Daniel Coats

Mr. COATS

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Madam President, it is the beginning of the appropriations season here in Washington. I am glad we are doing that. We are a little bit ahead of schedule from past experiences, although we haven't been doing appropriations bills during my second term in the Senate. I am glad we are doing them because that is really what we are here for. For those listening, this is for when Congress determines how we spend taxpayer money. There are a number of people in the gallery today--they are all taxpayers--wondering: Where does this money that is sent to Washington go? When Hoosiers from Indiana send their hard-earned tax dollars to Washington to be spent by the Federal Government, they expect their elected leaders to be good stewards of their resources. After all, they worked hard to earn this money. Before they get their net paycheck, their taxes are deducted and sent to Washington. They have every right to expect us to be good stewards. It is no wonder taxpayers are furious with Washington when the Federal Government wastes the money they work so hard to make. When they hear about or read about some of the ludicrous ways we spend their money or the wasteful ways we spend their money, they have every reason to be concerned and to be angry. Clearly, there are essential functions the Federal Government has to undertake, but we can't continue to ignore the fact that our national debt has now passed $19 trillion. Borrowing money in order to pay for expenditures and then having obligations to pay that money back, along with interest rates, puts us in a very deep hole that we have talked about a lot, but we have not done what is necessary to address this continued plunge into debt. Seemingly every day, we see examples of mismanagement and wasteful spending in Washington, which is one of the reasons I give my weekly ``Waste of the Week'' addresses. I have come to the floor now more than 40 times in this Congress to talk about documented cases of waste, fraud, and abuse within the Federal Government. It is not something made up but documented abuses by, generally, the Government Accountability Office, whose job is to examine how we spend our money and to publicize how that money is spent. Now we have racked up nearly $160 billion of documented waste, fraud, and abuse. This has included the ridiculous, such as Federal grant spending on rabbit massages, as well as the serious, such as double- dipping in the Social Security Disability Insurance funds. While many Americans struggle every day to pay their mortgage or to put food on the table, it is infuriating that the Federal Government is wasting money renting empty warehouses or funding a study to determine if being ``hangry'' is a real thing. I talked about the word ``hangry'' in one of my speeches several weeks ago. ``Hangry'' is a modification of the words hungry and angry. A considerable amount of taxpayer money was spent on a study to determine if a person gets angrier with their spouse when he or she is hungry and so they coined the word ``hangry.'' It refers to someone who is hungry, and because they are hungry, they get a little anxious or a little difficult to live with. This study determined and came to the conclusion that, yes, if you are hungry, you tend to be a little bit angry and you tend to take it out on the person nearest to you, who is usually your spouse. I think any of us could have come up with that conclusion without spending $400,000 or so in order to determine that that is the case. The word ``hangry'' has now been added to Webster's dictionary. You can look it up. How can we spend $400,000 of the taxpayer's money to do this study when people are having trouble paying their bills, their mortgage, or saving money so they can send their kids to school? This is the kind of thing that infuriates the American people. This is the kind of thing that has put our approval ratings in single digits. This is the kind of thing that causes people to say that Washington needs to be shaken up. Why do we keep taking the American people's hard-earned tax dollars and spending them on things like this? Many Americans struggle every day to put food on the table and pay their mortgage. It is infuriating to them that the Federal Government is wasting money doing these kind of things. Eliminating this wasteful spending can go a long way to restoring trust in Washington, and it needs to start now. That is why, as I said, the studies by the government's only watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office, are so important to the work we do here. The GAO, or the Government Accountability Office, just released its ``2016 Annual Report'' on additional opportunities to reduce fragmentation, overlap, and duplication. The GAO report presents 92 new actions we can take--either the Congress or the administration--to improve government efficiency and effectiveness to achieve cost savings. This report and some of its findings include programs I already talked about, such as the failed advanced technology vehicles program I highlighted last week. Unfortunately, in an amendment I offered here on the floor, we came up short with a vote of 48 to 49, but we raised the awareness of a program that is sitting on nearly $4 billion of unspent money. Of the five proposals that were released-- money was released on these five proposals--two of the companies have already gone bankrupt. Instead of sitting on $4 billion worth of additional money that we had to award, we simply said: Look, we have wasted $500 million in this program. Why don't we take that $4 billion and use it for a better purpose, like returning it to the taxpayer. If not that, we could have returned that money to the taxpayer or used the money to offset something essential, such as work that prolongs life and brings better health at NIH or perhaps put the money towards something else that is needed, such as infrastructure, but, unfortunately, we came up one vote short of a majority. I am looking forward to exploring ways in which we can use examples in our continued efforts through ``Waste of the Week.'' We are looking at several things. We know the IRS is paying billions in fraudulent refunds to criminals who steal people's IDs over the Internet, or whatever method they use, and then file for IRS returns. We are looking at consolidating programs that are scattered across 22 different Federal agencies and have all kinds of duplications or selling unused Federal property, which could save billions of dollars a year. The list doesn't end. It just continues. I will be coming down here week after week. I will have another ``Waste of the Week'' later this week. Exposing the waste, fraud, and abuse is only the first step that the administration and Congress must take. According to this report, the actions Congress has already taken--and Congress ought to be commended for this--by using GAO's recommendations over the past 5 years has saved $56 billion. That is not small change. I have documented another $160 billion worth of savings in the last 40 speeches--not million, billion. There is still plenty left to do. In 2010, I asked Hoosiers to send me to Washington to rein in the Federal Government's runaway spending. Whether it is through my continued ``Waste of the Week'' speeches, legislation, or highlighting reports like the GAO report, as I am doing today, I will continue to pour every ounce of effort I have into doing as much as I can to reduce wasteful government spending. We will be back later this week with speech No. 41 of ``Waste of the Week.'' Hopefully, we can continue to alert this Congress and this government to the hard-earned money that is being wasted and could be used for much better purposes. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, this is No. 40 of ``Waste of the Week.'' For the 40 weeks the Senate has been in session this cycle, I have come down to the Floor to talk about a waste of taxpayers' dollars through waste, fraud, and abuse. This week I am going to talk about yet another Federal program which has, at best, a questionable track record. I filed an amendment to the Energy and Water appropriations bill currently in the Senate, which is related to this program, and hopefully we will be voting on the amendment I will be offering in a few moments to address this issue. This amendment, which I offered with Senators Fischer, Toomey, and Flake, would finally wind down the Department of Energy's failed Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. Remember the stimulus? Remember how we were throwing all kinds of taxpayers' money out there? We talked about advanced vehicle programs, and many of these distributions of funds have been misused or simply have not come to fruition, and a great deal of money has been wasted. The ATVM Loan Program continues to sit on billions of dollars of unused funds that could be put to better use. I am glad there are some unused funds there because it means that when we look at the history of this program, perhaps we will have an opportunity to better use those unused funds or to help return it back to the Treasury so the taxpayer isn't on the hook for this kind of thing going forward. Let me explain this program. The Department of Energy's Advanced Vehicle Technology Manufacturing Loan Program was created in 2007. It was created to provide very low-interest loans to manufacturers that make vehicles or components of vehicles that use alternative energy. I am not here to downplay the use of alternative energy. I think that is something that is happening throughout our country. Hopefully, it is on a market basis. To qualify for this loan, there were a couple of requirements applicants must meet: No. 1, the vehicle or component must be new or significantly improved from what is currently available in the U.S. marketplace; No. 2, it has to be manufactured in the United States. The purpose of the program, partly, was to encourage manufacturing here--not in China, not somewhere else. Last month, nearly 10 years since the program's inception, the Government Accountability Office took a look at the program's finances and found that the Department of Energy has billions of unused and unspent funds. I am glad they do because a lot of things that have taken place under this program have not proven to be worth their weight. I have spoken before on a number of programs, but in 2011, under this fund--the Alternative Vehicle Fund--the Obama administration approved a $730 million loan to a company called Severstal Steel Company, a Russian-owned company with operations in Michigan. Remember, to qualify for this loan, the alternative fuel vehicle or vehicle part needs to be manufactured in the United States and--here is the key--it must be a new product. Technically, Severstal was manufacturing in the United States, but the Obama administration certainly walked the line in this case. The U.S. Government was providing American taxpayer dollars to a Russian company owned by one of Russia's richest oligarchs, Alexei Mordashov. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Mordashov has ties to the Kremlin and to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Apparently, this Russian looked at this program and said: Hey, here is a way I can get a low-cost, low-interest loan. All I have to do is operate this plant and the government will loan me $750 million and I will produce a new part, a new component of steel that is used in automobile manufacturing. After working with the Department of Energy's inspector general, Senator Toomey and I learned that the type of steel made by this Russian company was identical to the steel already being produced in my home State of Indiana and Senator Toomey's home State of Pennsylvania. Obviously, that violated one of the basic criteria in that the product has to be an alternative that is brand new or significantly improved and not something that is already being produced in Indiana. Fortunately, with the help of the inspector general, we were able to ensure the Obama administration voided the loan. To their credit, when we brought it to their attention, they said: OK. We have a Russian oligarch we are giving money to--and that doesn't sound very good. We are giving money to this multibillionaire in Russia with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Secondly, we now have learned what they are producing is already produced in the United States--in my State of Indiana and in Senator Toomey's State of Pennsylvania. Thus, fortunately, the administration canceled this loan. This example calls into question the integrity of this program. The ATVM Program also has a lackluster success rate. For example, Fisker Automotive received a $529 million loan to produce a $100,000 plug-in hybrid sports car. You will not see any of these on the road because the company went bankrupt after drawing down $193 million of taxpayer funds. Another loan recipient, VPG, planned to sell natural gas-powered vans. It went bankrupt after receiving a $50 million government loan. Of the five projects funded by this program to date, two of them have gone bankrupt. I think these examples demonstrate what happens when the government tries to pick winners and losers instead of letting the free market determine how we are going to go forward. The Coats-Fischer-Flake-Toomey amendment that will be offered would wind down this program and it would make much better use of the unspent funds from this program. I want to be clear. This amendment prohibits DOE from reviewing any new loan applications after the bill's enactment. There are currently some pending applications. We do not address those pending applications. I hope serious evaluation will be made relative to whether they qualify under the criteria that is laid out and we will not end up with any more Severstals. Those who argue that this shuts down an alternative energy program is not valid. Anything that is now being currently evaluated up through the end of 2020, the next 5 years--will be allowed to go forward and be evaluated under the program. The amendment doesn't take that away. CBO scored this amendment as saving at least $300 million over the next 10 years. I have been down here every week talking about a waste of the week. I have just identified another waste of taxpayer dollars. We are not counting that, but we are counting what we can save if this amendment is adopted. It is $300 million. I think that is a significant amount it raises our waste, fraud, and abuse level to $162 billion and change. I encourage my colleagues to work with us so we can offer this amendment. Remember, it does not affect anybody who has a proposal before the Department of Energy under this loan program. If that is underway, it can be evaluated--hopefully successfully evaluated, and if it doesn't qualify the criteria, won't be accepted. The amendment does not free funds for anything that is not currently before the evaluators of this program. I trust we can gain the support of my colleagues in saving the taxpayers some dollars. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS. Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 3814.

