Sam Brownback

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, let me begin by congratulating Chairman Gilman for the hard work he and his staff have done in reforming the defense and security assistance provisions incorporated in H.R. 3121. H.R. 3121 represents a commonsense approach to advancing our foreign policy goals of promoting global stability, ensuring the security of U.S. citizens and U.S. allies around the world, and encouraging democracy. However, the bill achieves these goals while effectively reducing the amount of excess defense articles that will be transferred to our allies on a grant or no-cost lease basis. We need to use the grant and no-cost lease options sparingly so that these programs recover as much money for the taxpayers as possible. H.R. 3121 will force the Defense Department to drastically reduce the number of no-cost leases and grants that are used to transfer excess defense articles to our allies. The bill creates a national security interest determination that the President will have to invoke in order to provide a no-cost lease for excess defense articles. H.R. 3121 also requires the Pentagon to evaluate whether excess defense articles should be transferred on a grant basis or on a sales basis, depending upon what the potential proceeds would be from a sale, what the likelihood of selling a defense article would be, and what the foreign policy benefits of a transfer would be? This is a good bill and I am glad that this body has adopted it. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, there are people with pure motives and different ideas on both sides of this issue. However, I rise in opposition to the resolution of disapproval. I have worked in the trade field before, and I can tell my colleagues that this is not the way to improve our trade imbalance and it is not the way for use to try to change China. MFN, as we have heard time and again, is the basis for trade. It allows our companies, our farmers, our businesses, our people to be able to engage and build long-term relationships with China. That is what MFN is allowing us to be able to do. If we are worried about the trade imbalance, we should force them to lower their tariffs and open their borders through other trade negotiations or as they seek to join the World Trade Organization, and force them to abide by international trade rules. If we are worried about human rights, as all of us are, we should keep engaged and encourage them through that engagement to do the right thing as they grow as a country, and not go in an isolationist mode. For those reasons I urge disapproval of the resolution.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this motion to instruct conferees. I just make a point at the very outset that the past speaker from Florida, who I agree with on some things, and she is a wonderful lady, I particularly agree with her point that she says we have a golden boy that chairs the Budget Committee. He is a golden boy because he is doing what is right. It is to balance the budget. That is what the American people want. Here we are talking about $5 billion on top of $494 billion that we are already spending, and we start breaking down the path toward balancing the budget. This is doing what is right. When you do what is right, you are a golden boy when you do that, and that is what the American people want. We need to do that. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this. We are protecting the seniors, and we are protecting the kids.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, with that, I have no objections to the amendment.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, the gentleman is attempting here to get at particularly the issue of when we are engaged in a particular theater that that information can be shared on that theater of operations, not just on a specific instance by instance?

Mr. BROWNBACK. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I want to engage, if I could, in a bit of a dialog with the chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Combest], on his amendment to my amendment. As I understand from his discussion of this amendment, he would maintain the majority of the bill that we have put forward, as far as the concerns that we have of the loose treatment of intelligence information by the United Nations of U.S. intelligence information. That is maintained; is that correct?

