Kit Bond

Mr. BOND

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, let me first thank the distinguished minority leader for his kind comments. I share his concern about the availability of affordable housing. At an appropriate time, I want to discuss some of the problems in a little more detail. I recognize his concern and the concerns raised by the Senator from Maryland, the Senator from Rhode Island, and others. There is a bigger problem, and we will discuss that later. We have been in quorum calls for almost the last hour. We have an amendment Senator Mikulski will offer shortly on behalf of Senator Inouye. However, we are open for business. This is daylight. This is a good time to present amendments, to argue amendments, with great coverage. Everybody is paying attention; everybody is awake. We beg and plead with our colleagues to come down and get going so we can finish this up at an early hour. I see the distinguished junior Senator from North Carolina who wants to share some views on the very serious problem caused by the hurricane in his State. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOND

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, let me express my gratitude to the Senator from North Carolina for outlining the tragic situation he faces in his State. As one who has faced similar circumstances in my State, seeing nothing but the tops of flooded buildings, I can tell you I was very grateful for then-chairman of the committee, Senator Mikulski, who came to my State and worked with us during the floods of 1993. I know there is nothing more important to these people who have lost everything than to know that somebody is trying. There is no way we can make them whole. We intend to see that FEMA meets their needs. I have already discussed with the senior Senator of North Carolina some of the needs. I assure both Senators that we on the committee will do whatever is necessary to make sure FEMA has the resources needed. We believe they have adequate reserves right now, but we are going to continue to work on this problem and follow FEMA's activities. We look forward to working with the Senators from North Carolina to make sure we do have adequate resources available. I join with the Senator from North Carolina in saying we appreciate and congratulate James Lee Witt and the entire FEMA operation for what appears to be a very prompt response to a disaster situation.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I certainly appreciate the diligence of Senator Helms and his willingness to work with me as we both seek to make sure FEMA is ready to help the victims of Hurricane Floyd. I know how deeply he cares for his constituents, and I join him in sending my thoughts to the people of Eastern North Carolina--as well as those suffering in other affected states--as they begin the hard work of recovering from this very serious natural disaster. I certainly intend to work with him every step of the way to make sure that FEMA has the financial resources it needs to continue the important work already underway in North Carolina.

Mr. BOND

Mr. BOND. I am prepared to enter into a colloquy with the distinguished Senator from Maine who has a matter of great importance in her State. Ms. COLLINS addressed the Chair.

Mr. BOND. I thank the Senator from Maine for her kind words. I know of her personal commitment to helping the homeless. I strongly support these important programs which do benefit the homeless men and women in America. I hope we can come up with a permanent solution to homelessness, especially for those persons with mental disabilities.

Mr. BOND. Unfortunately, we have had a number of Members express to us their concern about the continuum of care grant award process. Many believe that the HUD process has proven to be confusing for applicants and perhaps even incomprehensible to anyone outside the HUD compound.

Mr. BOND. What happened to Maine, and other States, in the competitive award process simply should not have occurred. To me, it is quite puzzling. As many of us know, the problem of rural homelessness is complicated; it is pervasive. I live in a rural area. Rural areas have higher poverty rates and a higher percentage of the population living in inadequate housing, which are key factors contributing to homelessness. Providing service to the rural homeless is not easy. It is complicated by distance, isolation, and lack of effective communication.

Mr. BOND. I certainly agree with the sentiments expressed by the Senator from Maine. I am very sympathetic to the intent of the bill. As she has pointed out, we are not able to accept it on this bill. But I do look forward to working with the Senator from Maine, and the many other Senators who expressed their concerns, to ensure that HUD does meet the homeless needs of every State. In the past, I have been a strong supporter of using block grant approaches to the States, which I think can best serve the needs of the homeless. We look forward to working with the Senator and the authorizing committee to solve the current HUD award process problems. I thank the Senator from Maine for bringing this very real and very compelling problem to our attention. I assure her we will continue to work to resolve the problem. Ms. MIKULSKI addressed the Chair.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, we accept the amendment and urge its adoption.

