Daniel Coats

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, having previously served in the Senate, I came to the floor once again for the second time as a freshman Senator, in the early months of 2011, full of optimism and a sense of purpose. Back for a second time as a newly elected freshman, I delivered my inaugural speech, which included the following thoughts: For each of us serving today, I believe it is our duty to rise to the immediate challenge and resolve the problems which now confront us. It will take all of us, united behind a common purpose--that above all else we must first restore and strengthen our fiscal security. We must articulate a clear vision, set specific goals and make the tough decisions needed to bring our nation out of debt and preserve prosperity and opportunity for future generations. Those remarks outline a major part of my vision for what I hope to achieve in my term as a Senator. It is now 5 years later. What I came back to try to accomplish hasn't been accomplished. At the time, I saw--and it was the reason why I answered the call to come back--that our fiscal health was eroding right before our very eyes. I didn't want to be a part of the first generation of Americans to leave our children and the country worse off than the one we inherited. Anyone who reads through our history knows the sacrifices that have been made by generation after generation after generation so that their children and their grandchildren and their country could be in a better position so that they wouldn't be saddled with the burdens that might not allow them to live the American dream. I asked Hoosiers to send me back to Washington to focus on taking on these essential issues. It was the first thing in my very first debate, where I put it on the table and said: Unless we go back and address our runaway mandatory spending and entitlement programs, it is not worth going back, and I will not ask you to send me back there unless you give me the mandate that this is a task that has to be undertaken. It was called political suicide at the time: Oh, you can't bring that up. I mean those who are on Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security will make sure that you will never be sent back to the Senate if that is what your goal is. I said: I just want every Hoosier to know, when you walk in that voting booth, what you are voting for and what you are not voting for. And I received the mandate to come back to address that because people in my generation understood that as to the privileges they had received and the opportunities they had received throughout their lives, they wanted to pass them and that same opportunity on to their children and their grandchildren. They wanted us to come back and make difficult decisions so that would happen. It is not that this issue wasn't worked on. Whether it was to fix the debt or the Business Roundtable, Domenici-Rivlin, Simpson-Bowles, the Gang of 6, the super committee resulting from the Budget Control Act, and the dinner club of Senators--all of these efforts over the early years I threw myself into and in support of. And many of us--even on a bipartisan basis--were working together to try to address this gorilla in the room, the runaway mandatory spending. It is now eating up over 70 percent of our total budget and ever-decreasing discretionary spending. The President, unfortunately, walked away from every effort that was made. The efforts were divided, and nearly 40 of us--20 Democrats and 20 Republicans--sent the President a letter stating: We need to address that, and we are willing to step up and address this if you will join us in this process. I was very much a part of the final effort with the President--the so-called dinner club--at the President's initiative. We were working with the President himself, his Chief of Staff, his top Director of OMB--now Secretary Burwell at HHS--and his political director. Over the months, eight of us met privately--there was no press, no staff-- working to see, as principals, if we could come up with something. In the end, it fell apart. It fell apart because the President, in the end, wouldn't even accept his own previous proposals--his own White House proposals to address this problem. Here we are 5 years later. Currently, what we have gone from, under this administration, is a $10.6 trillion debt at the beginning of this Presidency to now 18-plus, or almost $18.2 trillion. There was almost a doubling in just two terms of one President, almost a doubling of our debt. And here we stand with injunctions from the Congressional Budget Office saying that we are headed toward a crisis and it is holding down our economy. We are not growing as we should and putting people back to work as we should because this is a drag on us. It is an anchor holding us down. Every Member of this Senate understands that the issue here is not this particular program or that particular program. The issue is runaway mandatory entitlements that are eating up everything--virtually three-quarters of everything they spend money on. There are essential functions of the Federal Government that have to be addressed: the National Institutes of Health and, obviously, our defense and national security. There is the CDC, which deals with communicable diseases, education funding, veterans programs, law enforcement, border security, and food safety, just to name a few. Those are essential functions. But the money available to do what government needs to do is ever shrinking in terms of our ability to allocate it for that to be done, and the mandatory spending is just simply running out of control. Is anyone in this Senate or in this Congress saying we should end Social Security, end Medicare, and end Medicaid? Everyone here is saying no. Everyone has to understand, however, that to preserve those programs we have to bring on sensible reforms, and that has been the challenge. CBO said earlier this year: ``Large and growing federal debt would have serious negative consequences, including increasing federal spending for interest payments; restraining economic growth in the long term; giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges; and eventually heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis. The evidence that we read and talk about in the Senate every day comes to the same conclusion. Congress too often has governed to avoid a crisis and failed to make the tough but necessary choices. Now here we are in another crisis looming, another leverage for us to try to achieve some sensible forward movement in terms of dealing with this runaway mandatory spending, and this is the raising of the debt limit. Given all the failure of previous efforts, the exhaustion of the private sector and congressional efforts, we are left with very few options to address our fiscal problems. Now we have a debt limit that is hitting us just days from now, November 3, and we won't be able to pay our bills unless we raise that debt limit. So what have we done, using this potential leverage, to try to achieve something of significance? We end up basically waving the white flag and saying: There is really nothing more we can do. We just have to simply raise this. We have to live with it. We have to continue spending more. Oh, and by the way, those caps that we put in terms of discretionary spending, we have to break those also. There is a legitimate argument for the need to provide additional funding for our Department of Defense and our national security. All you have to do is turn on the television and watch what is happening around the world to understand that America is in a weakened position and that national strength and defense strength are important for the future of our country. So I do think that was a legitimate issue to try to deal with. But to break the caps on an equal basis for more government spending on the discretionary side simply is something we shouldn't have to do. These so-called pay-fors that were put out there are the same old, same old. It is spend now and maybe we will adjust the program later and that will help cover the cost now. That hasn't worked before, and it won't work now. It is a gimmick, in most instances. It is something to sell the program, but it doesn't begin to address the problem of out-of-control debt. Along with that, Social Security disability, the trustees have said, is going to go broke in just a few months, and the benefits are going to have to be dramatically cut unless it is fixed. So do we come in with a real fix for the real future of the Social Security-related programs? No, we transfer money from the old age fund--actually, there is no money in that fund, we simply allocate the money that is owed to that fund to pay for solvency for the disability part of that fund. First of all, the thing we need to do is to be honest with the American people is to rename the Social Security trust fund to something else because the trust tells us there is money there to pay these benefits when there isn't. There are IOUs there, locked in a box or a safe somewhere. There are simply piled up pieces of paper saying: We have to pay you back at some point. Without addressing this--and we saw this last evening in the debate, those of us who watched. I was going back and forth, to be truthful, between the World Series and the debate, trying to catch both of those. But we saw a few Members stand up and tell the truth--tell the American people exactly what the situation is and why we need to do what we need to do. I commend those few who had the courage to go forward and tell the American people straight up that this is the problem and it must be solved. Anyway, speaking of this vote that is coming up--the vote that will allow more spending for Federal programs, many of which are not priority programs--the arrangement will simply allow us to take a pass on raising the debt limit. We are not going to use it as leverage to try and achieve anything meaningful in terms of entitlement--frankly, offsets that we have used before and we use over and over again. It is the same old shuffle game where we move pieces around, but it doesn't accomplish the purpose. All of that leads me to the conclusion that I cannot support this particular arrangement. There are reforms that must be put in place. We have to get to the point where we stop talking about these reforms and put them in place, where we make the political decisions that I believe will be supported back home. But even if they aren't supported by everyone back home, even if they are distorted by organizations that are funded by trying to scare seniors into believing Congress or the government is taking away their benefits--which is not the case; we are trying to save those benefits and we are trying to put our future generations, our children and grandchildren, in a better position so they won't be so saddled with that debt--there are many ways we can go forward. We have talked about balancing our budget. What entity in the world doesn't have to balance a budget at some point? What entity can keep borrowing money, saying on a piece of paper they will pay it later-- that they are going to spend it now and pay it later? What businessman or woman, what small, medium-sized, or large business, what family, what organization continues to deal with their fiscal issues the way the Federal Government deals with its fiscal issues and survives? We are careening toward a crisis. There are solutions for this, but it takes political will, and we have seen far too little of that political will. More importantly, it takes support from both branches of government, both the legislative and the executive, if we are going to accomplish this. Unfortunately, it appears now we are going to have to wait for yet another Presidency, yet another Congress, because we are kicking the can down the road. We are dumping this problem on the next group coming in. Boy, I feel for whoever winds up with the Presidency, whether it is Democrat or Republican, because of what they will inherit, given the damage that has been done over the past several years. Clearly, we need to address the gorilla in the room. Clearly, we need to stand up and be truthful with the American people, as some of our candidates were last evening. We must tell them exactly where we are, what we need to do, and then put the long-term reforms in place that will save these programs and put America in a solid fiscal situation. Getting a balanced budget amendment in place is something we have talked about. We have made an effort, and we need to continue that. Without the discipline of putting your hand on the Bible