Thomas Carper

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. I withdraw my objection.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, something came to my attention today that I haven't seen before. Actually, it is a blog which was apparently written by Ben Bernanke, the immediate past Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He wrote it for the Brookings Institute, and he talked about one of the pay-fors for the transportation bill for which we will be sending conferees to discuss later today. As my colleagues may recall, the House passed a 6-year authorization bill for transportation--roads, highways, bridges, and transit--with funding for 3 years. When we sent our legislation over to the House, they came up with some new pay-fors. Frankly, it is not user fees, it is not even like pension smoothing, it is not like stealing TSA fees or Custom fees, but something new. They found money--about $40 to $50 billion--in the Federal Reserve and said: Why don't we use that for transportation spending? Interestingly enough, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve has written about this issue, and it has been editorialized in today's Washington Post, among others. I will read a sentence or two out of Chairman Bernanke's comments, if I may, talking about the new pay-for, where we take money from the Federal Reserve and use it for transportation purposes. Here is what Chairman Bernanke says: More substantively--and this is what I want to focus on in the post-- ``paying'' for highway spending with Fed capital is not paying for it at all in any economically meaningful sense. Rather, this maneuver is a form of budgetary sleight-of-hand that would count funds that are already designated for the Treasury as ``new'' revenue. Every year this extra money that the Federal Reserve has is turned over to the Treasury. In fact, it may be as much as one-half trillion dollars. That money goes into the earnings that the Federal Reserve makes, and at different points during the year, they turn money over to the Treasury. What the House language says here is that we are going to reduce that amount of money that would normally go from the Federal Reserve to the Treasury during some part of this year, and we are simply going to pull that money out and use it for transportation. Now, that money was going to go to the Treasury anyway. It was going to go from the Federal Reserve to Treasury anyway, and now we are going to sort of slip in and pull that money out and say: No, no, we are going to use it for roads, highways, and bridges. It is a sleight of hand. GAO is blowing the whistle on it as well, and I am delighted Chairman Bernanke is calling it for what it is. Look, we had the opportunity to pay for transportation projects. We had the opportunity to pay for roads, highways, and bridges, and to do it the old-fashioned way, and frankly, in a way that the chairman of our committee, Senator Inhofe, was in favor of. We have a tradition and history in this country of saying that things that are worth having are worth paying for, and people and businesses that use roads, highways, and bridges here in the past have said we ought to pay for the use of them. Now we are looking at a transportation bill that says: No, we are going to take money from TSA--TSA fee increases--and instead of using it to make our skies and aviation safer, we are going to steal 10 years of TSA revenues and put it over here in transportation. We are going to take money that ought to go to fortify our borders to make us stronger and better equipped so we can do a better job of finding out whether what is in the trucks is really produce or some other product, such as narcotics--our border crossings, where we have literally tens of millions of dollars' worth of trade going through trade every day--and instead we are going to take those revenues and put them into transportation. There is the idea of taking money out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, where we pay $80 to $90 to $100 a barrel and are now selling it for about half that and using the proceeds from that--buy high, sell low--to pay for transportation. The latest trick from the House is to take the money out of the Federal Reserve when it is already going to go to Treasury anyway. Instead, we are going to take that money away from the Federal Reserve and pretend like it has no consequence. Well, actually that $50 or $60 billion would have reduced the deficit. That is where it would have gone. This is not the way to do business. We had the opportunity to fully fund a robust transportation plan. Several of us--Senator Durbin, Senator Feinstein, and I--offered legislation, very much like Bowles- Simpson, that would actually restore the purchasing power of the gas and diesel taxes in this country. We have not raised them since 1993. Since 1993, the Federal gasoline tax has been roughly 18 cents. It is now worth less than a dime because of inflation. The diesel tax, since 1993, is worth less than 15 cents. Nominally, it is 23 cents. Meanwhile, roads, highways, and bridges are more expensive. Asphalt is more expensive, as is concrete, steel, and labor. Instead of being able to fund transportation in a genuine, honest kind of way, we are spending about $50 billion a year at the Federal level for transportation. It is about one-third of what is being spent nationally. Out of that $50 billion, we are only raising $35 billion through our user fees, and we just go out and borrow the money for the rest. When we run out of money in the general fund, we go around the world and borrow money from China and other places so that we can build roads, highways, and bridges. When the Chinese are mucking around in the South China Sea or the Spratly Islands or some of those other places, we say: You can't do that. They say: We thought you wanted to borrow our money. If they are manipulating their currency or dumping their goods and products into our markets, we say: You can't do that. They say: We thought you wanted to borrow our money. We should not be beholden to them or to anybody else. We should fully fund transportation projects, and we could do that. The legislation that Senators Feinstein, Durbin, and I offered would gradually raise the tax on diesel and gasoline by 4 cents a year for 4 years, and then index it going forward. How much money would that generate? That would generate about $220 billion over the next 10 years. Our roads, highway, and bridges get D-plus these days. Why? Because about a quarter of our bridges are in bad shape and the service of our roads and highways is as well. People say they don't want to pay any more money for user fees on gas or diesel. Well, people paid less than $2 a gallon for gasoline at about 30,000 gas stations across America last week. My friends, as it turns out, if we actually did raise the price for gas and diesel by 4 cents a year for 4 years, what would the effect be in 2020--4 years from now--for average drivers? The out-of-pocket impact would be about the cost of a cup of coffee a week. Meanwhile, because our roads, bridges, and highways are in such lousy shape, we, as constituents--people who drive around this country--have an average cost of damage to our vehicles, tires, steering, and rims of our tires of over $350 a year. That is not my number; that is a real number. The other thing that is going on here is that we sit in traffic a lot in our country these days because we are not addressing our bottlenecks and doing what we ought to be doing in terms of upgrading our roads, highways, and bridges. Every year Texas A&M does an analysis. What they do is to look at how much time we sit in traffic in this country. The average driver in this country sits in traffic 42 hours a year. In cities such as Washington, DC, the numbers are more like 80 hours a year. We are not moving. We are just sitting there wasting time, wasting fuel, and polluting the skies. We don't have to do that. Instead of doing something that is intellectually honest, what we are doing is really, I think, shameful. I think it is shameful. Initially, I was just confused by what the House wants to do with the Federal Reserve by moving $50 to $60 billion out of there. Now that I understand what they are doing, it is even more shameful. We can do better than this, and the American people deserve better than that. Our friends at the McKinsey Global Institute spent some time last year trying to figure out if we were actually investing robustly in our roads, highways, and bridges in this country. They looked at how it would affect our GDP and if it would have any effect on putting people to work. If we are willing to make robust investments for the next 10 years instead of, frankly, not much at all in terms of investments, here is what they said: We would grow GDP by about 1.5 percent per year for the next 10 years. So far this year it has been somewhere between 2 and 2.5 percent. We could increase it by another 1.5 percent if we make these kinds of honest investments. We are not going to come close to making robust investments. The McKinsey Global Institute also told us that in terms of new employment, if we were actually to invest robustly in roads, highways, and bridges in this country, we would put 1.8 million people to work building roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems. But we are not going to do that. We are not even close to what the McKinsey Global Institute was calling for in robust investments that would actually grow our GDP by 1.5 percent each year and increase employment by 1.8 million people. In fact, what we are passing here isn't even close to the 4 cents a year for 4 years and indexing going forward. That produces $220 billion over the next 10 years. What we are doing is barely keeping Federal funding at $50 billion, and the way we are doing most of that is by sleight of hand and by using money that has nothing to do with roads, highways, and bridges and nothing to do with businesses and people that use those transportation modes to pay for them--nothing. And now we are about to name conferees and go to conference on that kind of deal? The American people aren't stupid. They are not stupid. Do you know what a bunch of States around the country--like 12 States in the last 2 years--did when they found out they were running out of money to build their transportation systems in their States? They raised their user fees. They actually raised them. Do you know what happened when they had elections last November? Some 95 percent of the Republicans who voted to raise their user fees were reelected, and 90 percent of the Democrats who voted to raise their user fees in those 12 States were reelected. They didn't pay a penalty for it. They were rewarded for it. The people who voted the other way-- who voted not to raise the user fees--didn't do as well. People aren't stupid. We are going to have an opportunity here to name conferees and go to conference, and I just want to say that this man sitting next to me, Jim Inhofe, is a good man. He chairs our Environment and Public Works Committee. Our committee reported out a very good 6-year authorization bill. He is proud of it. Senator Boxer and I worked on it, and I am very proud of what we did. I commend Senator Inhofe for a great bill. That is the authorization piece. If we could just stop there, we would be fine. Unfortunately, the authorization is only half the game. What was the picture of the guy they had on the floor not long ago? It was a picture of a cowboy wearing a big hat and lying back sleeping, and the caption under the picture says: All hat, no cattle. Well, when you have a great authorization bill but no real money to pay for it, that is really all hat, no cattle. I don't think there is a better example of it that I have seen than the legislation that we are going to be conferencing on very soon. I wish I could sit here and say it is all going to work out and we will do just fine, but that is not the truth. We have let a great opportunity pass us by. We are about to let a great opportunity pass us by. We are worthy of a better opportunity than that, and frankly the people of our country deserve a better effort than that. With that, I yield the floor to my friend from Oklahoma.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I will speak for 10 minutes on transportation, and then we will have our caucus lunch.

Mr. CARPER. I am happy to yield.