Mr. COATS. Madam President, 205 loans issued by the Department of Energy under the alternative vehicle program have failed, costing taxpayers $500 million in losses. DOE currently sits on $4 billion of unused money. It is time to wind down this program. This will not affect any proposals that are currently with the Department of Energy on this program, but it will prevent any new programs going forward. We can save the taxpayers a lot of money and use this for other alternatives if we adopt this amendment. I yield the remainder of my time to the Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, this is now my 39th edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' For 39 weeks I have been back on the floor when the Senate has been in session to talk about unnecessary, fraudulent, wasted, abusive spending of taxpayer dollars. We have run up quite a toll--more than I thought we would--but the more I dig into this and the more information we get from the agencies that are looking at how we spend taxpayers' dollars, the more alarmed I have been and the public should be and our colleagues should be over how these hard-earned tax dollars are spent in a wasted and abusive way or a fraudulent way. So I am going to keep doing this to alert my colleagues and alert the American people--in particular, people in my State--that there are ways we can better and more efficiently use their tax dollars or not require them in the first place. This week I am focusing on documented abuse of the Department of Agriculture's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Most Hoosiers and other Americans know this as the Food Stamp Program. The Food Stamp Program has had some ups and downs in terms of our support, and there has been a lot of bad publicity about the abuse of this program. I get many letters and contacts in my office describing standing in the grocery line and seeing someone use food stamps not for milk for their children or cereal or nutritious food but for junk food or tobacco or alcohol. The program is not supposed to be used for that kind of thing, but somehow we keep reading about potential misuse of what this program is intended to do. Now, the SNAP program, as it is now called--Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, S-N-A-P, the SNAP program--exists to provide low- income individuals with their nutrition needs and food items. It is funded by the Federal Government, and it is administered by the States. Let me begin by saying I am not here to do a critique of the program. That is a topic for a different discussion. I am here to talk about whether this program is being effectively run by the States and effectively funded by the Federal Government. What we have learned is that--no surprise--as with so many other Federal programs, there has been gaming and fraudulent use of the program. There clearly are people who don't qualify and are not eligible for receiving these food stamp vouchers but are nevertheless receiving them through this program. The government has become modern with the digital age, and instead of food stamps they issue an electronic benefits transfer card. It is like a debit card that people carry in their wallet. Money is added to that card electronically and it can be used at grocery stores. People swipe it. Hopefully, it works better than Secretary Clinton's card worked at the subways of New York. Anyway, you can swipe this card, and it will deduct the amount you have, in terms of the cost of the food provided, and it is refreshed on a monthly basis. In looking at the program, the General Accountability Office got some tips about the fact that a lot of replacement cards were being sent out. We all leave our license on the counter in the kitchen or our credit card and we wonder, ``Where is that credit card,'' and then we need a replacement. This happens. We understand that. So there is a replacement card program available through SNAP. You say you lost your card and they send you a new one. The problem is that GAO--the Government Accountability Office--learned from the program that a tremendous amount of replacement cards were going out to people-- sometimes over four. Then, they say: Wait a minute. Maybe we ought to look at this because this person has been asking for replacement cards on a regular basis. Are they really losing those cards or are they using them for other purposes? So they set up a trial program. They looked at three States-- Massachusetts, Michigan, and Nebraska--and found that more than 7,500 households receiving these SNAP benefits had suspicious transactions and were using four or more EBT cards in a year during key times, such as when cards were credited with benefits, and all of a sudden the request came in, saying: I lost my card--and by the way this is the fifth time or sixth time or whatever. In totaling all of this, the General Accountability Office said this accounted for more than $26 million of suspicious transactions. Now, that was just from the three States. These are sizable States-- Massachusetts, Michigan, and Nebraska--but they pale in comparison to say Florida, Texas, California, and New York. So if it was $26 million of suspicious transactions for just these three States that were looked into, imagine what it would be if they checked all 50 States. So we did some calculations using the same proportion of SNAP households as those identified by GAO as affecting the whole country, and we came up with roughly $3.2 billion of waste over a 10-year period of time. That is not small change. A lot of people work awfully hard to accumulate the kind of money needed to total $3.2 billion and then only to see it wasted. People said: Maybe these suspicious transactions were legitimate. So we did a quick search on Craig's List. Craig's List is this list you go into--I know all of the young pages understand this. We old people aren't necessarily up to speed on all of these new electronic transactions and processes and so forth. I got into it with the help of my young staff. We got into Craig's List and we found that what was being advertised--see, on Craig's List you put up something that others will want to buy, and it can be anything from a washing machine to a lawn mower, to a picture frame or whatever. We found some people advertising these SNAP cards, these EBT cards. For instance, a mechanic named Marco could--this was not Marco Rubio, by the way--a mechanic named Marco will accept EBT cards as payment for auto care, he said. In other words, if you have a problem with your car, come over to my shop. I will fix it for you, and instead of cash, you can give me EBT cards. So probably that is pretty tempting. How much to fix my automobile? Thirty-five bucks. I have an EBT card. It has $33.47 left on it. How about I pay you with that? He says: OK. I can take that in payment. Then they apply for a replacement card. That is probably one of the ways it adds up. Another person advertised two Beyonce tickets. I haven't been to a Beyonce concert, but I actually know who she is. I actually realize, even at my age, that she is a star and everybody wants these tickets. So they advertised two tickets for $1,200 and said: We can accept EBT cards for payment. Somebody has to accumulate a lot of these cards to come up with a payment for two tickets to a Beyonce concert. Another post on Craig's List reads: ``I have around $1,300 in food stamps and have no need for it at all.'' I will sell this card with $1,300 in credits if you will send me $300. I guess that raises questions about how these cards are being used, and these are just a few examples. This kind of fraud obviously needs to be addressed. As all of the other 38 weeks of ``Waste of the Week'' I have put up here continues to accumulate, these cards obviously are not being used--all of them--for those who need it and for its intended purpose. It is clear that we ought to be adopting GAO's methodology of tracking both the number of recipients that receive more and more EBT cards at specific times of the year and those with suspicious transactions, and I think a lot of this abuse could be eliminated. So what we are doing today is we are adding another $3.2 billion of waste, and we continue to raise the amounts. It is now $162 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse. This is going to continue as we alert the American people, inform my colleagues in the Senate and the Congress, and inform the administration that there are ways to better use, and hopefully not even have to request in the first place, the kind of tax dollars we are paying for a clearly dysfunctional Federal Government program. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, today marks my 38th edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' With our Nation $19 trillion in debt, I am going to continue coming to the Senate floor every week the Senate is in session to highlight verified and documented examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. I turn to reports from nonpartisan organizations such as the Government Accountability Office which indicate that, thankfully, somebody is looking into how we run this government, coming up with examples of how we can run it better. They let the American people know that we are not wisely and carefully spending their taxpayer dollars, and, hopefully, we can take remedial action. Last year, I detailed an investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the GAO, which discovered that fraudulent applications are being accepted by healthcare.gov. That is the government's health care Web site for choosing ObamaCare plans on the Federal exchange. Just last month, I discussed a new report from the GAO that outlined how healthcare.gov allowed people to sign up for and receive ObamaCare benefits without proper verification. They did a test. They made up some names, they filled out the application, they sent it in to healthcare.gov, and 11 out of the 12 test applications came back approved, with no verification whatsoever. Subsidies started going out to these people. Even after they were notified at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it took months to correct. Some people collected these subsidies; these fraudulent subsidies went somewhere. These were just made-up names. When we look at 11 out of 12, we have to say something is wrong with the system. And if we extrapolated that out, there could be a stunning number of fraudulent applications certified and subsidies sent to people that don't exist. Today I want to discuss even more ObamaCare problems. This one totals up to $1.16 billion worth of problems. We all know that the Affordable Care Act--which I call the Unaffordable Care Act, based on its operations so far--directed States to either develop their own State-based exchange to operate ObamaCare or to use the Federal exchange accessible at healthcare.gov. States had a choice about the action to take. But in order to try to get States to set up their own exchanges, the Obama Administration awarded billions of dollars in Federal grants to States if they agreed to plan and develop a State exchange. In 6 of the 14 States that chose to develop their own exchanges and receive these Federal grants--Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Mexico, and Nevada--the end results were disastrous. In fact, the GAO found that these State exchanges were given the green light without the systems ever being fully tested. For example, Maryland's exchange Web site had more than 600 unresolved defects, and Massachusetts had over 1100 unresolved defects. And yet the exchanges were given the go-ahead by the Obama Administration even though these unresolved defects were not realized and not addressed. In Oregon, a State exchange was set up by political operatives. Months after the enrollment period began, the online Oregon exchange couldn't enroll a single person, and applicants had to fax in their handwritten materials. Talk about a dysfunctional rollout. On this Senate floor we have talked about how, in the rush to prove that ObamaCare was what this country needed and that the government could efficiently and effectively run a health care system and in a rush to prove and get the thing up and going according to what the promises were, all kinds of mistakes were made. Oregon's abysmal failure cost taxpayers $305 million plus an additional $41 million that had to be spent to bring Oregon onto the Federal exchange. In other words, they failed to set up their State exchange and cost taxpayers $305 million. Then they had to spend another $41 million to transfer the system over to the Federal exchange. All totaled, the Federal government gave these six States $1.16 billion, and today none of these six States are independently operating their own individual exchanges. This was a long time in the making. The nonpartisan GAO and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services raised concerns about these State exchanges more than a year before they were scheduled to launch. In other words, the warning went out, saying: You are not getting your act together. This was a year before the process started. We went through that whole year and they still didn't have their act together, and it ended up costing taxpayers $1.16 billion. It is no secret that the Obama Administration was in a rush to get this system up and going, and in the process, who knows how much money has been wasted? Who knows the trauma that people have gone through trying to sign up for these exchanges? I think we all remember the classic debacle that occurred in the whole software system and in the whole exchange system. People were calling in, they couldn't get anybody to answer the phone, and they couldn't get their applications fulfilled. All those promises, you know: Your premiums will not go up a penny. Count on that, the President said, period. Done deal. Take it to the bank. If you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Take it to the bank. I guarantee you that is what is going to happen. Costs will not go up. We have all seen deductibles shoot up. We have all seen premiums increase. People weren't able to keep the doctor they wanted. On and on it goes, and on and on it continues, and it is at the expense of the American taxpayer. Well, maybe it is not surprising. I am here every week, and I probably could come up here every day and maybe every hour and detail some waste of the taxpayers' hard-earned dollars. So today we are going to add more money to our growing list of waste, fraud, and abuse, taking us to $158,777,908,417. It just keeps adding up, and our colleagues have not taken the necessary action to try to tie the deal to these problems. Maybe government has become so overwhelmingly bureaucratic and dysfunctional that we are not able to run this country anymore in an efficient and effective manner. The problem is that we are asking people to go to work every day to put in a hard-earned number of hours earning pay and sending money to Washington, DC, only to find that it is wasted over and over and over. It is a relentless plunge into ever more debt because we don't have the money to pay for what we spend. Then we have to issue bonds in order to collect money, in order to pay for that. All of this falls to the taxpayer, and most of it is going to fall to future generations. They are going to have a limit on their ability to have the opportunity to make a viable living for themselves and for their children, and we wonder why the American people have lost faith in Washington's ability to carefully spend their hard-earned dollars. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I am once again on the floor for my 37th edition of ``Waste of the Week'' speech, where I disclose wasteful spending, fraud, and abuse of taxpayers' dollars. It seems it is never ending because after 37 weeks I feel as if I am just scratching the surface. Last week, as some will remember, I talked about how the National Science Foundation spent $331,000 of hard-earned tax dollars by giving a grant to researchers to study whether or not being ``hangry'' is a real thing. Most people have not heard about the word ``hangry.'' Last week I suppose people ran to the dictionary to see what the description was. ``Hangry''--I think among the younger people--means that you are both hungry and angry, and you are angrier than you normally would be in a situation because you are hungry. I wasn't hungry last week when I was talking about ``hangry,'' but I was angry. I was angry over the fact that $331,000 of taxpayers' money was being used to offer a grant from the National Science Foundation to study whether this exists. They came up with this crazy situation of giving voodoo dolls to husbands and wives. Every time a husband was angry with his wife, he would take a pin and stick it into the voodoo doll or if she was angry with him, she would take a pin and stick it into the voodoo doll. I don't know who ended up with the most pins. Probably the wife had more pins in the voodoo doll than the husband did. Nonetheless, then a glucose test was taken to see if they were actually a little short on glucose in the bloodstream, meaning they were hungry. Well, the conclusion was that, yes, if you were hungry, you tended to be a little more on edge, a little more testy. That might have been a fun study to be engaged in just for laughs, but this was paid for with taxpayer dollars. This was a grant issued by the National Science Foundation. We tell people about the National Science Foundation, and they must think, oh, that is probably one of the better government agencies. So that was last week, and I wasn't sure that anything could top last week. Because I was quoted as saying--who could make up stuff like this? Do people sit around and say: Let's see if we can get a grant to do some kind of research project that is nothing but crazy? The amazing thing is someone over at the National Science Foundation looked at this study and thought: Hey, this is a good idea. Let's give them a $331,000 grant. And so we added it to the chart. Now we are here this week, and I want to talk about something that is maybe even scarier than sticking pins in voodoo dolls, and it is called the Master Death File. This is not the name of a new novel on the New York Time's best seller list. This is not the name of a new movie coming out. The Master Death File is something, folks, you don't want to be on. The Federal Government, by law--the Social Security Administration-- has to maintain the Master Death File. Obviously, those of us on Social Security or who are of Social Security age don't want to see our name on that list. If your name is on that list, you are no longer eligible for Social Security payments because it is a death list; you have died. So as sinister as it sounds, it is probably necessary that we do this--that we have at least some list that lets the Social Security Administration know that it is time to stop sending Social Security checks to dead people. The beneficiary or the recipient has died, and, therefore, procedures