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in an attempt to restore sanity to our policy of sharing intelligence information with the United Nations. My amendment would amend the 1974 National Security Act to prohibit the sharing of U.S. intelligence information with the United Nations or any of its affiliated organizations unless the President certifies to Congress that the organization has implemented CIA, Defense, and State Department procedures to protect U.S. intelligence sources and methods. This provision is not intended to end U.S. intelligence sharing with the United Nations, nor does it mean to set unreasonable or impossible standards for the protection of critical U.S. sources and methods of intelligence gathering. The only purpose of this provision is to restore basic rationality to the administration's imprudent sharing of sensitive intelligence information with the United Nations. My provision establishes logical and reasonable standards for sharing intelligence information with the United Nations. All it says is that the United States should require the same level of protection of U.S. intelligence information from the United Nations that we require in our intelligence sharing arrangements with other states. If for some reason the United Nations is unwilling or incapable of providing that level of protections, my provision will still permit the sharing of U.S. intelligence with the United Nations on a case-by-case basis. In each of these cases, all that is required is a certification that the information shared advances U.S. national security interests. Protecting our sources and methods of intelligence gathering is not an academic subject. It is a matter of national security. It is a matter of protecting lives. It is a matter of protecting billions of dollars of investments that the American people have made in our country's vital national security interests. Mr. Chairman, the United Nations has acted like a sieve when it comes to safeguarding intelligence information to the same degree as the United States. Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine has identified four instances in which the United Nations has breached the security of classified documents provided by the United States. The most egregious violation occurred in Somalia where sensitive data was almost compromised due to the United Nation's carelessness. In addition, Senator Snowe has discovered that no agreement has been in place that requires the United Nations to provide for the protection of intelligence supplied by the United States. As a result of her findings, Senator Snowe drafted a provision included in the conference report of the State Department Authorization Act that mirrors the amendment I am offering today. The House has passed this provision twice. I simply ask now that my colleagues now act on it again. Mr. Chairman, the administration has failed to implement the safeguards needed to protect U.S. intelligence information from unauthorized disclosure. In fact, rather than further safeguarding our intelligence information, CIA Director Deutch has tried to institutionalize the widespread sharing of sensitive U.S. intelligence material by making it easier for foreign consumers to register complaints about the use of security markings, which protect the national security of the United States. Mr. Chairman, if my colleagues have any misgivings about this amendment, I simply want to point out to them that U.N. General Secretary Boutros-Ghali has appointed an Iraqi national, Ismat Kittani, to be the head of the United Nations' Department of Peacekeeping Operations. It is truly disturbing that a national from a country with which the United States has no diplomatic relations, which is on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist states, and with which the United States recently went to war could be appointed to such a sensitive position in the United Nations. This is wrong, and this is indicative of the recklessness with which the United Nations treats sensitive matters and sensitive information. The United States should not share our intelligence information with the United Nations unless it adopts the standards to which we hold our own agencies accountable.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, our amendment had put forward particular safeguarding procedures to try to encourage there to be an agreement between the United States and the United Nations on any sort of sharing of information and that we tighten up that procedure. Those are maintained, as I understand it, in the amendment that the gentleman has put forward.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on House Concurrent Resolution 178, the concurrent resolution just agreed to.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Chairman, just to follow up on those excellent comments by the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, what we all can agree to that is truly excessive here in Washington is the size of the Federal debt and the size of the Government. We have got over $5 trillion in debt and a government that takes up 22 percent of the overall economy of the country. We just think the debt is too big, it has got to be smaller for our kids, and we think the Government is too big and it needs to be smaller so that we can carry it. To put a little meat on the bones factually, the Joint Economic Committee says that if we can cut the size of government, if we can cut it slightly, get it from 22 percent of the economy to even around 19 percent of the economy, we will create a growth rate in this country that is double the current growth rate. We are going to create jobs, better jobs at higher wages, so not only do we get the size of government down, not only do we shrink the overall deficit, not only do we get to balance over a period of 6 years but we are going to create jobs, we are going to create growth in the economy. This is a win all the way around. I would like to report to the American people, if they do not know, we have hit our first-year balanced budget targets. We wanted to get the deficit down to $158 billion. Instead it is around $150 billion. We are below the target that we wanted to hit this year. And we are now on 6 years to balance the buget, and we are doing it fairly and compassionately and predictably so this economy can grow, so the American people can do better and so that we can restore the American dream. That is what this is all about.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. If I can ask another question, and I am just giving you this hypothetical question, if this was your company and this was your core product that you had to have good results out of, and you were having these sort of results, they would not have said to you, OK, Mr. Hoekstra, we are going to give you another $1 billion to spend because you have not produced on this, and the reason is we just did not give you enough money.