Mr. CARPER. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. CARPER. I have a statement I would like to make at this point in time. If this is the appropriate time to do it, then I would like to do it. I would like to speak for 10 minutes.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I understand that a request is pending, and I would like to reserve my right to object.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, tomorrow is Veterans Day, and it is a special day for all of us who serve here and for all of our colleagues down the hall in the House of Representatives. It is a special day for veterans across the country and around the world and their families and for a lot of Americans who value the service and sacrifice of our veterans. Veterans Day is not Memorial Day. On Memorial Day we mourn and salute those who have given their all in service to our country. Veterans Day is really for all veterans, not just for those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. I was privileged to go to college. I won a Navy ROTC scholarship and went to Ohio State. I studied a little economics--my professors would say not enough--graduated and went off to Pensacola and became a naval flight officer in the late 1960s. I ended up with Patrol Squadron 40 out of naval air station, Moffett, CA. I joined my colleagues there for several tours of duty in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. When we came back to the States from overseas, I resigned my regular commission and took a reserve commission and moved from California over to Delaware to enroll in the University of Delaware's Business School and earned an MBA. Literally the first week I was in Delaware, in September of 1973, I got in my Volkswagen Karmann Ghia with a rebuilt engine and drove up Route 2, Kirkwood Highway, to north Delaware to the VA hospital in Elsmere, which is about halfway between Newark and Wilmington in northern Delaware. I took my DD Form 214 in with me to present it to the folks at the hospital to see if I was eligible for any veterans benefits, and as it turned out I was eligible for benefits. Some of the benefits actually have their roots going all the way back to the end of World War II when FDR signed--I think in 1944--legislation creating the original GI bill. Among the things I was eligible for was a home loan in which the VA would guarantee a portion of my loan so I could buy a house sometime later, and I did. I was also eligible for some medical benefits, including dental benefits. I didn't realize it at the time, but the VA hospital there was a World War II relic of a hospital. The morale was not good and the quality of service was not good. If people in the central or southern part of our State needed access to a VA medical facility and they didn't have it there, they would have to somehow make their way up to northern Delaware. It is not like driving from one end of California to the other, but it is a hike. We didn't have any community-based, out-patient clinics in Delaware or any other States either at the time. That fall, those of us who were enrolled in school who were Vietnam War veterans, and in some cases other wars, were eligible for some benefits. The GIs who served in the Vietnam war, including me, were eligible for a GI bill benefit which was about $250 a month. It may not sound like a lot of money today, but I was happy to get every penny of it. I continued to fly with a new squadron at the naval air station in Willow Grove, PA--the P-3 Squadron--and continued to track Soviet nuclear submarines in oceans all over the world as a ready reservist. I am one of a number of people in my family who have benefited from the GI bill. My father's generation served in World War II. He was a chief petty officer. His brother and my other uncle served in World War II. One of them never made it home. He was 19 years old in 1944 and assigned to the USS Suwannee. The aircraft carrier was in the Pacific Ocean when it came under attack by Japanese kamikaze planes, and he lost his life. His body was never recovered and neither were the bodies of a number of other people who I guess were on the deck of the carrier when the attacks occurred. Other members of my family in my Dad's generation were able to take advantage of the very first GI bill, which was signed into law in 1944 by President Roosevelt. What happened in the wake of World War II was a very generous GI bill. At the time, you could go to Harvard on the GI bill, and it was basically fully paid for, plus you had a housing and living allowance. It was an incredible deal, and a lot of people took advantage of that, which is good. A lot of the folks went to colleges and universities, but others went to trade schools. I never really talked to my dad about this, but I am told that he learned how to do body work and to repair cars that had been wrecked. He went to some kind of private school or trade school and learned how to do that and ended up working at Burleson Oldsmobile in Beckley, WV, where my sister and I were born. He was able to somehow do a good job there and ended up working as a claims adjuster for Nationwide Insurance and ended up running the national school for claims adjusters for Nationwide Insurance. He was a guy with a high school degree from Shady Spring High School in Beckley, WV, and ended up, with the help of the Navy and the GI bill, with a wonderful career at Nationwide Insurance. He is sort of a poster child for those who were able to take that benefit and do something positive with it for their lives and for their families. In the wake of World War II, there was also an emergence of for- profit colleges and universities and for-profit trade schools. They called them proprietary trade schools, and they did not always have the best interests of the GI at heart. They were not always interested in making sure that the GI man or woman got the training and the help they needed to qualify for jobs, to go out there in that day and age and be gainfully employed and provide for themselves and their families. Some of the nonprofits that operated were very good and did a great job, others not so much. They took advantage of the GIs, and ultimately they took advantage of taxpayers. Over a period of time, back then and in the years since then, on the heels of the Korean and Vietnam wars, there emerged an effort on the part of the Federal Government to try to make sure we put in place some market forces to ensure that the for-profit schools, or proprietary schools, that were offering the benefits of colleges or universities-- that that college or university would treat the GI fairly, the way we would want to be treated, and to make sure they got the benefits that they wanted and that the taxpayers deserved. I think on the heels of World War II, there was an 85-15 rule that said if you happen to be a proprietary school and you were using the GI bill to pay for benefits for somebody--say you had 100 students; out of the 100, no more than 85 of them could be there on the Federal dime. The other 15 GIs, if you will, had to be there on their own or pay for it some way other than through the Federal Government. That was an early way to introduce market forces into the benefits that were being provided so we would end up with schools that were working and providing training certificates or degrees that were worth the paper they were written on. More recently, something emerged called the 90-10 rule. The GI bill had come and gone. For those who got into wars in Korea and Vietnam and more recently in the Persian Gulf in Iraq and now Afghanistan--the benefits that are offered to folks who literally served and applied for the GI bill I think after 2007 or 2008--that is a very generous GI bill. We sent off about 300 Delaware Guard men and women 2 months ago from Delaware to go serve in some cases in Afghanistan and in other cases maybe in Kuwait and at different duty stations around the world. But I told them when they went off to deploy that when they came back at the end of their 6, 7, 8 months--whatever it will be--that they will come back to the best GI bill in the history of the country. Here is what they come back to if they have served for, I think, 3 years. If they have served time in those parts of the world, they come back to a GI bill and if they went to a public college or university-- the University of Delaware, Delaware State, Wilmington University, Delaware Tech or a community college in my State or public colleges and universities across the country--they can go to those schools for free--pretty good, free. We got 250 bucks a month. They can go for free. Their tuition is paid for, books are paid for, fees are paid for, tutoring is paid for, and they get a $1,500 housing allowance. That is pretty good--very good. Just to make sure that we have some market forces in place to ensure that these for-profit colleges and universities are really doing a good job and not just taking advantage of the GIs or of the taxpayers, we have in place something called the 90/10 rule. It has been around for a while. The 90/10 rule says that no college or university--for-profit college or university, proprietary school, for-profit proprietary school or training school--can get more than 90 percent of their revenues from the Federal Government. But the 90 percent does not necessarily cover--it can cover Pell grants and things other than the GI bill. But the GI bill--a school can get all of their money from Pell grants, and students who are on the Federal dime and continue--Mr. President, I am not sure what is wrong with the public address system. I will try another mic. That is better. There we go. Today we have a loophole in the 90/10 rule that allows a college, university or a proprietary for-profit school to get 100 percent of their revenues from the Federal Government. It doesn't count the money they get from the GI bill. It covers Pell grants and other Federal aid but not the GI bill and not something called tuition assistance to Active-Duty personnel. I suggest that is something we need to fix. That is a loophole that needs to be plugged. No college or university should make 100 percent of their revenues off the Federal Government. The 90/10 rule is well-intentioned to make sure that market forces work, but I am sure that people getting their education from a source other than the Federal Government would ensure that the diploma they are getting--the certificate they are getting--is worth something and they are able to translate that into gainful employment. Several of us, including myself and Senator Blumenthal, have offered legislation to close the 90/10 rule and to really go back to the original intent--to say that no for-profit college or university or trade school can get more than 90 percent of the revenues from the Federal Government. You can add in the GI bill or you can add in Pell grants, tuition assistance for Active-Duty personnel, but that cannot exceed 90 percent--and educational entities' revenues. We need to restore that market force, that governing, if you will, to better ensure the integrity of these programs. So I would just say to my colleagues as we approach this Veterans Day, it is great that we are able to offer a benefit that provides free--I don't care whether a person is from North Carolina or from Utah; they can go to college free and get a housing allowance for $1,500 a month. But I want to make sure that when a GI--I don't care if it is Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines or whatever--gets their certificate or diploma, it is worth the paper it is written on and that they will in some cases be able to go on to graduate school or further their learning, but almost in any case that it enables them to go on to a job that enables them to be self-sufficient. With that, I am going to yield the floor to the chairman of the Finance Committee, on which I am privileged to serve, and to say to both of my colleagues on the floor here: My best wishes to you and your constituents and have a wonderful Veterans Day. I will see you all next week. Thank you.

Mr. CARPER

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

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, it is always a pleasure to spend these late afternoons--sometimes Thursday afternoons--when the current Presiding Officer gets stuck presiding, when I come to the floor to talk, yet again, about funding--paying for--these roads and highways, bridges and transit systems that we use. I thank the Chair for being here. As I look around, sometimes we have more than a few folks on the floor, but I think a lot of people are headed for home on Thursday afternoon when we have no more votes. Looking back over the last several days, there are actually a couple of things to feel good about. Last week we passed very important legislation improving the strength of our cyber defenses and our ability to fend off some of the 24/7 attacks that are being visited on financial institutions, on our military, on colleges and universities, on research operations, and on businesses in our country. I am very proud of the bipartisan work we did on cyber security, information sharing, and some of the new technologies that are being deployed to help fend off attacks from the bad guys around the world. I felt very good about that. Not everybody likes the 2-year budget agreement that has been worked out in rough form. But I like to say about a friend, when you ask him how he is doing, he says: Compared to what? The idea of living from week to week, not knowing if we are going to have to shut down the government, continuing to spend enormous amounts of human time and capital getting ready for a shutdown and hoping it won't happen but preparing for the worst and having to do that month after month--I think we have, for the most part, said we are not going to do that for the next 2 years. Whether one likes every morsel or portion of the budget deal, I think we can pretty much all say: Compared to what? Well, it is better than the path we were on. Today, as we prepare to take up over the next couple of weeks transportation policy for our country and transportation funding to fund that policy, there is the late-breaking news this morning from the House of Representatives that they have taken a very modest transportation bill including authorization--it is probably a two-part deal where we actually authorize transportation policy and then we try to figure out how to pay for it. Too often in the past we have decided to pay for it by bailing out the transportation trust fund. The legislation we passed and I voted against here in the Senate last month on transportation--during the last Congress I chaired