are made so that the next check doesn't keep rolling out and rolling out and rolling out. A lot of us here in the Senate get on different kinds of lists--voter records, awards for standing up for certain issues and policies that people respect--and I have found myself on a number of those. One list I don't want to be on, but know that as a human being I am sort of careening toward, is the Master Death File. So we thought, well, let's dig into this and see how it works. So we went to the Government Accountability Office and said: What about this Master Death File? So we did some investigation on that. Out of that investigation came an example of one agency the General Accountability Office had examined, and it is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture sends out checks--payments for conservation, disaster relief and crop subsidies. Well, we found that between 2008 and 2012, $27.6 million in payments for conservation, disaster relief, and crop subsidies were made to people who had died. What is more disturbing is that many of those recipients had been dead for more than 2 years. This is just one department out of all the hundreds of Federal agencies that issue checks for all kinds of different purposes. So it is important to have a Master Death File because what we want these agencies to do--in fact, they are obligated to do under the law--is to check the master death list to make sure the checks aren't going to people who are on that list. Obviously, with this one agency--the Department of Agriculture--one of two things happened: Either names did not get on that list, or names were on the list, but they didn't check it. Either way, there is a responsibility here for the Federal Government in handling taxpayer dollars to make sure that for those who are deceased, their names get on the Master Death File--as scary as that is--and/or, if they are on the list, they do not receive the payments. In this digital age, it shouldn't be too hard to keep that Master Death File updated. Every State has records that have to be kept--sent by the coroner or authorized by the hospital or whatever. There are a number of sources of finding out. Particularly in the digital age, it is pretty easy to enter a name when you get the certificate of death. You enter the name, it goes onto the master death list, and it ought to be relatively easy for agencies sending out checks to coordinate with that by either pushing a button or going into an app or whatever and finding out that John Jones or Bill Smith still qualifies for his Social Security payments. That check ought to be pretty automatic. Unfortunately, it isn't, particularly when you find people have been receiving these checks even 2 years after they have died. So something is amiss here. It is not like in the old days, where you probably had to call Farmer Bob out in rural America and say: Do you know if Farmer Joe down the road is still living? Have you seen him in town lately? What is happening? Did you go to the funeral? We don't have to do all that anymore. This stuff is all digitized and all very accessible. So here we are with the Social Security Administration needing to do what it needs to do to make sure that list is kept up-to-date. And, as I say, none of us are anxious to get on that list. I see all the young pages down here thinking: I have a long time to go. They are looking at this aging Senator thinking: You are a lot closer to that list than we are. I hope they are not thinking that. Some of them are smiling. Nonetheless, the agencies that are issuing the checks also have to do their job because, in a serious way, this is taking money from hard- working taxpayers. It is hard-earned money taken from those who have to pay the bills at the end of the week, who have to cover their mortgage and provide for the education of their children and who have to buy food at the grocery store and gas at the gas pump. People are scraping by, and when they see this kind of thing or hear about this kind of thing, they are outraged. We are seeing this being played out in the nomination process on both sides--the Republicans and the Democrats. People are frustrated with the inefficiency and the ineffectiveness of the Federal Government in the use of their tax dollars. So I am here to illustrate that--not to spur continued anger and outrage but to get people seriously focused on the fact their dollars are not being wisely spent. They need to call their Congressmen and Senators, and they need to say: You need to do a better job of managing our money we are sending you to protect this Nation, to provide for roads, bridges, health care, and so forth. There are some essential things government needs to do, but surely it doesn't need to put out $331,000 for a ``hanger'' study with voodoo dolls, and it doesn't need to waste $27.6 million of checks going to people who are deceased and who are no longer eligible for receiving that. So we continue to add money to our total--another $27.6 million to our $157,619,142,953. These numbers get up there. So we are at $157,619,142,953, and we will be back next week with the next edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, today marks the 36th edition of my ``Waste of the Week.'' For those who have been listening I have been down here every week, while the Senate is in session, addressing what has been documented as waste, fraud, and abuse. I took on a major role when first coming back to the Senate starting in 2011 to deal with the larger issue of our plunge into debt through deficit spending year after year after year. Despite numerous attempts, many of them bipartisan, all blocked by decisions made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we have not been able to put in place a reasonable plan--or any plan whatsoever--that would reduce our spending, balance the budget and begin to chip away at this ever-deepening cesspool of debt. It is hurting our economy, and laying a burden on future generations that will have enormous negative consequences. Given the fact that those larger efforts came to naught, I have decided to start chipping away from the other end of the fiscal spectrum to identify waste, fraud, and abuse, a much more efficient, effective Federal Government and not waste taxpayer dollars that these days are hard-earned and pretty scarce. This ``Waste of the Week'' deals with not as substantive an issue as many of these. The speeches talk about a whole range of issues that are taking a lot of taxpayer dollars out of the purses and wallets of our constituents, sent to Washington and simply wasted. Every once in a while I try to present something that is so ridiculous, so unnecessary, that it catches the public's attention and ought to embarrass every Member of this body. Some arguments can be made about, well, perhaps the Social Security Disability Trust Fund could be adjusted so we wouldn't do this or that. But every fourth or fifth time down here I like to throw out something where people say: Are you kidding me? We are actually using our hard-earned tax dollars to do this? One that caught the most attention was the grant that amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars to determine whether a massage made you feel better after an expenditure of physical effort. If they were asked that question, there is probably no one in America who would not conclude that. They would say, yes, that works. I'd prefer a massage over no massage at all. But this grant was used to determine that. Rather than take a human subject, they used mechanical massages on the backs of white rabbits. Actually, these rabbits were from New Zealand. Then they looked at the grin on the rabbit's face--I don't know how they determined it. Rabbits can't turn around and say: Yes, that feels good. Apparently they made some kind of measurement, and after spending about $400,000, came to the conclusion that, yes, it really works. Well, that caught people's attention. There are a lot of people who are outraged at the way we are spending their money. There are people trying to make their mortgage payment, trying to get to the end of the week for the next check, to buy groceries, or to set aside money for their kids to go to school. This is one of those weeks where I want to bring forward yet another issue of ``Can you believe this is how the Federal Government is spending your money?'' I am told by my staff that there is a new word around called ``hangry.'' It means that if you are hungry, you tend to get a little bit disjointed, and you are more angry than you would be if you were not hungry. I suppose that is something we could easily prove by all of us just asking: What is our disposition when we are hungry? Are we a little more tense or a little more quick to trigger in terms of getting upset about what someone may say to us or something like that--a little more irritable. So this new generation has taken this condition called hangry, which is hungry and angry, and turned it into the term ``hangry.'' The National Science Foundation said: Well, we better find out whether this is true. So they issued a $331,000 grant for researchers to study whether ``hanger'' actually occurs. If you get hungry, do you end up feeling ``hangry''? That was the question. So researchers issued a $331,000 grant for the study on married couples. Listen, you can't make this stuff up. They came up with the idea of giving each spouse a voodoo doll, and if they felt they were angry, they were to take a pin and stick it into the voodoo doll. They each had their own voodoo doll. Like I said, you can't make this stuff up. It only cost $331,000. So whenever a spouse made the other spouse angry, the other spouse grabbed the voodoo doll and grabbed a pin and stuck it in. The conclusion was after a 3-year study and $331,000 spent--yup, we proved it. ``Hanger'' occurs when you are hungry. There are some Senate pages who are trying to hold back their laughter. I see a lot of smiles on the faces of people in this Chamber saying: Surely, this can't be true. Surely, this is made up. Surely, this is a spoof to try to prove a point. This actually happened, folks. This actually happened. The serious part of this is that the taxpayer paid for it. At a time when we are trying to repair roads and bridges, when we are trying to put money forward for health care research, when we are dealing with terrorist issues to make sure our national security is strong, when our military is underfunded, when we are trying to deal with all the issues of the day, we are taking this money--and of all things the National Science Foundation could do, they do this. We take the $331,000 and add it to our ever-growing accumulation of documented waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars. We have now risen to a position of $157,591 million and change. It is not small stuff. It adds up. This is what your Federal Government is doing, and we wonder why the American people are frustrated. We wonder why they are angry when they hear issues like this. I am not trying to stoke the flames and make the American people more ``hangry.'' I am simply trying to expose this so we will be so embarrassed with these kinds of things that people will come down to this Chamber and offer legislation to clean up this stuff. We have already made some progress but we can make more. Migration Crisis in Europe Mr. President, I would like to reserve some time to talk about something that I think is very serious, to discuss an issue that I think has an impact on all of us, particularly our national security. Last week NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, whom I have had the opportunity to talk to a number of times, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee about how he views the threats facing us today and what the most serious threats are to the United States. Featured among them was a serious migration crisis that is destabilizing our European allies. He said: Europe faces the daunting challenge of mass migration spurred by state instability and state collapse. The influx of people is masking the movements of criminals, terrorists, and foreign fighters. Within this mix, ISIS [or ISIL] . . . is spreading like a cancer, taking advantage of paths of least resistance, threatening European nations and our own [nation] with terrorist attacks. Each day as we watch on television or read in the papers, this migration crisis continues to grow worse. Efforts by the European Union to stem the tide have failed to even slow down the flow of refugees and migrants. These repeated failures, now moving into its second year, are threatening to break the European Union apart as each member country resorts to a ``fortress Europe'' mentality, enforced by national means. These include new razor wire barriers along internal EU borders. They encourage divergent national policies on refugee admissions that make almost a mockery of EU policy consensus or even common efforts. The EU agreement on common borders--described as the Schengen Agreement of 1985--has been considered the bedrock of European unity. If this fundamental agreement is crushed by the unsupportable weight of hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants, how can the European Union itself be saved? That is the question. Many of our European friends are asking that question. I was recently in Munich at a security conference, and representatives from all the European nations were there. The No. 1 topic was the flow of migration and the destabilization of Europe and the unity of Europe, nations not abiding by their earlier commitments to receive migrants, nations raising barriers and building walls--whether they are razor wire or concrete walls--around their borders. It is creating a major crisis in Europe. The political stability and social cohesion of individual European states are clearly under strain. We have seen street riots and police suppression. Growing hostility between citizens and migrant groups is spreading like wildfire. Extremist political groups are feeding on this chaos and further threatening democratic institutions. Even in Germany, an extremist rightwing, basically fascist party has grown its population from zero 4 years ago to 15 percent to 20 percent today, taking over in many places as the third largest party in Germany. We all know that after key state elections this weekend, this may be growing. The latest EU effort to come to grips with this enormous problem is continuing at a summit meeting this week in Brussels, with attendance by Turkey. The draft agreement on the table shows how desperate the Europeans have become. Without discussing the detailed items here, it is sufficient to note that the central proposition under consideration is this: a convoluted system to send some migrant refugees from Greece back to Turkey in exchange for other migrants to be resettled directly from Turkey to European countries. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other refugee organizations have denounced this proposal as unworkable and illegal. Some EU countries, such as Hungary, have even promised to veto this scheme. Without entirely prejudging a proposal still under consideration, I nevertheless have to guess that even if it is accepted and enacted, it is unlikely to address meaningfully the real dimensions of this migration problem. Something else clearly has to be done. The numbers that are coming in show an ever-expanding number of migrants seeking relief by taking treacherous routes--many of them guided by criminal elements--into Europe and the European resistance and the instability all of that has provided. The draft EU-Turkey agreement does include a commitment to pursue another idea, and that is what I want to talk about on the floor this afternoon. I have long advocated this as hopefully a more workable condition; that is, to create conditions in and near Syria that will permit people to remain there in humane conditions of relative safety near their home country, within their own culture. To my knowledge, European leaders as a group have not before committed to pursue this solution, but I have raised it with European leaders personally. The response has often considered the caution that Europe would not be willing to commit the resources necessary for such a solution. I agree that the resources required would be considerable and that the political courage required would be even greater, but, I have argued, what is the alternative? Until political leaders in Europe, and here as well, see that creating safe areas in and near Syria is the only possible solution to this migration crisis, the political courage and vision to take it up will be absent. But now, at least, the Europeans, having failed at a number of other efforts to address this destabilizing problem, are talking about it. It has always been clear to me that such a solution is far beyond the capacity of Europe alone. It will require the United States and other cooperating powers to work with our European partners to create areas in and near Syria where Syrians can find safety and humanitarian relief. As difficult as this task sounds--and surely it is--it has been done before. There is a precedent here. The manner in which the international community eventually came to deal successfully with the Bosnian war in the 1990s gives us a useful template for how we can approach the safe-area task in Syria. That template, derived from our Bosnia experience, includes two essential components: the U.N. Security Council and NATO, North Atlantic Treaty Organization. First, we are going to have to have a clear mandate from the U.N. Security Council creating U.N.-designated safe areas. Secondly, the U.N. Security Council would have to create a new U.N. protective force. ``UNPROFOR'' is the term that was used in the Balkans. In the Balkan example, that force was comprised of 40,000 troops from 42 contributing countries. In Syria, I would suggest that such a course would include most NATO countries and especially neighboring Islamic countries. Russia should also be pressed to participate. NATO could take on primary planning and organization tasks. When I discussed this proposal with Europeans, the first response has been that no one is willing to put troops in the field to fight this war. It is important to emphasize that this UNPROFOR would not be in Syria to fight the war; rather, it would exist to protect the designated safe areas. The force would have policing functions intended to protect and secure the borders and keep radical elements out or under control. That was the model that was put in place in the Balkans. It succeeded. There were some glitches, there were some problems, but it succeeded. Third, it is obvious that safe areas in Syria would require rigidly enforced no-fly zones authorized by the UNSC. Mr. President, I have presided a number of times, and when the clerk turns and discusses the timeframe--may I ask whether I am under a time limitation? If so, I ask unanimous consent to extend that for just a few moments.