Mr. BOND. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

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

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, this is a good time to do a couple of things. We started off with a good pace and had a major amendment approved by voice vote. Then we had votes on two more amendments. We have had some wonderful speeches and some great colloquies. We are open for business. It is daylight. We want to get people here because we face a tremendous deadline with the end of the fiscal year approaching. We need to get this bill passed this week to make sure we keep these agencies funded. I ask colleagues on both sides of the aisle, please, if you have amendments, colloquies, or items we need to deal with, please bring them. Otherwise, I am ready to go to third reading in the not too distant future. Something has been brought up which I hope we can spend some time discussing. A number of my colleagues have talked about the tremendous need for housing. They have equated that with the need for additional section 8 incremental or additional assistance. I want to go through some of the difficult problems we face. Perhaps as I straighten out in my own mind the complexity of section 8, my colleagues will understand why we came to this point. This bill does not provide any of the 100,000 incremental section 8 vouchers requested by the President. The addition of these vouchers to the bill would cost an additional $578 million per year. Last year, we agreed to the President's absolutely necessary request for 50,000 additional section 8 vouchers. We pointed out at the time that this caused a real problem, and we would need additional money to fund them in future years. The representatives of the administration assured Members they would make provisions for that additional required budget authority. What did we get this year from the administration? We received a request that we defer $4.2 billion in budget authority to the following fiscal year. In other words, they were not able in their budget presentation to fund existing certificates, the section 8 vouchers, before we added the incremental, and they asked that $4.2 billion be deferred. In other words, their recommendation to us was $4.2 billion less than is needed to renew section 8 vouchers on a full-year basis in fiscal year 2000. That ought to demonstrate there is a problem. Let me explain as best as I understand it what the problem is. The section 8 account is one of the most difficult accounts for funding in the bill. Not only would the administration's request for 100,000 new incremental vouchers result in an annual cost of almost $600 million each year, it does not acknowledge or address the long-term funding needs of this account. Let me be specific. We currently fund some 3 million section 8 vouchers or assisted living units, as well as 1.5 million public housing units. Much of the cost of these 3 million units is hidden, meaning the annual cost in outlays is some $20 billion. In other words, we are paying out this year $20 billion in section 8 vouchers. We appropriate around here on budget authority. Most of the costs were accounted for in previous year's budgets when the Congress approved long-term 15-year and 20-year section 8 contracts. Now, the budget authority was committed in future years, but they said OK, Congress, you are going to have to pay out all that money each year in outlays. What is even worse, the budget authority requirement each year goes up because as contracts expire, we renew contracts on a year-to-year basis. We have to put that budget authority in each year's budget. As these contracts expire, we have to pay for the expiring contracts as an annual recurring cost in the section 8 account. Let me show you a chart. This is how the budget for section 8 has gone up. In fiscal year 1997, we only had to appropriate $3.6 billion in budget authority to cover the $20 billion or so, almost $20 billion in section 8 vouchers. The next year, we had to come up with budget authority of $11.1 billion. In the current year we would have had to come up with $12.8 billion, but we have adopted, because of the tight budget, the administration's proposal to defer $4.2 billion of that into fiscal year 2001. Guess what happens. We are coming into fiscal year 2001 about $8 billion short in budget authority. If we are to fund the existing contracts next year, we are going to have to come up with $8 billion more in budget authority. The news does not get any better. The next year, we would have to come up with $15.6 billion, the next year $17.0 billion, the next fiscal year 2004, $18.2 billion. This year, the administration has requested and we have proposed deferring $4.2 billion. So we took the easy out. The only easy out was deferring that $4.2 billion in budget authority for those portions of the section 8 vouchers which would actually have to be funded, actually outlayed in fiscal year 2001. That is confusing. I have worked on it for a long time. I am happy to work with any of my colleagues who have questions about it. With the help of staff, I think we can explain it. However, we made long-term commitments in budget authority. Each year, we have been spending outlays at a very high level. However, we can't get the budget authority to rise to the level needed to maintain those outlays. What is worse, in the HUD budget submitted by OMB--this is their 10- year budget. This is the budget projection they sent us--for this year, they said budget authority is right about what is needed, close to $14 billion. But for the coming year, the next year, they have lowered that to $11.3 billion for BA. Here is the BA need creeping up each year. Each year, it increases. The long-term projection of OMB, the President's budget, the budget of the Department of HUD, is to keep that budget