the Senate subcommittee on transportation infrastructure. I am I think the No. 2 Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. I am a former Governor. I spent 8 years as Governor in my own State of Delaware. We focused on transportation infrastructure. I chaired the National Governors Association for a year. So I have looked at these issues nationally as well as a Governor. But if we look at the authorization bill--again, that is one of the two parts of our legislation, to authorize programs. A lot of what we did in the Senate, coupled with what they did in the House, was pretty darn good. I was very proud of it. I want to give shout-outs to some of my colleagues, including Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe. I don't always think of them as two people who work well together, but on transportation and infrastructure, they do. They provide very good leadership, and they were good enough to let the rest of us join in. I think we had a good policy or set of policies that we can be proud of. I will just run through a couple of them here, using of this chart. I have made a big focus on freight transportation. It is not just people who use roads, highways, bridges, and transit to get places, but we move an enormous amount of freight in this country. We move it on barges--actually, I don't know how many people think of that--or ships. We move a fair amount on airplanes. We move a fair amount on trains. We also move a great deal of our freight by roads, highways, and bridges. The legislation we passed out of the Environment and Public Works Committee on I believe a unanimous vote makes good progress on the freight transportation side, trying to make our roads, highways, and bridges more reliable, more affordable, and more efficient. That is good. The legislation we passed out of committee, which I think is mirrored in the House Transportation bill, is that we prioritized bridge safety. I think something like one out of every four bridges in our country, deemed so by people a lot smarter than me, are not safe. So in our legislation, we focused on bridge safety and we focused on large facilities, large projects of national importance--not little projects but big ones of national importance, regional importance. The Transportation authorization legislation from the House and from the Senate also increases baseline funding and funding for public transportation. And it focuses on clean air funding toward the most dangerous diesel emissions to increase the bang for the buck, if you will. If you ever go by road projects, highway or bridge projects and transit projects, you will often see this yellow equipment that is almost always powered by diesel, and they put out--those vehicles put out a lot of pollution. We provide some money here in the authorization legislation to say that can't be good for us. It can't be good for the people who work around there and live around there. Let's see if we can't get some reduction in those emissions. The other thing I liked about our authorization bill is research grants that go to States to see if we can't find a better alternative to user fees, which we have historically traditionally used, and to eventually replace the gas tax or something that makes more sense. It could be something called a road user charge, it could be tolling in conjunction with public-private partnerships, but just to look at the alternatives to user fees like the gas tax and diesel tax, which has not been raised for 22 years. Let's see what we have next. The last time we raised the user fees in this country--part of me wishes I could be doing this speech surrounded by former Presidents who have supported the use of user fees. I think we go back a long time, actually, when I was a little kid, before the Presiding Officer was born. Dwight Eisenhower, the President who brought us the State highway system, was an advocate of user fees. Since then we have had other Presidents--let me think of another President who thought that was a--Bill Clinton thought user fees were appropriate. I want to say George Herbert Walker Bush might have been one who thought that things that are worth having--that folks who use our roads, highways, and bridges ought to pay for it. I think there might have been one more. Ronald Reagan supported that notion as well. So in a bipartisan way, Democrats and Republicans have said for a long time that if we really want to have a better transportation system, we have to pay for it. The idea is that folks who use that system and the businesses that use that transportation system have some responsibility to pay for it. That has been the way we have done it for a long time. Maybe someday, when we have the ability to do these vehicle-miles-traveled deals, where we don't have to worry about privacy concerns, figure out how many miles every car, truck, van in the country travels and be able to assess a user fee--I don't know if we are going to be able to do it. We have been trying for a long time. Maybe somebody will be able to do it, but concerns have been raised about doing that as well. Anyway, since 1993, what has been happening? Maintenance costs continue to rise. We raised the gas tax in 1993 to 18.3 cents per gallon. We raised the Federal tax on diesel to I think 24.3 cents. What has happened in the last 22 years, believe it or not, is the cost of concrete has gone up a lot. The cost of asphalt has gone up a lot. The cost of steel and the cost of labor has gone up a lot. And the gas tax and the diesel tax have stayed right where they were 22 years ago. The gas tax has lost almost 40 percent of its purchasing power--18.3 cents in 1993 is today worth about a dime. I think the 24.3 cent diesel tax is now worth somewhere between 10 and 15 cents. We have done nothing about it. We have not even been willing to consider indexing these user fees to the rate of inflation. Has the highway trust fund eroded? Not everybody knows we have a highway or transportation trust fund. We do. Not everybody understands it is largely fed by user fees. Not everybody understands that when we run out of money in the transportation trust fund, we have to--if we are going to still build roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems, we have to do something about it. What we oftentimes do is we move money from the general fund for our country and move that money over to fill up the transportation trust fund or the highway fund. When we run out of money in the general fund, we go around the world with a tin cup in hand and borrow money from all kinds of people, including the Chinese. We say: We would like to borrow some money from you, and, by the way, we don't want you to be mucking around in the South China Sea and all those other places where I used to fly around. We don't want you to be inflating your currency. We don't want you to be dumping your stuff on the American markets. And the Chinese say: Well, we thought you wanted to borrow money, so get off our backs. We don't want to be in that situation. There is a growing need for road repair, as I mentioned earlier. One out of four bridges is bad. Two out of every 10 miles of highway surfaces are not good. We have vehicles that are more fuel efficient. That is a good thing. We adopted CAFE legislation, and Senator Feinstein was good enough to let some of us help her write that. But probably over the next 10 years or so we are going to continue to require more energy-efficient vehicles. There has been a reduction in the annual miles driven. A lot of the millennial generation don't want to have a car. I remember as a kid growing up--maybe the Presiding Officer growing up couldn't wait to have and drive a car. That sure was my generation. We have an aging system that needs to be addressed. In the face of congressional inaction, what have we done to pay for our transportation system? Well, we use budget gimmicks. We are pretty good at pension smoothing. Our pensions must be pretty smooth, because we have used that. We have used unrelated offsets to pay for some. Say, for example, monies that go to TSA to supposedly provide for safer travel in our airlines and airways, we are going to use that money instead to go into transportation--money that should be used to strengthen our ability to monitor traffic coming across our borders, a lot of vehicular traffic, a lot of trade. We are going to raise those Customs fees, but we are not going to use it to build up our defenses along our border and other stuff that probably has no relationship with transportation. That is what we have done--gimmicks. It is not an easy thing to think about, but these are some numbers that we ought to look at. We bailed out the transportation trust fund in 2008 to the tune of $8 billion. We bailed it out again in 2009, $7 billion; the next year, 2010, almost $20 billion; 2013, over $6 billion; and we really got into the bailout business in 2014, $23 billion; and for the current year, 2015, $10 billion. Add it all up, it is about $75 billion in bailouts. We moved money from the general fund. That means we don't have money to spend on other things that are legitimate needs in our country, and we are using it to pay for things that ought to be actually paid for by the folks and businesses that use our roads, highways, and bridges. Now, a lot of people are saying to me: Why should we raise the user frees? Why should we raise the gas tax or the diesel tax? Because it is fair. The notion that people and businesses that use these roads and highways and bridges ought to pay for them, to me, that seems fair. Frankly, it seemed fair in this country for about 60 years. We seem to have gotten away from that. We need to get back to that. Here are a couple of questions--or the same question asked several times. Why raise the gas tax and fix the trust fund? This is $324. What is that number? That is how much the average driver in this country spends a year in vehicle repairs, such as replacement of tires, axles, wheel rims--you name it. I have seen it actually as high as $500, but we will take the low range of $324. We pay for it one way or the other, and that is how much we spend on average in vehicle repair. Again, the same question: Why raise the gas tax and fix the trust fund? The number 42 shows up. That is because that is how many hours a year we spend sitting in traffic. These are not my numbers. Every year Texas A&M updates this number, and they say that in Washington, DC, and up the road from where Senator Coons and I live, in New York City, where some of our family members live, or Denver or LA, it is about 82 hours per year sitting in traffic, wasting gas, and putting out harmful emissions. This is the number of billions of gallons of gas we waste just sitting in traffic every year--2.9 billion gallons of gas a year. That is a lot. I don't know if it is the last poster that we have, but it is not a bad one to close on. One of the major roles of government is to provide a nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. It is not the main role of government, but a major role of government is to provide a nurturing environment for job creation and preservation. We don't create jobs. Senators, Governors, and county executives don't create jobs, no matter how talented they are. Presidents don't create jobs. What we do is create a nurturing environment to help support job creation and job growth. What does that include? A world-class workforce, young people and not-so-young people coming out of colleges and universities who can read, write, think, and use math and technology, and who have a good work ethic--public safety and rule of law, affordable energy, affordable health care, access to foreign markets, and also the ability to move goods and products from place to place in this country and through our export markets. McKinsey has a piece of their operation that does consulting and it is called McKinsey Global Institute. They have done a little bit of thinking and calculating to see if we actually made robust investments--not just little investments, not just creeping from year to year borrowing money from the general fund but actually making robust investments. What would it do? We are talking about $150 to $180 billion of annual investments from all sources--State, local, and Federal--and to do this for 15 to 20 years. What would it do in terms of employment and GDP? Here is what it would do. Those kinds of investments in our transportation system would raise GDP anywhere from 1.4 to 1.8 percent per year. In addition to that, it would add almost 2 million jobs. Half of those jobs would be men and women going to work building highways, roads, bridges, and transit systems. We would have a more efficient economy--an economy to move products and goods more effectively, more efficiently, and more productively. We say thanks very much to the McKinsey Global Institute. If we did this, a lot of people would be put to work building our roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems. They haven't been working much because we have underfunded transportation investment now for years at the local, State, and Federal levels. If we had funded it in a more appropriate and robust way, then a lot of people who have been on the sidelines who are either unemployed or underemployed would be doing something productive with their lives and at the same time strengthen our economy. I see my colleague has been waiting patiently for me to finish. I will close with these words. Someone said to me: How do you feel that the House seems to have come up with a little bit more money? We are not sure what the pay-fors are that they are using. Somehow we found some magic money in the Federal Reserve, and I hope it is legitimate. I hope there are no unintended consequences that we are aware of, but we will find out about that over the next several days, I hope. I am not outraged. I was, frankly, outraged by what we passed here a month or so ago--so grossly underfunded, 3 years of not very thoughtful funding. What we hear from the House is that it is more robust, and I am happy to take a look at that. But it is not a user fee approach. It basically doesn't say: OK, those who use our highways, roads, and bridges ought to pay for those. We strayed from that. It is sort of a grab bag from places that have nothing to do with transportation. We are going to use that money, and it is only for a short while. We will be back in the soup again in 4 or 5 years. This Senator thinks we can do better than that. It is not just me who is disappointed. People are disappointed, but we will live to fight again another day. It is too bad that we didn't take advantage of this day and seize the day. Thank you, Mr. President.

