Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

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

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, as most of my colleagues know, this amendment would terminate NASA's space station program. This morning on the way to work, I was discussing this amendment with my administrative assistant, and we were discussing the fact that this is perhaps the fifth year I have offered this amendment in an effort to stop what I consider is a disaster in the making. She said, ``Why do you persist in doing this every year?'' That is an easy question to answer. The short answer is that I believe very strongly that we are embarked on the expenditure of $100 billion that, in the final analysis, is going to be considered by every physicist, every top medical man in the country, and by most Members of Congress, those who are willing to admit that we may have made a mistake, as a terrible financial disaster. We still have a chance to prevent that disaster. If we were to adopt the Bumpers amendment today, we have a chance to save between $50 and $74 billion. I invite all of my colleagues to look at the budget for the future. Defense continues to go up. Entitlements will continue to go up. Everything will go up, except that roughly 18 percent of the budget which we call domestic discretionary spending, within which lies this $100 billion for the space station. Do you know what domestic discretionary spending is? It is not Social Security. It is not Medicaid. It is not senatorial pensions, Government pensions, or military pensions. It is not interest on the debt. It is that very small portion of money that Congress still has some control over that determines the kind of nation we are going to be. It is the money we spend on education. How many times have I said that when American families sit around the dinner table in the evening and talk about what they love the most, it is not that Mercedes out in the driveway, it is not the farm out back, or that posh office downtown, or the country club and the golf course on weekends. It is their children. The more money you pour into wasteful spending, like the space station, the less you are going to have for the thing you love most, your children. When people talk about how much they love their children, what do they talk about? They talk about their education. What else? They talk about their children, long after the parents are dead, being able to breathe clean air and drink clean water. And where are the environmental constraints and improvements located? In domestic discretionary spending right there with the space station. When people talk about their children, they talk about how to keep them out of gangs, the place where so much of the crime in this country is located. Where is law enforcement found? Right in that small pocket of money for domestic discretionary spending. So this vote is about whether you believe in space. This vote is not about whether you get teary-eyed every time you see the shuttle take off. You are making a big, big decision, a big, big choice on where you want our country's money spent. For every dime you put into the space station, it is a dime that will not be available for our children's education. It will not be available for legitimate, honest-to-God medical research. It will not be available for all of those things that go right to the heart of what kind of nation we want to be. In 1984--some Members of this body remember it well--Ronald Reagan stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and he talked about the space station and how we were going to build a space station and have it completed by 1992. In 8 years we were going to build this monumental demonstration of our scientific skills. For how much? $8 billion. That was the cost. By the time we spent $11 billion we didn't even have a good blueprint. So President Clinton came to town and said this thing is out of control. It is much too expensive. Back in those days it was called Space Station Freedom, and the cost was absolutely staggering. So President Clinton said, ``Bring me another plan.'' So they brought him this plan called the Alpha, and he signed off on it. But it is not the Alpha anymore. It is the international space station because the European Space Agency is participating. And Russia is going to participate, if we give them the money. They are totally incapable of participating otherwise. Mr. President, do you realize that we have been in space for almost 35 years? We have been in space for almost 35 years, and the Russians have had a space station of one kind or another since 1971. For 25 years the Russians have had a space station. The first one in 1971 was called the Soyuz I. Then there were five succeeding Soyuzes. Then the Mir, which they deployed in 1986 and is still there in 1996. The Mir has been up 10 years. You are going to hear during the course of this debate all of these monumental claims about what we have gotten out of the space program so far. You are going to hear people talk about AIDS, cancer, arthritis and all of the terrible diseases that people fear so much. I am going to respond on the front end right now by saying, ``Ask the Russians.'' They have had a space station up for 25 years. Ask them. What have they gotten? I will tell you the answer. Nothing. You are going to hear all kinds of exotic technical arguments about different kinds of cells and crystals, protein crystals, gallium arsenide crystals. You are going to hear about bone structure, cell structure, and what all you get in space. I am going to give you a bunch of quotes that are not particularly interesting to listen to, but I am going to quote them to you anyway before I finish this statement, where every single scientist in America, every physicist who is not on NASA's payroll, every medical doctor worth his salt in America, says that to try to justify the space station on the grounds of scientific and medical research is laughable. You will not hear me reading to you a statement prepared by NASA. You will not hear me reading a statement to you that was prepared in a big four-page ad by Boeing. I am telling you that I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. You can tell me anything, and I cannot refute it. But I will let the experts refute the arguments for the space station. I used to say that I believe in picking the best brains in America. On any subject I can find the best brains. If I were going into anything, say, into the popcorn business, I would go to somebody that has been successful in the popcorn business. If I want to know about medical research, I might go to the Harvard Medical School. I will quote for you some of those people. If I were going to do something in an area of physics, I would go to somebody in the American Physical Society. Do you know who that is, Mr. President? The American Physical Society is 40,000 physicists. It is virtually every physicist in America. I will tell you before I finish this statement how adamantly opposed to this space station the American Physical Society is. I will tell you why the top medical people at Harvard and all across the country, from the Arthritis Foundation on down, are utterly opposed to the space station. You do not have to be a scientist to know the reason they are opposed to it. They are opposed to it because it is an utter misuse of the money. Let me digress for just a moment. I assume that most people in this body heard President Clinton's