway, and its outstanding service to New Mexico and our Nation in the area of education and technology, I would like to commend the University of New Mexico.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I would like to take a moment to recognize a New Mexican who made a notable contribution to my State--to its communications and to its participation in public policy. Daralee ``Dee'' Schelling passed away this week at the age of 57. She will be greatly missed. Dee was the executive director of the New Mexico Broadcasters Association for 14 years and she was well-known among State legislators for her participation in legislative issues regarding broadcast interests. In addition, she handled media relations for New Mexico First, an organization that Senator Domenici and I formed in 1986 to encourage citizens to take an active role in studying the long-range issues facing our State. Dee was with us from the beginning. She was born in Colorado, but came to New Mexico in the mid-1960's to work in advertising. She became the first female ad agency president in our State and handled many major accounts including various movie promotions and the Double-Eagle II trans-Atlantic balloon crossing--an event which is a source of pride to New Mexicans and is commemorated at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Dee's many public service accomplishments included service on numerous Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, Ski New Mexico, and Project I committees. She will be remembered fondly by many.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, on rollcall vote No. 13, I was recorded as voting ``nay.'' In fact, I voted ``aye.'' I ask unanimous consent that the official record be corrected to accurately reflect my vote. Mr. President, this will in no way change the outcome of the vote.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I will vote against the conference report on S. 1124, the second fiscal year 1996 National Defense Authorization Act which the Senate has considered. This bill is clearly better than the bill the President vetoed last month. A truly awful bill has been transformed into a merely bad bill by stripping it of a series of provisions that never made any sense. The provision on deployment of national missile defense by 2003 has been eliminated. The provisions on command and control of U.S. military forces and contingency operations have been eliminated or turned into sense-of-the-Congress language. The provisions undermining the landmine moratorium and eliminating the director of Operational Test and Evaluation have been removed. The sale of the Naval Petroleum Reserve at Elk Hills has been extended to 2 years while the safeguards protecting the taxpayers' interest have been maintained. I appreciate those changes and I commend Senator Nunn in particular for being able to bring them about and Senator Thurmond for accepting them. But this remains, in my view, a bad bill with only a handful of good provisions. The bad still outweighs the good for me. The bill still spends $7 billion more on defense programs than the Pentagon requested at the same time we are cutting critical domestic programs in areas such as education, the environment, Indian health care, civilian research, and many, many more. The bill authorizes a whole host of pork-barrel projects from military construction to research to procurement that can not be sustained in future years. Indeed, new pork was added in the new conference. The bill still contains a provision mandating the discharge of service members who are HIV-positive even though they are capable of doing their jobs. This is bad policy which will needlessly and unfairly disrupt the lives of service members who have served their Nation proudly and who could continue to serve their Nation for years before being stricken with AIDS. A majority of the Senate Armed Services Committee opposes this provision. I believe a majority of the Senate opposes it as well. I hope that it will be repealed later this year. The bill still includes unprecedented Buy-America provisions meant to protect the uncompetitive parts of our industrial base at the expense of the competitive industries who will certainly see their exports hindered by these provisions. Our protectionism will only beget European protectionism to the detriment of our security and to the detriment of taxpayers on both sides of the Atlantic. The bill still includes a provision denying female service members and the female dependents of all service members the right to use their own money to obtain an abortion in a military hospital overseas. The bill still includes a provision setting up a loan guarantee program for defense exports that is unneeded and unwise, a program under which up to $15 billion in defense exports will be guaranteed supposedly at no risk to the taxpayers, who should hold their wallets. The bill still prevents the Pentagon from retiring unneeded strategic weapons, weapons that do not make sense to retain under any budget- constrained scenario. Unfortunately, I could go on and on concerning provisions in this bill which I can not support. There are some good provisions, the provisions on military pay and family housing, for example, and the provisions on acquisition reform, which I cosponsored when the Senate debated this bill last summer. The acquisition reform provisions were dealt with on a bipartisan basis in the first defense authorization conference last fall. I thanked Senator Cohen and Senator Smith for taking that approach to these important provisions when the Senate debated the first defense authorization conference report in December. Senator Cohen, in particular, has much to be proud of in the acquisition reform provisions on information technology on which he was the driving force. I hope people will refer to division E of this bill as the Cohen act, and perhaps one day we will make such a designation official. I'd also like to commend Senator Glenn, Senator Levin, Senator Smith, and Senator Stevens for their hard work and great contributions to the acquisition reform provisions in the bill. Unfortunately, the acquisition reform provisions, the pay provisions and the family housing provisions are the exception, not the rule in this bill. There is more in this bill that I can not support than that I can. I will vote against it today and work to fix as many of the problems in this authorization bill as I can in the fiscal year 1997 defense authorization process which will soon be upon us. I yield the floor.