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, as I said, it is obvious that safe areas in Syria would require rigidly enforced no-fly zones authorized by the U.N. Security Council. I suggested that with its planning and leadership capabilities and massive resources, NATO should take on that job, as it did in the Balkans. In this role, too, NATO must work creatively to bring in the regional powers in a broad, coordinated effort under NATO leadership. Fourth, as in Bosnia, the U.N. must mobilize a massive relief effort within Syria led by the UNHCR and similar humanitarian organizations. The international community must be willing to pay for this important humanitarian effort. We should call for major contributions from the regional states, European countries, and other traditional donor countries long committed to the humanitarian crisis. Dealing with so many refugees in safe, humane conditions will be expensive, yes, but it cannot be more expensive than the costs already being borne by those destination countries burdened with uncontrolled migration. In the current discussions of Turkey, the EU has offered 6 billion euros to help them deal with refugees, and Turkey has reportedly demanded as much as 20 billion euros. With such sums being discussed-- and they almost certainly are underestimates--the costs for caring for these desperate people humanely, in conditions of safety, and in or near their homeland, are easily justified. Far greater costs will be incurred if this problem is not dealt with effectively. For example, a collapse of the Schengen system and reimposition of border controls in Europe--a process now underway-- could cost as much as 1.4 trillion euros over the next 10 years, according to a recent European Commission report. This is the cost in reduced economic outlook for the region, not including the costs for infrastructure and personnel if the Schengen system is abandoned. In returning to where I began, the extra security gained by such a solution is beyond price. I strongly believe the time has now come for us to press vigorously for the safe-area solution to the migrant crisis. The problem is growing far worse with each passing month. Efforts to identify other solutions have failed, and the safe-area proposal may be the only one left standing. Those who are discouraged by the admitted obstacles and great difficulties in pursuing this solution must simply be persuaded to take it up with creativity, determination, courage, and leadership. I have discussed this proposal directly with Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Kerry, Supreme Allied Commander and NATO Commander General Breedlove, and senior European leaders. The Vice President, based on his own experience with the Balkan wars, agrees that the Bosnia precedent could be a useful guide. The general agrees that there are sufficient resources if there is sufficient political will. The European leaders I have spoken with agree that no other alternative is visible at this time. That they included this idea in the negotiations with Turkey is a positive sign. I intend to keep these discussions going in coming days. In conclusion, I am under no illusions about how difficult this task would be for either us or our allies. It is an enormous undertaking, and even when it does not address the underlying conflict in Syria, which has so far defied all of our best efforts, it is something we must pursue. However, the continuing flow of millions of refugees and migrants is completely unsustainable, posing serious threats to our European friends and ultimately to all of us. I will continue to press for this and talk to European leaders and others in our country to see this as a necessary, viable, and doable solution to a crisis situation that is having enormous impacts on the stability of Europe and even on the United States in terms of this humanitarian crisis. With that, I thank my colleague for his patience and allowing me to conclude. I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Minnesota. I am here to talk about opioid abuse as well, although I am trying to combine two speeches. Since we are now talking about the opioids abuse and drug addiction, I am more than happy to listen to the Senator from Minnesota finish her speech. I thank her for the time, but I want to make sure I am not also unduly holding my colleague back as I flip through my weekly ``Waste of the Week'' because I can delay that, if necessary. Mr. President, I am joining my colleagues here. I believe all of us are deeply concerned about the drug addiction epidemic that is sweeping through our Nation. It is an epidemic for people of all ages, but it is most tragically an epidemic for our young people who feel a sense of immortality when they are young and often fall prey to the ``just try it, it is harmless, don't worry about the addiction.'' Obviously, that is not the case. We are talking about highly addictive drugs and heroin that is coming into our country, and we are talking about serious consequences of this. In our States, as in every other State, it is a major crisis, and we are trying to do everything we can to address that. In one county alone, we have had an unprecedented rural HIV outbreak as a result of the sharing of needles to inject opioids. These needles that are providing the kind of drug addiction we read about every day. It is clear the legislation before us is a comprehensive approach, and that is needed. As I have said, I think we have to have an all- hands-on-deck effort here, whether it is prevention, whether it is law enforcement to keep the drugs from coming in or whether it is treatment. It is all three, and it requires not only those three components but communities and community organizations, whether Federal, State, local, or volunteer organizations, such as the various charities that are operating and their volunteers who are stepping up. All of us need to get involved in all aspects of dealing with this. I am pleased to cosponsor the bill Senators Portman and Whitehouse have worked on, CARA, which has been talked about on the Senate floor. I am proud to be a cosponsor of this bipartisan legislation. The legislation includes a provision Senator Blumenthal and I, on a bipartisan basis, have offered, which authorizes individuals who are authorized by the State to write prescriptions for controlled substances, such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, to access State prescription drug monitoring programs--so-called PDMPs--to reduce drug abuse. I will not go into the details of that program, but it has been very successful in terms of providing the transparency and the information necessary so we can control prescriptions and the output of drugs that are perhaps prescribed for legitimate purposes but are used for illegitimate reasons. For all of that, I look forward to our being able to work through this legislation and to successfully pass this legislation and move it on through the Congress and to the President. Wasteful Spending Mr. President, if I could also, ask for the indulgence of my colleague from Minnesota, to talk briefly about my waste of the week. I think this is the 35th or 36th week. I have almost lost track of the number of weeks I have been down here. Every week the Senate has been in session I have been down, with maybe one or two exceptions, talking about the waste of the week. Waste of the weeks are simply issues documented, through a nonpartisan process, of waste, fraud, and abuse that occur through the irresponsible spending and oversight of our bureaucracies here in Washington. Today I am highlighting two policies that have occurred within the State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration. Frankly, I could be talking about every agency in the Federal Government that has fallen prey to a lack of oversight. We have come to the point where we have identified over these ``Waste of the Week'' speeches well over $150 billion of documented waste, fraud, and abuse. These are issues that have been raised through inspections and analysis by the Government Accountability Office by the inspectors general of various agencies whose job it is to delve in and find out how the taxpayer money is being spent--is it being spent for the legitimate purpose of providing the service that is needed or is there a problem either in mismanagement or through waste or are criminals and others taking advantage of the program? I have now documented, as I said, 35 of those cases totaling well over $150 billion. Today we want to look at two agencies as examples of this. I can go through every agency, but we will take two today. One is the State Department. Let me note it is estimated that changing the policies here could save the taxpayers an estimated $295.6 million. That is not small change. Just addressing these two agencies $295-plus million it will save. Let me go into a little bit of detail. State Department employees located overseas--those serving in embassies or consulates--have access to what is called a purchase card. The concept is OK. The idea is that rather than go through all the paperwork and processing and sending back to the United States, employees can say: Look, we need some office supplies. We didn't order enough initially. We need to pick up 100 Scotch tape containers or pens or who knows what. A purchase card is given to those employees who are responsible for providing those supplies to make what is called simple transactions. To prevent the wasteful use or fraudulent use of these purchase cards, Federal law and State Department guidelines require all transactions meet certain eligibility criteria and be continually monitored. We know from experience that mistakes are made. We know from experience that fraud is committed. One of those key eligibility criteria is that all of the purchase receipts have to be retained for a minimum of 3 years. That is so inspectors general can go back and look at what the purchase is, look at the receipt, make sure everything is up to speed and done within the law. However, a recent report by the State Department inspector general has revealed that overseas employees have been told they do not have to send any purchase documentation to their supervisors in Washington for further review. All they need to do is keep the receipts of the purchases for a 3-year period of time so that if those assessments are evaluated, when someone comes back and says ``We heard there is a problem here,'' they will have the receipts to verify whether the purchases were legitimate or not. That is the ``trust but verify'' that I think is important for dealing with these kind of situations. When the State Department inspector general tried to access the documentation for purchase card transactions as required by the law and by State Department regulation, he found that many of the overseas offices didn't keep their transaction records. As an example, in fiscal year 2014, the inspector general found that more than half of overseas offices either didn't perform reviews of purchase card transactions as they are required to do or didn't even respond to the inspector general's request to produce the documentation. The report determined that during 2013 and 2014, there were $53.6 million in unaccounted purchases. That is unacceptable. If you take a job, you are told: Here is your card. If you need to buy something locally and don't want to go through all the rigmarole of purchasing and sending documentation overseas and so forth, you can use this purchase card. But you have to keep the documents if you do this because you are going to be reviewed. Someone is going to come over here and say: Prove it. Yet the State Department has basically said: Don't worry about it. You don't have to keep those--probably thinking that they will never come over and follow up on this. So that $53.6 million in unaccounted- for purchases at this rate, over a 10-year period of time, amounts to about $263 million in unknown and unverified purchases just within the State Department's overseas offices. Who knows what is going on here? Secondly, I want to talk about the Federal Aviation Administration because they have a similar situation that was inspected by their inspector general. He found that many employees do not comply with the guidelines, and the employees are not consistently held responsible for safeguarding their assigned equipment and supplies, such as digital cameras, laptops, and any other number items. As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration IG, the Inspector General, found that there are nearly 15,000 pieces of equipment and material that employees may not be able to locate. The combined value of that missing property is over $32.5 million. To make matters worse, the IG report states that the FAA division that essentially lost $32.5 million worth of equipment doesn't even have the authority to hold employees accountable. Not a bad job, right? It is as if they are saying don't worry: If you mess up, if you do something illegal, fraudulent, or you are just sloppy you're not responsible, if you don't know where the equipment is, if you don't keep track of it, you will not have to be accountable for that lost equipment. No American business could function this way and stay solvent. But walk back an employee there and say: ``What happened to the new laptop that we gave you 6 months ago?'' They would say: ``I don't know. I don't know where it is. I need another one.'' ``That's fine. Don't worry. This happens all the time. We will give you a new one.'' On and on it goes. That division of the FAA essentially has lost $32.5 million worth of equipment, and, again, it doesn't even hold its employees accountable. We have racked up nearly $19 trillion of debt in this country. No one can explain how large an amount of money that is. What we do know is that we are continuing to plunge into debt, and we are going to keep doing that. One of the ways we can be more accountable here is what I have just described. I know my time is running out. With that, I am going to add this week to our accumulating waste $295.6 million for these unknown, unverified purchases, bringing our total now to $157.5 billion. It is time to put a stop to this. It is time to enforce these rules and regulations. It is time to be sensitive to the fact that we are wasting hard-earned taxpayers' dollars. With that, keeping on schedule, I thank my colleague from Minnesota for the time which she has yielded, and I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I am on the Senate floor for my 34th edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' As you know, I do these speeches each week to highlight waste, fraud, and abuse and simple ways that we can save the taxpayers' dollars from being misused. Last year, in my 18th ``Waste of the Week'' speech, I detailed an investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that discovered that fraudulent applications were being accepted by healthcare.gov, the government Web site for choosing ObamaCare plans. I discussed the waste, fraud, and abuse of ObamaCare subsidies that were being awarded to fraudulent applicants. As part of that investigation, the Government Accountability Office investigators purposefully submitted 12 fraudulent applications. They wanted to test the system. They wanted to see how well the system worked. So they drew up 12 deliberately fraudulent applications just to see what the response would be. They submitted them to healthcare.gov. Eleven of them came back as approved. Only one application was called