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

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator for inviting us to come to the floor this afternoon and have this conversation. It is great to be with our colleague from Hawaii as well. Senator Durbin and I came to the House of Representatives together in 1982. I had been a State treasurer and before that I was a naval flight officer. I was a P-3 aircraft mission commander. I served three tours in Southeast Asia. In 1968, the P-3 four-engine aircrafts were on 12- hour surveillance flights tracking Soviet nuclear submarines all over the world. We flew a lot of missions off the coast of Vietnam and Cambodia, low-level missions tracking infiltration. That is what I did on three tours over there. I came back from overseas after the last tour, 5 years, and moved from California where my station was home ported, where my squad was home ported during the war, and I ended up moving across the country. I found Delaware on the map, drove my Volkswagen across the country, and enrolled in business school. I signed up with the GI Bill. I remember the first check I got was $250. I was thrilled. I used that money to help pay my expenses, and I signed up with a Reserve P-3 aircraft squadron up at the naval air station north of Philly and started flying the same aircraft and a new squadron. I did that for another 18 years and then retired as a Navy captain. As Senator and as a Governor for 8 years and as commander in chief of the Delaware National Guard--they have a special spot in my heart. A couple of months ago, a delegation with the Governor were sending off the 300 men and women from the Delaware National Guard to eventually end up in Afghanistan. I suspect they are there by this time. I said to the men and women and their families as they were preparing to leave--I told them about my GI Bill and how grateful I was to have it for my generation. I talked to them about their GI Bill. I said: When you come home, if you have 3 years of service during your time in Afghanistan, here is what you are going to get. If you go to Delaware State University, University of Delaware, Delaware Tech Community College, you go for free--tuition, free; books, free; fees, tutoring, free. Plus you get a $1,500 a month housing allowance. People said: Wow. And I said: If the GI doesn't use it--the Delaware National Guardsman--if you guys don't use it when you come home, your spouse can use it. If your spouse doesn't use it, your dependent children can use it. It is the most incredible GI bill benefit ever. My generation, we got $250 a month. I am happy for the folks today who serve in Afghanistan and in Iraq for the benefit they receive. It has not only been a great benefit for the veterans and their families, it puts in the words of--I think it is Polly Petraeus who works at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Polly said that what the GI bill does is it also puts a silver bull's-eye on the veterans because they come back and what happens is a lot of colleges and universities and training schools want to help those GIs and their spouses and maybe their kids go to school. Some of them are for-profits and some of them are non-profits; some of them are public colleges and universities. Some of them do a great job. Some of the for-profits even do a great job. But some of them--and the Senator from Illinois has mentioned some of them here today--do not. They spend more money on trying to recruit people to come to their schools than they actually spend educating them. They are preparing them for careers, allegedly, for what there are no jobs. Senator Durbin mentioned what Corinthian has done to place people in work opportunities for a month or so just so it will look like people are being gainfully employed. There is a lot of money to be made by these for-profit colleges and universities, and for the ones that aren't the white hats but the black hats, what is happening to the GIs and, frankly, to taxpayers is shameful. It is just shameful. I want to say around maybe 1992, maybe the early 1990s, maybe on this floor, the Senate debated whether or not there should be some way to harness market forces to ensure that--whether it is people using Pell grants or other Federal aid programs, or maybe the GI bill--they could somehow harness market forces to ensure that taxpayer money going to people going to college was being well used. Initially, when the Congress adopted something called the 85-15 rule, the idea was that for at least 15 percent of the students in the school, if they were receiving Federal assistance, 85 percent of those students would have to be coming on nonFederal money. That seemed to make sense, so for a while, that worked pretty well. Then the rule was changed to the 90-10 rule so that at least 10 percent of the revenues had to come from nonFederal sources. The idea was to use market forces to ensure that the quality of the diploma was actually worthwhile at the school. Then, we had this new GI bill. We have spent, I think--and the Senator from Illinois probably knows better than me, but I think we have spent today close to $50 billion on the Iraq-Afghanistan GI bill, close to $50 billion. It probably dwarfs whatever we spent for folks coming back from the Vietnam war. Some of the smart for-profit colleges figured out a loophole, though, and what they figured out is the law, when it was first adopted, didn't really focus on the GI bill because it wasn't all that robust, and the 90-10 rule--85-15 and 90-10--focused on things that did not include the GI bill. So when veterans go to college and the GI bill helped to pay for their tuition, or for that of their spouses or their children, that does not count toward the 90 percent. So as a result, what we have is a loophole that allows a college or university, a private college or university, to realize as much as 100 percent of their revenues from the Federal Government--100 percent. There is nothing about market forces; 10 percent, 15 percent of your students have to come by nonFederal means. All of them are there on the Federal Government's dole. Among the people who pushed for the 85-15 rule, I think, were Bob Dole and Phil Gramm, and they said a long time ago that we ought to have something like the 90-10 rule. A couple of years before that, the guy that Senator Durbin will remember named William Bennet--remember him, the Secretary of Education--here is what he called for-profit trade schools. Here is what he called them in 1987. He said: Diploma mills, designed to trick the poor and to take on Federally-backed debt, milk them for their loan money and then wash them out or graduate them, ill-prepared to enter the job market and pay off their loans. That is what he called them. As I said earlier, there are some for- profits that do a good job, but there are a bunch that don't. That was the case in 1987 and, unfortunately, it is the case today. I just want to say we--you have, I have, Tom Harkin in past years-- have continuously drawn this to the attention of our colleagues and anybody who wants to listen this issue. This needs to be fixed. It needs to be fixed. I thank Senator Durbin for working so hard and letting me help him a little bit on this stuff. I think we are starting to break through. Some of the folks who are the worst actors in this business are starting to fold, and that is a good thing.

