Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. That is correct?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, on August 27, 1996, the Industrial Developers of Arkansas will honor Mac Van Horn as their Developer of the Year. Mac Van Horn has been the backbone of industrial development for the past 25 years in Russellville, AR. Owner of a local construction firm involved in residential and commercial development, Mac began work as a cheerleader for development in the early 1970's. He began to attend seminars, visited Arkansas Industrial Development Commission project managers, and others and learned all the things that were important to industrial recruitment. He was such a good student of industrial recruitment techniques that two Arkansas Governors placed him on the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission where he served faithfully for 15 years. In the past 5 years, Mac and others on the Russellville Industrial Contact Team have recruited five new companies to the Arkansas River Valley. Fasco Industries, Inc., Alumax Foils, Inc., Bardcor Corp., CarMar Freezers, and Amarillo Gear Company have all chosen to locate in Russellville. Mac combines his knowledge of industrial development recruitment and home cooking since he invites prospective company officials into his home when they visit to lure industry to Pope County. Mac plans to retire soon from these endeavors. His leadership, years of experience and expertise, and his skills as a negotiator will be missed on the Russellville Industrial Contact Team. This award is most deserved and I want to join in congratulating Mac Van Horn for his tireless service to the community he loves.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. This amendment deals with an account in this bill called weapons activities. This account has $516 million more than it had last year, which is a 14-percent increase--14 percent. Incidentally, it is $300 million above the House, $269 million more than the President requested. My amendment simply takes them down to a 7-percent increase. It is the account where you deal with testing. And we have had a testing moratorium for 3 years. Under the START Treaty we are going to go from 24,000 weapons and 25 types to 3,500 and 7 types. We are increasing the budget to do all of that by 14 percent. If they cannot get by with a 7-percent increase, they ought to be abandoned.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, has a motion been made to table my amendment?