Mr. BROWNBACK. I appreciate the gentleman from Michigan yielding to me, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate very much the gentleman also taking us to the root of the problem we are talking about today. That is the concept and the idea that we are going to create governmental solutions, and from a centralized planning authority in Washington, actually solve problems. I want to talk about one particular example in this area that we are talking about, a magical bureaucracy being able to solve an issue. This is the agency of HUD, Housing and Urban Development. Mr. Speaker, I would like to start this off by saying that no one here questions the good intentions of the people who work in these agencies, of the employees at HUD, or the people even that design these programs. These are good people with good intentions, but the problem is we want to talk about reality and what has been the actual reality of what has happened after all these good intentions and all this investment of resources and all these people pouring in from a centralized solution. We are talking about a centralized bureaucratic organization in the form of HUD, Housing and Urban Development as an agency, trying centralized solutions from Washington for a Nation that covers 260 million people across five time zones that has the largest economy, that is the international leader of the world. We are going to plan all this in one central entity. That is the fallacy of what we are talking about. The Department of Housing and Urban Development began with great fanfare in 1965. It was on the front lines of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. It was charged with these things: Renewing our cities, encouraging job creation, providing decent, safe shelter for low-income Americans. That was the charge in 1965. You can say, did we adequately fund HUD, this centralized planning model of what we were going to do? Since then, in 1965, HUD and other bureaucracies have spent more than $5.5 trillion on poverty programs, $5.5 trillion. That is basically about the size of our national debt today. It would be virtually about $19,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Yet, by virtually any standard, any measure, poverty, crime, drug abuse, and violence are far worse today than when HUD was created in 1965, and since we spent the $5.5 trillion. This is what the good gentleman from Michigan is pointing out about the fallacy of saying that, OK, if we are going to solve a problem, let us create a bureaucracy with good people in it to design a program that is going to fit the entire Nation in a one-size- fits-all, and then let us fund it, and if it is not working, the answer is for us to put more money into it. Mr. Speaker, I just beg to differ on that. The centralized command and control type of model failed in the former Soviet Union, has failed in command and control areas, and it is failing in America today. Past and current attempts to fix HUD have met with a great deal of resistance and past failure. Created in 1965, the entity has already gone through four major reorganizations of where we are going to reinvent HUD, four major reorganizations since 1965. All have failed. Jack Kemp's efforts to reform HUD by giving power to tenants were stifled by a reluctant Congress at that point in time and an inflexible system. Yet the problem underlying HUD's national housing policy is the myth upon which it is created: The notion that Washington can address the housing needs for all Americans through a centralized system here where we set here how it is going to be in Connecticut, in Kansas, in California; this is how it is going to be. It just does not work. There has been a surge of more than 200 separate Washington-based housing programs that have tended to displace rather than encourage local innovation and creativity. I want to add as a side note here as well, there have been a number of these that are trying to engage now more local creativity and innovation. I think those are on a positive note, as they try to localize and get local solutions brought forward. We have had a lot of rules and regulations coming out of HUD as well that have stifled local creativity and innovative solutions to housing needs. It has caused former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp to recently conclude that HUD is an agency with a disparate and contradictory mission. ``The more I was at HUD, the more I realized that the flaws were endemic to the bureaucracy.'' He went on to say at a press conference we had, where Secretary Kemp was calling for the elimination of HUD and us giving these decisions back to local tenants, that there are good people that work at HUD. It is a failed design of the system. It is a failure for us to think that we can manage, and that a mythical Washington bureaucracy will solve the problem, because it will not. It tends to get more of a centralized focus. Our model for housing opportunities is local empowerment. It is rooted in the premise that housing policy should bypass governmental bureaucrats and central planners and provide direct assistance to tenants themselves. In other words, we would seek to give vouchers to tenants that we want to help and ask them to go find their own housing abilities, whether it be with public housing, whether they purchase a housing unit, or whether it be in private renting. Housing is a local issue. Washington cannot solve local housing needs. Indeed, the more we focus on Washington, the more we take away from local housing innovative solutions that we could come forward with. Just recently the HUD bureaucracy has announced the planned construction of a new project in Washington, DC that has an estimated cost of $186,500 per unit, $186,500 per unit. This represents, I think, an enormous waste of taxpayer money, not to mention those poor families who will lose out because of the finite resources that will be spent on this project. Instead, HUD could have provided housing vouchers to individuals, they could have provided them to 35 families for 1 year for the initial cost of building one new unit in this housing project. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that HUD has obligated the Federal Government to spend, and get this number, $180 billion over the next 30 years to pay for the public and private housing commitments, most of which were made more than 10 years ago. This experiment in central planning is already being passed on to our children. Besides, HUD's attempts to fix our Nation's housing problems, this bureaucracy applies Washington's answers to igniting economic growth in our urban communities. A number of us believe that the key to economic growth in our urban communities and other places is to cut the burden of Washington. Let us cut that taxation, litigation, regulation and manipulation out of Washington so that we can have those localized solutions spring up and people go forward. As Jesse Jackson once said, capitalism without capital is just another ism. We need to remove the barriers to self-creating capital. Block grants will not do this. People do it. People do these things. The Republican Congress has already passed reforms to try to be able to cut back on taxation, regulation, litigation and manipulation so people and localized solutions can flourish. On a worse note, the HUD bureaucracy has become in some cases a catalyst of racial and economic segregation. That is according to a doctor who has worked at HUD, and an April 1996 desegregation suit brought against HUD, Thompson versus HUD, et al. by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland on behalf of several Baltimore public housing tenants who alleged that HUD illegally segregated black public housing tenants for 6 decades. This resulted in a settlement which caused HUD to break up several of the dilapidated Baltimore projects. As one can see, there are direct social and economic costs to this mythical bureaucracy. The American people realize that compassion is not measured in how many billions we spend on bureaucratic solutions when this is done and people are hurt by it. This is one of the most uncompassionate solutions of all. Fortunately, there is a better way. You have brought that to our attention. Our society benefits when people realize their own freedoms and creativity and our Government does not try to replace them. That is why I think this is a good discussion about a mythical bureaucracy does not solve things. Many times it can actually hurt or concentrate problems. It is people. It is individual solutions. We have those solutions we are offering to the American people.