Mr. CARPER

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

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, in recent weeks I have spoken three or four or five times on the question of whether we are going to realistically and honestly fund the transportation improvements our country so badly needs. I don't know if it is my imagination, but every time I am here speaking on the subject, you are here. We have any number of people--50-some Republican Senators in the majority--who cycle in as Presiding Officer, yet you always seem to draw the short straw and get to hear me wax eloquently about transportation infrastructure. I am honored you would be back again today for more of the same. Pretty soon, you will be able to give these talks for me and I will sit up there and preside. I won't ask unanimous consent for that, but it is a good thought. Mr. President, this is a picture that was taken, gosh, 60 or 70 years ago, and there is a quote here by a fellow who was a great military leader for our country during World War II and later one of our Presidents. In fact, he was President when I had just about come into the world and left as President a few years after that. The photograph says, ``This is the first project in the United States on which actual construction was started under provisions of the new Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.'' This is in Missouri. They have the contractor and some of the local folks there. I don't see Ike anywhere, but his words are here at the bottom of this old photograph. His words that day were: ``A modern, efficient highway system is essential to meet the needs of our growing population, our expanding economy, and our national security.'' There is a word--``prescient''--that indicates something is wise and forward-looking. Those words are just that--wise and forward-looking-- and they were first spoken almost 60 years ago by President Eisenhower. This week, President Obama and leaders in the House of Representatives and the Senate reached a long-sought compromise on a budget deal for 2 years, through 2017. And while there are certainly some aspects of that budget deal that are disappointing, other aspects of it, at least for me--in terms of finding ways to save money, going after program integrity, and looking for waste and fraud--bring a good deal to like about it as well. It is encouraging that Democrats and Republicans were able to come together to reach an agreement--any agreement--that will pause the cycle of crisis government, from crisis to crisis, where we find too much of our time across the Federal Government, as we run up to these crises, spent not doing work--the work we ought to be doing-- but actually trying to figure out how we deal with a shutdown. At least we can say this agreement will prevent that and for the next couple of years enable people across the Federal Government to do their work, whether it happens to be agriculture, environment, law enforcement, border security, or you name it. The other thing I would say is by preventing a default on our Federal obligations and lifting the harmful spending cuts--particularly in the areas of our budget where we actually invest money that create economic opportunity--this deal will help to encourage continued economic growth and recovering from low job creation and job preservation. I heard today that this agreement is worth about an extra one-third of a million jobs, and in a little State like mine, Delaware, with fewer than a million people, that is quite a few jobs. However, if we really wanted to focus on economic growth and job creation, we would be talking a lot more about transportation, and I mentioned the words here of Dwight Eisenhower, but let's go on to the next poster. While there is much to like in the budget agreement we are debating today and into the night, I am disappointed that it fails to offer a long-term plan to increase investment in America's infrastructure, particularly in our transportation infrastructure. A budget deal like this offered a prime opportunity to address our chronic underinvestment in the roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems of this Nation. I have looked high and low in this budget agreement, and when it comes to transportation, there is a ``whole lotta nothing'' in there with respect to transportation and infrastructure investment. Instead, Congress is now poised to pass not the 13th but the 14th extension of our Federal transportation programs since 2008. We have done this 14 times. Fortunately, this extension does not require us to add to the $74 billion we have spent since 2008 to bail out the highway transportation fund time and again, but it only continues the cycle of uncertainty and crisis governing that prevented our States and our cities from planning major transportation projects. I would just insert here that if you look at the country from coast to coast, our State transportation budgets use a mix of funds from different sources, but on average, about half the money they spend-- from Delaware and the other 49 States--comes from the Federal Government. We have missed another opportunity to give our Nation's economy a serious boost. This is a little bit of what I am talking about. This poster says: ``Here's why Congress needs to reauthorize funding to rebuild America's infrastructure.'' Here are a few numbers to keep in mind: 25 percent, 45 percent, and 65 percent. Twenty-five percent of our bridges require significant repair. Either that or they cannot handle today's traffic at all. Twenty-five percent. Forty-five percent of Americans lack access to transit. Forty-five percent. Sixty-five percent of America's roads are rated in less than good condition. Sixty-five percent. There is an outfit called the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of the things they do every year is to rate highways, roads, and bridges. They assign a grade. It could be an A. We have our pages here. They are here doing their school work while they are paging in the Senate, so they do double duty, but hopefully they are all getting A's in their courses. Our roads, highways, and bridges do not receive any A's. They do not receive B's. Hopefully our pages get B's and better, but our roads, highways, and bridges do not. In fact, our roads, highways, and transit systems are earning a D. D is disappointing. D is degraded. D is dogged. And our Nation's bridges earn a C-plus. Those aren't grades that our pages would be proud of or that their parents would be proud of, and those certainly aren't grades we should be proud of as a country. In the most recent World Economic Forum ranking, in less than a decade the United States has fallen from seventh overall in the quality of our transportation infrastructure. A decade ago we were No. 7; today we are No. 18. In Billboard magazine, when they are rating the top record across the country--a record on the rise gets a vote. A No. 5 in the vote means it is heading up the charts. Ten years ago we were No. 7, and now, like a bullet, we are heading right the other way--from No. 7 to No. 18. We are heading in a very wrong direction. Here in this poster we can see that highways and transit spending as a share of GDP has not been going up. In 1962 John Kennedy was President and I was a junior in high school, just like you pages. In 1962 the share of GDP that we spent for highways and transit was right at 3 percent--right at 3 percent. Over time it started dropping. Around 1972, in the middle of the Vietnam war--I spent some time overseas in Southeast Asia with my compadres--it dropped to 2 percent. We were trying to pay for guns and bullets. It really dropped rather steeply there, probably because of the war. What has gone on since 1972 is to trend down, down, and down, and now the number is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent. It has diminished by more than half since 1962. Let me mention a couple of other numbers. The infrastructure spending is only about 2.5 percent of GDP in the United States. Actually, it is only about 1.5 percent in the United States. What is that compared to? Compared to what? I have a friend, and when you ask him ``How are you doing?'' he says ``Compared to what?'' Well, how is the United States doing? Well, compared to what? We are at 1.5 percent--actually, a little less than that--of GDP for transportation infrastructure. Where are our Canadians up to the north? They are at 4 percent--more than twice the number we are. Australia, South Korea--where are they? They are at 5 percent, and 5 percent for most of Europe. China is at 9 to 12 percent. They are spending 9 to 12 percent of their GDP on transportation and infrastructure. We are spending 1.5 percent. That is not a good thing. That is not a good thing. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates that their investments in roads and highways dropped significantly between 2003 and 2012. How significantly? By another 20 percent. To meet our country's needs in ways that support American business and families, an outfit called McKinsey Global Institute--most of us have heard of the McKinsey Consulting Company, but they have an arm of their company called McKinsey Global Institute--estimates that we need to increase infrastructure investment by $150 billion annually through 2020 to catch up the backlog of projects that are badly needed--roads, highways, bridges, and transit. Our lack of transportation investment is hurting families, individuals, and businesses. There is an outfit down in Texas, Texas A&M, which is famous in recent years for their football teams, but they are also well known because every year they give us a report on congestion on the roads, highways, and bridges in the United States. They found that the average commuter across the country wastes 42 hours per year in traffic--42 hours per year just sitting there or barely moving. If you actually look at cities such as New York City or Philadelphia or Dallas or Denver or L.A., that number is 82 hours per year. Think about that--82 hours per year here in the greater Washington area and a lot of other places, such as L.A. and New York City. The resulting wasted fuel and lost productivity cost the Nation's economy $160 billion this year--$160 billion. That works out to about $960 per commuter. In addition to congestion, we have other costs to commuters--people out on the roads, highways, and bridges--that come from our repairs. Not everybody can see this, but obviously there is a guy working on potholes and talking to his supervisor. It says: Warning, potholes. But here is the number that is really the key: There is $516 per driver in increased repair and maintenance costs every year. There was an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, talking to consumers and voters, that said: The next time you get a bill for replacing your tires, your steering, your rims or whatever, send the bill to your Congressman, your Congresswoman, your Senator. Even if it is only half of that, it is still a lot of money. I don't have reason to believe it is half, but even if it is, it is a huge amount of money that we are spending. Add to that the waste of time, and this adds up. This is a sad commentary. Some of the charts I use are humorous; this one is not. Poor roadway conditions were a significant factor in approximately one-third of the 32,000 traffic fatalities last year. About 10,000 people who would be alive today are not. The primary contributing factor to their death was the poor condition of the highways, roads, and bridges on which they were traveling. I mentioned the McKinsey Global Institute a minute ago. They said that if we were serious about making real progress and doing it promptly on the condition of roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems, we ought to be investing about $150 billion a year. Here is another report from the McKinsey Global Institute. It says that about a $150 to $180 billion in annual investment is needed for 15 to 20 years. That is a lot of money for a long time. They say that if we are serious and consistent in robustly investing in transportation infrastructure, we would add to GDP, not once but every year, somewhere between 1.4 percent and 1.7 percent per year, and we would add about 1.8 million jobs if we are willing to make the kind of investments that we need. Those aren't my numbers. Those are McKinsey's. Put it all together, and this explains why Senator Dick Durbin and I introduced a month or so ago what we call the TRAFFIC Relief Act. It raises about $220 billion in new money, user fee revenue--revenue that can only be used for roads, highways, transit, and bridges, and not for anything else--not for foreign aid, not for wars, not for some other domestic program. But $220 billion would go into roads, highways, bridges, and transit systems. The legislation Senator Durbin and I introduced permanently eliminates the annual highway trust fund shortfalls. Every year we run out of money. We run out of money in the transportation trust fund and take money out of the general fund to fill up the transportation trust fund. When the general fund runs out of money, we go around the world cup-in-hand borrowing money from people such as China to refill the transportation trust fund. Then, when we call China on their misbehavior--it might be manipulation, it might be dumping various goods and services on our country, it might be messing around in the South China Sea and other places--we say to them: You can't do that. If I were them, I would say to us: We thought you wanted to borrow our money. We shouldn't be in that position. So the TRAFFIC Relief Act Senator Durbin and I introduced raises an additional $72 billion over 10 years for new transportation investments, over and above what would otherwise be generated. We could use that $72 billion and more. Not everybody can read the script here, but this one fellow here is saying: ``There is no way I can afford an increase in the gas tax.'' Then over here it goes on to say, as his car is towed away: ``I spend all my money fixing my car because of these terrible roads.'' Think about that. There are a lot of terrible roads, highways, and bridges, and some pretty lousy transit systems as well. I spent money on my minivan last year replacing a tire that cost me about $200 because of a problem with the road. I am not the only person. That happens to a lot of folks during the course of the year. Those are all the posters I have. I will close by saying that on the Environmental and Public Works Committee, where I serve, we have reported out unanimously authorizing legislation that would authorize investments in transportation systems--roads, bridges, highways, and transits--for the next 6 years. It is actually very smart legislation. I give Senator Boxer and Senator Inhofe, the lead Democrat and the lead Republican on the committee, a lot of credit for leading that effort. The House of Representatives is coming up with a 6-year transportation authorization plan that reflects in many ways what we have done in the Senate. To the extent that is the case, then we applaud their efforts as well. Some may remember another poster I showed earlier, an enlarged photograph of a fellow wearing a cowboy hat as if he were asleep on his back. The cowboy hat was covering his face. He didn't look like the ``Marlboro Man.'' He looked like a cowboy who had been ridden hard and put up wet. The caption at the bottom of the poster was talking about the hat: ``All hat, no cattle,'' suggesting the guy wasn't a real cowboy. ``All hat, no cattle.'' It is great that we have sound, smart transportation authorization legislation, and we do. What is really disappointing is ``all hat and no cattle'' when it comes to paying for this stuff, not coming close to the amount of money we need to invest. We are not even close. I think we are going to look at a 6-year transportation authorization with maybe 3 years of funding. Some of that funding we create by borrowing and spending, which is like 8, 9, 10 years down the road and bringing it forward to pay for spending today. I don't feel good about that. I expect you don't either. In some cases we are taking money that is supposedly being collected for TSA, for aviation safety and our security in the skies, and using that money for roads, highways, bridges--taking TSA funding increases and using it for a couple of months on roads, highways, bridges, and improvements. We do the same thing with Customs fees along our border. People and a lot of commerce come across our border. Another idea we have used in the past is taking money out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, maybe from oil we bought for $80, $90 a barrel and turning around and selling it for half that price. Buy high and sell low--I don't think that is a very smart strategy for investing in or for funding transportation projects. The American people deserve better than this. Ronald Reagan, Eisenhower, and others--even Democrats--have said that the way we have funded transportation for years in this country and improvements to transportation--roads, highways, bridges--is a user approach. The folks and the businesses that use our roads, highways, and bridges ought to pay for it. That is what we have done. We have come to a place in this country where we are finding it hard to pay for the things we need and the things we want. Somehow we have to summon the courage to do what the American people expect us to do, which is to work together, to work smartly, and to make some tough decisions. The legislation I alluded to that Senator Durbin and I and another colleague or two have introduced and sponsored would raise the gas tax and diesel tax in this country. It hasn't been raised in 22 years. The gas tax, which 22 years ago was raised to 18 cents, because of inflation is now worth less than a dime. The diesel tax, which 22 years ago was worth about 23 cents, is now not even worth 15 cents. Meanwhile, the cost of concrete, asphalt, steel, and labor have all gone up, and we are still stuck with the same purchasing power from these user fees that we had 22 years ago. The math doesn't add up. As a result, we earn nearly failing grades for the transportation system that we have. If we were to somehow wave a magic wand and the House and the Senate would come to their senses and pass by acclamation an increase in the user fee of 4 cents a year for 4 years, we would get to 2020 and we would have added 16 cents over that period of time to what is one of the lowest user fees on gas and diesel of any advanced nation in the world. I think we are No. 33 out of 34 of the OECD nations. In 2020, after an increase of 4 cents a year for 4 years was put in place, the cost to the average driver is the cost of a cup of coffee a week. Think about it. For the average driver paying an additional user fee of 4 cents a year for 4 years, indexing for inflation, the cost is the cost of a cup of coffee a week. The question I would ask my colleagues--and I think we would ask most people--is this: Would you rather put up with really--one of my favorite, good senatorial words--``crappy'' roads, highways, bridges? Would you rather continue to put up with that? We could have a transportation system that we could be proud of for a cup of coffee. I don't think that is asking too much. I don't have a magic wand. I don't think it is likely that my colleagues will rush to the floor after these remarks today and say: Let's do something real. Let's see if we can't get our roads, highways, and bridges making the kinds of grades that our pages are making doing their schoolwork while they serve us here in the Senate. In the Bible there is a parable where some seeds were sown on the hard ground and never bore fruit. Some came up for a little while and raised up some plants but then died away in the hot sun. But others took root and grew a hundredfold. I am going to keep sowing these seeds, and hopefully someday soon--sooner rather than later--some of these seeds will fall on fertile soil. Until then, I look forward to joining the Presiding Officer on the floor to keep this up until you say ``uncle'' and then we will change places. I see my friend from Kansas--my many talented friend--here with our friend from Nebraska. I am tempted to wait and see what they have to say. I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that, on behalf of the Delaware congressional delegation, I wish to honor the exemplary service of Jamie Turner, director of the Delaware Emergency Management Agency, upon his retirement. Jamie has served as director for 13 years and during that time has provided first responders and Delaware citizens with emergency preparedness training and education to keep Delawareans safe when hazards such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and fires hit Delaware. His efforts will be a guide and inspiration for the hard-working employees at DEMA and the many first responders in Delaware for years to come. Jamie has a lifetime of experience when it comes to responding to emergency situations. In 1970, he began his education in fire protection technology at Delaware Technical Community College. He studied the causes and proper responses to various hazards and preventive measures that can be taken to avoid them entirely. Jamie took the knowledge he gained from his education and in 1976 began working with the Delaware State Fire School as the emergency service training administrator. It was his responsibility to supervise instructors, research technical information, and work with fire, rescue, and emergency medical services to develop necessary guidelines and effective procedures. Then, in 2000, he took on the role of executive secretary of the Delaware Volunteer Firemen's Association, where he was tasked with following legislation at every level of government that affected DVFA's membership. In this role, he researched different laws and ordinances to ensure that the DVFA was following the proper guidelines. Thanks to Jamie, Delaware's firefighters stayed informed on the regulations that were put in place to keep themselves and those in emergency situations safe. Jamie has been a dedicated public servant for years. Before his appointment to director of DEMA, he was serving and protecting Delaware through his consistent endeavors to remain on the cutting edge of best practices in emergency protocol and then use that experience to educate others in the field. He is active in the Smyrna Little League and continues to volunteer with the Delaware Fire Service. On behalf of Senator Chris Coons and Congressman John Carney, I wholeheartedly thank Jamie Turner for his service to the State of Delaware. His model leadership and dedication has improved the quality of our State's emergency response systems and has kept countless residents safe. We offer our sincere congratulations on a job well done and wish him and his wife Debbie, their daughters Kim and Katie, husbands Mike and Sean respectively, and their grandchildren Madelyn, Harper, Keegan, and Kolton many happy years to come.