acceptance speech at the convention the other night, and you heard him say that in the past 4 years we have doubled the life of AIDS victims. That is a monumental success. Do you know what the space station had to do with that? Nothing. Do you know why we were able to do that for the people who are victims of AIDS? Because we put $12 billion a year out at the National Institutes of Health where real medical research takes place. How does it take place? The National Institutes of Health passes the money out to schools like the University of Arkansas, MIT, Harvard, and Pennsylvania and all of the other great universities of this country. It is those universities and the private sector who have been going all out to find a cure for AIDS, or something that would prevent it. But what is Congress doing? We are getting ready to drop another $74 billion into the space station--$74 billion. Where I come from, $74 billion ``ain't bean bag.'' When the year 2002 comes around, you are going to see this domestic discretionary spending account having gone from today's $264 billion to $220 billion. We are going to cut it $40 billion over the next 6 years. You tell me. How are we going to find the money to fund the things that we want to fund? We are not only going to have to cut $40 billion out of the account by the year 2002 but we are going to continue to fund this space station. It will be safely ensconced in that $224 billion. Mr. President, when it looked as though the space station might be in serious trouble, everybody said, ``Well, let's make it an international project. Let's get the Russians involved. Let's get Europe involved.'' And so we have been able to get them involved to some extent. But I can tell you that right now the Russians are 6-8 months behind. They are supposed to build a module where the astronauts will live and control the station. The Russians are going to build a module where the men actually live, or the men and women, whichever the case may be. They are behind. And the Russian Government has not given the Khrunichev Corp. that is supposed to build it any money to build it with. I am one who has favored virtually all the assistance we have given to Russia and will continue to do everything I can to help foster democracy in Russia because I think it is to our advantage and we are the beneficiaries. But if you think the Russians are going to come in on time and they are going to be able to launch all their Soyuz rockets right on time, you have to be smoking something. It is going to take 90, about, space shuttle flights to deploy the space station and to service it. You know something that is really interesting? How many times have you ever heard your mom talk about something that is worth its weight in gold? Well a pound of water sent by shuttle from Earth to the space station once it is deployed--1 pound of water, 1 pound of food, 1 pound of anything--will cost $12,800, twice the cost of gold. Can you believe that? Every time we launch that shuttle today it cost almost $400 million. We are going to have 90 shuttle flights to deploy the space station and to service it and take food and water to our astronauts. And so when they talk about the $50 billion for these shuttle flights to service and maintain the space station, there is a big assumption, and the big assumption is that everything is going to happen right on time, that the launches will take place precisely when they are supposed to, they will arrive at the space station right when they are supposed to, they will hook up right when they are supposed to. The editors of Space News say it is utter folly to plan on that basis. The space shuttle was supposed to take off for the Russian space station Mir in July. But it was grounded for six weeks because of technical problems. Yesterday it was on the launch pad being prepared for a launch on September 14. Do you know where Atlantis is right now? It is back in the hangar. It is in the hangar in Florida because a hurricane is approaching Florida. So they had to probably download it, that is, take the fuel out of it, and put it in the garage. What if we were planning to launch the Atlantis today? We could not because of the hurricane. You say that is no big deal. It is a big deal. It cost millions every time you miss the target to take off in one of those things. To assume that every one of those missions is going to take off right on time and everything is going to go hunky-dory, as the General Accounting Office says, is the height of folly. Now, Mr. President, we have already built 17 percent of the hardware of the space station. That translates into 167,000 pounds. So the argument on the other side will be that we have gone so far, we have already put this much money into it; we cannot stop now. Lord, how many times have I heard that argument in 22 years I have been in the Senate. Once a month. I was absolutely the most shocked person in the Senate when we killed the super collider because I had listened to that argument for 3 years. Three years I had been trying to kill that thing. Incidentally, I do not take a lot of credit for that. The House killed it. The House killed it and held firm in the conference. We only got about 44 votes in the Senate to kill it. You cannot kill anything in the Senate that costs money. You can get a lot of noise about balancing the budget until you start trying to balance the budget. Two weeks ago Aerospace Daily said that the space station construction budget is already $500 million above target. If you think the current $94 billion estimate, which is what the General Accounting Office says it is going to cost, NASA says 72 or 3--I will put my money on the General Accounting Office. They say it is going to cost $94 billion if everything goes perfectly from now on. Everybody knows it is going to cost more than that because everything will not go perfectly. On that night when Ronald Reagan assured the American people that we were going to build this space station in 8 years for a total cost of $8 billion, NASA also said here is what we are going to do with the space station. Here is the mission. Listen. This is 1984. No. 1, we are going to make it a staging base for future missions. If we decide to go to Mars, we will have the space station there. We can park a rocket there, refuel it and send it on to Mars. That mission is gone. No longer one of the missions. No. 2, we are going to make a manufacturing facility out of it. For example, we will manufacture crystals for computers. They will be perfect because they are made in space. Nobody can tell you quite why zero gravity is important. Most physicists will tell you it is not important. But everybody assumes if you do it in space it must have some kind of benefit, or you must be able to do something in space you cannot do anyplace else. I will come back to that argument in a moment. But, No. 2, it says we are going to make a manufacturing facility out of it--gone. It is no longer one of the missions. No. 3, we are going to make a permanent observatory out of it. I assume we were going to observe Mars and space and observe the Earth also. So, No. 3 was to make a permanent observatory, observing the stars and the planets--gone. No longer one of the eight missions. No. 4, we were going to make a transportation node, sort of a bus stop in space. But that mission is gone too. No. 5, a servicing facility. It will be a place where shuttles could park and get any service work done. If they had to recharge