with your right hand up and swearing you will uphold the Constitution of the United States, which includes balancing our budget and not spending more than we take in, we will never get there. You have to put people under oath in order to achieve that. We have come close on a couple of occasions but, unfortunately, not close enough. Therefore, I am resorting to a program that has worked in the past regarding our national defense and our military and proposing that what we do is create another BRAC. BRAC was the Base Realignment Commission--a process we finally agreed to because there was no way we could touch or close anything, and we were just overrun with excess spending and excess bases in the United States. And that worked. It worked very well. All of us here know exactly or very closely what the parameters of that were. In this case, if we cannot summon the courage and the will to stand up and do this, as we are required to do under the oath of office we take, but which we avoid doing, we should turn to a commission that would provide a solution. It would be a budget reduction accountability commission. We can use the same BRAC title on the thing. Let's call it the budget reduction accountability commission, which would bring forward a plan to achieve the goal of bringing us back to fiscal health. We would put it before this Congress, both the Senate and the House, with a straight up-or-down majority vote--yea or nay. Here is the plan. You haven't been able to do it yourself, you have tried it, we appreciate your trying it, but it has come up short, whether it is the executive branch or the legislative branch. So the outside commission presents the path forward, and we say yes or no. Then the people back home all know exactly where we stand in terms of the future fiscal health of this country. They will know exactly where we stand in terms of how we want to leave our legacy to the next generation and future generations, how we want to treat our children and our grandchildren. Each Member will have to go home and not talk about procedures and not talk about bumping up to the crisis level of spending and how we have to do something to avoid a government shutdown or avoid chaos or avoid economic collapse. Every Member will go home and say they were presented with a plan to get us there, and they were either for it or against it. Nobody could say: Well, we had to do this, we had to do that, it was late, we bumped up against the ceiling, it was running out, and so forth. I am tired of hearing all of that. Mr. President, clearly solutions exist to deal with this problem. Clearly, we must summon the courage to set aside politics and do what we all know we need to do and suffer the consequences. I think the consequences will be applause and support because finally someone is standing up and saying we are going to fix this problem for the future of America and the future of our children and grandchildren; we are going to take that risk. If the groups outside are going to rally against this kind of thing and try to take us down, fine; we will go down doing the right thing. But I think we will be rewarded for doing so. I want to close this today with the same words I used to conclude my inaugural speech in 2011, where I said: I am standing here today to find solutions--to make the hard decisions--and to leave behind a country that is stronger and more fiscally secure for future generations. This crisis is not insurmountable. We can overcome it by doing what great generations before us have done--mustering our will to do what is right. If we do, I know America's greatest days are not behind us, but still lie ahead of us. Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I return to the floor this week for my 24th edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' I have been coming down every week that Congress has been in session during this cycle talking about waste, fraud, and abuse of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. This is the 24th edition, and today I want to highlight improper Medicare payments. We all know that Medicare is important to our older citizens, of which I am one. Tens of millions of Americans depend on Medicare for their health care coverage, and we all know that we have the responsibility here in this body to preserve these important health benefits for those who depend on them. Preserving these benefits is protecting Medicare from waste, fraud, and abuse. Unfortunately, throughout the history of Medicare, it has been plagued by improper payments, and it is shocking to hear the numbers. The Government Accountability Office has reported that improper Medicare payments totaled nearly $60 billion in 2014 alone, and over the last 10 years, there has been $336 billion of improper payments in the Medicare system. This figure does not even include improper payments for certain Medicare programs whose record keeping does not date back that far. Examples of improper Medicare payments include services that are not medically necessary, duplicative billing for services by providers, ineligible practice locations, and spending on services that actually never took place. Yes, actions that never took place have been billed to the government. It wasn't discovered until later that those reimbursements were improper, and it is rampant. This is taking money out of American people's pockets. It is also denying those who have Medicare the coverage that they are entitled to under the program. It is driving Medicare down a road to insolvency that we are going to have to deal with, and I think we should have been dealing with it over the past few years. Since we can't summon the political will--to my great distress--to recognize the fact that Medicare is careening toward insolvency at some point, which will result in significantly cutting benefits for current members receiving benefits under Medicare or require massive tax increases to cover the deficit, one of the areas we can deal with now is to at least address those issues where we know that abuse has taken place. This is the 24th time I have come down to the floor to talk about this issue, and I have this chart with a thermometer on it to demonstrate the spending that has taken place. We wanted to reach the goal of defining $100 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse. Well, we shot way past that. I mean, we just can't catch up with it. These are matters that have been accounted for by the Government Accountability Office. This is not something that Republicans are just making up or drawing from anecdotal items that appear in the paper or are raised on the talk shows. These are examples of what we have already documented. Every once in a while when I come down here, I could talk about the $60 billion, and we could add $60 billion to our climbing accountability of the total of waste, fraud, and abuse. But every fourth or fifth time I like to address something that is so egregious that it draws the public attention to say that we ought to look into this or to press their elected representatives to do something about this matter and say: Can you believe we are wasting money on something as frivolous as this? The Washington Post recently said in an editorial about improper Federal payments: ``Every misspent dollar lining an undeserving pocket is a dollar not available for those who need the help.'' Now, from time, as I have said, I try to bring up something that catches the public interest. We have talked about Federal grants that were used to prove that massaging of rabbits--using rabbits as an example--makes them feel better after a strenuous workout. I think most of us could have figured that out without having to spend some $300,000. I think it was even more than that--as a grant. Somebody came to the conclusion that this would be a worthy project and a good use of taxpayer dollars. That got a lot of attention. Today I will talk about improper payments that were made to ambulance suppliers. Medicare coverage allows ambulance transports when a patient's medical condition at the time of transport is such that any other means of transportation would endanger the patient's health. If something happens with the patient at home where the spouse decides to drive the patient to the hospital but then comes to the conclusion that, no, that could potentially endanger the person's health further and decides to call 911 instead for an ambulance and they decide they need to transport this person so he or she has medical care on the way to the hospital, then a person is eligible under Medicare for transportation by the ambulance if they can prove that is necessary. The transport has to be for a patient who has a condition that is covered under Medicare in order to get a ride home from the hospital. So the patient gets transferred both to the medical provider, usually the hospital, and is then transported back to his or her house if it is medically necessary. As a further requirement to qualify for the reimbursement, the provider who is providing the ambulance service has to meet specific qualifications in addition to what I just said. It can only be transportation that takes you to a hospital, a skilled nursing facility or a dialysis facility for certain patients, and then the ambulance can take them back home after they have received the care. Unfortunately, even with these guidelines, fraud is taking place and millions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted. A recent report by the inspector general from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare, found that Medicare made $207 million in questionable ambulance service payments during the first half of 2012. Shockingly, these payments include $30 million where Medicare paid for transportation even though the beneficiaries may not have received any Medicare services at either the time of pickup or dropoff or at the locations or anywhere else. Thus, we are talking about millions of taxpayer dollars that may have been spent on phantom transports. These improper charges were made and sent to Washington and the ambulance services were reimbursed. Can you imagine an ambulance with its lights flashing and going down the road on its way to the hospital while cars pull over to the side of the road, as we are required to do, because presumably the person in the ambulance is in danger and their health is at risk? They need to get them to the hospital or maybe the person needs dialysis and doesn't have means of transportation. No, these may be empty ambulances with their lights flashing--cars pulling over. Then they bill the government and are getting reimbursements for the trip to and from the hospital. There has been $207 million of documented improper billing for these services. Let me give one example. One of those services is a Pennsylvania company that fraudulently billed Medicare $3.6 million for transports, and the supplier recruited patients that did not require any transport. They made a deal with them. They said: Look, we are going to use your name to submit the billing for reimbursement. We know that you don't need the transportation for anything, but we need to document this so we can get our money back. So what we will do is give you part of the reimbursement. We will pay you some of the money that we get if you will allow us to use your name and identity--maybe your Social Security number or Medicare card number--and you will be in on the deal. So if you get a call from an inspector or somebody trying to verify this reimbursement, say: Yeah, I had to go to the hospital or dialysis, and yes, that was a legitimate charge. This company was finally identified after charging $3.6 million for transportation that did not meet Medicare coverage requirements. You might say: OK, that is one company charged with fraud. You read about that in the paper. The inspector general found that one out of every five suppliers had a questionable billing practice, and that is how it totals up to $207 million. Clearly, this is a problem that has to be addressed, and if we address this problem, we can save the taxpayer money or we can at least make sure that this money is going to cover the necessary medical treatment for those under Medicare. With 10,000 retirees entering the Medicare program every day, we need to slow down the movement toward insolvency. We need to deal with that here in Congress. We should have been dealing with this issue before. So by putting these proper safeguards in place, over $207 million in questionable ambulance services could be eliminated and taxpayers' dollars could be saved. This is a small addition to an ever-growing list of savings to the taxpayer if we can eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. I will bring up my chart. As I said before, we used to have a thermometer here to show this, how we were creeping up, and it went so high, it started going to the ceiling. We now have a total of $117,141,182,855 and change in terms of waste, fraud, and abuse. We will be back next week for the next installment of many more to come. Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, first, I want to commend my colleague, my partner on the Senate Intelligence Committee, for his recent remarks delivered here on the floor. It was our Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Clapper, who said that in all of his 50-plus years of serving in intelligence functions--first in the military and now as the Director of National Intelligence--he has never seen a world so troubled, he has never seen such a proliferation of threats, threats to our way of life, threats to our country, threats to our allies, threats to world order. And my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford, just laid out in specific detail the multitude of threats, the multitude of dysfunction and chaos that exists not just in the Middle East but throughout the world. I won't repeat any of it, but I thank him for bringing attention to the fact that we live in very uncertain times, times which require decisive leadership, and that leadership--over the years and over the centuries, world nations have pointed to the United States as the democratic leadership absolutely necessary to deal with these types of issues and provide directional leadership to our allies and to the world, as well as show strength to our adversaries that has restrained some of their actions. That is missing. There is a huge void being left by the lack of any kind of sensible policy--if there is a policy at all--coming out of this particular White House and from this President. This vacuum that has been created has allowed the opportunity for those who seek to do us harm, to do others harm, and those who seek to use power to achieve their means-- literally, a blank check and a free hand, knowing there is no order here in terms of addressing this in a successful way. So I thank my colleague for defining this on the floor, and I certainly want to support--and hopefully my colleagues will pay attention to this serious challenge that America faces with the lack of a coherent strategy and lack of decisive leadership that is coming to us from the White House. Wasteful Spending Mr. President, today we face something far less consequential but still consequential from the standpoint that it is a contributor to another major threat that Americans face. I have been engaged in everything from major programs--done in a bipartisan way, with support from the President, all of which have failed--to address this and bring us to the small, sometimes almost ridiculous and embarrassing, spending that has taken place here for those who are looking at it from bottom up instead of from top down. It is something I have tried to identify every week--now for 23 weeks-- called the waste of the week, hopefully it will provide the kind of embarrassment to my colleagues and knowledge of the fact that we simply cannot keep spending money that we do not have. These waste of the week sums are substantial, into the tens of billions of dollars. Some are there to show the American people or describe to the American people the fact that there is a significant amount of unneeded spending, of waste, fraud, and abuse that occurs on an almost daily basis throughout all of our agencies and throughout Federal spending. People are saying: Given the kind of debt crisis we are looking at, why are we spending hard-earned tax dollars to address this or that or whatever? Today I want to address one small but yet another example of unnecessary Federal spending, and it involves the role of robots replacing humans for certain functions. Those who have watched ``The Jetsons''--I don't really tune in, but my grandkids do--perhaps wish that they, too, could have a Rosie the maid, the robot that cooks, cleans, and tells jokes to the Jetson family. This obviously is a cartoon presentation, but it reflects a role for robots that provides us interesting entertainment or perhaps the robot from ``Lost in Space'' that played the electric guitar and exhibited human emotion or Michael Knight's trusted robot sidekick KITT on ``Knight Rider.'' This is a little bit beyond my generation, but I am told robots are now part of the entertainment scene. While this makes for good television and draws viewers, we all know robots can never replace the care of a human being, the care of a parent, the efforts of a teacher, those who are reaching out to provide support and encouragement for young people. Yet the National Science Foundation is currently spending $440,855 trying to do that with robots. The agency recently awarded a taxpayer-funded grant to develop the use of ``autonomous, personalized social robots'' in the classroom. The first thing that came to my mind was what in the world does a personalized social robot look like and how do you personalize a robot to provide social interaction with children? The purpose of this grant, which began last month and continues until August 2017, is to create robots that can tell stories to children. This might be a cute thing to do. I don't know. Is this something the Federal Government, at a time when we are in the middle of deficit spending, evermore borrowing, should ask the taxpayer to send out their hard-earned tax dollars for--this kind of thing? If private industry wants to do this and can sell the product to schools, more power to them, but why do we have to go to the Federal Government to do a test case to see if this works? We know we do basic research here. We support that through NIH and the National Science Foundation. This is not basic research. I am questioning this. Let me quote from the grant description. This will ``offer unique opportunities of guided, personalized and controlled social interaction, whatever that means, during the delivery of a desired curriculum. They can play, learn and engage with children in the real world--physically, socially, and emotively.'' Maybe the effort here is to build a robot that can physically, socially, and emotively connect with children. That might work on ``The Jetsons.'' That might work on television. I can't believe how that works in real life. What parent wants a preschooler to be read to by a so-called social robot instead of a teacher or a parent? And why are we spending taxpayer dollars on reading robots? Actual human teachers provide what robots cannot. They relate to our children. They understand their individual needs, and they tailor their instruction to bring out the very best in our children and on a personalized basis. I don't think a robot can adjust emotively and socially to different children in the classroom. Yet obviously the teacher is trained to do that. Even the most advanced robot can't sense when a child is going through a rough time or provide the right touch to ensure a child's learning. Should the Federal Government, which is over $18 trillion in debt, be spending any money, let alone $440,000, on this research? Is this something the private sector could be conducting instead? Certainly, if that is what the goal is. My purpose throughout the Waste of the Week Initiative is to drive home the point that the Federal Government should be stewarding taxpayers' dollars for essential functions and in a way that truly helps people. Let me be clear. I am not criticizing all Federal research spending or the National Science Foundation. The government does play an important role, as I have said, in promoting basic science research that cannot be done elsewhere, but there are many private companies that offer products that use technology to help children learn. Is it the role of the government to also perform this sort of research? Just because something is interesting to do doesn't mean it rises to the level of priority, particularly at a time when we are continuing to spend more money and go deeper into debt each and every day. Families and small businesses have to prioritize all the time. The Federal Government needs to do the same. So let's pull the plug or take out the battery and short circuit this funding for this grant. Today I am marking more money on our ever-increasing amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. We are adding $440,855 to the nearly $117 billion that over the last 22 weeks we have brought to this floor. 60th Anniversary of Crispus Attucks Championship Mr. President, while I am here, let me switch and for a couple of minutes speak to something that I think speaks well of our State; that is, celebrating an important anniversary. In Indiana, few things better personify the Hoosier spirit of hard work and overcoming adversity, persistence, and sportsmanship more than high school basketball. It is rabid in our State, and it always has been. It defines our State. Every year the high school basketball season culminates in February and March with what we call Hoosier Hysteria--the postseason tournament. Half a century ago, the height of Hoosier Hysteria was before school consolidation and before the advent of class basketball. At that time we had one single athletic class and crowned one high school basketball team State champion each year. For the final game of the tournament, fans would fill Butler University's historic Hinkle Fieldhouse to standing-room-only capacity. Throughout those weeks of tournament, as the small, medium, and large-sized schools worked their way through the system to that championship game, it captured the hearts and minds of Hoosiers in a way that nothing else does. This phenomena was immortalized by the award-winning 1986 movie ``Hoosiers''--one of my personal favorites--and based on an improbable but true story. Back in the 1950s, hundreds of small high schools existed across our small State, but no small school had ever won the basketball State championship. In 1954, Mylan High School--a rural school with an enrollment of only 161 students in all four grades-- faced a much larger school, Muncie Central High School, whose enrollment was 2,200 students in the State championship game. The Mylan Indians defeated the Muncie Central Bearcats to win the State title. It has been immortalized through the movie ``Hoosiers,'' which any Hoosier, and hopefully people outside the State, watched more than once. I watch it on a regular basis. It is a great story. Even today, Mylan's incredible accomplishment is widely admired and discussed by Hoosier basketball fans. Indiana high school basketball in this era produced not only this ``David and Goliath'' episode but also another truly inspirational team. This is their 60th anniversary. En route to winning the 1954 State championship, Milan defeated the Crispus Attucks Tigers in the semi-State. That is no small accomplishment. That was a large school with an exceptional team. At that time, Crispus Attucks was an all-Black high school in Indianapolis. Despite their loss to Milan in 1954, the Tigers were back the next year. On March 19, 1955--60 years ago--Crispus Attucks won the State title by defeating Gary Roosevelt High School 97 to 74 in that championship game. The next year Crispus Attucks went undefeated, riding a 45-winning streak to State title. The Tigers finished the 1950s with a third championship in 1959. Crispus Attucks High School's 1955 State title was one of several firsts. Not only were they the first team from Indianapolis to win the State title, they were the first African-American school in the Nation to win an open State tournament. Through the perseverance and leadership of their coach, Ray Crowe, the players learned not just the game of basketball but also valuable lessons about discipline, patience, and perseverance. These lessons resulted in back-to-back State titles, as I have said. On the court, the Crispus Attucks teams of the mid-1950s were led by a future professional all-star, champion, and Hall of Famer named Oscar Robertson. Oscar Robertson said of those Crispus Attucks teams: ``The way we played and won, we did it with a lot of class.'' The Tigers' success on the basketball court helped tear down many lingering racial barriers of that time. This team inspired the State of Indiana with their hard work, graciousness, and sportsmanship. Today I join my fellow Hoosiers in marking the 60th anniversary of this milestone and honoring this team of champions. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, as many of my colleagues know, I have been coming to the floor for 22 weeks now--every time the Senate has been in session during this cycle--to address another waste of the week, and that is what I am doing here this afternoon. The amount of money we would be able to save that has been designated as waste, fraud, and abuse has an estimated total of nearly $116 billion, and though people continue to say we can't cut a dime because every dime of taxpayer money is used for an essential function, that is simply not true. While we have not been able to come forward with what I believe is absolutely necessary to stop this continued deficit spending and plunge into debt--the larger issues that we will be dealing with later in this session--we can at least hopefully stand together and support those documented spending waste, fraud, and abuse issues that have been presented to us by the various nonpartisan agencies that audit and look at how we control our spending. Today I will add some more money to that amount by discussing an agency called the National Technical Information Service, NTIS. This is an agency within the Department of Commerce. It was created during the Truman administration to keep all the reports produced by the Federal Government in a central location and make them available to the American public through sale. The idea here was that various research papers, and other studies which were conducted by various agencies in the government, would be centrally located in one place and that the American people would have access to that research and information. They had to pay for the receipt of that, and it was a modest pay-for, but the money they paid for that was to be used to pay for the administrative costs of storing this information and providing it and making it available for people. Frankly, it was a good idea. It was the only way we could truly access that. It had important information that the government could access as well. Times have changed. Obviously, the way we store information and the way we make information available to people is entirely different than it was back during the Truman administration some 70 years ago. Today the American people access and conduct research using a variety of tools and methods, largely online and largely for free. The abundance of free information has obviously greatly decreased the need for the NTIS. In fact, last year, the Government Accountability Office, GAO, found that three-quarters of the documents added to the NTIS collection in the past 20 years can be found elsewhere, and 95 percent of it can be found for free by using a basic search on Google. When testifying before the Senate, the Government Accountability Office said ``the legislation that established NTIS requires it to be financially self-sustaining to the fullest extent feasible. However, the increasing availability of the information that NTIS collects and disseminates--primarily through the Web--has called the service's basic statutory function into question.'' Well, that is a mild way of saying: Look, this is an outdated, antiquated way of providing benefits to the American people to get these scientific papers and research. They no longer have to go through NTIS to get this information. It is available for free. The irony here is that if you do dial up NTIS on their Web site, a large message comes up--first thing on the screen--saying ``Before purchasing from NTIS, you may want to check for free access from'' and then they list those Web sites. NTIS says you can use their Web site to get this information for free. They list the U.S. Government Publishing Office's Digital System Web site, the Federal Government Internet portal, usa.gov, or a Web search conducted by a commercial search firm, such as Google. In fact, one of my colleagues, who retired from the Senate just last year, actually introduced a bill called Just Google It Act, a clear indication that we no longer need this agency and it no longer serves its function. That has been introduced again by Senator Kirk this year, and I have cosponsored it. This is an agency that is saying: Don't use us anymore. You can get it for free, and we will even show you how to get it for free. Why are we covering the cost of NTIS at a rate of $880 million over 10 years when that savings could be applied to reducing our deficit, giving money back, and not requiring that amount of money to come from taxpayers--or better used for another essential purpose of the Federal Government. What we are putting up and adding to our ``Waste of the Week'' this week is another $880 million, bringing our total to nearly $117 billion of savings that has been declared through nonpartisan government agencies that oversee our spending as waste, fraud, and abuse. So Members cannot come down here and simply say: Where are we going to get the money to cover this or do that? They can't come down here and say: It is impossible to cut any more spending. We have done all that we can do, and now we need more revenue. That is simply not the case. Each week I will continue to bring up examples that are documented by nonpartisan agencies to be totally unnecessary. This is a small step in the direction of trying to deal with a much larger problem. That much larger problem is something I have been dealing with since I came back to the Senate after the election of 2010, and I am going to continue to talk about it even though it is not foremost on many people's minds right now, given all of the dysfunction and other problems we are dealing with. We must not ignore the fact that we are continuing to act on a deficit-spending basis, meaning we spend more than we take in each year, and we have to borrow the money to cover the difference. Our national debt has moved to a staggering level of nearly $19 trillion, and almost $9 trillion of that amount accumulated in less than a decade. It was more than 200 years before we first reached the $1 trillion mark. We have been on a spending binge ever since then, and it has to stop or we will pay a huge price. The debt collector will be at the door. We need to make a major effort, and hopefully we will make an effort this year. I have already announced that I will not support any spending effort to continue funding for this government unless we put some policy changes in to start us down the path to fiscal responsibility. We are working hard on that, and I will outline a number of ways in which we can do that. In the meantime, I am saying: If you can't go big, let's at least start small. Let's at least take those things that we already know have been declared waste, fraud, and abuse by nonpartisan agencies. At least we are taking steps in the right direction. Mr. President, with that, I yield back my time. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, since February I have been coming to the Senate floor every week to talk about the waste of the week. Back in 2010, when I made the decision to answer a call to run for the Senate again, one of the primary reasons for my decision to go forward was my alarm over the plunge into debt and rising deficit that was taking place. At the time, the national debt of this country was a little over $10 trillion. It is alarming to note that as I stand here 5 years later, our debt has nearly doubled. It's over $18 trillion in just the 5 years I have been here. There were alarm bells ringing in 2010, and those alarm bells were saying that we cannot stay on this course, that it is going to come back to haunt us someday, that it will affect our economy, that it will affect our credit rating. Someday the bill collector will be at the door of the taxpayer saying: You have to pay up big time or we are going to go into default. What took place going forward from that was a series of efforts--some of them very equally bipartisan by both Republicans and Democrats who were alarmed at where we were and wishing to come together to persuade the President to work with us and put us on a path toward fiscal responsibility. That work involved any number of proposals and iterations. We all remember the so-called Gang of 6, the Committee of 12, the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, and various others who had plans. It was the dominating issue of our time during the first couple of years of my return here in 2011 and 2012. After the election of 2012, when the President was reelected, at his own initiative he reached out to a few Republicans--I was one of them-- and said: I am willing to sit down and work together to deal with this. This is a major issue affecting the future of our country, affecting our economy. I was encouraged that after the election and when no longer seeking any further office, the President would be willing to seriously work with us. We did serious work for several months. The President's top three appointees--the head of the Office of Management and Budget, his Chief of Staff, and his political director--met with eight of us on a regular basis, both here in the Capitol and at the White House. We had agreed we would not have any public meetings. We would not have staff. It would just be Members and the President's designated individuals. We did not broadcast what we were doing because we knew it would become public and then political and therefore perhaps end up with the same fate all the other efforts had resulted in. We got to the end of that, and in the end, even though we made an extraordinary number of concessions to the President, even though we essentially had put together a package of items he himself had suggested in his budget plans that we could accomplish in slowing down the growth of government, the spending, and the deficits every year that were rolling out and plunging us into debt, we came up short. At that point, it became very clear to me that we were not going to be able to achieve a long-term plan for putting us on the road to good fiscal health. So I thought: OK, I am hearing from a lot of colleagues here in the Senate but also from other outside sources saying that under sequester we just can't cut any more. We need more revenue to expand necessary spending projects in government. And while some essential functions that only government can do might need that type of attention, there is a range of things that you really have to question why they are on the books in the first place. A number of my colleagues--particularly former Senator Coburn--took this floor often--as I did, as well as others--to point out areas where not the Republican Party had decided, where not individuals representing our party had decided, but where nonpartisan agencies of the government--the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget at the White House--had investigated and produced examples of spending that were either waste, fraud, or abuse, and had no legitimate qualification to stay on the books. So we started looking into this. Thanks to Senator Coburn and others, we have come up with a number of things we could easily take off the books, easily use to pay for essential things, easily use to reduce our deficit spending, keep from going into debt, return money to the taxpayers, or however we wanted to do it. So we started to accumulate that, and our goal was to reach $100 billion to simply defy the myth going around that there is not a penny we can cut and that we have done all we can do. So over the 20-some times I have been on this floor, we have come up with a number of issues which could save the taxpayer money and certainly need to be addressed. Our current total is now well over $100 billion, and today we are adding $10.5 billion to our $100 billion total. We are now at $116 billion. I said we would stop at $100 billion, but the examples keep rolling in, and so we are going to keep going every week. As long as this cycle of the Senate is in session, I will come to the floor and label yet another example of waste. Last month, when I was home in Indiana, coming down from northwest Indiana to our capital city of Indianapolis on Interstate 65 for the umpteenth time--as I drive from north to south or south to north on that road, I pass through wind farms of literally thousands of windmills. Interestingly enough, and as I observed even this time, many of them are not turning. There are windmills--a few of them turning-- driven by the wind, but most of them are not turning. We have thousands of these, and it looks as if fewer than 100 or a comparable number are operating, and so I am wondering why and whether the taxpayer is getting a good deal on this. I want to give a little bit of history of how all this came