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Let me start off by saying to Senator Feinstein, 6 years ago, you, along with Senators Susan Collins, Joe Lieberman, Jay Rockefeller, and others started leading the effort to put in place comprehensive cyber security legislation and offered the first comprehensive bill dealing with information sharing. We had a vote in late 2012. It came up short, and we started all over again in the last Congress. You have shown great leadership right from the start. I thank you and I thank Senator Burr, the chair of the committee. I thank you for cooperating with us and with others to make sure that we have not just a good bill but a very good bill that addresses effectively the greatest challenges we face in our country. I have heard Senator Feinstein say this time and again, and I will say it again today: If companies don't want to share information with the Federal Government, they don't have to. It is elective. In some cases they can form their own groups called ISOCs that will share information with one another. They don't have to share information on attacks with the Federal Government. They can share it with other peers if they wish to, but if they do share it with the Federal Government, with a couple of narrow exceptions, we ask that it be shared with the Department of Homeland Security because the Department of Homeland Security is set up in large part to provide a privacy scrub. Next month the DHS will have the ability, when these threat indicators come through that are reported by other businesses across the country, in real time to be able to scrub that information through the portal and remove from it personally identifiable information that should not be shared with other Federal agencies, and just like that, bingo, we are off to the races. It is a smart compromise that I am pleased and grateful to have worked out with Senators Burr and Feinstein and their staff. I thank both their staff and ours as well. The other piece is the legislation we literally took out of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that has been pending. I think the entire title 2 of the managers' amendment is the legislation that Senator Johnson and I have worked on. We are grateful for that. One piece of it is something called EINSTEIN 1, 2, and 3--not to be confused with the renowned scientist, Albert Einstein. But we have something called EINSTEIN 1, EINSTEIN 2, and EINSTEIN 3. What do they mean? What this legislation does is it means we are going to use these tools--we are going to continue to update and modernize these tools-- to, No. 1, record intrusions; No. 2, to be able to detect the bad stuff coming through into the Federal Government; and No. 3, block it. We are going to make sure it is not just something that is positive work on a piece of paper but that 100 percent of the Federal agencies are able to use these new tools. Senator Johnson and I worked on legislation included in this package that uses encryption tools and doubles the number of processes we have available to better protect our information. Finally, I would mention that Senator Collins, the former chair of the Homeland Security Committee--she and a number of our colleagues, including Senator Mikulski, Senator McCaskill, and others, have worked on legislation that we added to and all of that was reported out of the committee. All of this together is a very robust defender of our dot- gov domain and could be used to help those outside the Federal Government as well. Going back to the last Congress, Tom Coburn and I worked together to do three things to strengthen the Department of Homeland Security to let it do its job. Growing up, I remember seeing cartoon ads in a magazine about some guy at the beach kicking sand on a smaller guy. The smaller guy in this case would have been the Department of Homeland Security, with respect to their ability to provide robust defense against cyber attacks. If I can use that cartoon as an analogy, in the past, the Department of Homeland Security was the 98-pound weakling, and it is no weakling anymore. Legislation that Dr. Coburn and I offered, passed in the Congress, to, No. 1, say the cyber ops center in the Department of Homeland Security is real. We are standing it up. We are making it real and robust. The Federal Information Security Management Act for years was a paperwork exercise and was a once-a-year check to make sure our cyber defenses were secure. We are transforming that into a 24/7, robust, around-the-clock operation by modifying legislation and improving legislation called FISMA. We also in that legislation make clear what OMB's job is and we make clear what the job of the Department of Homeland Security is. Finally, for years the Department of Homeland Security hired and trained cyber warriors, and just as they were getting really good, they were hired away because we couldn't retain them. We couldn't pay them or provide retention bonuses or hiring bonuses. We need to make sure we have some of the best cyber warriors in the world working at the Department of Homeland Security. Now DHS has that authority, and we will be able to hire these people. Putting all this together, folks, what we have done is move the needle. With passage of this legislation we will move the needle and we need to do that. There will be discussion later on of amendments. There are a couple of them that for this Senator are especially troubling. Senator Feinstein has mentioned a couple of them, and I suspect Senator Burr has mentioned them as well. We will look at them as we go through, but a couple of them set this legislation back and I will very strongly oppose them. Having said that, regarding the old saying--I am tired of hearing it and I am tired of saying it, but ``don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.'' This isn't just good legislation, this is very good legislation, and it has gotten better every step of the way because of the willingness of the ranking member and the chairman of the Intel Committee to collaborate. The three C's at work are communicating, compromising, and collaborating. We should work out these amendments today and pass this bill. I thank the Chair.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I want to go back in time a little more than 12, 13 or 14 years ago, to 9/11. One of the lessons learned by the committee on which the Presiding Officer and I serve, now the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was learned from former Governor Tom Kean of New Jersey, cochair, along with former Congressman Lee Hamilton from Indiana, former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. They were the cochairs of the 9/11 Commission. One of the things they brought to our committee and to the Congress, after a lot of work by a number of good men and women who served on that commission, was the root causes for how that disaster occurred: How could those four aircraft take down the Twin Towers, crash into the Pentagon, and crash into a field in Shanksville, PA, instead of this building right here? How could that have happened? There are a number of reasons why it happened. But one of the reasons why it happened is that we had stovepiped our intelligence services. What the folks over at the FBI knew wasn't necessarily known or shared with the Department of Homeland Security. What the folks at the National Security Agency knew was not shared with either of the other two agencies. What the Defense Information Agency knew or what other agencies knew simply didn't get shared--stovepiped--because we did a lousy job of sharing the real story, the full truth on what was being plotted, what was going to come down and literally take thousands of lives in one day and change in many ways our country--in profound ways that still exist today. ``Stovepiping''--I have heard that word a hundred times in hearings and before our committee and in talking to folks in the 9/11 Commission. The legislation that we passed on the heels of that disaster was designed to make sure we didn't end up stovepiping again with intelligence information that might lead us to avert that kind of disaster. So far, it seems to be working and is much needed, and I think it has been helpful. Today, I want to talk about a different kind of stovepiping that I am afraid we may end up with--not to avert or block an aviation takeover of an aircraft and disasters involving the aviation sector but a disaster in cyber space in the face of cyber threats to our country. We are working here today and will be voting later today on an amendment or two and then on final passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. Again, just to remind everybody, the reason why we are considering this is there needs to be a better sharing of information when businesses come under cyber attack from those within our country, outside of our country, cyber nations, and criminal organizations. We need to do a better job of sharing that information-- business to business and business to government--and for the government to share that information within the government to agencies that need to know so we can respond to those attacks. Shortly after the 9/11 Commission recommendations were enacted, one of the things that we did was we stood up a new department called the Department of Homeland Security. It is a civilian agency, as we know. It is not the Department of Defense. It is not the Department of Justice. It is not the FBI, and it is not the National Security Agency. It is a civilian organization. When the Department of Homeland Security was created, one of the ideas behind it was that it would not be just a civilian operation, but it would be a civilian operation that could receive, from businesses and from other governmental entities, information relating to cyber attacks. That information could come through a portal--think about it; almost like a window--through which those threat indicators would be reported. Those threat indicators would come through that portal at the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security would do, almost in real time, a privacy scrub to strip off from the information--the threat indicators submitted from other businesses or other government entities--Social Security numbers or other personally identifiable information or information that just shouldn't go to other Federal agencies or other businesses. They would strip it out--not in a week, not in a day, not in an hour, not even, in many cases, in a minute, but just like that--immediately--real-time privacy scrub. As the Presiding Officer knows, we tried for years to be able to enact legislation that incentivizes businesses that have been victims of cyber attacks to share that information with one another, with other businesses, and with the Federal Government. A bunch of them have been reluctant to do it. Some of them have been reluctant to do it because they don't want to get sued. If they disclose that they had a breach and maybe their competitors didn't, how would that be used against them? How could they be named in lawsuits if attacks occurred? So in order to get them to be willing to share information, we had to incent them. And the way we decided to incent them is to say: Share the information. You don't have to worry if you share it with the Department of Homeland Security through the portal established in this civilian agency. Share it with the Department of Homeland Security, and you have liability protection or, as it turns out, if you already shared it previously, if it has been shared previously with the Federal Government, you can share it again and still enjoy liability protection. You can share it with companies that are victims of cyber attacks, share it with their regulator, and still enjoy liability protection. What we want to do is to make sure companies and businesses that are hacked don't just sit on the information, that they do something with it. This is a saying we have on Amtrak: If you see something, say something. If something happens to a business--a cyber attack intrusion--we want them to share it so other businesses and other Federal agencies can be prepared for it, look out for it, and stop it. Where does this take me? This takes me to an amendment that we are going to be voting on later this afternoon offered by one of our colleagues, Senator Cotton. It would, I fear, risk revisiting stovepiping--not the kind of stovepiping that led to the disaster of 9/ 11 but stovepiping that could lead to cyber threats--threat indicators shared with the Federal Government but not with the Department of Homeland Security, which receives these threats and immediately disburses them to other agencies that have a need to know. But what the Cotton amendment would do is that it would say that a business that is a victim of a cyber attack could share with the FBI, could share with Secret Service, but wouldn't have to share with the Department of Homeland Security. The reason why in our legislation, which Senator Burr, Senator Feinstein, I, and others have worked on, we have it going through the Department of Homeland Security is because, more than any Federal agency, they are set up to do privacy scrubs. That is one of the things they do, and, frankly, they do it really well. Their job is to then spread that information and share that information back to the private sector, in some cases, and in other cases, just with relevant agencies--NSA, FBI, Department of Justice, Treasury, whoever else needs to know that information. As part of the authors of the legislation, I join them in this. Our fear is if the information isn't shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which will then broadly share it in real-time and share that information with those who need to know it, and if it ends up that the FBI or, frankly, any other agency that doesn't have that ability to do a great privacy scrub maybe, that doesn't have maybe the mission to immediately share that information in real time to other relevant players, then the news--the word about that cyber attack--could literally stay at that agency--the FBI or the Secret Service, for that matter. We don't want that to happen. We don't want to see that information stovepiped in one agency. We want to make sure that it goes to one agency that does the privacy scrub. We want to make sure the agency that does the privacy scrub shares that information in real time with relevant Federal agencies and the private sector. I probably shouldn't pretend to speak for Senator Feinstein and Senator Burr. They will be here to speak for themselves. But I know they share my concerns about this legislation. I ask, on behalf of them, and, frankly, for others of us who believe that this is a dangerous amendment--and I don't say that lightly. We have worked really hard. We have worked really well across the aisle--literally for months now--to get to this point. To use a football analogy, we are not just in the red zone passing this legislation; we are on the 10-yard line, and it is first down and goal to go. Let's not muff the play. Let's get the ball to the end zone. Let's pass this legislation. Let's vote down the Cotton amendment, and let's go to conference. Let's go to conference and provide the kind of protection against cyber attacks that this country desperately needs and deserves. I yield the floor.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, it is with great pleasure that I speak on behalf of the Delaware delegation to honor Head Start's 50 years of service to our Nation's most vulnerable children and families in Delaware and nationwide. On May 18, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched Project Head Start as an 8-week summer demonstration project to teach low-income students needed skills before they started kindergarten. Over the past 50 years, Head Start has served 32 million children and families across the country with comprehensive services. The Head Start Program has given children and families the tools to succeed by ensuring a high quality education and access to health care and social services. The Head Start Program represents a critical investment in the education of our nation's youngest children. In the State of Delaware, 2,714 children and pregnant women benefitted from Head Start, Early Head Start, and the Early Childhood Assistance Program in 2014. Head Start is instrumental in uplifting families in Delaware by providing resources to families who, like many of us, want to see their children reach their full potential. The teachers, home visitors, and family service workers that make up the Head Start Program are the backbone of this mission. Without them on the front lines each and every day, these early education goals would not be met. I commend the teachers and staff who are deeply committed to seeing all children succeed. On behalf of Senator Chris Coons and Congressman John Carney, I recognize Head Start Awareness Month and the 50th Anniversary of Head Start. It is our sincere hope that future generations of children and families can continue to greatly benefit from Head Start's programs and we can put children on the right path from the very beginning.