the batteries, put on new fuel, whatever. We could also repair satellites there. It was going to be a garage in space--gone. No longer one of the missions. No. 6, it was going to be an assembly facility where we would assemble a satellite or a spacecraft for further use, to go to Mars or maybe just to orbit the Earth or something else. That was the sixth one, to make an assembly facility--that is gone. No. 7, a storage depot, where we would store fuel and parts and supplies, a gas station in space--gone. No. 8, a research laboratory to study the impact of weightlessness-- that is still there. Of the eight original missions, seven are gone. So, with this mission of research laboratory now the only mission remaining, what are they going to do? They are going to do medical research, according to a very lengthy statement that was put into the Record by my very good friend from Ohio. Let me digress for a moment and say the Senator from Ohio and I came to the Senate together and we have become very close friends. He is one of the finest men I know. But he is entitled to be wrong occasionally. His wife, Anna, will tell you that. We just happen to disagree on this. We do not disagree on much. But when it comes to the kind of research you are going to do, let us talk about the life sciences, the medical research part of it. As I said earlier, I am not a doctor, so I have to depend on people that I respect, whose judgment I trust. So, here is then-Presidential Science Adviser D. Alan Bromley. He wrote the Vice President remarks on March 11, 1991, and here is what he said: The space station is needed to find means of maintaining human life during long space flights. This is its only scientific justification, in our view. And all future design efforts should be focused on this one purpose, how to maintain human beings in space. He went on to say. The primary thrust of whatever life research is conducted will be focused on manned space exploratory programs. Medicine and commercial applications will be secondary. Carl Sagan--who, incidentally, favors the space station because he favors space exploration, but the purposes are quite different, according to Carl Sagan, than those of the proponents of the space station--said: The only substantive function of a space station, as far as I can see, is for long-duration space flight. Before I forget it, here are the organizations who oppose this thing: The American Physiological Society, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, American Society for Investigative Pathology, American Institute for Nutrition, American Association of Immunologists, American Society for Cell Biology, Biophysical Society, American Association of Anatomists. Let me continue. Here is what the American College of Physicians said, in April 1992: We agree that much if not all of the money slated for the space station, the super collider, SDI, and for defense intelligence could be better spent on improving the health of our citizens, stimulating economic growth, and reducing the deficit. Here is what the American Physical Society said on July 24, 1994. Bear in mind they speak for 40,000 physicists who are charged primarily with building the space station. Here is what they said in 1994: The principal scientific mission of the station is to study the effects on humans of prolonged exposure to a space environment. Medical researchers scoff at claims that these studies might lead to cures for diseases on Earth. David Rosenthal, Harvard Medical School, testifying on behalf of the American Cancer Society. Listen to this: We cannot find valid scientific justification for the claims that this will affect vital cancer research. Based on the information we have seen thus far, we do not agree that a strong case has been made for choosing to do cancer research in space over critically needed research on the Earth. Dr. Sean Rudy, who runs the American Arthritis Foundation: I will submit to you the medical research done here on Earth is of greater value than that planned in space. Space station proponents have indicated that the space station will provide a first-class laboratory. We used to have first-class laboratories in universities and medical schools across the country. Reports by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have indicated that in over 51 percent of the biological laboratory research, space is deemed inadequate for the conduct of research. Furthermore, the National Science Foundation report estimated that the capital construction backlog for lab research space is $12 billion. Should our priorities now be a first-class laboratory in space or correction of a long-standing deficiency in laboratories throughout the country? His point is not debatable, not arguable. Donald Brown, president of the American Society for Cell Biology, in an article in the Washington Post called ``Who Needs A Space Station?'' Here is what he said: In reference to experiments on cellular processes in normal and diseased cells and organisms, there is no obvious need for this research. It is extremely difficult to imagine what special conditions space might provide for answering important questions about the causes, diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Dr. James Van Allen--everybody has heard about the Van Allen radiation belt around the Earth. Here is what he, the world's most famous astrophysicist, said: There has been nothing that resulted from the manned space program, essentially nothing in the way of extraordinary pharmaceuticals or cures for disease or any extraordinary crystals which have revolutionized electronics. Claims to the contrary are false--not true. If you are not going to listen to people like James Van Allen, I might as well sit down and go home. If you are not going to listen to people like Alan Bromley and Dr. Rosenthal, what am I doing standing here? What I am doing is quoting the top people in America, the people everybody should look to on issues like this. Then we have the subject of growing cells in zero gravity. For some reason or another, we have this cockamamie idea that if you want to do research, if you can just do it in zero gravity, somehow or another you are going to get some benefit that you could not possibly get on Earth. But here is what the Space Studies Board said on the subject: The promise of protein crystallography and potential usefulness of microgravity in producing protein crystals of superior quality should not provide any part of the justification for building a space station. Growing crystals of superior quality in space is not close, nor is it likely to become close, to being cost-effective. It currently is, and is likely to remain, faster and very much less expensive to obtain superior quality crystals on the ground. On making industrial crystals, here is what T.J. Rodgers, the founder of a semiconductor company said: I run a semiconductor company, and I am director of Vitesse, a gallium arsenide semiconductor company. So I know about this stuff. All I can say is, this program of growing gallium arsenide wafers in space is a colossal con job, and there is nobody I know in my industry who wants those wafers in the first place. There is no economic benefit to increasing the purity of crystal beyond the point we can currently improve it. The cost is huge, and the economic benefit is almost nil for that last step. Namely, going into space. Dr. Al Joseph, founder of Vitesse, a gallium arsenide semiconductor company. I have met