authority at a flat level of $11.3 billion. What would happen if that occurred? Very simply, 1.3 million families or elderly or disabled would have to be kicked out of section 8 housing over the 10-year period. We do not have the budget authority, we do not have the funds, to continue supporting those residents who depend upon section 8 housing. That, to me, is a major problem. We have been forced, out of necessity, to defer $4.2 billion in section 8 assistance until 2001. While we have adopted this proposal--some would call it a gimmick-- let's say, because everybody seems to agree on it, this necessary budget tool for the year 2000, we have done so unwillingly and with the great concern that this will create a nearly untenable budget hole for next year, 2001, when we have to fund section 8 contract renewals by an increase of some $8 billion, for a total of $14 billion. In fiscal year 2000, some $6.8 billion was needed for section 8 contract renewals, but in 2001 we have to make up the $2.2 billion in advance appropriations. So we are going to have to find some way to get an additional $6.8 billion and still defer the budget authority for outlays in future years to those future years. I am extremely worried about how HUD is handling this very complicated and difficult problem. We understand that HUD has underestimated renewal needs for this year and is close to running out of section 8 renewal funds. We are very concerned that we will not be in this position when that happens next year. The problem is, as I said in my opening statement, that HUD is a high-risk area designated by the General Accounting Office, the only Department so designated. HUD's management deficiencies are particularly acute in the section 8 area. Part of the problem is that HUD loses some $900 million per year in its public and assisted housing programs due to fraud and abuse in the collection of rent in the assisted housing program. If HUD and its agents were able to collect this $900 million, some 135,000-plus additional low-income families could receive section 8 assistance annually. That is why we have added $10 million in this budget for the inspector general to hire outside professional help to try to identify where those funds are being lost and to find some means of recovering those because that is a tremendous loss. Let me explain another problem. A major problem with section 8 is, while section 8 is one of the most important Federal housing programs, it is not a panacea for providing affordable housing for low-income families. While vouchers do provide choice in housing for low-income families, the fair market rent restriction is currently set at the 40th percentile of the housing market, and therefore it severely curtails housing choice. As a practical matter, this has created market distortions in the availability of section 8 housing, leaving many low- income assisted families in very-low-income neighborhoods living in substandard housing. In a number of areas, families with vouchers are unable to use their vouchers to obtain affordable housing. I am told in St. Louis County their public housing authority has to release 100 vouchers to get 50 vouchers that are actually used because half the people who are given the vouchers cannot find housing. The lack of choice can also result in de facto redlining. HUD has also suggested that incremental vouchers will mean the construction of new low-income housing units. I disagree. There is absolutely no evidence that incremental 1-year section 8 assistance will ever leverage construction funding. When we went from the 15- or 10-year down to 1-year, we took away the financing incentives and the basis for constructing low-income housing to fulfill section 8 needs. I agree with HUD in that we do not have enough low-income housing units. We need to develop a housing production program with deeper targeting than the low-income housing tax credit program. This should be a theme in the next Congress. We need to continue to fund HOME and CDBG, which are used by communities to provide additional housing. We need the additional funds we put in section 202 housing to build housing for the elderly. We need to continue to work with organizations that are present in every State, and which we celebrated in Missouri on Monday with the 100,000th home through the Enterprise Foundation. Enterprise, Enlist and others are building affordable homes. Habitat for Humanity does a great job of rebuilding homes. But, frankly, there are many problems with the availability of affordable housing that go far beyond the availability of incremental section 8 vouchers. We have not identified the means to pay for the section 8 vouchers that we have already. Unless and until we do, I fear it is a hollow promise, to add incremental vouchers when we cannot assure that those people who now have them will be able to continue to get the vouchers and continue to get that housing assistance in the future. I assure you, this committee, and I believe everybody in Congress, wants to continue them. We are going to do everything we can to assure renewal, but right now it is a huge financial and budgetary task. We do not have the answers on how we are going to do it. Before we start adding incremental housing, I ask that somebody sit down and work with us on how we will pay for them next year, the year after, and the year after. We are going to be revisiting this issue frequently on the floor. I wanted to give that background so people will know what I am talking about when I say we have a tremendous wave of needs coming in for budget authority for section 8. We do not have the money. There is no projection we are going to get it. Before we continue to increase that outyear bow wave, we need to have some assurance we will be able to fund it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BOND