Mr. BUMPERS. Have the yeas and nays been ordered?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, this is an amendment which could get terribly complex. It involves a segment of the energy and water bill that is immensely complex. It is called ``Atomic Energy Defense Activities.'' Within that there is an account called ``Weapons Activities.'' This bill contains $3.978 billion, almost $4 billion, for weapons activities. That is too much. Let me say by digression, there are not two people in the Senate for whom I have a greater respect and admiration and personal friendship than the chairman of the committee and the ranking member, Senators Domenici and Johnston. But I feel obligated to raise this issue and get the debate going on how much money we are putting into this weapons activities account. Mr. President, the Senate bill proposes to provide roughly $269 million more than the President's request and $300 million above the House level. The Senate bill's proposed funding level is actually $531 million above the amount provided in fiscal year 1996, a 14-percent increase. That is just entirely too much. I had a very good, lengthy letter from Senator Domenici pointing out that one of the reasons for this increase is that DOE had some carryover money in prior years that we are spending in 1996. However, that only accounts for a portion of the 14-percent increase. My amendment takes the carryover funds into account and proposes to reduce the weapons activities account by only $269 million, which is the difference between the amount provided in the Senate bill and the administration's request. The Senator makes what I know he considers to be plausible arguments, and I am not in a very good position to dispute some of the technical arguments made about why it was necessary to put all this extra money into this account. But any time you are offering a 14-percent increase in any kind of a budget in this day and time, with the budget constraints we are under, it ought to get every single Senator's attention. The OMB Acting Director, Mr. Lew, sent each Member of the Senate a letter outlining the administration's concerns about the Senate bill being $531 million above 1996 spending levels. And well he should be concerned. He is concerned because we are putting another $531 million into weapons activities, and the Department of Energy is suffering mightily from cuts in civilian energy and research programs. The Appropriations Committee report outlines the add-ons to the weapons activities programs. If you look over those add-ons, I am not sure exactly what they do, but there is one thing I do know. About $90 million is not authorized. For example, there is an $80 million add-on for stockpile stewardship and $50 million of that is not authorized. What are we doing appropriating money that has not been authorized? There is an add-on for $40 million for the accelerated strategic computing initiative--a mighty fancy name and I am not sure what all it does. But it is not authorized. The request already proposes $120.6 million for the program--a 43-percent increase from fiscal year 1996. Mr. President, I only have 7\1/2\ minutes on my time. I am not going to pursue this any further. I would just like to make a comment. I was speaking to 400 of the brightest kids in Arkansas at what is called Governor's School Saturday and about 800 parents. Politicians do not get a chance to talk to 1,200 people very often. I was trying to figure out what I could say to those youngsters that my father used to say to me about the nobility of being in politics and public service. Not too many people believe that anymore, including an awful lot of people in this Chamber. They do not think it is such a hot profession anymore, either, including the 15 colleagues that are leaving this body. But I tried to leave them on an upbeat note. I told them there were no problems in this country that were insurmountable. Indeed, if it weren't for the way we misspend money, I promise you we could have a balanced budget with a $100 billion surplus in 1997. When I talk about how we misspend our money, you bear in mind that this year, this fall, September 1, we will have for the third consecutive year less food carryover in our grain bins than we have ever had. The third straight year that our foodstuff carryover is going to be down, and in 1995, for the first time in 50 years, yields of foodstuff such as wheat, corn, rice, and so on, did not go up. So how are we dealing with that? We are putting $1.2 billion into agriculture research this year, 1996; $1.2 billion. What are we giving the Defense Department for research on things that will explode and kill people? Mr. President, $35 billion, almost 35 times more than what we are putting into agriculture research to feed our people and help feed the world, indeed. Mr. President, $14 billion is going to NASA, $2 billion of which will be for the space station, and nobody has ever explained why we are putting money in the space station. And $12 billion for medical research, which everybody heartily agrees with. Incidentally, one of my staff members, Tracy Alderson, is leaving my office to pursue a medical degree and hopefully advance the cause of medical research in the future. When you put it like that, there are very few people in America who would agree with those priorities. So while the $531 million increase in weapons development doesn't mean much around here in a $1.7 trillion budget, it ``ain't'' beanbag either. What it would do in medical research, what it would do in educating people, what it would do in providing more health care--and think about this--think what it would do in reducing the deficit, $531 million. Mr. President, my amendment does not even propose to eliminate the entire $531 million increase. Rather, I am only trying to get us back to what the President requested, which is a 7-percent increase in this account. I yield the floor. Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, first of all, I ask unanimous consent we limit this amendment to 15 minutes with the time equally divided.

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

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

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, the Senator from Wisconsin is correct. The seasonal base plans reauthorized by this bill are merely intended to level production and prices over the year to stabilize the market and are not intended to provide any price enhancement or production incentives, measured on a yearly basis, to dairy farmers in those orders. The Secretary of Agriculture should administer any seasonal base plans consistent with that understanding.

Mr. BUMPERS. I agree with the chairman's assessment.

Mr. BUMPERS. Senator, I suggest if you have plans after 6 o'clock, cancel them. We have been here since 12 clock without one single amendment being offered, without anything happening. As the Senator from Mississippi said, a lot of negotiations are going on. I assume some progress is being made. But we have about four pretty contentious amendments and I do not know whether they are resolvable or not. If they are not, obviously each one of them is going to require a rollcall. We have a number of other amendments that we could offer right now that have been cleared but, as I say, we have four or five that are pretty contentious. I do not know whether any progress is being made. But, if it is not, we are obviously going to be here for a while.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, has the Kennedy amendment been accepted?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I send a series of amendments to the desk.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me echo what the distinguished Senator from Mississippi has just said. First, let me say--I do not say this to be all that gracious but to simply state as fact--that the Senator from Mississippi's patience is much greater than mine. There were times this afternoon when I grew terribly frustrated about the pace of the proceedings, and the Senator from Mississippi kept assuring me that negotiations would pay off and that we would get the bill passed in due time. Of course, he was dead right. But more importantly than that, he is a very gifted legislator and a man of great patience and intellect. And it is a real pleasure for me to work with him as the ranking member on this committee. I thank him for his really truly magnificent work on the bill. I would be remiss if I did not thank Becky Davies, Jimmy Reynolds, and Hunt Shipman of Senator Cochran's staff; and my own staff, Galen Fountain. If we choose to tell the truth, we will admit that is where most of the work was done. We could not have done it without them. I want to pay special tribute to the staff. Mr. LOTT addressed the Chair.