Dr. Joseph two or three times. Here is what he said on industrial crystals: The idea of making better gallium arsenide crystals in space is an absurd-- Absurd. business proposition. Even if you give me perfect and pure crystals made in space, it won't help me commercially, because 90 to 95 percent of my costs and 85 to 90 percent of the integrated circuit yield on a wafer is driven by what I put on the wafer and not so much by the purity of the wafer itself. The cost of one trip to the space station would finance just about everything the American electronic industry needs to do to ensure its technological superiority for years to come. That's for sure. I have never seen a project or a mission as desperate for a justification as this one. I look at those ads Boeing puts out. Of course, Boeing is the prime contractor. They stand to make billions out of this. And so that makes their efforts slightly jaundiced to me. I certainly understand why any Senator in Florida, Texas, California, and Maryland, I can understand why any of those Senators would vote for this. They have a lot of jobs in their State, and those jobs pay well over $100,000 each. The cost of this project in jobs will be the most expensive jobs program in the history of America, by far. On microgravity research, one of the most interesting statements I have seen was by Dr. Bromley when he talks about manned space flights and how important that is to microgravity. Dr. Bromley said: The human habitation of the space station is fundamentally incompatible with the requirement that the microgravity experiments be unperturbed. In other words, if you are operating in microgravity, you don't want anybody jarring around in the space station. And so he says, having men on board is incompatible with any research that requires zero gravity or even microgravity. The Space Science Board of the National Research Council said in 1991: Continuing development of the Space Station Freedom cannot be supported on scientific grounds. One article in Newsweek in 1994 I thought had the best one. ``What is the space station for?'' That is a question that nobody has been able to answer. The author said something which was demeaning in a sense to astronauts, which I am reluctant to quote. But he called them a bunch of people floating around in space looking for something to do. Well, they are all very brave men. We are always proud of our astronauts. I don't know when I have ever been prouder than I was watching our astronauts repair the Hubble telescope, a magnificent thing to behold and they saved the country a tremendous amount of money, simply because it was flawed in the first place. In 1995 the National Research Council's Space Studies Board said: The committee reaffirms the findings of the previous report that there is little potential for a successful program to develop manufacturing on a large scale in space for the purpose of returning high-quality, economically viable products to space. And the American Physical Society, once more: It is the view of the Council of the American Physical Society that scientific justification is lacking for a permanently manned space station. We are concerned that the potential contributions of a manned space station to the physical sciences have been greatly overstated and that many of the scientific objections currently planned for the space station could be accomplished more effectively and at a much lower cost on Earth on unmanned robotic platforms or on the shuttle. There are a lot more quotes I could give you. I am just telling you what all the top people in the country say. I think about the fact that we have been in space almost 35 years and we have had space stations up since 1971, and nobody walks in here and says, ``Here is where we found a cure for this,'' ``Here is where we make great advances of that.'' Tang, Velcro, magnetic resonance imaging, Teflon--the space station had nothing to do with those. The space program had nothing to do with those. Yet those myths persist that somehow or other we have gotten Tang and Velcro and Teflon and all those things out of the space station. That has been debunked totally, so I will not use it anymore. But I will say this. There are not 10 medical doctors in this country who would support the space station if you gave them the option of putting this $2 billion into the National Institutes of Health, who in turn will put it out to the great researchers of this country to cure or make great advances toward curing some of the terribly incurable diseases we have--it is a no brainer. You think about the poor National Institutes of Health sitting over there able to fund only one out of every four good applications. I am not talking about one of four of all applications; I am talking about one out of four they would like to fund, that they consider viable, scientifically viable. I saw a thing that my good friend, Senator Glenn, sent out about the National Institute on Aging, that they can do studies on aging on the space station. Do you know one shuttle flight would fund the National Institute on Aging for a full year? When you say, What do you get out of the space station that you do not get out of just a shuttle flight? The answer is always, Well, it takes longer. You can't do this research in 2 weeks. It takes longer. I do not know how much longer. Then if you ask what kind of research? You hear all of these possibilities. Well, we can look at this and we can look at that and we can look at this and we can look at that. They give you some complicated stuff. NASA has all that stuff cataloged on a computer over there. They can give it to you in spades. As I say, we have been at it 35 years. We have not gotten anything yet except a space suit. Space suits are marvelous contraptions, but there is not much demand for space suits in this country. There is a lot of demand for education. There is a lot of demand to feed the poor. There is a lot of demand for cleaning up our rivers and lakes. There is a lot of demand for stopping gangs in high schools. There is a lot of demand for bringing crime under control and doing something about drugs. No demand for space suits. So Mr. President, if I were to ask each Member of this body, if you had a chance to go back over the last 15 years and spend the $4 trillion that we spent that we did not have--the deficit has gone up $4 trillion since 1981--if I were to ask you, would you have spent the $4 trillion over the last 15 years the same way we spent it? Why, of course you would not have. If you had a chance right now, if somebody came to you and said, Look, here's a chance to save $74 billion on this space station. Do you think you could solve some of this country's problems? Why, it would be like a child at Christmas; people saying, Oh, my gosh, we could educate every child in the country for what that's going to cost. We could pave every road in the country for what that's going to cost. We could go through all those things. Every problem we have in this country can be traced not to a lack of money, but to the way we spent it. It would not have been for a space suit, even though I am a strong proponent of the space program. I got teary-eyed with the rest of America when I watched John Glenn soar into space. I have gotten teary-eyed a lot of times, but not as teary-eyed as I am going to get after we have spent the rest of this $74 billion on the space station. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. HOLLINGS addressed the Chair.