Mr. CARPER

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

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I would just note that the Presiding Officer and I are on the same schedule, because I come here a couple of times a week, but you are here more often than not when I am speaking. I am sorry. This is cruel and unusual punishment, I suspect, for you. But I welcome the opportunity. Thank you for showing up. Otherwise, I would not have a chance to share these thoughts today with the folks that are in the Chamber and anybody else who might have tuned in. Earlier this year, the Senate actually took up legislation that was reported out of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which was a 6-year Transportation authorization bill. A lot of people who don't work here don't realize that for us to spend money--taxpayer money--in most cases we have to authorize a program at certain funding levels. Then we have to come back and do a second step, and that is to actually appropriate the money to spend that has been authorized. Usually, if we are authorized to spend $100 in a program, we cannot come in and just appropriate a lot more money than that. We have to do it within the levels set by the authorization bill. Well, we took up on the floor of the Senate the Environment and Public Works Committee's 6-year Transportation bill, coauthored by Senator Inhofe and Senator Boxer, Republican and Democrat, and reported out of the committee unanimously. Most people think we fight about everything. Well, we don't. Environment and Public Works Committee Senators Boxer and Inhofe have been very good at working together on these authorization bills. Now, the authorization bill does not contain the funding, but it says: These are our transportation policies, and this is the level that we think is appropriate. But it does not actually fund a dollar to go to those programs. Well, over in the House of Representatives today, they got in the act. As I understand it, the House transportation committee has reported out--I think on a voice vote--their own 6-year authorization bill. This is good. It has not passed the House yet, but at least it is out of committee, with apparently a fair amount of broad support, which is good. This is the Senate-passed bill called the DRIVE Act, reported out by the committee a couple of months ago and passed the Senate here more recently. As you know, we have names for our bills, such as the names for cars. But the DRIVE Act, the Senate-passed bill, the Surface Transportation Reauthorization and Reform Act, has a number--3763. It is a 6-year authorization for transportation programs. Do these bills have any good ideas in them? Well, they really do. As it turns out, there is a fair amount of common ground that these two pieces of legislation share, the Senate-passed bill and the bill out of the House committee. One of them is that there is a new focus on making freight transportation more reliable, more affordable, and more efficient. When you look at an outfit called McKinsey & Company, a big international consulting firm, they have an entity, an appendage of McKinsey, that is called the Global Institute. A year or so ago, they opined that a fully funded, robustly funded transportation program in the United States would provide 1.8 million new jobs in this country--1.8 million new jobs in this country--and that it would grow GDP, gross domestic product, by 1.5 percent per year--not just one time, but per year. Those are pretty amazing numbers, actually, for me. Well, one of the things that actually drives the increase in employment and the growth in GDP is a more efficient freight transportation system and one that actually focuses--as in this legislation--on freight, and not just moving our cars, trucks, and vans but actually figuring out how we move freight from place to place in a more efficient way. The second area where there seems to be some agreement is that both pieces of legislation prioritize--especially the Senate version--bridge safety and large facilities of national importance. Think big bridges; think big tunnels. We have a bunch of bridges in this country--I forget what the percentage is--that are substandard, not safe--maybe one out of every nine. So take your choice for the bridges you are going over. Think about that. One in nine is deemed to be essentially unsafe. Both of those bills say: Well, that ought to be a priority and we would like to authorize higher spending for that. These bills focus on clean air funding and toward some of the most dangerous sources of emissions--diesel emissions. A lot of it comes from roadbuilding--road and highway--and bridgebuilding equipment that is diesel powered and puts out harmful emissions. Actually, our bill in the Senate does some good things to reduce those emissions while we go about building these transportation projects. One of the things that I especially like about our bill is that it says that eventually we ought to have an approach to funding roads, highways, and bridges. Maybe it should be something that reflects vehicle miles traveled. We don't have that kind of magical system now. In Oregon, they have been trying to do it for 10 years. They call it RUC, a road user charge. They have maybe 5,000 families that are actually using this. But it is a long way from 5,000 families in Oregon to having a national system that we can use to come up with money to pay for roads, highways, bridges, and transit. But our Senate-passed bill establishes research to develop alternative user fees to replace, maybe eventually, the gas and diesel tax somewhere down the line--not next year, probably not this decade, but somewhere down the line. I think that should be a growing part of the source of revenues to pay for transportation. The Senate bill even increases--bumps up not hugely but bumps up a little bit--the baseline funding and funding for transportation. I wish it had been more, but at least it is an effort to do that. Our next chart is one of my favorite charts. I have a friend from Montana, a former attorney general, former Governor, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, whose name is Marc Racicot. Folks from his State like to talk about cowboys who really are not cowboys. They have a saying out there. They say: All hat, no cattle. In this case, we can have all the transportation authorization bills until the cows come home, but unless we actually fund them, they are just words on a piece of paper, and we don't build a road or a highway or a bridge or do anything on the transit side unless we actually fund them. I don't know who this guy is, but I love this poster. All hat, no cattle. That is where we are right now because we don't have agreement on how we are really going to pay for robustly funding transportation projects. There is an idea out there that goes beyond lousy pay-fors. I think the kind of stuff goes like this: We steal money for 10 years out of TSA, instead of making our skies safer, and we put that money of 10 years of revenues into 3 months of helping to fund transportation projects. That is not too smart, but we do that. Instead of making border crossings in this country safer, where folks are trying to get into our country, we use Customs fees for that purpose. But instead of using it to make our border crossings safer and our ports of entry safer, we put 10 years of Customs fees collected into 3 months or so of transportation projects. We look at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for which we bought the petroleum. We try to buy it low and not use it very much. But we will see what we spent in the last couple of years buying and refilling our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at $80, $90, maybe $100 a barrel, and now we are selling it at basically half of that price. You are supposed to buy low and then sell high. That is where you end up making your profits. What we are doing with our Strategic Petroleum Reserve is to buy high, sell low, and use whatever money we realize to help pay for some transportation projects--not a real smart investment strategy. What Senator Dick Durbin and I have introduced is something we called the TRAFFIC Relief Act. It is an acronym. Tax Relief and Fix the Trust Fund for Infrastructure Certainty Act of 2015. Here is the real thing we need to know about. It raises $220 billion over the next 10 years. We raise $220 billion in the next 10 years to go into the transportation trust fund. If we just want to go, frankly, not to a level of spending that actually addresses the problem, then, in fact, we have our roads, highways, and bridges get a D-plus. Civil engineers across the country every year evaluate our transportation infrastructure. They give us a D-plus. ``D'' as in ``dog.'' ``D'' as in ``dangerous.'' ``D'' as in ``degraded.'' That is when you spend $90 billion a year, which is maybe contemplated in the authorization legislation--maybe a little bit more. We don't really make much of a dent in the work that needs to be done. What we propose in our legislation is $220 billion, and we would have $130 billion for new investments in repairs and upgrades. I should be able to do some new projects and make a bigger dent in the ones that need our attention. Let's see what we have in our next chart. I think there is a fair amount of support for doing that from what I hear. Let's take a look. We looked at a couple of recent editorials that basically say what day--I think from these newspapers are from coast to coast, from North to South, East to West. Believe it or not, they say we ought to pay for transportation--roads, highways, and bridges. It should be that the user pays to use the roads, highways, and bridges. They ought to pay for them. It is what we have done for years. If we raise the gas and diesel tax from 1993--22 years ago, about 18 years ago for the gas tax, 23 cents for the diesel tax--in today's purchasing power, adjust for inflation. So the gas tax is worth less than a dime, not 18 cents, but less than a dime. The diesel tax is not worth 23 cents, but less than 15 cents--probably closer to 12 cents. Here is what some of the people say. The New York Times says: ``Highways Need a Higher Gas Tax.'' They are essentially saying restore the purchasing power of the gas and diesel tax. All right? Not add $1, not add 50 cents or 25 cents, but restore the purchasing power. USA TODAY says: ``Raise the gas tax: Our view.'' They also add: ``Highway funding hijinks: Our view''--which actually coincides with mine. Let's see if we have any others. The Washington Post says, and this is a very recent one: ``Highway Transportation Fund needs a permanent and simple fix.'' Even more recent, editorial board said: ``Congress recklessly refuses to top up the Highway Trust Fund.'' Then even more recently: ``Congress should fix the gas tax.'' Again, restore the purchasing power of the gas and diesel tax, not to use it for extraneous stuff, not to use it for foreign aid, not to use it for Afghanistan or other places around the world, not to use it for health care, not to use it for education, but to use it to take these roads, highways, and bridges that are deteriorating and actually put the money, any extra money we generate, into those. Bangor, ME: ``The nation's highway fund doesn't have to continue to lose ground.'' The Register-Guard--I am trying to remember where that is. I am not sure where the Register-Guard is, but it said ``Just raise the gas tax'' in an editorial in July. Again, the Washington Post opined the same message earlier in January of this year. Let's look at that one again. They said: ``With oil prices low, now's the perfect time for Congress to raise the gas tax.'' That is what they said in January of this year. As it turns out, we did some checking. We found out last week, at 29,000 gas stations across the country, they are selling gas for less than $2 a gallon. Think about that: 29,000 gas stations across America. The gas station in my neighborhood is at $2.09, and the Washington Post opined 7 months, 8 months, 9 months ago that ``With oil prices low, now's the perfect time for Congress to raise the gas tax.'' Actually, gas prices are about half a dollar lower now than they were then. If the Iran agreement is fully implemented, Iran--which now produces about 200,000 barrels of oil a day--a year from now they are going to be producing about 1 million barrels a day. This suggests to me that a world already awash in oil might actually continue to be awash in oil for a while, so with the low oil prices, I think there is reason to believe they are not going to spike back up any time soon. There are more editorials and headlines. The Miami Herald: ``Fix our roads.'' Akron Beacon Journal, Akron, OH: ``Raise the gas tax and make better policy.'' The JournalStar, which is in Nebraska: ``Follow the logic on gas tax.'' Those are major newspapers across the country. We have also had some polling done, not by us, but by the American Road & Transportation Builders Association and also by Mineta. Some of us remember Norman Mineta, former mayor of San Jose, the Secretary of Transportation who worked in both the Republican Bush administration and the Clinton administration. In these two recent nationwide surveys, clear majorities have indicated support for increasing fuel taxes as a fair way to invest in transportation projects. This is from the American Road & Transportation Builders Association: A Strong Majority Supports Payments to Keep Up With Inflation By more than a 2:1 margin, voters support increased payments directed to upkeep of the nation's infrastructure, given the need to keep up with inflation. About 68 percent to 70 percent support, strongly support, or somewhat support doing that. We have another recent poll, and these are just representative samples. There are others that are coming out almost weekly now. The Mineta Transportation Institute Poll--there is one that gives a variety of different options in gas tax, sales tax, and vehicle-miles- traveled fee. The one that actually gets the most support is a 10-cent increase with revenue used just for transportation--not for any other purpose, just for transportation--71 percent. I was surprised it was this high. People want us to fix their roads, highways and bridges. They are tired of paying for repairs to their vehicles. The next quote is from the Philadelphia Inquirer today. They are talking to people who read their paper. ``The next time your axle snaps or a tire rim is bent on a bumpy highway, consider delivering the broken car parts to your congressional representatives''--your representatives in Congress, your House Members, and your Senators. The average amount of money that we spend on repairs of cars, trucks, and vans every year that is related to bad roads and bad bridges is anywhere from $350 a year to as much as $500 per year. That is the range there. I wish to close with sometimes people say you can't vote--we can't vote here to do this stuff. None of us will ever get reelected. Well, wait a minute. How about the 12 States where in the last 2 years they actually voted to do this stuff. State highway transportation departments get about half of their money from the Federal Government, and they raise about half of their money locally. Their major sources of revenues locally are taxes and user fees on gas and diesel. In 12 States in the last 2 years they voted to do this. These are mostly red States because there are more red States, at least with legislatures and Governors, than blue. But 95 percent of the Republican legislatures voted to raise user fees on gas and diesel in their States; 95 percent of them were reelected last fall. They won their primary; they won their general. They were reelected. Who wasn't elected as much? The people who voted against doing that. So the folks who actually voted to raise the user fees actually were reelected more than the people who voted against it. On the Democratic side, in the States where they voted to raise the user fees to pay just for transportation--not for anything else--90 percent of the Democrats were reelected. More legislators were reelected than did not get reelected. So just keep that in mind. I have said enough. The majority leader is waiting, and I thank him for his patience, but here is the long story short: There is a need out there. The American people expect us to do something about it. They want us to work together. We need not just to have a hat. This can't be all hat; there has to be some cattle. Where is the beef? Where is the money to pay for all of this stuff? I will be back next week to talk about it some more, and I thank the majority leader for his patience.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I wish to respond very briefly to what our colleague from Oregon has said. Senator Feinstein shared with me a copy of the actual text of the managers' amendment. I would maybe make two points. One, if a private company elects to share information--they don't have to, but if they elect to share information, as Senator Feinstein has said, it is their call. But if they do, there is a requirement under the law that they scrub it. The reporting entity which is submitting the indicator--in this case to DHS, the Federal entity--has to scrub it. They have the responsibility, whoever is initiating this, to scrub and remove that personally identifiable information. If for some reason they don't, the way the legislation comes before us today, in order for a company that chooses to submit threat indicators to the Federal Government, in order to get help on the liability protection they are looking for, they have to submit it through the Department of Homeland Security, through the portal of the Department of Homeland Security, which is literally set up to do privacy scrubs. It is literally set up to do privacy scrubs, and then to share information it wants with other relevant Federal agencies. Very, very infrequently--very infrequently--will there be some reason to--the threat indicators coming through the portal at DHS, maybe less than 1 percent of the time, there might be a need to take a closer look at that information and make sure there is nothing that is personally identifiable or problematic. I think with the compromise that has been worked out, the issue that our colleague has raised has been addressed. Let me just go back in time. Why is this important? We know the situation is grim. When the Secretary of Defense has his emails hacked by an entity, and we know not who, when we have 22 million personal records and background checks hacked by maybe the Chinese or maybe somebody else, that is not good. When companies such as DuPont in my own State and universities all over the country are having their R&D information--their intellectual seed corn upon which our economy is going to grow--stolen, and presumably stolen for bad reasons, so that they can beat us to the bunch in terms of economic opportunity, that is not good. What are we going to do about it? It turns out we did quite a bit about it in the last Congress. Two Congresses ago, Senator Feinstein proposed comprehensive cyber security legislation, the whole kit and caboodle. We tried very hard, as she knows, for a year or two to get that enacted. We couldn't get it done. Finally, we gave up at the end of I think the 112th Congress. We gave it up, and we started again in 2013. Tom Coburn was the ranking member on Homeland Security. I was privileged to be chairman. He and I partnered with people on our committee and, frankly, with a lot of folks outside of the committee, to do three things: To strengthen the capability of the Department of Homeland Security to do its job, a much better job of protecting not just the Federal Government but the country as a whole against cyber attacks. We passed three pieces of legislation. They are helpful; they are not the whole package, but they are three very helpful bills to make DHS a better, more effective partner. This year, the Intel Committee, under the leadership of Senator Burr and Senator Feinstein, came forward with their proposal. The administration, the President, came forward with an information sharing proposal as well. We took it up in a hearing in the committee on homeland security, looking at the President's proposal, trying to figure out what we should retain and what we should change to make it better, and we did. We changed it and we made it better. I introduced it as a standalone bill. The Intel Committee reported out their legislation 14 to 1. We have been working with Senator Burr and Senator Feinstein and their staffs ever since to try to infuse the elements of the President's proposal, modified by us on homeland security, to make a more perfect--not a more perfect union, but a more perfect bill. Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Sure, it is better. I think it is going to enable us to do a much better job protecting that which needs to be protected. The last thing I will say is this: On this floor I have said more than a few times I love to ask people that have been married a long time, what is the secret to a long marriage? The best answer I have ever received is the two C's--communicate and compromise. I would add a third C, which is also important for a vibrant democracy. The third C is collaborate. This legislation is a great example of communicating, talking with own another, with stakeholders on Capitol Hill, off Capitol Hill, across the country and around the world, but at the end of the day to figure out how to compromise and to do so by collaborating. I think we have come up with a very good piece of legislation. At the end of the day, if an entity or business wants to share information--I hope they would, we need them to do that. If they want to share information with the Federal Government, the idea is to get liability protection and share it through the portal of the Department of Homeland Security; that information is scrubbed--cyber security scrubbed, piracy scrubbed. Share with other Federal agencies as appropriate after it has been dutifully scrubbed, and then we are in a better position to defend against those attacks in the future. I think when people send us to work on big problems--and this is a big problem for our country--they want us to work together. They want us to get stuff done. We have been talking about this for 3 or 4 years, and now we have an opportunity to get something done. Let's pass this and accept this managers' amendment, and then let's take up some other amendments, and pass this bill and send it to the House. When they have done their work, let's go to conference. Thank you very much.