to be put in place. Back in the early 1990s--in fact, in 1992--the Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which included the renewable electricity production tax credit, called the PTC. The point was that as we looked at alternative ways to produce electricity to reduce our dependence on oil and fossil fuels, there was a tax credit created for those using windmills to create power. It was designed to be claimed if the wind farm was actually making the power. Earlier I said that many times I have come down that road and I have seen windmills that were idle. But the blades had to be turning and the electricity had to be being produced in order to receive that tax credit. At the time, because I thought we were overly dependent on Middle Eastern oil and that it was creating issues for us geopolitically and militarily and otherwise, I thought it would be good to have a stimulus here to support the creation of wind energy, to give us the ability to stand on our own and have less dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The main reason I supported it is because it was to start the process and incentivize diverse energy sources to get them off the ground. It was going to be a short-term boost to help these new energy sources become competitive. The original credit was designed under the law to last only 5\1/2\ years and then there would no longer be this credit. Well, like any other credit, subsidy, or anything else passed here which provides taxpayer support for production of something, it never expires. Few if any of them expire on the expiration date. So once again, once you get a law on the books, once you get a credit on the books, once you get a subsidy on the books, you can't get it off. Since the time the original bill passed, the wind industry and its supporters have repeatedly come to Congress and said: Just give us a few more years and then wind will be competitive, without taxpayer subsidies. As a result, this 5\1/2\-year program, which started in 1992, has been extended multiple times. In 2013, nearly two decades after the time the subsidies expired, Congress changed the rules so the facilities only have to begin construction before the expiration date to automatically qualify for a future 10-year subsidy, even before those windmills become operational. So if someone is just in the business of building windmills, as some of our major companies are, they are going to qualify for the subsidy. They are going to get the tax credit--whether or not the windmills are needed. They can just pour some concrete and start the building process, and they are going to qualify for the credit. The result is that more and more wind facilities are being constructed irrespective of the needs of the electricity grid or market demand. Just last year, Warren Buffett, who is a smart investor, noted that wind isn't profitable without subsidies. He said: For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit. So regardless of the demand, regardless of whether or not those windmills need to be turning and generating electricity, regardless of whether or not that electricity can be put into the grid--and, by the way, the cost of wind energy is three to four times the cost of fossil fuel energy--regardless of any of that, the tax credit is there. In 2014 Congress retroactively extended the wind tax credit at the end of the year, and the general assumption here in Congress is that the production tax credit will once again be extended at the end of this year. That is probably going to happen. According to an estimate from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, if we continue and extend this tax credit, this will add another $10.5 billion to our budget. Clearly, it is way past time to end this seemingly never-ending subsidy. It is time to give the hardworking taxpayers savings, and it is time to stop wasteful spending. If we can prevent Congress from just automatically extending this way beyond the original 5\1/2\ years, decades beyond, we can save the taxpayers $10.5 billion. So today I am adding to this chart and picture here $10.5 billion, which now totals $116 billion-plus in terms of money that falls under the category of waste, fraud, and abuse. My colleagues cannot come down to this floor and say we can't cut a penny more of any program and defend the numerous--now well more than 20--examples of what have been defined as waste, fraud, and abuse--not by me, not by the Republican Party, but by nonpartisan agencies of the Federal Government. There it is. Stay tuned for next week's ``Waste of the Week.'' I yield the floor.

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 Pope Francis will be making a historic visit to Washington, DC, to address those of us in Congress and millions of Americans across the United States. While I am not a Catholic, one of the tenets of the Catholic Church that I have long respected is adherence and devotion to the sanctity of life. We have an issue before us regarding the very essence of what life is and how life is treated in this country. So my colleagues who don't agree with the legislation before us and who don't even want us to have a debate on this are trying to, through a procedural motion, stop us from moving forward to discuss an issue that ought to be debated before the American people and certainly before this body. It is no secret now that the science has proven that pain can be experienced by an unborn child in the womb. And the taking of that life--many of us believe that life begins at conception, but even if you don't adhere to that, it is now a fact, a pure fact, that it is a viable life at the age of 20 weeks and that life can experience pain. Surgery can be provided for that life. Anesthesia is given to that unborn child in the womb to prevent it from experiencing the pain that may result from surgery that is trying to correct perhaps an abnormality or some condition in the womb and give that child an opportunity to be a healthier baby and to live out the privilege of living. I have spoken a number of times on this floor about the sanctity of life and how we as elected representatives and the American people-- people of conscience and conviction--need to protect the sanctity of life. In doing so, it means that we have to discuss the issue of abortion. This is not a pleasant or comfortable issue to debate on the Senate floor, but we are not elected to come here to just discuss and debate pleasant issues; we are here to face difficult and often emotional issues, to face it honestly, to face it openly, and to cast our votes either for or against. There are few, if any, issues that I believe are potentially more divisive and emotional than the issue of abortion because it goes to the heart of the meaning of life itself. It is about protecting those who cannot protect themselves. The story of America is a history of inclusion and an impulse to protect and uplift those who have been on the margins of society, and no human being is more on the margin of society than an unborn child who is seen not as a human life but is seen as something that can be dissected, can be torn apart, can be harvested, and the organs can be sold for research. That is not the issue we will be debating in this vote coming up, but it has been debated and it has been raised--I have been on the floor listening to a number of these speeches that raised it a number of times--that somehow Republicans are denying women health care coverage because we are not wanting to fund an organization, Planned Parenthood, that uses some of the most brutal and inhumane efforts to harvest from unborn children organs to sale for the use of research. We had that debate and we had that vote. Unfortunately, we came up short on that vote. That, in and of itself, is an issue that we must continue to debate and continue to deal with, but the issue before us now is the ability to debate, discuss, vote, and hopefully pass legislation that is based on science--not on theory, not on ideology but based on science. We now know that a child growing in the womb of its mother at the age of 20 weeks can experience pain, and we also now know that under the procedures that are used by Planned Parenthood, those children are harvested--they are dissected, harvested, some of their organs are carefully preserved and sold. It is almost beyond comprehension that a nation that has reached out to be inclusive to the most vulnerable, that at this point in life for a child views it as nothing more than something to be harvested. The descriptions of how Planned Parenthood describes the cold, calculating, numerical profit that might occur from the sale of certain organs and the techniques used to go into the womb to make sure that certain organs are preserved while others are crushed, just goes beyond comprehension. Yet to stand on the floor and simply say Republicans are taking away women's health--no, we aren't. We are simply saying we don't want the taxpayers to fund an organization that practices these methods, that takes the lives of children, and that ignores the pain that is incurred in doing so. We want to transfer that money to women's health organizations--about five times as many in my State as there are Planned Parenthood organizations--that will provide for every aspect of women's health care except for abortion. The question before us on that vote was: Should the taxpayer fund something of this nature? And, unfortunately, we came up short because our colleagues simply would not support us in the effort to do so. This goes to the soul of the Nation. This goes to who we are. This goes to a country which has been compassionate and reached out to those on the margin but now turns its back on those who are the most vulnerable. It is not just a matter of politics. It is not, as has been said on the floor, that Republicans want to roll back important health care coverage for mothers, deny women's health and access to health care. It is not a manufactured crisis, a dangerous game we are playing. How can you describe as a dangerous game the provision before us on the Senate floor that addresses the issue of the excruciating pain a child feels, which we now know is scientifically documented and proved in the taking of that life, for the harvesting of that life's organs? How can you describe that as a dangerous game? If we treat this with such total irrelevance, in terms of what is happening here, it says something about our country. I deeply regret our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are even denying us the opportunity to go forward. We are on a procedural motion here where they can kill the debate. They can prevent us from doing what the American people have sent us here to do--to deal with tough issues, state our positions, and let our yes be yes and our no be no. Once again, we are in a situation now where even that procedure to get to that point is being denied. I regret we are here. I have noticed the discussions on the floor have been quite somber. The statements made are made softly. That doesn't mask the kind of emotion and the kind of passion that many of us feel. What it shows is grief. What it shows is the grief over a practice conducted in this advanced Nation of ours. It is a grief over the fact we are taking hundreds of thousands and have taken millions of lives of unborn children. It shows a special emotion and a special grief over the fact that we know those children are experiencing the pain of dismemberment--of arms and legs being ripped apart, of organs being harvested for sale. So without the shouting, without the accusations, it is a sincere belief and grief over what is happening in this country. As has been stated by my colleagues, only seven other countries in the world allow this kind of practice. It is shameful that one of those countries is the United States of America. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, there has been a lot of talk around here about the Iran deal: It is over. We made our best effort. We have fully exposed exactly what is in this agreement. We had hours and hours, days and days, and weeks and weeks of debates over this. It has been on our plate ever since the beginning of the negotiations. Some of us started to express alarm and concern about the direction of those negotiations and what was potentially being given away, but we weren't sure until, fortunately, thanks to the Corker bill, Congress had a chance to weigh in and the administration was required to give us the ability to look at every word of this agreement, the annexes and everything attached to it. Sometime later on, we found out there were two secret side agreements which we weren't able to see, and that alone, in my opinion, should have been enough to vote against this agreement. How can one enter into any kind of a contractual relationship with a nation or a car dealer if the person you are negotiating with says: Well, there are a couple of secret matters over here that you can't have access to, but don't worry--it really won't mess things up. No one is going to sign an agreement like that except the President of the United States and apparently the Secretary of State. We made a valiant effort to defeat this. Many of us poured our heart and soul into this not just for days, not just for weeks, not just for months, but for years. And, yes, the American people have learned a lot more about this, a lot more than what has been marketed by the White House in terms of how good this is for the future of America, our national security, and the future of the world. In many ways, I think we have exposed--and I have listed at least 10--major issues that we conceded. There were goals that we wanted to achieve going into the negotiations, and we conceded on every single point. In the interest of time, I will not go back over that. All I am here to do is to say that I guess I am not ready to give up. Earlier on the floor, I quoted Yogi Berra: ``It ain't over till it's over.'' Everybody said it is over, but the consequences of this are not over and the results of this are not over. We will be living this out for the duration of this agreement, and at the end of this agreement, Iran will have completed exactly the goal that it is trying to reach--in fact, they may complete it much earlier than that--and that is the legitimatization of their possession of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon capability. This is a country that says: We only need to develop this for medical isotopes; to fuel a reactor that is going to produce electricity for our people--despite all the Sun, wind, and the unlimited amount of oil and gas underneath their soil which could provide that much cheaper than any other form. So there is no justification for their going forward except to achieve that one goal which we know they have worked on for years. We know they have lied in terms of organizations that have been sanctioning this. And now we have simply given them a pathway to achieving this and a legitimatization of their achievement of this. Some say that all the consequences will be good because Iran will abide by every part of this agreement and throughout this process there is going to be a major change in Iran--the theocracy will be overthrown, and they will become a responsible neighbor and nation--and this is the pathway to achieving that--that is the vision of the President. That is the dream. Frankly, I hope my assessment of this is wrong. For the sake of the future of the United States, for the sake of the future of Israel, and for the sake of the future of the world, I hope I am wrong. But there is nothing in this agreement and there is nothing that has been said or done by the Iranian regime that would give us any indication--any hint at all--of any kind of change in their behavior. In fact, as they deride our agreement, our negotiators, and embarrass our President day after day after day with ``Death to America'' and ``Extinction of Israel.'' What will be the consequences? As I said, I discussed at length what I think is wrong with this bill. I won't go over that again today. It is already in the Record. But there will be consequences that I don't think we have fully discussed, and I wish to lay out some of those. For Iran, they will have liberation from all sanctions and will be back in business. They will become rich. They will become rich with the release of hundreds of billions of dollars, and they will be using that for any number of purposes. Their oil industry is dominated by the Republican Guards. This is not Exxon Mobil, not Occidental Petroleum, it is not any of our international oil companies; this is the Republican Guards. A military organization that dominates that oil industry. They will be free to exploit one of the largest oil reserves in the world. Their national income will spike. State coffers will fill. And Iran's terrorist adventures and proxy wars will be well funded. We all know about Iran's ambitions for dominance throughout the Middle East and to be recognized as a world nuclear power. They will have all the more money now to be able to feed their proxies fighting for them in Syria, in Yemen, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in a number of places throughout the Middle East, and their terrorist threats resonate across the globe. After nearly a decade of international efforts to force Iran to give up on this dangerous and illegal nuclear activity, Iran now has a green light--a pathway built for them by U.S. concessions in this agreement-- to reach nuclear weapons capability. We have entirely conceded to Iran the right to create fissile material that can only have one use: nuclear weapons. Now let's look at the larger question: the region, and the strategic impact of this on the region. We haven't really had a great deal of discussion on the strategic consequences. I discussed it briefly during some of my time earlier this week and last week, but the Iranian continuing revolution and regional misbehavior will affect the Middle East and will affect the world. It is dangerous and it is irresponsible. Former Secretaries of State Kissinger and Schultz--well regarded for their experience and well recognized as global experts, international experts--discussed this broader strategic point in an important joint article that was released last April. Former Secretaries Kissinger and Schultz explained that the then-outlined deal was so weak that Iran would inevitably expand its power, Sunni States will inevitably proliferate in their response, and the United States will get dragged into Middle East wars--except, this time, the wars may be nuclear. Let me quote from their statement. The Secretaries explained: Previous thinking on nuclear strategy assumed the existence of stable state actors. . . . Iran is anything but stable. These are wise words from wise people who have had a lifetime of experience. Unfortunately, their views seem to have been largely ignored, if not completely ignored, by this administration, because it didn't fit their purpose to complete a deal, no matter what. No matter what we had to give up, they wanted to complete this deal. In fact, the State Department's spokesman was quoted as disparaging the two Secretaries of State, Kissinger and Schultz, stating that their words were just ``big words and big thoughts'' and that the two were ``not living in the real world.'' Not living in the real world. I think that statement applies much more to the President and the Secretary of State than it does to former Secretaries of State Kissinger and Schultz. Let's look at proliferation. Some of us have discussed the obvious proliferation dangers flowing from an agreement that puts Iran on the path of nuclear weapons. Despite the reluctant words of acquiescence that have been wrung out of others in the region, who can possibly argue that Iran now will never be permitted to develop these nuclear weapons technologies without a response from others. If I were the King of Saudi Arabia, if I were the Prime Minister or the President of any major country in the Middle East, I am not going to stand by and watch Iran achieve nuclear dominance. They are going to take their own action. We have now basically shredded the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Let's look at Syria and the impact on Syria. America's appalling lack of effective response to the open wound that is Syria is one example of the paralysis born out of the single-minded obsession accommodating the Iranian regime. Iran is the principal prop for the brutal Syrian regime. Assad could not have remained in power these past 4 years of catastrophic disintegration of his country without Iran's support. I fear our negotiations with Iran have taken on such an overwhelming priority with an administration obsessed with legacy that it helped freeze us into inaction on Syria. The administration claims the nuclear negotiations were about Iran's nuclear misbehavior only and were never intended to address the rest of its regional brutality. That is true in some cases, but careful reading of the annexes and careful reading of the agreement--by doing so, we now know the administration went well beyond just discussing the nuclear capability issue. It did not address the hostages that were being held by the Iranian regime--the Americans. It did not address the ballistic missile development and proliferation. Those are two issues which had nothing to do with the agreement itself, according to the administration. Negotiations between the Ayatollahs and the Great Satan--that is us, according to the Ayatollah--could not happen in a vacuum. Subjects not addressed by the negotiations nevertheless are affected by them, and our stupefying passivity on Syria proves the case. Let's look at Russia. Our problems with Russia have only grown and multiplied as we tried to ignore Russian misbehavior during our joint negotiations with Iran. But worse, our obsession with getting a deal has unleashed a Russia-Iran axis. Their new cooperation creates yet another threat to American interests. Just days after concluding this deal, the commander of Iran's elite Quds Force, General Suleimani, flew to Moscow--which he was sanctioned by the U.N. not to do, but he did anyway--reportedly to convince the Russians to step in to help shore up the crumbling Assad regime in Syria. It worked. The Russians are now in Syria in force, building barracks and bringing in trainers, tanks, and other heavy weapons. Iran and Russia together are Assad's best friends--maybe his savior. By ignoring Syria, empowering and enriching Iran, and making Putin's Russia an actual negotiating partner, we have created the perfect storm. This is the price of dealing with the devil. Lastly, let me speak about Israel because any discussion of consequences must return to what should be the core issue: the consequences for our only and best friend in the Middle East, Israel-- the only democratic ally in the region. We cannot ignore the major risks that will follow through with the often-repeated threats of obliterating the State of Israel--a threat repeated by the Supreme Leader in no uncertain terms just this week. Is this hyperbole or posturing as the administration claims? The Israelis don't think so, and I don't think so. We have to assume that an extremist, violent state such as Iran, after decades of creating, arming, and guiding terrorist organizations devoted to Israel's destruction, will continue their assault one day, now we know, with nuclear weapons. One day, others may look back through the smoke and ashes created by this Iran deal and wonder how we could ever have been so blind. How could we ever have conceded to an agreement that violated every goal that the previous three Presidents and current President said we must not concede on--that is, it is totally unacceptable for Iran to have possession of nuclear weapons capability. Two Democratic Presidents, two Republican Presidents, over three decades of time, have made that statement. It was the goal of the United States to do everything in its capability to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, and we just signed an agreement that gave them the pathway to that nuclear weapon. Does it possibly delay their achievement of that? Yes. But does it reach the goal of preventing them from having it? No. So after all the shouting and all the efforts and all the debate and all the examination of the agreements, we are told to give up. It is a done deal. The President used his ``Executive authority'' to deem this an agreement and not a treaty, which is a fallacy in itself. But now we are told we have to give it up. We have to move on. We have other things to do. You made your best effort. We won, you lost. No, America lost. America lost, and we will be paying a price year after year after year as we watch the flow of money into Iran, the flow of oil out of Iran and money in return, supporting proxy wars throughout the Middle East, igniting a nuclear arms race in that tinder box of the region. We will regret the day--we will regret the day--the announcement was made that we have signed a deal with Iran. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I came to the floor having spoken at great length last week outlining why I thought this agreement was something that ought to be fully debated and fully understood not only by Members of the Senate but by the American people. We had that debate. We were promised from the very beginning and it was enacted into law that Congress would be provided with all materials talked about and agreed upon before we had a vote to determine whether we would support approval or disapproval of this. We had a vote Thursday, which was procedural, to give us the opportunity to register our yes and no, our yea and nay. The American people deserve to know on the record where we stand on this. There have been arguments made on both sides of this issue. Personally, I think a close examination of this raises serious questions--so serious that it is not something someone can come to the floor and simply say: Well, that is over, that is done, and let's move on. There are more important things ahead. It is hard for me to understand what is more important than getting this right. I think the issues I laid out last week on Thursday before the vote are issues that still need consideration. But the real reason we are back here-- thank you, Senator McConnell, for giving us another opportunity--is because we fell two votes short of the opportunity to even take a vote. We took a vote on a procedural measure--a measure which, as we all know, you can go home and hide behind. I don't understand why my 42 Democratic colleagues were afraid to put their names on a yes-or-no vote proposition so that everyone knows exactly where we stand and nobody can go home and make an excuse as to why they are for or why they are against it. It goes all the way back to the Scriptures: Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. That has always been what I have believed to be the right way here in the United States Senate as well as the United States Congress so that when we go home, the people we represent know exactly where we stand. I think what we are witnessing today in terms of the debates that will be taking place tomorrow in terms of the Presidential nomination process is the public partly frustrated--frustrated in many ways, but I think part is the fact that there is a lot of procedural gobbledygook out there that elected Members can hide behind and not have a direct clarification of exactly where they stand on any particular issue. The purpose for delay was to hopefully give our Members the opportunity to go home and listen to their constituents about how they feel about this, and perhaps we could have had two of the minority group who voted to block us from going forward--we won the majority vote 58 to 42 on a bipartisan basis, including four Democrats, all of whom have significant foreign policy experience, some having more than the rest of us. So it was a bipartisan effort to move to this process, and we came up two short. We were hoping that over the weekend--I was assuming that many of my colleagues were receiving the same kinds of calls and input from their constituents as I was. Mine was running 10 to 1 against this agreement. The more we disclosed from this agreement, the more the American people learned about this agreement, the more concerned they were, and hopefully they expressed those concerns to their Senators who went home over the weekend having blocked us from this vote. At the very least, we are pleading that we could have a vote so that our yes is yes and our no is no, so that we reach the threshold by which we will buy a little bit of time to hopefully expose more of this very flawed and I think fatally flawed agreement, more time for the American people to express their wishes. We are not talking about a normal process of moving legislation through the Senate; we are talking about a process, a negotiation that will have enormous consequences for the future, enormous impact on the national safety of this country, enormous impact on the world in terms of a rogue nation now having the pathway to development of a nuclear weapons capability and weapons, unimpeded after this period of time expires. The very first thing people ought to understand is that coming down to the floor--or listening to the President of the United States say that this prevents Iran from having nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capability is false. It is absolutely wrong. This provides a pathway for them to get it. It just defers, but it legitimizes their becoming a nuclear-armed nation. This rogue nation, which is seething terrorism throughout the Middle East and cries ``Death to America'' and extinction to Israel, will have the wealth because of the release of well over $100 billion, will have the capabilities because even under this agreement their nuclear processing research and development goes forward--with our assistance. It is in the agreement, with our assistance. So this is not something we can simply say: Oh well, we had the vote, you guys came up short, and we will cease all debate because it is over. It was over for the President of the United States when he declared it an agreement, not a treaty. If ever something as consequential as this should fall under being a treaty and not an agreement, it is this agreement. Yet it was declared an executive agreement. The President obviously knew what he was doing because he has had a lot of practice basically saying: I can bypass the Congress, I can bypass the Constitution by simply declaring it an executive agreement, an executive order, whatever. In declaring this, it put us in a terrible position. Thankfully, we were able to secure and vote into law, on a vote of 98 to 1, signed by the President of the United States, an agreement that would allow us to play a role in this and to look at the agreement and anything connected with this agreement before we made a decision and the opportunity to vote on approval or disapproval. Well, all that has been denied, and the President now only says it is over. The minority leader on Thursday said: It is over. Get over it. We are moving on. Other things need to be done. We just heard that again from one of my colleagues here, the second in command on the Democrat's side. Let's move forward. Moving forward is a violation of the law. That will be tested in courts. But it is very hard to understand how the administration and the 42 who voted for this could ignore the very language they voted for, the very language they agreed on, the very language that allowed us to go forward and understanding what this agreement says. Let me quote from the law which was signed by the President of the United States, in nearly unanimous agreement by the U.S. Congress:

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Madam President, I thank my colleague Senator Corker for his diligent efforts, as it consumed literally hundreds, if not thousands, of hours as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in helping guide us through this very important, very difficult process. I was on this floor earlier saying this is an issue that rises above partisan politics. This is something that each of us as a Senator has to weigh carefully. I don't know how many hours and how much time I have spent reading through, parsing through, trying to analyze and understand this agreement, its side annexes and everything connected with it. I would like to now say to my colleagues, perhaps with an appeal that they at least, at the very least, set aside: The deal is done. You lost. Therefore, we are not even going to allow a vote on this matter. This is one of the most historic, consequential measures that anyone in this Chamber will ever be confronted with. I know for me it is one of the most historic because of the consequences that may occur if we don't get this right. It is important that we debate this, have ample time to go through every bit of this, and have each Member weigh carefully what we hear from each other and what we come to understand on the basis of our own personal examination. I hope that will be the case. To deny us the opportunity to even let our yes be yes or our no be no before the public I think would be a tragic mistake. I would like to go back a little bit and talk about my history with all of this. When I returned from my ambassadorship to Germany and actually had to deal with this as one of many different issues--because even back then there was great concern among both the United States and the German Government over Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons capability. I engaged in a number of discussions and diplomatic efforts there in working with our allied country Germany on this issue. But when I did come back, I suppose partly because of my engagement there, I was asked by the Bipartisan Policy Center that had just been formed to chair a task force on this very issue, the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons. We obviously wanted this to be bipartisan, so I recruited my fellow Senate colleague Chuck Robb, then a retired Senator from Virginia. Together we cochaired that effort. Later we were joined by retired 4- star General and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of Europe Chuck Wall. We put together a who's who of experts on the Middle East and experts on nuclear capabilities. We had renowned experts from across the spectrum come and present to us. All of that resulted in three major reports titled: ``Meeting the Challenge, U.S. Policy Towards Iranian Nuclear Development''; the second one, ``Meeting the Challenge, Time is Running Out''; the third, ``Meeting the Challenge When Time Runs Out.'' There is a treasure trove of information here about how Iran has violated U.N. treaty resolutions, violated the nonproliferation treaty agreement. We have talked about the consequences of all of this and made recommendations to the administration, whatever administration that would be. As it turns out, these recommendations went both to a Republican administration under President George W. Bush and to the Obama administration under our current President. Clearly, we have outlined--and in the interest of time I will not be able to go back through all of this. But let me just state a couple of the conclusions here relative to all of this. Absent necessary leverage, we believe it unlikely that Supreme Leader Khamenei will reciprocate President Obama's conciliatory gestures in a meaningful way. First of all, we endorsed diplomacy to its ultimate, but we recognized that diplomacy has its limits. You can sit at a table and not come to agreement for decades. We had been trying diplomatic efforts with Iran and they were not succeeding. So then we talked about the necessity of having sanctions, ever-ratcheting, tightening sanctions, to bring Iran to the table. Included in that was the threat of the use of force if all else failed. None on that committee were warmongers. We wanted to do everything possible to prevent conflict in this in solving this problem. So we laid out a long framework. Perhaps if this continues into next week, I will be able to go through some of this framework, but the key on this is stated here somewhere. The key to this was that you had to have a combination of tough diplomacy, which we had years of, and we were going to continue that, backed up by ever-ratcheting sanctions, to show Iran that there was a price to pay for not coming to agreement, and then backed up ultimately by the threat of force if we could not secure an agreement, which would reach the goal. The goal was to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapon capability, knowing the destabilization that would take place in the Middle East, the historic impact this would have, and consequences this would have if we allowed that to happen. Let me move on to what I believe are major problems with this deal. We know Iran's misbehavior, its violation of six U.N. treaties that it agreed to, its violation of the nonproliferation treaty, its support for terrorism. It is a bad actor, perhaps the world's worst bad actor, engaging in weaponization that killed American troops. We are dealing with a rogue nation here. I don't know how my colleagues react to this, but when they cut a deal with the United States, they are cheering on the streets of Tehran. And the Supreme Leader came out yesterday and basically said: Well, don't worry, Israel won't be around in the next 25 years. They will be wiped off the map. We have already said ``Death to Israel'' and also ``Death to the Great Satan, the United States.'' This is the party that we just negotiated an agreement with. Now, if we had negotiated an agreement that achieved our goals, I would say good for us. Finally, the sanctions worked. We