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, today the Senate will provide its long- overdue advice and consent to ratification of the START II Treaty. I believe that this may be the most significant accomplishment that this body will have in this Congress. That will depend on whether our action is followed by similar action in the Russian Duma in the months ahead. I regret that we were not able to take this action months ago. At the end of last March Senator Lugar predicted that the treaty would be ready for Senate debate in May. It should have been, but it wasn't through no fault of the Senator from Indiana. I hope that the 8 months delay has not hurt the treaty's prospects in the Duma. It clearly is overwhelmingly in Russia's interest, as well as our own, that this treaty go into force as soon as possible. Mr. President, this treaty will truly reduce the nuclear danger in ways unimaginable when I entered this body in 1983. Then we argued about nuclear freezes and nuclear build-downs at levels far above those stipulated in START II. Now the United States and Russia are truly reducing their nuclear stockpiles under the START I Treaty that went into force in December 1994 and we will reduce far further under START II. Land-based multiple warhead missiles, the most destablizing weapon of the cold war, will be eliminated. Arsenals in both sides will be reduced to 3,500 warheads and bombs. Far more of the strategic nuclear threat will be eliminated by this arms control agreement than anyone ever contemplated countering through missile defenses, even at the height of the exaggerated claims of the SDI program. President Bush was right to be proud of this treaty and his role in negotiating it. Mr. President, today's action will allow Vice President Gore to press Prime Minister Chernomyrdin next week to accelerate the Duma's consideration of the treaty. Newly appointed Foreign Minister Primakov has said that the Duma would await Senate action on the treaty. Now they not need wait any longer. I hope that they will complete their deliberations promptly. As the President pointed out in his State of the Union message the other night, this could be the year in which truly significant strides are made in arms control and in defining a safer, more stable world. I hope that our action today will be followed by a similar overwhelming vote by this body on ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention in the spring and by conclusion of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty among the nuclear weapon states by summer. If all that is accomplished and then fully implemented, our children and grandchildren will remember 1996 as a watershed year in the post- cold-war era. And these accomplishments, if they can be achieved, will be remembered far longer, I suspect, than anything that comes out of the endless budget debate in which we have been engaged. I yield the floor.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. The figures I was given were that in the Improving America's Schools Act, which we adopted in the last Congress, we adopted the technology for education provisions. The President requested $50 million for K-12 funding for educational technology there. The House has cut that request from $50 to $25 million. The Senate Appropriations Committee cuts it down to $15 million. The bill we are considering here would result in even less funding for educational technology.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, could I just respond to that and respond to the Senator from Pennsylvania?

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Massachusetts for his leadership on this issue. I strongly support the amendment he has offered because it would put back into some kind of reasonable balance the priorities that we should be pursuing here in this Congress. In a few hours we are going to vote on a defense authorization bill. In that bill the Congress has decided to add $7 billion to what the Pentagon requested in funding for this year. At the same time we are voting $7 billion extra for defense, we are, in our appropriations process, proposing to cut $3.1 billion from what goes to education. Those priorities are out of whack, in my opinion. They are out of line with the priorities of the American people, and this amendment would help correct that. I strongly support it. I would like to mention one other area, the issue of educational technology. The President spoke the other night about the importance of bringing all of our students up in educational technology and making them all technologically literate as they go into the next century. He said each of our classrooms should be hooked up to the Internet by the year 2000. The truth is, the President asked for $50 million to begin this process. On the House side the proposal is to cut that in half. On the Senate side the proposal is to cut it by two-thirds. The bill which we are now considering, this continuing resolution, cuts it by even more. Our priorities are not what they should be. Let me also say something about the procedure we are following here. This is the ninth continuing resolution since the beginning of this fiscal year. In addition to that, we have in this continuing resolution a statement that the act should be cited as the Balanced Budget Downpayment Act, No. 1. Essentially, what we are saying here is that not only have we had nine continuing resolutions so far, but that this is the first of a series of additional continuing resolutions. Our States cannot plan. They do not know what their funding is going to be from the Federal Government. Our school districts cannot plan. Our teachers, our parents, our students cannot plan. This is an irresponsible way for us to be conducting our business. People deserve better from the U.S. Congress than they are getting with this process. A great nation like this should deal with its children in a more responsible way. I yield the floor. Mr. SPECTER addressed the Chair.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I appreciate that response. I guess what caused me to come to the floor today was an article which came out in our paper in New Mexico today saying that ``The Federal budget deadlock has caused depleted drug cupboards at the Veterans Administration hospital in Albuquerque. The hospital's procurement division has warned pharmacists that drug stocks soon will be exhausted.'' Then they go on to say, ``What is the Government thinking about these people who fought for their country?'' I was wondering if the funding in the bill that would come from the House would provide money to the Veterans' Administration to buy drugs for the VA hospital in our State. I have a one-page summary of what might be passed by the House. It says here veterans' compensation, pensions, and education programs would be covered. But it does not say anything about the VA hospital functions and the expenses for drugs for veterans. I do not know if the Senator from Virginia has any information on that.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, if the Senator would be able to get answers to two other questions, I will just pose those and then yield the floor. One pertains to our Department of Labor in New Mexico. This is another article that was in our papers there. It says that the Department of Labor employs State workers but they use Federal funds to pay their salaries. I gather that is a normal practice all around the country in the Department of Labor. They operate the unemployment compensation program and a variety of programs there, and the State workers are paid with Federal funds. Does the bill which is being considered in the House contemplate that there would be funds to pay the State workers who are paid with Federal funds as well as the Federal workers, or does the Senator from Virginia know?