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

Mr. BUMPERS. I share the chairman's view.

Mr. BUMPERS. Let me say to the Senator that I would encourage USDA to assist in establishing a Northern Plains policy research center using funds provided in this bill, as the Senator indicated.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me just say, the amendment has been cleared on this side. It has taken all afternoon to craft this amendment in a form which is acceptable to all sides. I compliment Senator Kennedy for his tenacity and determination in getting this accomplished. It is a very, very worthwhile amendment in this Senator's opinion.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the distinguished Senator from Montana, Senator Baucus, be added as a cosponsor of the Burns barley amendment that passed immediately preceding the passage of the bill.

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

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I don't have anything to add to what the distinguished Senator from Mississippi said. It is very frustrating, frankly, to sit here hoping somebody will show up with an amendment you know has an amendment and is going to come charging in at the last minute if you try to go to third reading. So we have about four amendments here, and I might just mention, there is a Mikulski amendment on crab meat study by FDA, which I think is agreeable; there is a Wellstone amendment on wild rice under the farm bill of last year, which I think has been agreed to; there is an emergency drought assistance and Hurricane Bertha assistance by Senator Domenici, which I think has been cleared on both sides; Senator Lugar on double cropping. I am told that is not quite worked out. The Brown amendment I think has about been worked out. A Hatfield amendment on rural development has been worked out. So we can offer those on behalf of those people if they do not want to offer them themselves. But I would like for those people to know that they need to get over here. If they have been cleared, they need to offer them unless they want to bring them to us and let us offer them for them. The amendments that are probably going to require rollcall votes are one by Senator Kennedy dealing with Medguide. I do not know if Senator Santorum has any more peanut amendments or not. I understand he had eight. He has offered two so far. But anyway, the Kennedy amendment, an amendment by Senator Simpson dealing with wetlands, an amendment by Senator Leahy on northeast forestry, and the barley amendment by the Senators from North Dakota. So that leaves us about four amendments that could possibly require rollcalls unless we get them worked out. But if we can get those we have agreed on passed, and which will just leave us those four that could require rollcall votes, we ought to be through here by close to the middle of the afternoon or late afternoon. So with that admonition and plea to our colleagues to get over here to offer their amendments, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4967