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

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I was just going to yield myself 2 or 3 minutes.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I am prepared to yield back the remainder of my time and vote now, if it is agreeable with the managers. The unanimous-consent agreement a moment ago was to vote at 5:30. We can just go ahead and vote now.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I have listened to the speakers who oppose this amendment. I have listened very carefully. I have not heard anybody make any claims of any beneficial research, mechanical, medical, physical, or any other successful research being accomplished by the Russians and the former Soviet Union after 25 years in space. That is right. The Russians have had a space station orbiting the Earth for 25 years. The only reason in God's world we are putting one up there is because they have one. If you don't like that explanation, there is another one that is probably about as good, which is to figure out how we are going to get to Mars, because it is going to take at least 24 months to get there and back, and we want to know, can man survive that long in space. If you want that to be the justification for the space station, for Pete's sake, be honest about it and let us debate that. Carl Sagan is not rhapsodic about all these arguments about curing cancer, but he is about the exploration of space. Even Daniel Goldin said that we not only need to go to Mars, we need to have an outpost there on a permanent basis. He as much as said that is the reason for the space station. If you want to buy that as a rationale for building a space station, I won't vote for it because we don't have the money. Bear in mind that every dime you put into this space station is borrowed money. Now, just as soon as we get through with this debate and I lose and we continue inexorably, irreversibly toward spending $94 billion we don't have, the same people will come over and you hear all these pompous speeches about balancing the budget. Senator Hutchison, a moment ago, talked about all the magnificent accomplishments so far of the space program. One was a remotely programmable heart pacemaker. And she mentioned other products and inventions. But I say to Senator Hutchison, those things could have been accomplished for peanuts right here on Earth. You don't have to go into space to develop a remotely programmable heart pacemaker. I also say that those things were discovered and developed by NASA, not the space station. The space station had absolutely zilch to do with those accomplishments. If you want to do research in the space program on the shuttle, that's fine. I talked earlier about how many times I had gotten teary- eyed watching the shuttle take off. I want you to know that once I got involved in the space program--and I went on the space committee when I first came here and, believe you me, it was a spacey committee--I quit shedding tears when I found out it cost $400 million to send one of those things up. Think of that--$400 million. My good friend, Senator Glenn, said that I misspoke when I said we had only built 17 percent of the hardware of the space station. He suggested we had done 45 percent. Let me clarify that. We have built 165,000 pounds of the station's total 950,000 pounds of hardware. That is about 17 percent. However, NASA says Boeing has accomplished 45 percent of the prime contract. But of the $17 billion the space station is going to cost in the bill, the prime contract is now only $6 billion of it. It is true, we have done 45 percent of the prime contract, but we have actually only built 17 percent space station's hardware. And we are, according to the General Accounting Office, using up those reserves he talked about at a much faster pace than the program can sustain. I might also point out that Boeing is indeed at least 4 months behind, and the Russians are 6 to 8 months behind, and the press is reporting that the space station is already $500 million over its construction budget--$500 million. If you ask any Senator how he would like to have $500 million for some of his favorite programs, he will start salivating. I have not heard one single claim that one single case of influenza has been cured by anything we found in space. I have not heard one single claim anyone plans to commercially grow gallium arsenide crystals in space. They can be made there but nobody argues that you can do it economically. On the contrary, everybody says it is totally uneconomical. It is always what we are going to do. We have been at this business 35 years headed for a $94 billion project, and we are saying look what we are going to do. Look at this chart. The cost is all broken down for you neat as a pin; $94 billion. I can hardly wait for us to get through with this so we can listen to all of the speeches about balancing the budget again. Where is the cost going? We have already spent $18 billion since Ronald Reagan made that famous speech about how we are going to build this whole thing for $8 billion. We have spent $18 billion since then-- $10 billion more than President Reagan suggested. That is just for building the station. That does not include the $51 billion we are going to spend on shuttle launches to keep the space station supplied with water, food, and whatever else they may need for 10 years, which is supposed to be the life of the space station. So it is all right there--shuttle launches, construction, operations, and $1 billion in additional costs. You still have $76 billion to spend. You can vote ``aye'' on this amendment and save the taxpayers of this country $76 billion. Give it to the National Institutes of Health and you might cure cancer. You might make a greater impact on AIDS, arthritis, and a host of other diseases which make life miserable for so many millions of people. You are not going to accomplish anything by putting it into the space station except maybe a good, warm, fuzzy glow occasionally. This whole thing, $94 billion, works out to a total cost of $25 million for each day the space station will be in operation. You think of that. This thing is going to cost $25 million a day every 24 hours. What is it worth in gold? Twenty-five times its weight in gold. Isn't that something? You think about something costing 25 times its weight in gold for no tangible benefit. Jobs--each job on this thing of the 15,000 jobs costs $140,000. I can tell you one thing. If I were from Texas, Alabama, or California, I would probably be on the other side of this issue. If I had 15,000 jobs, or any portion of those 15,000 jobs at $140,000 apiece, I would probably think the space station was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is going to cost us $12,880 to transport one pound of water or bread or anything else to the space station. Each astronaut is going to use how many pounds of water a day? They are allocated for all purposes I believe 9.5 liters per day. It all comes to $319,000 a day I believe for each astronaut, just for bottled water. That is $1.9 million in water per day for a crew of six astronauts. Mr. President, I want to read a portion of a letter which I consider to be extremely important in this debate. The testimony by Prof. Robert L. Park before the Commerce Committee, the Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, which