Mr. BROWNBACK. The myth that was created, I want to read these off, it was on the front line of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, charged with renewing our cities, encouraging job creation, providing decent, safe shelter for low-income Americans. We followed up spending-wise, spending nearly $5.5 trillion since then on HUD and other low-income programs.

Mr. BROWNBACK. I think we would have renewed our cities, encouraged job creation, and provided decent, safe shelter for low-income Americans.

Mr. BROWNBACK. If the gentleman would yield for just a minute for a question, I would ask you, you came from the private sector in the business world. What would happen to your business had you done something similar, investing this sort of time, resources, and focus in a particular program area and had the types of results that you have just articulated?

Mr. BROWNBACK. If the gentleman will yield further, let me put you in another role and ask you if you were the superintendent of schools at a particular local school district and had these sort of results, spending this sort of money in this sort of program design, what do you think the school board would ask of you there?

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, I want to again thank the gentleman for yielding to me for a few moments. I want to take a few moments to explain how the myth of the magic of Washington bureaucracy is actually at times hurting the environment which it is designed to protect. The environmental movement has produced some wonderful results of protecting the environment, especially in improving people's attitudes and people's outlooks and actually improving the environment. We are all committed to a good, clean, healthy environment. If we do not provide a good, clean healthy, environment for our kids and our grandchildren, they will not have anyplace to live. We have to take care of Mother Earth, we have to do the right things to take care of the environment, and I know of no Member in Congress, no Member whatsoever that is not strongly supportive of a good, clean environment. We have to provide that. But I want to provide one bit of information that I do not know if it is commonly known about Washington bureaucracy and the environment. Does the gentleman know who the biggest polluter in America is? The biggest polluter in America today?