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank my very able ranking member for her efforts to move the bill forward. We certainly intend to do so. I have a clarifying amendment, a technical correction amendment. amendment no. 1779 (Purpose: To clarify the prohibition on using Federal funds for lobbying or litigating. This is a technical correction)

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, this is simply a technical correction the experts have told us is necessary to assure that the provisions in the law at that point are properly phrased. I know of no controversy on it. It is technical in nature. I believe it has been cleared on both sides.

Mr. BOND. I ask for its adoption.

Mr. BOND. I ask unanimous consent reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank the Chair and all our colleagues. We have been making great progress. We are ready to move forward on several matters relating to the housing section of the bill. I am sorry that it appears we are not ready to do so. I renew my request to all Members who have amendments. We welcome the opportunity to look at them. On some of these amendments, we find we can work them out in a way that is very easy to accommodate the reasonable requests of our colleagues. We want to do so in every possible way. But as I believe we have said many other times, we are facing a real time deadline. We need to get this measure passed out of the Senate, I hope, no later than tomorrow. Then we can go to conference committee and get it back and send the conference report to the President prior to September 30 so this measure will not have to be included in the continuing resolution. To do so would relieve a tremendous amount of burdens from the agencies that are covered and would certainly move forward the work of this body. We have had good discussions, and we have had very helpful discussions from a number of Members who have not offered amendments. We are not looking for more amendments, but if there are Senators who have either colloquies they wish us to include or amendments they wish to offer, we would be happy to consider them at this time.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maryland for her help. amendment no. 1780 (Purpose: To require a report on the effect of the allocation of funds under Veterans Equitable Resource Allocation (VERA) formula on the rural subregions of the health care system administered by the Veterans Health Administration)

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I have let the clerk read the entire sense- of-the-Senate resolution because I think it makes the point. I believe there is nothing further I can add to the terms of that Senate resolution. It simply requires VA to undertake a study of rural subregions. I urge its adoption.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, thank you very much. I thank my colleague from Maryland. I believe it is a very good amendment. We are at this moment waiting to find out from others what the schedule will be for this evening and whether there are additional amendments to be offered. At this point, we intend to stay on the bill. I see the Senator from Nevada is ready to speak on the bill. I withhold my suggestion on the quorum.

Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I appreciate the kind words the Senator from Nevada shared. We did appreciate working with the Senator on these very important bills. I thank him for his interest. With respect to the new vouchers, I believe I have already addressed at some length why we have not recommended any new vouchers. We do not have the resources identified to maintain the ones we have. In fact, there are $40 million worth of additional vouchers for the disabled. We put in $100 million for the Opt Out Program to protect the residents in section 8 housing where the landlords are choosing to get out of the program. We are also working through HOME and CDBG to provide additional housing facilities. I have stated those points before. I will not reiterate them at any length. With respect to community builders, we will address this in conference. The bill would terminate HUD's Community Builders Program for all external community builders. We were originally told there were supposed to be about 200 staff. It is now up to 800. The program represents about 9 percent of the HUD staff. In fiscal year 1999, HUD is expecting to spend as much in funds for staff and support costs for this program as they will spend for the HUD's community planning and development staff, which is responsible for administering programs such as CDBG and the homeless. I believe investing in 2-year terms for employees hired out of the normal practices of HUD is a questionable use of scarce resources. What does it say about the capabilities of existing HUD staff when the Secretary says we have to bring in people who are hired for a 2-year term outside of the normal hiring practices to explain HUD programs? It says something is going on. Before the community builders' staff was hired, the roles were not adequately defined by HUD. It is still in the process of developing and defining the role, even though most of the positions have been filled for several months. According to the information we have from the IG, 76 percent of the external community builders' initial hiring was not in accordance with Federal selection rules. The hiring appeared to be political despite the assurances to the contrary. The FHA Commissioner in charge of the multifamily housing has written: Community Builders in certain areas have misinterpreted or overstepped their role in dealing with HUD's identified multifamily projects. In his letter, the Commissioner states: It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Community Builders must communicate with the appropriate HUD staff. In my view, community builders are not acting as HUD staff. They are acting in the capacity of lobbyists or public affairs representatives for HUD. HUD already has a public affairs office. The public affairs office is providing the direction to these people. The Department recently directed the community builders to reach out to the media to voice strong opposition to the House of Representatives appropriations fiscal year 2000 budget. I can state that they are also reaching out to lobby Congress to keep the community builders. I don't need to fund a group of people whose job it is, in addition to all the other normal functions of HUD, to lobby me and tell the news media how valuable they are when they are only on for 2 years and, according to the information we have, have not even in some instances been able to define the job of HUD and the roles and the programs of HUD adequately. I don't believe there is an amendment pending. We will have more to say about that at length if it is brought up in the form of the amendment. Amendment No. 1785 (Purpose: To provide a period of time for consultation and evaluation of any realignment plan for the VISN 12 health care delivery system)

Mr. BOND. On behalf of Senators Fitzgerald and Durbin, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.