he delivered on July 1, 1993. I am not going to attempt to read the whole letter. But I am going to read the salient parts of it. I hope my colleagues will pay close attention to this. Dr. Park represents the American Physical Society with 40,000 physicists including astrophysicists. About the only physicists who support the space station are the ones that are on NASA's payroll. Here is what Dr. Park said: It is the view of the American Physical Society that scientific justification is lacking for a permanent manned space station in Earth orbit. We are concerned that the potential contribution of a manned space station to the physical sciences has been greatly overstated, and many of the scientific objectives currently planned for the space station could be accomplished more effectively and at a much lower cost on Earth by unmanned robotic platforms, or the Shuttle. You have two groups of experts on the space station. You have physicists and you have medical science. Here is what the physicists say. He goes on to say: The only unique property of a space station environment is microgravity. It is not surprising, therefore, that much has been made of this environment in attempts to sell the space station, but many years of research on shuttle flights and in continuous operation of the Russian space station Mir have produced absolutely no evidence that this environment offers any advantage for processing materials or drugs. Indeed, there are sound reasons for doubting that it could. Gravitational forces are simply too weak to significantly affect most processes. He goes on: A possible exception was thought to be the growth of molecular crystals, specifically protein crystals. In November, however, a team of the Americans that collaborated in protein crystal growth experiments on Mir and on the U.S. space shuttle reporting in Nature magazine that 10 years of work at stupendous cost has produced no significant breakthrough in protein crystal growth. Microgravity has no effect on crystallization of most proteins, they report, and, if it does, crystals are as likely to be worse as better. No protein has been observed to crystallize in microgravity that does not crystallize on Earth. In short, you can do it on Earth. You do not have to spend $100 billion to go into space. He goes on to say, in quoting Dr. Blumberg at Harvard, a Nobel laureate and physicist, and he summed it up bluntly in testimony before a Senate committee. Microgravity, he says, is of ``microimportance.'' Then he goes on to the spinoff, what you are going to get out of the spinoff. ``It is both false and demeaning for NASA to claim''--listen to this. He says: It is both false and demeaning for NASA to claim that products, from magnetic resonance imaging to synthetic pig teats, are spinoffs of the space program. Any program that spends $15 billion per year is bound to produce something that society can use, but few of NASA's claims stand up. Indeed, an internal NASA study of technology transfer which became public in January acknowledged that NASA's spinoff claims were exaggerated, including such famous examples as Velcro, Tang and Teflon. Contrary to popular belief, the study found NASA created none of these. I have heard that old Teflon, Velcro, Tang argument for 5 years. NASA had nothing to do with it except publicize it. Let me just close this segment by saying the opportunities for saving money are very limited around here. This year, the deficit is going to be $116 billion. If Bill Clinton had not acted when he did in 1993, it would be $290 billion this year. I do not care whether you like Bill Clinton or not. A lot of people here do not. But he did something that was very unpopular in 1993--he raised taxes. But he raised taxes on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of the people of this country; 28 million people actually got their taxes lowered. But we are today looking at the most dramatic reduction in the deficit any of us ever dreamed would happen. It is a gratifying thing to see that deficit reduced so dramatically over a 4-year period. But I can tell you, while that was not easy, it is easy compared to how you are going to find that other $116 billion toward a balanced budget. You are not going to balance the budget by spending this $76 billion. You keep spending money like this and all you can do is make those great speeches about balancing the budget but you will never balance it. You may convince the chamber of commerce back home that your heart is in a balanced budget, but you just cannot find it in your heart to vote for the things that bring about a balanced budget. So I plead with my colleagues to show the kind of spine and spunk that your constituents have a right to expect of you. Oh, it is an easy vote; 99 percent of the people in this country really do not care whether you vote ``aye'' or ``nay'' on this. That is the reason you cannot win it. That is the reason I have not won it in 5 years; it is too easy to vote ``aye.'' So, as I said, I have no illusions about what the vote is going to be, but I am just like the turtle. A man was riding the turtle across the creek. The turtle got out in the middle of the creek and he went under after he promised he would not. And the man who was on the turtle's back said, ``You promised me you wouldn't do that. Why on Earth did you do it?'' And the old turtle said, ``I guess it is just my nature.'' That is the way it is around here. It is just our nature to vote for big spending projects like this and make speeches about balancing the budget. I yield the floor, Mr. President.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, if I may say to the Senator from Missouri, I recognize I have been in that position too many times when Senators want to speak but do not come to the floor. But in the interest of accommodating him, if the Senator would like to put in a quorum call without the time being charged to either side, that would be satisfactory until the speakers get here.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I want to clarify the record on one thing, before Senator Heflin leaves the floor. As he knows, he and I talked about it, I also have a stent in my heart. We are getting conflicting information. My doctor told me he was part of the team that developed stents out at the National Institutes of Health. He never did mention the space station or any part of space. So we will have to reconcile that little difference about who developed stents. In any event, I am grateful to whoever did it.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I want to add one point about the cost of keeping the astronauts supplied with in water in space. As I said before, it will cost $12,880 per pound to ship water to the space station. With each astronaut allocated 9.5 liters of water per day, that comes to $1.9 million per day just to keep a crew of six supplied with water. I've done some more calculations and that comes out to about $700 million per year. Let me say that again, because I think that is sliding over everybody's head. We are talking about almost three-quarters of a billion dollars a year to send water to six people on the space station. Now, you talk about balancing the budget, that is a great way to do it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, how much of my time remains?