Mr. BROWNBACK. It is the Federal Government. It is the Federal Government. For example, hundreds of billions of dollars and many decades will be required to clean up Federal hazardous waste sites. I will give the gentleman some General Accounting Office numbers on this. And the General Accounting Office is the watchdog of the Federal agencies of the Federal Government. GAO says Federal agencies expect to spend $54 billion this year, this year, to clean up their own facilities as far as environmental waste and environmental problems created. And the Office of Management and Budget estimates that as much as $389 billion in additional funds may be needed through 2070 just to clean up pollution and waste caused by Washington. There are many government programs in Washington and run by Washington, and enacted by this Congress even, or past Congresses, and operated by government bureaucracies that actually harm the environment. The Government should take steps to make sure its own house is in order. If we could clean up the Federal Government's own mess, the bureaucracy mess that we have created, that the bureaucracy has created, we will go a long ways towards improving the environment in America, towards making this country better for our children and our grandchildren. It makes no sense for Washington, a Washington bureaucracy to subsidize environmental destruction on the one hand while establishing laws and regulations and bureaucracies to mitigate that damage on the other hand. And here is a classic example of a place working against itself on an overall policy that we all support: a clean, good, healthy environment, better for our children and grandchildren in the future; and yet the Federal Government being the biggest polluter in America. I yield back to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. BROWNBACK. That would seem basic to me, something we should ask of everything.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues and urge them to support this veto override. We need to do this. We need to do this consolidation. If it has not been already pointed out, or even if it has, I would like to reiterate that this is being supported by Secretary Baker, and previously it had the support of Secretary Christopher, until he was talked out of it by some other people within the administration. I think it is key to point out that lead individuals within the administration, people that have occupied key positions within the foreign policy apparatus, have said that we need to have this sort of consolidation take place. These old entities do not have a place at this point in time of U.S. history. It is important for us to be able to effectively manage our foreign affairs resources at a time of declining budgets, at a time of declining budgets, when we are going to better manage our foreign affairs budgets and resources, that they be put in together, that they be allowed to be managed and consolidated. The very essence and focus of this bill was to allow some people that are running the foreign policy apparatus to be able to more effectively and efficiently operate the foreign policy apparatus, rather than from these myriad different stand-alone entities. Let us allow some ability to be able to manage this. Any time we are going into a time like we are of balancing the budget for the first time since 1969, we are going to be making changes, needed changes, real changes to take place. What we are going to have to do is allow some flexibility of people in the system to make those changes. This bill does that. Secretary Christopher was supportive of this bill, and then was talked out of it by other people within the administration, saying, ``Well, you should not do this.'' A prior Secretary of State, Secretary Baker, who I would say knows a little bit of something about foreign affairs and foreign policy, says, ``This is a good thing to do. You need to be able to do this to be able to manage foreign affairs.'' We do not need 5 different entities doing foreign affairs in the United States. We need one Secretary of State. We need to be able to act, to be able to move, and to be able to get things done. Mr. Speaker, I think it is more posturing and politics to leave it alone and to not do the veto override; that it is more posturing and politics to say, well, OK, they are just trying to do this to show that they can eliminate an agency, rather than listening to their own people within the system who have said that these are things that needed to be done; than to listen to the people who historically have worked in this area and are saying we need this to effectively manage in a time of downsizing. With that, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the veto override. It is needed. It is needed to effectively manage the foreign affairs arena in our country. I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the veto override.

Mr. BROWNBACK. I would be happy to. He testified in front of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, of which my colleague is a distinguished member, as well, saying that this was an entity, that one of these or several of these entities needed to be folded within the State Department itself. What we are saying in this bill is, let us let the State Department itself pick and choose which would be the most effective now, at this point in time, so that they could implement what Secretary Baker and what Secretary Christopher have suggested earlier, as well.

Mr. BROWNBACK. It helps by virtue of allowing the key foreign policy leader for this country who the President has appointed, the Secretary of State, the added flexibility to be able to say in a time of declining budget, ``I have this as a higher priority than this artificially set entity over on the other side that the Congress has put.'' It gives that individual greater flexibility to be able to address what they deem to be the key and the highest point interest. That is why we urge this bill.