out, where someone said, ``Wait a minute, we don't have the appropriate information'' or ``we didn't do the fact-checking.'' But 11 apparently weren't even fact-checked. The Government Accountability Office said, ``I think this might be the canary in the coal mine.'' This ought to be a signal that this program is being abused; when 11 out of 12 applications come back with a stamp for approval and the subsidies are given, you would think the government would take notice of that and simply say, ``We have to get ahold of this.'' After the investigation, after this was made public it ought to have been embarrassing to the agencies that are handling this, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid disbursement. You would think they would jump on this. If I were heading up this agency, if I had anything to do with this at all, I would either fire someone or I would put reforms in place to make sure this never happened again. You would think this report would have spurred some kind of action. But this week, the Government Accountability Office released a new report detailing how the Obama administration continues to take--and this is in their words--``take passive approach to dealing with the potential fraud'' in the ObamaCare program. The GAO report outlines how healthcare.gov is still plagued by serious operational problems that lead to fraud and abuse. They found that in 2014, over 4 million ObamaCare applicants received a total of $1.7 billion in taxpayer subsidies despite these unresolved documentation errors. What this means is that the healthcare.gov site is allowing people to sign up for and receive ObamaCare benefits without proper verification. When you have had a previous investigation that said that 11 out of 12--more than 90 percent--of the applications were stamped ``approved'' and subsidies were paid without verification or with faulty verification, you would think by now they would have cleaned this up. Hundreds of thousands of people have been able to get their ObamaCare applications approved without having their eligibility verified. That has become clear. As GAO investigators bluntly stated in the report, healthcare.gov ``is at risk of granting eligibility to, and making subsidy payments on behalf of, individuals who are ineligible to enroll.'' The GAO said that one of the biggest problems with healthcare.gov is that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, CMS, which is responsible for the oversight and management of ObamaCare, did not resolve Social Security number inconsistencies for thousands of applications. When you submit your identity, you give your Social Security number. It goes to CMS. They are supposed to check it to see if it is a legitimate Social Security number, and if it isn't, they obviously cannot or should not issue the subsidy and approve the application. But, instead, CMS approved subsidized coverage without verifying those numbers from the applicants. It potentially allows access to subsidies by illegal immigrants or other ineligible individuals. So word gets around: Hey, you don't even need to put your Social Security number on there or you can put a false Social Security number on there, and you are going to get the subsidy. This is how your government is spending your tax dollars. It is an outrageous way, to pump up ObamaCare. And we keep hearing the White House touting the fact that millions are signing up for this. Of course they are. Millions are signing up for this because whether they are eligible or not, they are getting a subsidy. Who wouldn't want to get a check from the government every month? But it is done through fraud. It is done through waste, and it is done through something that hasn't been documented. People have to realize that under ObamaCare, you have to be a citizen or a legal resident, fall within a certain income range. Healthcare.gov is supposed to verify all of this when you sign up. But the GAO found that the program does not check new applications against existing approved applications. The resulting failure is that millions of people have been approved for benefits while using the same Social Security number. Here is another situation. Not only are people using false Social Security numbers on the application and they are still getting subsidies, but a lot of people are using the same Social Security number. This is not the era of having mountains of paperwork stored in warehouses around Washington, DC, because the agencies have been flooded with paper applications; this is an age of computerizing and digitizing all of this information. So all you have to do is push a button to find out whether that is a legitimate Social Security number. I mean, how hard is it? To make matters worse, we have learned that in thousands of ObamaCare applications, it wasn't even clear if the beneficiary was serving a prison sentence. The law basically says you are not eligible for Obamacare subsidies if you are serving a prison sentence. The GAO found that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ignored many opportunities for reducing ObamaCare fraud. Basically, it appears that CMS is willing to look the other way. Maybe they were ordered to, maybe they are just doing it, or maybe they are just purely incompetent. But they are looking the other way as the President continues to tout the benefits of this law. If that isn't bad enough, GAO also found that CMS actually knew that millions of applications were potentially fraudulent and still approved the applications. I am not making this up. We have information provided by the Government Accountability Office that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services knew about these fraudulent practices, so they couldn't plead ``Well, we didn't know this was happening'' or ``This was a computer glitch'' or ``We are just so overwhelmed with paperwork or applications that we can't handle it.'' They knew about it. They knew it was happening, and yet they still haven't cleared the situation up. It really drives you up the wall--and it is no wonder the American people are so unbelievably frustrated with this government and have deemed that this government is simply wasting their tax dollars. It is the biggest bureaucratic mess they have ever seen and they are paying for it. Doesn't it just practically make you want to scream? CMS told GAO ``that they currently do not plan to take any actions on individuals with unresolved incarceration or Social Security number inconsistencies.'' Does anybody find that outrageous? We know there is a problem. We have documented there is a problem. But they currently are not willing to undertake any kind of reforms or action to deal with this problem. To address this mess, I will introduce legislation that will mandate CMS to recoup all improperly paid subsidies. I am going to continue to press the agency to take action to enforce the existing requirements. What does it take to get the Congress to take the steps to insist that these agencies--entrusted with taxpayer money carry out their programs and then not act in such a cavalier, dismissive way--deal with this situation? What does it take? I guess what it takes is what is happening in our election process right now, and that is the example of the reason American people saying: We have had enough and we are blazing mad, and we ought to tear the place down and start all over. And this is all because this behemoth of a dysfunctional government continues to rob the taxpayer of its hard-earned money. Yet it is not providing job opportunities for people, despite all the best efforts of this administration. It kind of reminds me of back when Obamacare was being debated in the House of Representatives and the then-Speaker of the House, a Democrat, said: Well, we have to pass this bill so we can find out what is in it. Well, Madam Speaker of the House of Representatives, we are finding out not only what is in this bill, but we are also finding out we need an efficient, effective government enforcement of this to ensure that waste, fraud, and abuse is not occurring. So once again, I am down here adding to the ever-growing amount of money is been documented as waste, fraud, and abuse of. Today we stand at $157 billion of documented waste, fraud, and abuse, and we are just scratching the surface. I probably could come down here every hour of every day the Senate is in session and point out another waste of taxpayer money. When are we going to step up to the plate and stop this charade that is happening here? When are we going to deal with this problem? I am urging my colleagues to support my efforts and other efforts to at least address known documented problems of waste, fraud, and abuse. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, this week the President unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2017, and it landed here in the Senate with a big thud. This is not the first time that has happened. In fact, when the President's budget has been brought up for a vote by the 100 Members of the Senate, it has never received more than 1 vote. Both Democrats and Republicans have roundly rejected the President's proposals. Why? Overspending and overtaxation, driving us ever deeper into debt--nobody wants to put their name to that. Yet that is the situation we are in. We are in that situation because of the irresponsible policies that have been laid upon the American people and put into law by this President and by those who have supported him. Despite numerous efforts over the past several years to address this ever-growing threat to our future, all of these efforts--some of them bipartisan, even--have been rejected by the President. They have failed due to the President's unwillingness to work with the Congress and to put us on a path to fiscal solvency. Now, I have been a part of that effort now for the last 5 years. All of us throw our hands up in frustration as we watch the debt clock click away ever faster, as we watch the debt rising ever greater. When the President took office, our national debt--the money we had to pay back--was $10.6 trillion. It is almost impossible to describe what $1 trillion is. Trust me; it is a lot of money. It was $10.6 trillion. Today, it is over $19 trillion--nearly double--just in the term of this President. And what have we done about it? Nothing. Some will say a little bit. We have touched on it a little bit, but it continues to rise. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan organization that just does the numbers, has told us that in 10 years the debt will rise to well over $27 trillion. The shocker is the amount of money that has to be spent in paying interest on the debt. Nobody is giving us this money for free. We have to pay interest on it because people want interest, and they want their principal back. The interest on that, plus the mandatory spending--that is, automatic spending over which we have no control here unless we put reforms in place--will consume 99 percent of all the taxes and revenue that is coming in to pay for these programs. So that means we won't be building any roads; we won't be repairing any roads. That means we won't be providing research capabilities to the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means we won't have money for viable programs in the fields of education, commerce, and transportation. Ninety-nine percent is all revenue consumed by just these two items: the mandatory spending--which we have lost control over and refuse to take reform actions to address--and the interest that has to be paid. Well, this is unsustainable. It will all come down with a crash. That is why the President's budget this year will be soundly rejected and will only receive one vote, if it gets that. I am not giving up. I am looking at the major reforms that are necessary, even if we start today, even in an election year. I personally think the public is way ahead of us on this, and they will reward people who stand up and tell them the truth: Folks, we are going broke, and here are the numbers. This isn't political; these are pure numbers that come out of a neutral office. Nevertheless, we will see whether or not those who are running for office will take up the cause. So I thought: Well, OK, we can't do the big stuff. Can we at least look at waste, fraud, and abuse? Can we not at least encourage my colleagues to take things that have been presented to us--examples of waste, fraud, and abuse by inspectors general, by the Congressional Budget Office, by the Government Accountability Office that looks into all the ways in which we spend money--can't we at least do that? So for the last 33 weeks, starting in the last session and moving into this session, I have been coming to the floor every week to highlight yet another documented example of waste, fraud, and abuse. This is the 33rd time. Today, this one involves the sum of $25 billion that has not been properly accounted for by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. I spoke with the Secretary this morning about it. There are 25 recommendations as to how the Department can address this matter, and she is committed to that. I know she has the right intent, and we will see if it can be accomplished. In this particular case private sector contractors partner with the CMS, or the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, to provide any number of products and services to beneficiaries--those on Medicaid and Medicare. Federal agencies that administer the contracts are required to track the contracts' progress and costs and then close out these accounts once the contracts are finalized. There comes the rub. The regulations give a grace period of up to 20 months in order to close out a contract--to get everything closed down and so forth on these contracts. There is a handful of extensions where maybe it takes a little bit longer to do that. The timeframe or the grace period is intended to prevent improper payments and reduce the agency's financial risk and then close it out. The inspector general looked at all this and said: Great idea, good regulation--but it is not happening. In December the Health and Human Services inspector general issued a report of the investigation into these terminated contracts. There are over 6,000 contracts that have been completed, but $25 billion in funding is overdue--meaning that the accounts haven't been closed, which makes CMS vulnerable to improper payments. Sadly, 15 percent of the completed contracts remained overdue for more than 10 years, even though the regulation states they have to be closed out within 20 months. It shows the ineptness of this bureaucracy. It shows the incompetence of this bureaucracy, the inability of this bureaucracy to manage taxpayers' money in an effective way, to perform functions in an effective and efficient way. It is shocking. It is shocking to have the inspector general come along and find that there are thousands of contracts that have been completed for years--some over 10 years--and they are still open. The cost of that is $25 billion. Even worse, the system that CMS has in place to monitor the contracts hasn't been accessible to the bureau within HHS responsible for closing the contracts. It is just a complicated mess. Once again, we have situations totaling about $25 billion that could either be used for more necessary functions, returned to the taxpayer or not taken from the taxpayer in the first place. The bottom line is that these have been identified and action needs to be taken. This Senator continues to add to an ever-growing amount of