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, are we out of time on the Democrats' side?

Mr. CARPER. Colleagues, keep in mind, EINSTEIN 1 and EINSTEIN 2 are already effective to detect but not block these intrusions. EINSTEIN 3, authorized by our legislation, puts a new player on the field--a defensive player--to be able to block these intrusions. This is new and requires these agencies to implement that. For no other reason than that, it is a good reason to support this proposal. Thank you.

Mr. CARPER

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the cyber security information bill introduced by my colleagues, Senators Burr and Feinstein. I want to commend my colleagues and their staff for their leadership and for their tireless efforts on this extremely important piece of legislation. As ranking member and former chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I have been following cyber security and this information sharing proposal in particular literally for years. In fact, when Senator Feinstein first introduced an information sharing bill in 2012--that was like two or three Congress's ago--it was referred to Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, on which I served. That bill was ultimately folded into a comprehensive cyber security bill that I had the honor of cosponsoring with Senators Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Jay Rockefeller, and Senator Feinstein. We were not able to pass that bill, but I think it has paved the way for other cyber legislation, including the bill that is before us today and a number of the amendments that are going to be offered to that bill in the managers' amendment, especially. Last Congress, I worked with our ranking member on homeland security, Dr. Tom Coburn, and our House counterparts to get not one, not two, not three, but four cyber security bills enacted into law, signed by the President. I believe these four bills laid a very strong foundation for some significant improvements on how the Department of Homeland Security carries out its cyber security mission and really for this bill before us too. What the legislation Dr. Coburn and I worked on during the last Congress did, in essence, was to better equip the Department of Homeland Security to operate at the center of the kind of robust information sharing program that the Burr-Feinstein bill would set up. How do they do that? One, make sure the Department of Homeland Security would have the ability to attract and retain top-flight talent, much like the National Security Agency already has. The legislation actually takes something called the cyber ops center, NCCIC, within the Department of Homeland Security and makes it real and functional and an entity that people would use and listen to. Finally, we took an old law called FISMA, the Federal Information Sharing Management Act--we took something that was just a paperwork operation, this FISMA legislation--like a once-in-a-year check to see how good a cyber security agency might be--and turned it into not a paperwork operation, not a once-every-365-days operation, but a 24/7 surveillance operation on the lookout for intrusions within and across the Federal Government broadly. That legislation, affectionally known as FISMA, was also designed to make clear what the division of labor was between the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, and the Department of Homeland Security on protecting the dot.gov domain. We made it clear that the job of OMB is to, if you will, steer the ship. The job of the Department of Homeland Security is to row the ship, to row the boat. That is a good division of labor given that OMB only has six employees who work on this stuff and the Department of Homeland Security has hundreds. So I think we figured out the sharing of labor, the division of labor, and also made sure the Department of Homeland Security has the resources--the horses, the resources--and the technology they need. Sharing more cyber security threat information among and between the private sector and the Federal Government players who are on the frontline in cyber security is critical for national security. Over the last couple of years, we have witnessed many troubling cyber attacks against our banks, but not just our banks, against retailers, health providers, government agencies, and God knows how many others. Some of those launching these attacks were just criminals. Some of them were just criminals. They want to steal information. They want to make money off of our personal information, off our intellectual property, like our intellectual seed corn, if you will, for companies large and small and for universities as well. Others just want to be disruptive or they want to make political points. Some actors, however, are capable or would like to develop the capability to use a cyber attack to harm people and cause physical damage. It is long past time for this body to take action to more effectively combat these threats we now face in cyber space. That is why earlier this year I introduced a similar information sharing bill. This bill largely mirrored the administration's original proposal. The administration asked me to introduce their information sharing bill. Before I did that, we actually had a hearing in the committee on homeland security. Part of the centerpiece of the hearing was the administration's proposal. We got some good ideas on how to make it better. We made it better and introduced that bill to use, if you will, as a point-counter point in a constructive, positive way with the legislation that worked its way through the Intelligence Committee. But we did not stop there. We took information from a lot of experts and stakeholders. The measure we are discussing today shares the same goals as my original bill--largely the administration's original bill--to increase the sharing of cyber threat information between the Federal Government and the private sector and between different entities within the private sector. I am pleased that we are finally discussing these critical issues on the Senate floor. The substitute amendment we are debating today makes a number of improvements to the bill that was first made public after the Intelligence Committee reported it out. It also includes several changes that I, as well as several of my colleagues, have been calling for--including the chairman of our committee. I would like to thank Senators Burr and Feinstein. I thank their staff for working closely with our staff and others to produce what I believe is a significantly smarter and stronger bill. Is it perfect? No, not yet. But I can say there is always room for improvement. That is why we still have a debate on a number of amendments and those like the one mentioned by Senator Whitehouse that may be germane in a different kind of way in conference. While there may not be agreement on everything in this bill, I believe most of our colleagues would come to the conclusion that it really will help to improve our Nation's cyber security and, by extension, our national security and, by extension, our economic security. First, the bill would ensure that the government--our government--is providing actionable intelligence to private sector entities that are seeking to better protect themselves in cyber space. Businesses around our country are hungry for information they can use to fend off attacks and better protect their systems and their customers. This bill would make the Federal Government a much stronger partner for them. Many companies that I have talked to of late also want to share more information with the Federal Government about what they are seeing online every day, but they are unsure of the rules of the road. In other words, companies want more predictability and they want more certainty when it comes to working with our government. This bill would give them that by clarifying that they won't be putting themselves in legal jeopardy if they choose to share cyber threat information with our Federal Government. If companies do want to avail themselves of the legal protections the bill offers, they would have to, with two narrow exceptions, use the information sharing portal at the Department of Homeland Security. This puts the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian entity, at the center of the information sharing process. I think this is smart and the right thing to do. In fact, many experts and companies that I have talked to across the country as recently as last week out in Silicone Valley and out on the west coast--they agree with what I have just said. I know many Americans are uneasy with companies they do business with directly handing over data to an intelligence or law enforcement agency. The Department of Homeland Security will carry out its responsibilities under this bill through the cyber ops center I mentioned earlier called the National Cyber Security and Communications Integration Center--that is a mouthful. We affectionately call it N- Kick. It is the cyber ops center. It includes folks from DHS and other Federal agencies. It includes a number of representatives of financial services, the utility industry, our retail industry, and so forth, all together under one roof, talking together and working together to help us support one another and make it strong and more secure. One of the bills I worked on with Dr. Coburn last Congress formally, as I said earlier, authorized this center. We are pleased to see that this bill would make the most out of the resources we have already invested in this cyber ops center, NCCIC. Earlier this month, Secretary Jeh Johnson of the Department of Homeland Security told our Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that beginning in November, the cyber ops center, NCCIC, will have the capability to automate the distribution and receipt of cyber threat indicators. I will say that again--to automate the distribution and the receipt of cyber threat indicators that they receive from others, including those in the private sector. In other words, the Department of Homeland Security will have the ability to share information with other agencies in real time--not next month, not next week, not tomorrow, not in an hour, but in real time, which is really what this little bill before us today requires. I know that the real-time sharing is incredibly important to the bill's sponsors, and it is important to me and probably to many of our colleagues and stakeholders. Equally important, however, is the ability of the Department of Homeland Security to apply what I call a privacy scrub to the information it receives from industry, the threat indicators that come from industry--see something, say something--stuff that they send to the Department of Homeland Security. In the bill that I authored with others in my committee, including our chairman, we allow the Department of Homeland Security to, if you will, receive information through its portal from various entities that witness threat indicators, to see it and to put it through the portal, to bring it through the portal to do a privacy scrub. That is one of the things the Department of Homeland Security has expertise in doing. I used an example at lunch earlier today. I talked about baseball. I know the Presiding Officer has some interest in baseball. There are teams called the Phillies in Philadelphia and the Pirates in Pittsburgh. I would just say to him, thinking about baseball for a minute, let's say you are in the playoffs. Let's say you have a team in the playoffs. You are in the ninth inning, and you need to get somebody out of the bullpen to close. You have a one-run lead. You look to the bullpen. He is now retired, but Mariano Rivera was the best closer in baseball history. You have Mariano Rivera in the bullpen to come in and close the game, and you have three other guys you just called up from the Minor League, so maybe from AAA. You say: Well, whom do I put in to close the game? Do I put in the best closer we have ever had in baseball history or do I bring in three rookies, three Minor League guys? Well, you bring in Mariano Rivera. When it comes to being able to do privacy scrubs, the Department of Homeland Security--that is what they do. That is what they do. Now they have the horses, the ability, and the technology to do it even better. I know some of my colleagues are concerned that a privacy scrub will slow down the information sharing process. I share those concerns, but I have been assured by the Department--the bright, smart people at the Department of Homeland Security--that less than 1 percent of the information it receives would actually ever need to be reviewed by a human, by a person. The rest--roughly 95 percent to 99 percent--would be shared with other agencies at machine speed. Bingo. I am very pleased that DHS has come to an agreement on this process with its agency partners. We will be up and running with a portal in the way I have described in the next couple weeks. One of the amendments I filed speaks to this privacy scrub process. It would make clear that the Department of Homeland Security could carry out an automated privacy scrub in real time and without delay. In fact, my amendment would add just one word to the bill so that DHS could continue to automatically remove irrelevant or erroneous data from cyber threat information. I am very pleased that Senators Burr and Feinstein have taken this amendment into consideration and have now modified their substitute amendment to make sure the Department of Homeland Security can do what it does best, and that is to apply a privacy scrub--pulling out personally identifiable information that actually shouldn't be passed on to other Federal agencies. The substitute amendment now calls on DHS to work with its agency partners to agree on a process to share information while protecting privacy. This is a process DHS is already undertaking. I thank Senators Burr and Feinstein, as well as our friends at the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, for working so hard to find agreement on this language and for working with my staff and me on this important matter. Another amendment I put forward with our committee chairman, Senator Johnson, aims to improve what we call cyber hygiene across the Federal Government and to prevent attacks against Federal agencies. This language is based on a bill that Senator Johnson and I introduced and had reported out of our homeland security committee by a unanimous vote. The amendment does three main things. First, it would require all Federal agencies to implement specific best practices and state-of-the-art technologies to defend against cyber attacks. For example, we had experts testify about the importance of strong authentication and data encryption. This amendment would make sure that agencies are taking these commonsense steps to bolster their cyber security defenses. Second, the amendment would accelerate the deployment and adoption of the Department of Homeland Security's cyber intrusion and detection program, known as EINSTEIN, as in Albert Einstein, but you don't have the ``Albert'' in the name of this technology; it is called EINSTEIN. For my colleagues who may not be familiar with EINSTEIN, with respect to homeland security and cyber security, let me take a couple of minutes to describe its main features. We had EINSTEIN 1 present at the beginning, EINSTEIN 2 was follow-on technology, and then there is EINSTEIN 3. EINSTEIN basically analyzes Internet traffic entering and leaving Federal civilian agencies to identify cyber threats and to try to stop attacks. This system has been rolled out in phases over the last several years. EINSTEIN 1 is the first step. It sees and actually records Internet traffic, much like a guard at a checkpoint watches cars go by and maybe writes down and records the license plates. EINSTEIN 2 detects anything out of the ordinary and sets off alarms if a piece of malware is trying to enter a Federal network. For example, a car comes through and it is not supposed to come through. That would set off an alarm and enable EINSTEIN 2 to actually detect a cyber intrusion. It doesn't do anything about blocking. It doesn't block the car, in this example. It doesn't block anything. EINSTEIN 3A, the latest version, uses unclassified and classified information to actually block the cyber attack. So initially EINSTEIN 1 records basically what is being detected, EINSTEIN 2 actually detects bad stuff coming through in terms of an intrusion, and EINSTEIN 3A blocks it. The problem is that less than half of our Federal civilian agencies actually have EINSTEIN 3A in place. They have the ability to record an intrusion, the ability to detect an intrusion, but not the ability to block an intrusion. They need the ability to block. What our legislation would do would be to make sure that agencies have EINSTEIN in place, including the ability to block intrusions, within 1 year. Finally, our amendment incorporates the language originally drafted by Senator Susan Collins, the former chair of the homeland security committee and a great colleague of ours for many years, Senator Mark Warner, Senator Kelly Ayotte, Senator Claire McCaskill, Senator Dan Coats, and Senator Barbara Mikulski. They are all cosponsors of the amendment Senator Collins offered. These provisions would strengthen the ability of the Department of Homeland Security to shore up cyber defenses at civilian agencies and to address cyber emergencies across the Federal Government. Again, I am incredibly grateful that Senator Feinstein and Senator Burr agreed to include our language in the substitute amendment language that worked its way through our committee. We had hearings and had the opportunity to mark up the legislation. It worked the way it is supposed to work. And I think that without exception it had bipartisan support coming through our committee. It is the perfect complement to the information sharing bill we are discussing this week. I think it makes a good bill that much better. I thank the Senators for working with me and Senator Johnson on it. Just one more thing before I close. I know the Presiding Officer thinks a lot about root causes, and rather than just address the symptoms of a problem, let's think about what is the root cause of the problem. The Senator who is waiting to follow me on the floor, the former Governor of Maine, thinks similarly. I do too. It is not enough to just address the symptoms of these problems. A part of what we need to be thinking about is, How do we get to the root cause? Until fairly recently, a lot of our financial services institutions in this country were under constant attack by somebody who was trying to overload their Web sites and essentially trying to shut them down. It is sort of like when we were first standing up the Affordable Care Act, they had so much traffic on their Web site that it would kind of break down. There are so many cyber threats from around the world. We think Iran is behind it. They are trying to do that, to bring down our financial services business--and sometimes with some success. About a year ago, when we got very serious about negotiating with the Iranians and our partners--the French, the Brits, the Germans, the Russians, and the Chinese--some kind of an agreement where the Iranians would give up any hope they had of having a nuclear weapon and the terms for our lifting our economic sanctions--when it became clear that those were serious negotiations, that something might actually happen from those negotiations, guess what happened to those attacks. We call them DDoS. What do you suppose happened? Well, guess what, they started letting up little by little until the time we actually voted here to let that agreement be enacted and hopefully be administered and implemented. That was a root cause being addressed. Another root cause we had over in China--for years the Chinese have sought to use cyber attacks to get into our most successful businesses, some of our research and development operations in those businesses, and work being done within Federal agencies on research and development--actually, the intellectual seed corn for creating jobs and opportunity in this country. The cyber attacks were--we believe it was China trying to steal information from our universities. They were doing a lot of research that could lead to economic activity and job creation. We didn't like it. We don't do that. We don't do that to them, and we don't want them to do that to us. We complained about it and complained about it and called out some of the folks whom we thought were behind this in China. President Xi visited us in this city about 3 week ago. He and our President had some tough, direct, and probably not entirely comfortable conversations. One of them dealt with this issue, what we believe is the intrusion by Chinese actors in order to steal our intellectual seed corn, in order to maybe have a short step, a shortcut to economic development, economic activity. They would not have to spend the money, the time, and the energy to do all the research that would lead to this innovation and job-creation activity. The agreement that came out of that was the Chinese and our country have agreed that neither side will knowingly steal this kind of information from the other. ``Knowingly'' is a very broad term, and so we have to make sure that ``knowingly'' actually means something. Secretary Jeh Johnson, the head of the Homeland Security Department, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch have been assigned to build on this initial agreement and see what we can make of it. I will close with this. A lot of people in our country don't understand what all this cyber security stuff is--intrusion, EINSTEIN, and all the items we are talking about that are in the legislation which is before us this week. They do know this: It is not good when people can steal the kind of information that needs to be protected. Whether it is part of the government domain, military or intelligence secrets; whether it is economic secrets or developments that lead to economic gain; whether it is personally identifiable information that can be used for blackmail purposes or to monetize and to somehow make money off of that information, we know it is not good. There is no one silver bullet to actually stop this kind of activity, but there are a lot of silver BBs, and some of them are pretty big. The legislation that is before us today, bolstered by similar legislation that has come out of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, is a pretty good-sized BB. They are not going to enable us to win this war by themselves, but they will enable us to make real progress. It will make us feel a good bit more secure than we have, knowing that this is an enemy across the globe and that a number of enemies wish us harm. They are not going to give up. There is a lot of money involved. They will be back at us, and we have to bring our ``A'' game to work every day in the Department of Homeland Security and other Federal agencies working in tandem with the private sector. Hopefully, with this information, the folks in the private sector--if they want to get the liability protection and share information with the Federal Government, we want them to use the portal through the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security, to the extent that privacy scrub is needed--it does not happen often. It happens less than 1 percent of the time with the information that comes through the portal. The legislation before us, with the amendments that are offered, will enable us to have that kind of security about our private information and at the same time to do a very good job--a much better job--in protecting what is valuable to us. Mr. President, I think that is about it for me. I appreciate very much the opportunity to speak. I appreciate the patience of Senator King, and I will yield the floor to him. I will just say in closing--no, Senator Blunt, I will yield to you next. It is good to be with both of you. I look forward to working with you on these and, with respect to the Senator gentleman from Missouri, very closely on related matters. Thank you so very much.

Mr. CARPER. I appreciate the yielding by Senator Whitehouse. Let me just say that if your provision, Senator Whitehouse, does not end up in this bill and we actually do pass it, I am sure we will conference with the House. There will be an opportunity to revisit this issue. So I hope you will stay in touch with those of us who might be fortunate enough to be a conferee.