Mr. BUMPERS. I do not think so. Is the Senator from Missouri prepared to yield back?

Mr. BUMPERS. Is the distinguished manager of the bill short on time? I will be glad to yield some time.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I also rise in support of the conferees decision to increase spending on food safety research through the Agricultural Research Service. This research is a very important part of the Federal Government's effort to protect the nation's food supply. The FY1997 Agriculture Appropriation's Conference Report sets spending for ARS Food Safety Research at $5.5 million. By increasing funding for this research the Conferees took an important step toward ensuring that our food supply meets our highest expectations.

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator from Nebraska for his question. I support the Conferees decision to fund research of host-pathogen relationships, rapid on- farm DNA-based diagnostic testing and improved methodologies for HACCP validation. These three areas have been targeted by the administration as priority research that should be carried out by the Agricultural Research Service, and I support that prioritization. By supporting research to elucidate the relationship between livestock and pathogens, we will lay the foundation for breeding livestock that are resistant to foodborne pathogens and developing effective on-farm diagnostic tests. In this manner, scientists can improve our food production systems in the earliest stages before the meat ever reaches the processor. Furthermore, effective methodologies for HACCP validation will help federal food safety inspectors to ensure that our meat and poultry is not contaminated. The Conferees sent a strong message that they support food safety research at the Agricultural Research Service and I am pleased that the bill provides increased funding for this purpose.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I would like to respond to the Senator from California by stating that I and the other conferees are very aware of this budget item and agree that construction should commence at the earliest possible date. I am happy to report that the Senate bill included $11 million for this facility. I wish we could have provided the full amount requested by the Senator from California, but our allocation, being severely reduced from the previous year, prevented us from meeting her full request. Unfortunately, the House provided no funding for this project. As the Senator knows, once construction begins, any delays in project completion eventually result in greater cost. There were a number of ARS facility projects nearing completion that could be completed in fiscal year 1997. Accordingly, the conferees decided to complete those projects before allocating funds for new facilities in order to better manage our limited resources. There was discussion about the merits of the Palier laboratory during House and Senate conference negotiations. It is intended that by completing ongoing projects, which will be no longer the subject of future appropriations, we will be able to provide higher levels of funding for other priority needs. If we can provide full funding for the Palier facility next year, it will serve the double benefits of assisting the U.S. agricultural industry and helping us use our fiscal resources more efficiently. Although it is impossible now to know what our allocation will be for fiscal year 1998, it is clear that if provided adequate resources, it would be to everyone's advantage to provide full funding for the Palier laboratory in the fiscal year 1998 appropriations bill.

Mr. BUMPERS. I would like to associate myself with Senator Cochran's comments on this matter and urge the Department to respond positively to the Center for Applied Aquaculture's proposal for a core aquaculture technology development facility together with integral satellite facilities to demonstrate those technologies for the benefit of U.S. aquaculture industry.