waste, fraud, and abuse totaling, since we have started, a grand total approaching $156 billion. Having exposed this, the first thing we ought to be doing before we begin talking about raising taxes, before talking about a program staying in place or not staying in place is going after the waste, fraud, and abuse and stopping this outrageous waste of money that is occurring. The next time we are back in session, I will be back down here with more. They just keep pouring in. We keep finding these documents, finding this and that. It is unbelievable that we have put ourselves in this situation and the ineffectiveness is out of control. It is no wonder the public no longer trusts us. If we can't get to this, how can we ever get to the reforms necessary to stop us from becoming insolvent? With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, this is the first week of February, and a new month brings a new ``Waste of the Week'' speech from the Senator from Indiana. In preparing for this, we learned another disturbing fact about our economy, and that is that the United States has hit yet another new mark. Our national debt now exceeds $19 trillion. It wasn't that long ago that I was standing on this floor and talking about the fact that we are approaching $11 trillion of debt, and in just a few years that has accelerated in a most dramatic way. Now it has reached $19 trillion. Obviously, it is having and it is going to have a significant impact on the future of this country and our economic growth. In fact, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said that our Nation's gross domestic product--the measure of our Nation's economic activity--grew a very anemic 0.7 percent in the last quarter of 2015. We simply cannot sustain our economy and grow and provide economic opportunity for Americans and jobs for Americans at a growth rate of 0.7 percent. In fact, the growth rate on the average is now about 2 percent. We can't even keep our heads above water in terms of providing employment opportunities for people if we don't grow at a much faster pace, particularly following one of deepest and most damaging recessions we have ever had. Clearly there are issues that need to be addressed, issues that need to be talked about, and actions that need to be taken that put us on a better path to growth. Not having come up with the ability to address our long-term debt in any kind of a macro sense after many opportunities over the years and many efforts--some of them bipartisan and all of them denied by the President of the United States in terms of going forward for ``political reasons''--I have shifted my talk to, say, at least let's try to stop spending money that falls in the category of waste, fraud, and abuse. I have documented over the last year or so well over $130 billion of documented waste, fraud, and abuse. This isn't just conjuring up some story or picking up stories out of a newspaper; these are documented examples by independent agencies of the Federal Government that examine our spending and come up with ways in which they can point out that the spending is not necessary and that these funds can be used for much better purposes, the best purpose of which would be to not increase our national debt in paying for waste and not demanding ever-more tax increases from our constituents to help pay for waste. This week I am going to highlight something that wastes taxpayers' money and literally wastes space, warehouse space. The Department of Homeland Security owns or leases a number of warehouses around the country. They need this because they need to have in place the equipment that is necessary to address a disaster. Whether it is a natural or manmade disaster or whether it is a terrorist attack--for whatever reason, they need a number of these warehouses. They either buy or lease these warehouses to store this equipment that is needed for emergency situations. In 2013 the Department of Homeland Security spent $60 million to own or lease a total of 1,628 warehouses that, when added together, occupy 6.3 million square feet. That is a lot of leased space. That is a lot of space to own or lease to store equipment. That is the size of 110 football fields. No one is questioning the need to be prepared for disasters or the need for warehouse space in different locations around the country, but, as is the case with so many government agencies, in the use of taxpayer dollars, we need to oversee and make sure the money is being spent in an efficient and effective way. Thank goodness for these inspectors general. Without them, we would not be able to determine and find out what is going on at these various agencies regarding the handling of taxpayer money. The latest report from the DHS inspector general said that there are some warehouses that are ripe for elimination, which would save taxpayers about $9.7 million over a 10-year period of time. The inspector general said that the first of these buildings holds primarily a bunch of broken chairs--unused furniture. It is storage space for paperwork that is no longer necessary--and indicated that the DHS leases this warehouse in Northern Virginia for $934,000 a year. I wish I owned that warehouse. I would be prohibited under the ethics code from doing that, but that is a pretty good deal. You build a warehouse and you lease it to DHS and charge them $934,000 a year, and it is filled with equipment that is either broken or needs to be thrown out. In a macro sense, it kind of reminds me of my garage. I started thinking, well, there is a bunch of broken stuff in there sitting around on a shelf. Why don't I just get rid of it? Then I would have the space to store something that is needed. I guess what the Inspector General is saying is, look, this stuff looks like a bunch of broken chairs and stuff we don't need, so why don't we get rid of it and save the taxpayers some money? Over the next decade, this could save the taxpayers a lot of money. Let me show another picture. DHS also leases a 6,500-square-foot warehouse in Northern California. That is only $74,000 of taxpayers' money on an annual basis. The warehouse is virtually empty. Maybe they have a plan to put something in there, but it is sitting there empty, and it is costing the taxpayers $74,000. The IG said: There are some old computers there which we don't use anymore. We bought new ones. There is a lot of broken equipment in there. There is old office furniture, and there are some books. Again, it sounds a little bit like my garage on a macro basis. Why do we pay over $70,000 to lease this warehouse when that is what it contains? I mean, let's throw it out. These are just a few of the items the IG found. Clearly, though, it is an example of an inefficient use of taxpayer dollars, and it can add up to some significant numbers. Those numbers, as I have been posting here over the last year or so, are now totaling $130,146,746,016. It is a waste of a lot of money, and it is a waste that needn't take place. I am going to keep coming down here week after week highlighting to my colleagues that we can do a better job of oversight, we can do a better job of running this government, and we can do a better job for the taxpayers, who are working hard to earn money that is taxed by Uncle Sam. Some of it is wasted or spent through fraud or abuse. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I come here during a sad time for Hoosiers. The beloved principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School in Lawrence Township, in the Indianapolis area, was seeing her students off after a day of school. A bus came around the corner to pick up the kids and accidentally lost control. The principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School, Susan Jordan, saw the bus coming, saw that it was going to hit the students, and put herself in front of them, and saved the lives of her young students. Two were injured seriously but will recover, but Principal Susan Jordan lost her life in doing this. The situation is still under investigation, but all elements and indications point to this as simply a tragic accident. This story is not just one of tragedy, it is also one of heroism. As I said before, the bus struck her as Principal Jordan pushed several of her students out of harm's way. The principal, who came out of her office at school every day to help the students safely board the buses, lost her life in doing so. Those who knew her well--said that was not a surprising act. ``It didn't surprise any of us Susan would sacrifice herself,'' said the district administrator for Lawrence Township. Shawn Smith, superintendent of the Lawrence Township schools, called Principal Jordan ``a legend'' and said that ``we lost a great educator.'' Susan Jordan served as principal of the school for 22 years. She was known for her cheery disposition and welcomed each classroom every morning. The Gospel of John tells us that ``greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.'' The love that Susan Jordan had for her students should be an inspiration to us all. We offer our deepest condolences to Principal Jordan's family and friends, to the students who were injured and their parents, and to all parents and students of the school. I know I join with all Hoosiers in mourning her loss and celebrating the life and impact of this talented, compassionate educator who paid the ultimate price for the students she loved so dearly. Wasteful Spending Mr. President, I rise to address something I have been doing on a weekly basis called ``Waste of the Week.'' This is No. 31 of my visits down here to the floor to talk about the egregious waste, fraud, and abuse in spending by the Federal Government. We hear so often that we just can't cut another penny, we just can't cut another dime out of this program because they have been subject to freezes or they have been subject to sequester, and, besides, we don't have the money to pay for it. Well, I have been highlighting small steps--because we haven't been able to achieve the big steps--small steps of ways that we can save taxpayer money and address Federal spending. So I have come down every week, and put up the board ``Waste of the Week,'' and this week deals with a situation, once again, where we don't need to be in a position to spend taxpayers' dollars on what was already being done. The Amtrak Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration participate in a joint task force that works to interdict passengers who are trafficking contraband on Amtrak trains. Amtrak information is available to the Drug Enforcement Agency at no cost from the Amtrak Police Department--two agencies that are working together. But despite this agreement, the DEA wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars paying just two Amtrak employees to do exactly what this task force was formed to do. So we have a task force of paid employees who are there for a specific purpose--providing information to DEA. The DEA says this is important information, but the task force also uses informants. These are people who work for Amtrak on the trains, and some of the information they provide is valuable. According to an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general, the DEA paid two Amtrak employees a total of--are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? Two paid Amtrak employees are getting a salary, they work for Amtrak, The DEA paid them a total of $864,161 for information they have been providing to Amtrak and then giving to the DEA. The information probably was important, but over a period of 20 years, these payments went out to just two employees, this $864,000- plus. The IG's investigation concluded that when DEA officials sought approval to register these Amtrak employees as informants in the DEA's Confidential Source Program, the required documents did not indicate that these informants would be paid. Let me stop for a minute and say that confidential sources are an important tool for our law enforcement agencies. Officials at the DEA actively use confidential informants to obtain information regarding drug trafficking or investigations. Some DEA officials have said they consider the information the confidential sources provide as the ``bread and butter'' of the agency. My point today is not to question the use of confidential sources but to point out that Federal agencies like the DEA don't need to pay for information they already have access to. This is a waste of taxpayer dollars and poor stewardship of limited resources that fall in the category of ``waste of the week.'' Twenty years of the DEA paying for information that they were already supposed to receive at no cost without a second thought indicates a serious, systemic spending problem that spans multiple parties and Presidents. We must pull the plug on this type of waste. So today I add an additional $864,161 to the taxpayer price tag for this already free information from Amtrak employees. We continue to add more, our gauge continues to rise, and we now are well over $130 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse. So let no one come down to this floor and say we can't take a penny away from this program or come down to the floor and say we don't have the money to pay for things that we ought to do or to return to the taxpayer. I am trying to show that government can be run much more efficiently and effectively. I applaud the inspectors general and others who are looking into this waste, but I want to bring to my colleagues' attention the fact that we have a lot of work to do, chipping away at this spending and waste and also looking at long-term, major financial fixes to our ever-careening plunge into debt and deficit. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, as the Presiding Officer knows, throughout last year's session I would come to the Senate floor every week and talk about a waste of the week. That was in 2015. We did nearly 30 of those in the 30 weeks that the Senate was in session, maybe skipping one or two. It is 2016. We are in a new year, and I am back for the 2016 version of ``Waste of the Week.'' The reason I am doing this is because I am trying to bring to the attention of my colleagues and the American people the fact that the government is not spending their hard-earned tax dollars in the most efficient and effective way that they could. By highlighting these various uses of expenditures in Washington and abuses of that spending, we alert them to the fact that there are significant savings that can be made. In 2015, we totaled up to nearly $130 billion of demonstrated examples of waste, fraud, and abuse--money that was spent for no purpose whatsoever or for a purpose that certainly didn't qualify for the use of taxpayer dollars and the abuse of that spending and the fraud that went along with it. This is just scratching the surface. The Presiding Officer was very much a part of this and knows that since 2010 there has been a significant effort, much of it a bipartisan effort, to try to deal with the long-range plunge into evermore spending and evermore debt that is plaguing our country, holding down our ability to grow as an economy, and will have long-term negative consequences on our generation and particularly on future generations. Whether it was Simpson-Bowles or Domenici-Rivlin or whether it was the Gang of 12, the Committee of 6 or the Vitter committee, many efforts were made to try to work with the administration to address the long-term problems. Eventually, each one of those failed. I am not here to impose blame on anyone. It would be easy to do. It is a very difficult problem working with the administration, and sometimes we have differences between our two parties here, but there was general recognition--universal recognition--that we couldn't continue down the same path of excessive spending, more than we received in revenues, year after year at a frightening pace to ever greater debt. When this administration took office, the national debt--accumulated well over 200 years of the existence of this country--that debt has nearly doubled in the 8 years this administration has been in office and will virtually double before that term is up. It is unsustainable. The Congressional Budget Office--a neutral agency that has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats or politics. It simply gives us the numbers and the numbers tell the story. Those numbers are frightening when we look at the degree to which we continue to plunge into debt. The Congressional Budget Office just released its latest report, which said coming deficits will be more than 20 percent larger than previously forecast--previously forecast, just last August. Depending on some of the actions taken here in Congress regarding spending, the calculation has to be changed, and it is going to be 20 percent more than what they had projected just a few months ago. We are looking at trillion-dollar deficits on the horizon. In my mind, here is the most startling of the 10 recommendations and notices to us: In 10 years, 99 percent of all revenue that comes in to the Federal Government--the cumulation of everyone's taxes and all the money that flows into Washington through user fees, excise fees, withholding taxes from our paycheck, the taxes we pay either every April or quarterly taxes, every tax out there accumulating, 99 percent will go to mandatory spending and net interest spending. If you are for a stronger defense, if you are for better research at the National Institutes of Health, if you are for funding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, if your interest is education, social welfare, if you are looking at any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of programs that various interests have here, if 99 percent of the revenues coming in are going to things we have no control over-- mandatory spending, which is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid-- essentially only 1 percent is left to divide up among everything else the Federal Government does; that is, building roads, fixing bridges, grants to cities, environmental interests, on and on we could go. If 99 percent is going to spending what we can't control--simply paying interest on the debt and covering the entitlement spending of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--it is unsustainable. Those efforts have failed. It is a pox on all of our houses. We tried mightily and had no ability to bring it to conclusion. That has been kind of pushed off the table. We didn't talk about that much in the last year of this Congress. The focus was on other issues. But this looming catastrophe that will happen based on nothing but numbers, arithmetic, and facts--will happen sooner than anybody anticipates--cannot be put aside. But having failed in those major efforts and as long as this President is in office, it appears that we are not going to be successful this year. This catastrophe will be dumped on the next President's lap, whoever that President might be, and I thought the very least we could do is continue to look at how to make government more efficient, how to prioritize our spending, and how to eliminate and address the issue of waste and fraud. I started this program, waste of the week, trying to educate the public in terms of the fact that there is money out there that can be spent more wisely or that wouldn't have to be taken from them in the first place or that can be used to reduce our debt. I am now up to 30 examples of ways in which we can address that. So today I am doing, I believe, No. 30. This is something that has to do with our foreign policy. These wastes of the week have everything from the ridiculous, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars for a grant to a university to study whether massaging rabbits--after strenuous activity--allows for faster recovery from the strain of the rabbits' work. This is what they are spending your tax dollars on. I think you can ask any person--whether they are in Little League, high school, professional sports, or college--whether, after strenuous exercise, it helps if you have a massage. I think the answer would be yes, of course. Everybody knows that, but we had to issue a grant of almost $400,000 to somebody who filled out a form and said: This is a great idea. Send us some Federal money, and we will produce this study, and then we will give you the conclusion. There is everything from the ridiculous to issues that are very serious, such as the duplication of effort in two programs to help people who are out of work either because of disability or because they can't get a job. One is called unemployment insurance and the other is called Social Security disability. To qualify for Social Security disability, you have to prove you can't work. To get an unemployment insurance payment from the government, you have to prove you can work but there isn't a job. You don't get both. Yet we identified $5.7 billion of expenditure in duplication--people who were getting a check for both being disabled and not being able to work and saying: I am able to work, but the job isn't there. So two checks arrive every month in the mailbox for these people--to the total amount of $5.7 billion. You would think that in this day and age where everything is computerized, it would be easy for the unemployment insurance agency to call up or to contact Social Security and say: You know, John Smith here is applying for unemployment insurance. Can you check your records to see whether he is also receiving Social Security disability? It would be easy to get their Social Security number and match. But, no, one agency is working over here and another agency is working over there. Both are sending out checks, one of which is illegal, and they are not communicating with each other. It ought to be an easy fix, but this is the Federal Government. On and on it goes. Let me talk about No. 30. No. 30 involves the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations in Afghanistan. It is a Pentagon business advocacy agency that was formed to provide contracting work in Afghanistan through rebuilding. We did this in Iraq, and now we are doing it in Afghanistan. It was established for a valid purpose: to encourage foreign investment. They have a task force, and the task force lives over there. What we found through the inspector general--a special inspector to ensure that this money that is being spent over there is spent wisely has found that millions has been spent on private housing for the staff of this task force instead of allowing those people to utilize excess space at existing Department of Defense bases. So here is a Department of Defense program. The Department of Defense has housing and provisions for food and shelter and so forth, and they have excess capacity because we have drawn down troops. But instead of putting those people in this area where they can occupy unoccupied space, where they can get food through the DOD process--a much cheaper process--they put them in specially furnished, privately owned villas and spent $150 million doing it. They have also hired contractors to provide--because they are separate from the Department of Defense base, they have to have private security, they have to have food services provided to them, they have to have bodyguards for staff and visitors, and they have to have onsite laundry service, food and drink services, private transportation, cultural advisers, and housekeeping services. All of this could be avoided for this task force which is there to provide investment counsel and advice for Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, reports of the spending drew the attention of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, who has spent time digging into finding out exactly what is happening here. He noted that the exorbitant cost of the villas is especially concerning, as I have said, because there are other facilities through the Department of Defense that have been planned for this specific purpose that are not being used and it would be much cheaper if they were used. Because they are already there, they don't to have all this collateral support. He said that 20 percent of the task force budget provided housing and security for no more than 5 or 10 staffers. Former task force employees told investigators that the inspector general estimates that housing a staff of 10 at the U.S. Embassy in 2014 in Kabul would have cost $1.8 million and little or nothing if they had bunked with troops at a military base. The IG also noted that poor oversight and the complete lack of coordination--where have we heard that before? Where have we heard about Federal programs with a complete lack of coordination with other programs to see if there is duplication, such as Social Security disability and the unemployment insurance as an example? That has not been provided, he said. He is still investigating all of this, but what we are going to do today is take that $150 million price tag for these Afghanistan villas to the taxpayer, and we are going to add that. By the way, I have a picture of the villas. I can see why people might want to live in something like this rather than an Army base. But this is tax dollars going over to Afghanistan. We have a mission over there to complete. I don't know--this could be in Washington, DC, or this could be in Indianapolis, IN. They are pretty nice digs. Is it really necessary to spend that kind of money when other facilities are available, when all the services and food are available to maintain these and the security is within a Department of Defense military base? Do we have to go to this level of support with taxpayer dollars? We are adding $150 million to our ever-growing list of waste, and our total is now well over $130 billion of cost. That is this week's waste of the week. Syrian Refugees Mr. President, I also wish to talk about the Syrian refugee issue. I had the opportunity to spend some time in Jordan, as a member of the Intelligence Committee, and in Turkey looking at the situation as it exists in Syria. I also spent time in Italy and Greece relative to the humanitarian crisis that is taking place, with literally hundreds of thousands of people who are fleeing Iraq, northern Iraq, and fleeing Syria because it is a war-torn area, and their migration and all the issues involved with that migration and the implications and consequences it is having on Europe. It is an issue here in the United States, resettlement of refugees. It is overwhelming. These countries cannot even begin to process people coming to their borders to determine whether they are legitimate or whether they are inserted terrorists who are using this flow of migration to gain access to Europe, to gain access to the United States, and to gain access to other places. They are legitimate people who are leaving with their families to avoid the consequences of this war; yet we know, because we have already ascertained this, that included in that effort are terrorists who want to insert themselves into that flow so they can come to Europe, come to our European capitals, come to the United States, and continue their brutality and jihad against Americans and against Western civilization. I think the issue we just voted on here unfortunately fell short. We didn't get support from our colleagues across the aisle and didn't have the necessary number of votes to pass what the House has already passed, and that is to provide a suspension of time to comply with what our FBI Director has said needs to be done so that we can ensure that people in this refugee flow who are going to be admitted to America under the administration's plan are truly war-torn refugees and not representing a terrorist threat to the American public. The FBI Director and our intelligence agencies have said we don't have the necessary tools in place to be able to ascertain this, and until we do, we cannot guarantee that these refugees do not include people who are not coming for asylum reasons but are connected in one way or another to terrorists. I thought it was a very reasonable thing to do to provide for security for Americans and assure them that we are not simply opening the gates here to terrorist access, to pause and get these screening procedures in place before we allow this to happen. We just had this vote within an hour or so and came up short, which is unfortunate, and we did not gain the support we needed to get the necessary votes from our colleagues. So the effort the House has made once again dies in the Senate because while we had virtually every Republican vote, we couldn't get any other votes to get to the necessary level to take up the legislation and move forward. There may be another attempt to do that. After going and looking and talking to U.N. associate officials, talking to our government officials, talking to officials from these various countries and particularly those entry points from northern Africa that come through Italy and from Greece, which comes from Syria and Iraq, the conclusion I came to was that this flow, which is now well over 1 million people--temporarily slowed here because of the weather, and it will start up again in the spring when it warms up--is overwhelming Europe. You don't have to watch too much cable news or read too much of a newspaper to see what is happening in Europe with the massive inflow of refugees, asylum seekers, and the incorporation of people who are not abiding by the laws, overwhelming the system. So as open-arms welcome, as Germany was under the Chancellor's proclamation to ``bring them here, and we will take care of them,'' even that is now under question in terms of Germany's capability of doing that. A number of other countries, including Denmark and Hungary, are basically saying: We can't handle all of this. It is just overwhelming us. The social and financial consequences of all of this are a great political, as well as a financial, threat to Europe, and we have seen evidence of that. No one is really talking about a possible alternative that can deal with this problem. Several months ago, I came to the Senate floor and basically said: I think I have a better solution that is perhaps even more financially feasible. My solution is to provide safe havens for these people either within their country or simply across the border of other countries. Turkey and Jordan are taking in millions of refugees, but they are overwhelmed. There is a precedent here in terms of providing safe havens. I was serving in the Senate at the time of the Balkan war, and the brutality there was equal to some of the brutality that is taking place in Syria. It was a desperate situation, but through the U.N. agencies for refugee relief and the use of NATO to provide security, we created, as a coalition of nations, safe havens for people in the Balkans. There were a few mistakes, but in the end it worked very significantly. These people wanted to go back to their homes. They wanted to stay citizens of their country. They had hundreds of years of history through the line of their families in these countries, and they didn't want