Mr. BINGAMAN. I thank the Senator very much. There is a similar article about the Bureau of Indian Affairs activities in our State and how that agency has had trouble buying food, heating oil, trucks, and other equipment in order to perform their responsibilities on the reservations. I hope we can get information as to whether or not those items would be covered by this kind of a bill which is coming to us. I say to my colleagues, the information that I have been given is that there would not be funds made available for anything other than the salaries of the Federal workers. Obviously, that becomes a problem if your job as a Federal worker requires you to drive a vehicle and you have to have funds to buy gasoline for that vehicle. The other issue on which I hope we can get an answer relates to an article I saw that the Government shutdown has delayed the construction of a fence at the United States-Mexican border. I had the occasion a few weeks ago when I was in Dona Ana County in my State near El Paso to get a tour of the area for the planned construction of a fence that would go along the southern part of the Anapra area between the United States and Mexico. This is a priority for the law enforcement officers of that region. It is a law enforcement issue. They feel the incidence of crime across the border has increased very dramatically and they need to get this fence up. The article I saw indicated that because contract officers responsible for obtaining building materials have been furloughed, work on that project has had to stop. I hope very much that when we get the bill from the House of Representatives it will contain funds, authorization and appropriation of funds, for those items as well. So I will not delay the Senate further at this point, Mr. President. I do think that there are a great many activities going unattended, a great many needs going unaddressed which I hope this House action today will correct. Again, I have spoken several times on the Senate floor this week commending the majority leader and other Senators, all Senators, Republican and Democratic Senators, for the continuing resolution that was passed earlier this week and sent to the House. In my opinion, that was the correct and responsible way for us to proceed. It demonstrated and reflected the recognition that the Congress as well as the President have a shared responsibility to maintain a functioning Government. I think that is the essential issue: Do we agree that we in Congress share in that responsibility to maintain a functioning Government? I feel very strongly that we do. I think all Senators indicated their belief that we do by agreeing to that continuing resolution. I hope the action by the House reflects the same recognition of that responsibility. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, before the Senator from Virginia leaves the floor, I wanted to just ask in a very straightforward way if he had any more information than I have been able to get about what might be in the bill which would be coming to the Senate from the House of Representatives on several different issues. And I would ask the President pro tempore at this time if the Senator from Virginia would be able to respond to my question on this issue.

Mr. BINGAMAN

Mr. BINGAMAN. I will be glad to yield to the Senator from Maryland for a question.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, let me speak about one other issue that I am quite concerned about, and that is the implication of what is going on now for the work of this Congress in the second session and in future sessions. There has been a lot of talk about hostage-taking. There was a very good editorial that has been referred to in the Washington Post yesterday about how the current shutdown is an example of hostage-taking. Yet, the editorial stated, I thought, very eloquently: Hostage-taking is an ugly business. It doesn't matter what the cause. Innocent people are seized and used as pawns; they become political trading stamps whose welfare is exchanged for things the hostage-taker could not win by normal means. Obviously, the most dramatic example of hostage-taking in recent history in this country was the hostage-taking in Iran in November 1979. It could be debated whether the current Government shutdown rises to the level of a hostage-taking. Perhaps this is just a using of public servants, Federal employees, as pawns in a larger political game, and I will leave to others the debate about whether this is, in fact, a hostage-taking. But, Mr. President, in my view, when each of us took our oath of office, and that oath included the duty to protect and defend the Constitution, implied in that was the responsibility to maintain a functioning Government. Now, that is not written into the Constitution, but I think it is clearly implied that those of us who seek public office will take on that responsibility. We can argue about what the Government ought to do, we can argue about how large the Government ought to be, we can argue about how many employees ought to be hired by the Federal Government, but the basic responsibility to maintain a functioning Government is something about which I think is very difficult for us to argue. The Republican leadership in the House has taken a different view. They are saying that as to the parts of the Government which today remain closed, they do not share that responsibility to maintain those parts of the Government functioning. They believe that is the President's problem, it is not their problem. Those who wrote our Constitution established a system of government where power is shared, but also a system of government where responsibility is shared, and part of that responsibility that is shared is the responsibility to maintain a functioning Government.