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I do not want to shock my colleague too much, but I am not going to offer a rebuttal to the arguments he just made on the Market Promotion Program. I think I first offered an amendment to strike those funds 5 years ago, and the Senate has heard that debate many, many times and so I will not belabor it again. But I did want to point out to my colleagues that there was a very interesting op-ed piece in the Post this morning by Daniel Greenberg who is editor and publisher of Science & Government Report, a Washington newsletter. Yesterday, in the Chamber, I pointed out that last year is the first year in modern history that yields per acre on a same-crop basis did not increase. Every year in the lifetime of every single person in the Senate soybean yields have gone up, wheat yields have gone up, cotton yields have gone up, and particularly food yields have gone up to feed an ever-expanding population in the world. As you know, one of the reasons corn and wheat are as high as they are right now is because there was a genuine concern that we were going to run out of wheat and corn in this country. I will not bore the Senate by reading it to them, but there are a couple of paragraphs I think ought to be emphasized. Pre-harvest stocks of grain-- That means the carryover; preharvest stocks are what we have on hand when we start harvesting the next crop. Pre-harvest stocks of grain have declined for the third straight year and now are at the lowest levels on record, according to Worldwatch Institute. To satisfy its growing appetite for meat, China has shifted from a net exporter to a net importer of grain, even as urban growth takes over farmlands. Another big problem, Mr. President. In the United States and elsewhere, increases in per-acre yields have leveled off from the fabulous gains from the past three decades. Throughout the world, food prices have risen substantially as supply fails to keep pace with population growth and upscale tastes. Worrisome? Yes. But history records the capacity of science to mock Malthusian gloom with miracles of productivity. Surely it will deliver a late-century encore for the Green Revolution and other science-based breakthroughs in agriculture. It can, but don't count on it. He goes on to point out--we had an amendment offered here which may be withdrawn or voted on a voice vote to cut research money in this bill, agricultural research. And here is what he says. These are statistics that maybe Senator Cochran and I are not as familiar with as we should have been. At about $1.2 billion this year, the research budget of the United States Department of Agriculture accounts for a mere 2 percent of all Federal research and is lower in purchasing power than it was 5 years ago. In Washington politics, agricultural research is barely noticed among such giants of Federal research as defense ($35 billion),-- That is pure research in defense. Space ($14 billion) and health ($12 billion). That is a combined total of $61 billion in those areas compared to $1.2 billion for agriculture research, and the population of the world is now calculated to be 5\1/2\ billion people and growing at 100 million per year. The fishermen all around the world, particularly in littoral nations that depend almost exclusively on the oceans, are draining the oceans. When I was a child, I can remember one of my elementary school teachers saying: Do not worry about it. The oceans will always supply enough food to feed the world. No matter how many droughts we have, no matter how many other devastating things happen to our crops--hail, flood, whatever--the oceans will feed us. Right here at our back door, the New England fisheries have had to virtually shut down in order to give the fisheries there a chance to replenish themselves, which they have not yet done. Yesterday morning the front page of the Metro section of the Washington Post pointed out that the crab supply in the Chesapeake Bay is down dramatically, 500 people out of work, and a few crab-picking operations working 3 days a week. Mr. President, I always have a tendency to get a little too dramatic about these things, but you cannot overdramatize a problem like this. My complaint, in the 22 years I have been in the Senate, is that we have a serious misplacement of priorities. We deal with the politics of issues instead of what the real issue is. Senator Cochran and I were talking early yesterday afternoon. He told me he had been reading ``The Adams Family,'' the chronicle of the John Adams and John Quincy Adams family, all of whom were brilliant. They believed, about public service, it was a place to do good, just like the ministry. In the old days, people went into public service, politics, because it was a place where they could serve their fellow man. They did not worry about the politics of the issues they debated. I said on welfare, it is a tragedy it has to be passed in such a highly volatile, political climate. But my father, as I have said many times, was probably the last man who ever lived who encouraged his sons to go into politics. He did not encourage my sister, because in those days it was unthinkable for a woman to go into politics. But he urged my brothers and me to go into politics because he considered politics a noble calling. He considered it a noble calling because he studied Edmund Burke, he studied John Adams, he had studied all the Founding Fathers who went to Philadelphia and crafted a Constitution to give this country guidance for 200-plus years and who were not worrying about somebody accosting them on the street when they got home about some uncrossed t or undotted i. So we have come a very long way in politics in this country. While most of it has been good, an awful lot of it has not been. We have put our priorities on things that have been politically popular. Nobody wants to curb the $35 billion expenditure on defense because nobody wants to see a 30-second attack ad when they run again that they are soft on defense. Nobody wants to vote against welfare reform because welfare is very unpopular. If you ask the ordinary man on the street-- 80 percent of them say they hate welfare. Yes, it ought to be reformed; yes, it ought to be changed. So it is not easy for me to be one of 24 Senators who voted no yesterday. I am not saying I am all right. I am saying the bill could have been an awful lot better. One of the things that disturbed me was the total lack of compassion during the entire debate. People love to go to church on Sunday morning and read the Sermon on the Mount on ``blessed are the poor,'' but when it comes to worrying about children and people who are kicked off welfare, we could not seem to be punitive enough around here. So I still believe those old Methodist Sunday school stories I learned as a child. I also did not like the formula which I thought discriminated against my State tragically--tragically. Back to the point I was going to make a moment ago on misplaced priorities. Science can only do so much--and it can do a lot more. But we are not going to solve the world's food problem, which is developing right as I speak, by putting $1.2 billion in agriculture research and $35 billion into making something explode and $14 billion on sending a space station up which has absolutely no merit whatever. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the Daniel S. Greenberg article, to which I referred, printed in the Record, and I yield the floor.

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