Mr. BUMPERS. Your understanding is correct. As we noted in the Senate report accompanying H.R. 3603 at the time, the provision covering the voluntary medication leaflet program was not to be construed as applying in any way to the FDA's use of its existing authority to require patient leaflets for drugs that can cause severe birth defects, have serious adverse reactions when used with other drugs, and similar instances that pose a serious and significant public health risk.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Thank you, Mr. President. I thank the distinguished floor manager from Nebraska. Mr. President, let me say, first, that nobody knows better than I that our welfare system does not work very well. Everyone who is going to vote against this bill today said they do not like the system, that it is broke. There is a lot of truth in that. There are a number of reasons I am going to vote against this bill. First, the bill is not going to address those deficiencies we all know exist in the system. Second, I am going to vote against it because it discriminates against my home State of Arkansas in a massive way. Children in my State will get $390 a year. Children in Massachusetts will get $4,200 a year; in Washington, DC, $2,200 a year. You tell me why a child in Arkansas is worth $390 a year and $4,200 in Massachusetts. You expect me to vote for a formula like that, one that does not even take into consideration how many poor children are in your State? Everybody hates welfare. I am not too crazy about it myself. But I will tell you one thing. I have seen it firsthand. I have been in the ghettos of my State in the Delta. I can tell you it is not a pretty picture. Mr. President, I find it rather perverse that 535 men and women who make $133,000 a year will be voting on whether children are going to eat or not, whether their mothers are going to eat or not. Never has such an important piece of legislation been crafted in such a highly charged political environment. Everybody understands precisely what the politics of this whole thing are. The election is coming up. So we have to do it. I said the other day that there ought to be a rule in the Congress against considering bills like this during an election year. The American people detest welfare. I understand that. But there ought to be a rule against considering these kinds of bills that affect the very fiber of this Nation in an election year. This is the first time in my lifetime we have deliberately and knowingly and with some elation turned our back on the children of this Nation. I still believe those Methodist Sunday school stories I heard about ``blessed are the poor.'' I used to be one of them. We are going to kick people off welfare and tell them to get a job. I would like to invite all of my colleagues to go to the Arkansas Delta. I will pick out a dozen communities for you to visit, and then you tell me after you have kicked these mothers off welfare where they are going to get a job; 50 percent of these mothers will be kicked off the welfare rolls after the first 2 years. There are no jobs. We could not even find it in our hearts to provide vouchers for mothers so they could provide diapers, medicines, and other necessities for children. We wouldn't even give them a voucher to buy nonfood products for their children. I can't vote for this. We have one out of every five children in this country in poverty. You think of it. One out of every five children in this country, 20 percent, now live in poverty. Every single study of this bill says there will be a minimum of 1 million to 2.5 million children added to those rolls within 5 years. Oh, Mr. President, I could go on and on about why I am not going to vote for this bill. Simply, I just can't find it in my heart to vote for a bill that I consider to be punitive. Punitive toward whom? Not just some lethargic person on welfare, but innocent children. If you are a legal alien and the school district wants to take your child, that is their business. We are not going to pay for it. So if you are a legal alien, you have a right to be here, you work here, you pay taxes here, and you send your child down to the school. They may take your child, but they will not let him go to the lunchroom because the Federal Government pays that bill, and ``We ain't paying.'' We are not going to pay it. I have heard it said that 47 members of our Olympic team are legal aliens, or children of legal aliens. Tonight, instead of honoring them during the Olympics, we are turning are backs on them. So, Mr. President, I admit I am soft-hearted. I am very compassionate toward children and women. So I just simply cannot vote for this bill. I wish everybody well, and I hope it works. I do not believe it will. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. That is correct?

Mr. BUMPERS. You appropriate the money in 1995 for 1996, don't you?

Mr. BUMPERS. Please feel free to interrupt.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, to say that it is a complex issue is an understatement. I am not sure everybody on this floor fully understands what we are debating. But let me tell you what I do understand about it, and I welcome the comments of either of the managers or the author of the amendment. We appropriate trust funds 2 years after we receive them. For instance, whatever we took in in the trust fund in 1994 is actually allocated to the States in 1996. That is my understanding. As I say, I invite anybody to correct anything I say. I just want everyone to understand what we are talking about. So whatever the Treasury Department takes in in gasoline taxes, which is called the trust fund, in 1994, is allocated for use in 1996. So in 1994, apparently the Treasury Department made an error and took in $1.5 billion more than they said they were going to have, and rather than try to correct the error at the time it was made, they said, ``Well, we will just save this until next year. We'll put it in the 1995 allocation.'' Now, bear in mind that when you are allocating money in 1995, you are talking about money that the States are going to get in 1996, simply because we appropriate money a year in advance.

Mr. BUMPERS. That is right, you allocate it 2 years later than the Treasury Department receives it. But the basic problem here is that the Treasury Department underestimated by $1.5 billion 1994 receipts. So when it came time to appropriate the money from the trust fund in 1995, it was appropriated, not realizing the fact that they had $1.5 billion more than they thought they had. So this year, 1996, the States got an allocation of 1994 trust funds that was $1.5 billion short--$1.6 billion, to be precise. Here is my problem. My State tells me that by the time the $1.5 billion error had been discovered, everybody knew it, and the great State of Arkansas got less money in 1996 than we were entitled to, and we were told that we would get it made up in 1997, which is the bill we are debating here tonight, the 1997 bill. So the 1997 money is being allocated here this evening and, lo and behold, an amendment is offered that would cause my State to be about $6.5 million short. Now, that is not a lot of money to a very many people. However, in the State of Arkansas, $6.5 million is a pretty good hunk of change. So Arkansas got less money in 1996 than we were supposed to get. We did not get our share of that $1.5 billion. And now they are taking it away from us again in 1997. So, as I say, that is my understanding so far. And on that basis, of course, I do not have any choice but to vote against the Senator from Montana's amendment. I am hoping that a lot of other people will do likewise. I also note that the managers of this bill would like to get this thing done tonight so they can get out of here. I do not want to slow things up. But I would like, when all this conversation ends over here, to have somebody to comment on the things I have said, either refute the statement I made that we got less money in 1996 than we were supposed to get, or that we got more. But you should not penalize my State in 1997 and give us less money if we got penalized last year. That is what we call a double whammy. And it is not right and it is not fair. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BUMPERS. Say that again, please.