to try to take on a different language and have to learn different skills in order to assimilate in other countries any more than we would want to move our people out to another country if we were in that situation. By creating safe havens and having NATO provide the security to keep these safe havens from being attacked or misused and by providing a coalition of financial support and enough humanitarian support through the United Nations and through the world's nations, I said this is a better way to handle it, and we succeeded in that effort. So the precedent is there, and I thought: Why not use the same model for Syria? It solves the immigration issue because those people are housed in a humanitarian way, with NATO providing for their safety, which is what I suggested. After all, Turkey is part of NATO. It is a mission in which NATO would address the problem in Europe, where most of the NATO nations are housed. Obviously, the United States would take part in it. It provides a financial situation to the issue. I haven't been able to calculate this, but the cost of providing those safe havens can't exceed the cost of all the transfer, movement, assimilation into the culture, training, education, learning the language, and everything that has to be provided for those who are going to foreign nations from their homeland. So once again, I am bringing this suggestion to my colleagues' attention, and, hopefully, to the attention of NATO and other countries that are caught up in this refugee problem and asking: Why don't we reopen the discussion and debate about what the cost would be, what it would take to accomplish it in order to create these safe havens in areas close to or within the borders of the countries from which they are coming from? It addresses a multitude of problems that are overwhelming the capability of European nations and have created a political storm of opposition both in Europe as well as in the United States, and it legitimately gives those refugees safe harbor, humanitarian support, and housing conditions. It gives them food, water, and humanitarian and medical support at their safe haven rather than have them flowing into other countries. So, once again, I am calling for this. Germany estimates that last year alone the cost of the refugee crisis was 21 billion euros, and in dollars it would be even more. Italy spent 620 million euros in 2014 and more than 800 million euros in 2015. Individual islands in Greece spent between 1 and 1.5 billion euros last year, and they can't afford it. We all know that Greece can't begin to afford this. They have said: We have enough financial problems trying to take care of our own people, let alone the massive influx of refugees. Sometimes they get 10,000 refugees a day in their country who say: We are here, we want to eat, we want a place to sleep, and we need to be taken care of. Greece is saying: We can't even take care of our own, let alone the refugees. It is creating tremendous tension and tremendous political consequences for many European nations. The EU allocated 560 million euros for the crisis last year, which is far too short. But in that context, this money can be used to address the problem of funding for these safe havens, avoiding all of the cultural, political, and social dynamics that are a part of this refugee flow and creating so many problems there. I have kind of given an outline here of what I think we ought to seriously consider as we are looking at the refugee crisis. For those who say America is not a welcoming country, that is not true. My mother is an immigrant. I am the son of an immigrant. She came here as a young child with her sisters and brothers the legal way. My mother and father learned the language and worked hard so that we could get a good education and assimilate into the United States. But now we simply don't have the capability. It is not wise to simply open our borders and say: Come one; come all. Maybe that was possible before ISIL, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and these other terrorist groups were formed, but today we have a major national security issue combined with the ability to assimilate refugees from other countries. The security issue alone puts us in a position where we just simply can't provide the kind of security for the American people without screening and background checks because ISIL said: We are doing this. Look at California and these other places where they are inspired over the Internet or injected into our country. The FBI Director says: We are overwhelmed in terms of trying to keep track of people whom we suspect are trying to do harm to the American people. I think because of that issue alone, as well as the other issues involved here, this is a model we ought to take a serious look at. Once again, I am calling for that, and I will talk more about that as we go forward. I am now finished with my two presentations. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, this is the 29th time I have been on the floor over this current session to address what is called, ``Waste of the Week.'' Twenty-nine weeks of this year, I have been on the Senate floor talking about examples of how the Federal Government wastes taxpayers' money through waste, fraud, and abuse. I have laid out specific examples. Some changes have been made in programs as a result of the publicity it has received not just from me but from the accounting offices that are doing the checking and the inspectors general who are doing the checking. Sometimes I wonder if anybody is listening, but I am very encouraged by the fact that a number of us now, including the Presiding Officer, are talking about this issue. I hope every Member in this body, all 100 of us, start thinking about ways in which we can make our Federal Government more efficient and effective and stop wasting through fraud and abuse, stop wasting taxpayer dollars. I don't want to keep doing this, but I am going to keep doing this until there is a majority and hopefully a unanimous clarion call saying: Let's clean up this government. Let's go after this waste, fraud, and abuse. In terms of examples, we have now totaled well over $100 billion. We are coming up with much higher numbers as we come down to the floor every week. The Presiding Officer just issued a book, which I think every Member of this body ought to read, collecting other examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. All of this is really in honor of a former Member, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who really led the charge on this issue. I regret that Tom is not still a Member of the Senate. He had a way of digging out this information that was commendable. He would come to the floor and make a persuasive case through the illustration of various forms of abuse of the taxpayers' dollars. A number of my colleagues are picking up the clarion call. As I said, we need all 100 of us to come to the conclusion that we don't have to stand here and say we are doing everything we possibly can to manage the people's money when we know that is not true, when we know that inspectors general of virtually every agency in the government have come up with reports that simply say ``Why in the world are you doing this in the first place?'' or ``Look at this amount of fraud.'' One-hundred billion dollars or more is just a drop in the budget, so we are going to continue to expose this waste. Today I had hoped this 29th waste of the week would be the last one of this calendar year, but it looks as if we might be here 1 more week, so we will get the 30th in next week if necessary. Recently, the inspector general for the Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted a series of audits on HUD's multibillion- dollar portfolio. The results that have been printed are deeply troubling. After reviewing HUD's books, the inspector general found that the agency's finances are missing records, contain inaccurate information, and have even violated Federal laws. He acknowledged that HUD's accounting has lacked appropriate oversight for a long time. This has been going on for a long time. Let me quote from his report: Multiple deficiencies existed in HUD's internal controls over financial reporting, resulting in misstatements on financial statements, noncompliance laws and regulations. We have reported on HUD's administrative control of funds in our audit reports and management reports since fiscal year 2005. HUD continued to not have a fully implemented and complete administrative control of funds system that provided oversight of both obligations and disbursements. This was exposed in 2005. Ten years later, they are still having the problem. They still haven't cleaned up their act. This is just one agency. Maybe this is the worst agency--I don't know--in terms of being irresponsible and how they spend money, but I doubt it. I suspect that this statement could have been made by a number of our agencies. I wish to highlight a couple of specific examples from the inspector general's audits. One audit examined HUD's Government National Mortgage Administration, commonly known as Ginnie Mae. Ginnie Mae buys mortgages from banks and institutions, bundles those mortgages together, and then sells portions of those bundles to investors. These mortgage-backed securities are fully backed by U.S. Government guarantees. The IG's audit bluntly noted that HUD's financial records are so bad that it was not even possible to audit the entirety of Ginnie Mae's $25.2 billion portfolio. In other words, the recordkeeping for the transactions that took place under HUD was in such disarray, so bad, they couldn't even provide an audit that correctly addressed the problem. From what the IG could review, it found Ginnie Mae's finances contained nine material weaknesses, eight significant deficiencies in internal controls, and six instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations. After reviewing Ginnie Mae's 2015 finances, the inspector general found over $1 billion in abuse and inefficiencies. If this had happened to any business in America other than the Federal Government, either the business would be bankrupt, the stockholders would have depleted its value, or the board of trustees would have fired its manager. They would have had to reorganize the entire--no way can you run a business this way. No way would it be possible to run it. This would happen only in the Federal Government because we can print money and we can keep it flowing into HUD and these other agencies. And for the 10 years since it was disclosed, they have continued the same practices that have gone on before that don't even allow us the ability to fully understand what they are even doing. They have been warned about it, and they have been talked to about it. They said they are going to clean it up, but it continues. Let me give another example. The IG also found waste and fraud and mismanagement involving HUD's taxpayer-subsidized housing benefits. The low-income housing program provides affordable housing for households with incomes less than 80 percent of the median income for the area. This program has helped many families put a roof over their head through the years. Unfortunately, because of a loophole in HUD's review policies, households that have too high an income and thus are not qualified to receive Federal support have been able to remain in the taxpayer-subsidized Federal housing program. The inspector general of HUD found that more than 25,000 over-income families were living in HUD taxpayer-subsidized housing in 2014 alone. So over 25,000 people who don't qualify for the program any longer because their income has improved are still living under the subsidized housing program, which is providing subsidies to them that they are no longer qualified to receive. One doesn't actually have to have a low income to participate in this taxpayer-subsidized low-income housing; they simply had to have a low income when they applied. But hopefully this helped them as they were having income problems and financial problems--those who are able to come out of the system and who receive a larger income and therefore no longer qualify retained the subsidies, and HUD never took action to basically determine that they no longer qualify for this. There were over 25,000 specific incidents. In a specific example in New York City, the program's income ceiling for a four-person household is just a little over $67,000. Yet a New York family was legally able to remain in public housing when their annual income was nearly $500,000. In fact, they owned real estate that produced over $790,000 in rental income within only 4 years. So people who had qualified for this had achieved tremendous financial success-- from what source, I am not exactly sure. They have moved from a program that said you have to have income below $67,000 to qualify. Their income was over $500,000, and yet they still retained their qualification. Let's look at a small town. In Oxford, NE, a single-person household earned over $65,000 annually and had assets of nearly $1.6 million--far higher than the city's income cap of $33,500. In other words, to be in the program you could not earn over $33,500. This individual was earning obviously extraordinarily more than that with a $1.6 million value of assets and yet still received subsidized housing. If this was a one-off, if this was a few people here and there taking advantage of the system and so forth--but we are talking tens of thousands of people on just this single program. Remember, the audit of HUD looked at a whole range of discrepancies. I am talking only about a couple of specific programs. It is not hard to agree that this waste of taxpayer dollars is something that can be addressed. I am encouraged that my colleagues are looking at this in a number of ways--and the more the better. We do this in respect and honor for what Senator Coburn started, and I am happy to be a part of that. I know the Presiding Officer is also. I will conclude by saying for just this one agency, I can give a lot more examples of reckless disregard for use of taxpayer money that have been documented by the inspector general and that have been provided to that agency, which has not been able to clean up its act since 2005. They have had 10 years to do it, and it still continues. The inspector general says it is such a mess, it is so disassembled, it is so poorly administered that it can't even come to a conclusion of how bad it is. It is impossible to fully audit the Department of Housing and Urban Development because of their financial ineptness and their financial incapability of keeping records on their very own programs. Today we are going to add a modest amount. This could be tens of billions. We took only a couple of examples here, and those examples total $1,174,000,000. That is not small change. Think about being about to send this back to the taxpayers who are working their hearts out and having taxes levied on them or think about how we can send this money to higher priorities--maybe to some things related to national security where we are scraping for funds to be able to provide the security this country needs. Whatever the reason, the waste continues to pile up. No one coming down to this floor can say ``We can't cut a penny more of spending'' without addressing this first. It appears that we will be down here for the 30th ``Waste of the Week'' next week, which I regret. But we have plenty of waste lined up to be talking about. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 2888.