came up with a good agreement. But I have read through this document and parsed over every word, tried to find every meaning. I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and earlier I served on the Armed Services Committee. I have had more than a decade of experience in this. I spent almost the entire weekend carefully reading this, hoping that we had achieved, if not all, at least some of the most important goals we had. But to my dismay, we ended up not achieving any of those goals. The goal was to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons capability that could break out and totally destabilize the Middle East. What we have come up with is an agreement that puts them on a path to do exactly that, justified now by this agreement, justified by the Security Council at the U.N. I said there were two major things that needed to be talked about before we talk about some of the specifics: First is the false claim that we must choose between accepting this failed agreement or war, and the second is that the agreement prevents Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. This is the sales pitch from the White House. This is the sales pitch that is being made to the American people, and neither of these is true. It has to be a desperate administration that has chosen to force this agreement on us by arguing that it is a choice between this deal and war. I am disgusted by the administration's sales strategy for this agreement and those who are led down the path of belief that the only option here is war, and therefore, no matter what we gave away, this deal is better than the alternative. This false choice is among the most infamous, cynical, and blatantly false manipulations the Obama administration has used to distort this important debate, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves for using this tactic. In fact, the false argument masks a far more valid argument that this deal makes future war far more likely, not less. By abandoning the tool of economic sanctions, in giving away a strong, principled negotiating position, the administration's desperate tactic is reducing our options when Iran does go nuclear, as we have put them on the path to do. President Obama and Secretary Kerry have repeatedly said over the past year: No deal is better than a bad deal. They never argued that any deal is better than no deal, yet that is what they ended up conceding. We had the strength of the six most powerful countries in the world-- the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia-- sitting at one side of the negotiating table. On the other side of the negotiating table was Iran, crippled by sanctions and oil falling into the range of $40 a barrel, costing more to extract and sell than they could get back. They were desperate to achieve some kind of relief from these sanctions. We had the negotiating leverage. We gave away that leverage in these negotiations, desperate to conclude any deal whatsoever so that we could avoid making some difficult decisions down the line in terms of what we had said we must do. Four Presidents--including this President, two Democrats, two Republicans--said it is unacceptable for Iran to achieve nuclear capability. We gave that away just to get them at the table. Just to get them at the table, we took off the use of any force, any leverage or additional sanctions or continuing sanctions in order to get to the table--not negotiating to get what we needed, but just to get to the table. The administration has accepted, in my opinion, a deeply flawed deal and then set it in motion with a U.N. Security Council resolution on the next day, well before Congress could even respond to it. Thank goodness Senator Corker and Senator Cardin were able to convince their colleagues on a 98-to-1 vote to give Congress the right to have a say in this issue. Had that not happened, the President, by not declaring this a treaty, by declaring this simply an executive agreement, the President would have locked this thing in even before we had a chance to read it, before the American people even had a chance to know what it was except for what the President told them it was or the Secretary of State told them that it was. So we are having this debate thanks to these two men, these two leaders--one a Republican and one a Democrat--who had the courage to stand up to this President and say: No, the American people deserve to have a say. And, boy, what a say it is. I don't know about others. My mail is running 10 to 1 against this. Maybe I am talking to the wrong people, I don't know, but the more they learn about this agreement, the more they say: Are you crazy? We gave up that? For what? What did we get back? I want to go over some of that, trying to move through this because I know time is of the essence here, but this idea that war is the only alternative--and then the sales pitch that I have heard so many of my colleagues and others who support the deal say: You know, I am for this because this prevents Iran from having a nuclear bomb. It is just the opposite. It gives Iran the pathway to have a nuclear bomb. This has a sunset clause in it, and it releases all the sanctions. It has a sunset clause that says after 15 years they can do whatever they want to do. We cannot reimpose sanctions. What kind of a deal is that? But the false narrative that this will not allow that--the agreement, even the annexes say we have to help Iran achieve nuclear research, nuclear research that can help them move toward this. I looked at the annex and said: Surely, I am reading this wrong. We are committed to help them? And if other nations, say Israel, want to take action against this because they think they are going to be extinguished from the face of the Earth--as the Iranians have told them that is going to happen--if they want to take action, we actually are required to convince the Israelis not to do that. We side with the Iranians. I mean, you can't write this script. This is beyond comprehension. So those two false narratives alone ought to be reason to say: Wait a minute. Let's not go forward with this deal. Surely we can find a way to negotiate a better deal for us. Our Bipartisan Policy Center committee--I want to read from this because we looked into this very question, and this was the conclusion: Even if Iran were to honor all of its obligations and fully comply with all the restrictions in the agreement--JCPOA--the deal would not prevent a nuclear Iran indefinitely. Starting in year 13, Iran will be able to break out, produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon in about 10 weeks, down from 1 year. In year 16 Iran would obtain nuclear weapons capabilities in a breakout time of less than 3 weeks. That was the conclusion--not of Republicans--that was the conclusion of a bipartisan group of experts, chaired by a Republican and a Democratic former Senator at the time. And what we have said actually has come true. The sunset clause should, by itself, be enough to persuade, hopefully, a majority of us to reject this deal. This doesn't make sense. If President Bush in 2001 had presented to the American people this same deal with Iran and secured the votes to pass this deal, today Iran would be having breakout--unrestricted breakout, assisted by the agreement. And we are going to call that a diplomatic victory? Fifteen years is going to go by very fast. They are going to have breakout capability much earlier than that and could easily--if you read the agreement--easily declare that we have breached the agreement, they are pulling back, and therefore they are going forward. And they will have well over $100 billion to achieve that effort. They will have sanctions relief--total sanctions relief. They will be able to export all of the oil that they want, and Iran wins. There are some particular problems with this, and they have been listed by people on the right, Charles Krauthammer, and on the left or at least in the middle, David Brooks. The New York Times is not exactly a Republican rag, and David Brooks is not necessarily far rightwing. They are basically saying: Every single major goal that we had going into this agreement has been given away in a desperate attempt to achieve any agreement so that we don't have to deal with this. What we have to deal with can be pushed down the road. So on that basis I went through the agreement and looked at some of these areas. I would like to identify for the record those that we had the leverage to achieve--a goal, a stated goal by the administration and by others negotiating to achieve--and we caved on every one of them. First, verification inspections. Most people understand that anytime, anywhere means anytime, anywhere. Actually, now it means--well, a minimum of 24 days if Iran agrees with us initially that we should go through this convoluted process where Iran helps make the decisions. It is like giving Tom Brady and the Patriots the right to determine whether or not the footballs were deflated. I am from Indiana, it is the Colts, and they whipped us in the Super Bowl. I am probably biased in that statement. On the other hand, just to simplify it for people, if you have an adversary that you don't trust and you want to have an ability to find out if whether or not what they do and say is true, you don't say: Go ahead, check it yourself, then tell me what you think, and we will take that for an answer. So, talk about caving anytime, anywhere on inspections. The administration also argued this principle of short notice. Secretary Kerry, when asked this at one of our meetings here, basically said: No, we never pursued such a goal; and, indeed, we never heard of it. I, along with every one of us here was relieved when the administration announced--I don't know if it was Secretary Kerry or one of his team supporters--announced inspections anytime, anywhere, and everybody said: Oh, OK, at least we have that. Now we learn no American can be part of the inspection team. Now we learn that a U.N. independent agency will do inspections, and now we have learned that military and former weapon manufacturing and research facilities are off limits, and we are not even allowed to inspect them. So anywhere, anytime has become a farce. How can you possibly--that in and of itself would be reason not to vote for this agreement. How go do you go home and say to people: Anytime, anywhere is a scrubbed version of 24 hours a day at a minimum as long as Iran agrees. It doesn't take somebody with a Ph.D. or a law degree--or even a Senator or a Congressman who has delved into these issues--for people to say, are you nuts? Who would sign a deal like that? Uranium enrichment--we caved there. Then talk about one of the key weaknesses is the agreement that the centrifuges are to be disconnected and only stored feet from their original position. They can be reintroduced into the enrichment system when the earlier expiration dates of the deal occur, whenever the Iranians choose to move quickly toward nuclear capability. This involves some highly technical stuff, but the bottom line is almost all aspects of these enrichment details in dispute are in dispute by experts who understand the technical application of all of this, and they are not persuaded by the misleading leadership coming out of the administration--once again another cave. Fordow. What is Fordow? Fordow is a facility at which some nuclear technology pursuit was being undertaken, and we wanted to be able to shut that down. But the Iranians said: No, no, I don't think so. So we said: OK, let's cave on that; let's move onto something else. The same applied to military dimensions and undisclosed military facilities. So Secretary Kerry is faced again with Iranian intransigence and explained his new position now. He no longer was fixated on the past: That was something that we talked about months ago. I am not fixated on that anymore. So scratch that one off. Don't worry. Keep Fordow. Keep Fordow open, no problem. What is next? Sanctions relief. This agreement does not generally relieve sanctions pressure as originally intended. Rather it abandons the sanctions regime entirely all at once. Indeed, the multilateral sanctions are now already gone. European nations and others are flocking into Tehran to sign long-term agreements that will never be subject to sanctions if they are snapped back. We lost again. So the re-imposition of sanctions, if we find out something is wrong here, is a farce. It is not implementable. I talked about snap-back here, so I am going to move forward from that. This is one I mentioned before, but I still can't comprehend it. The deal obligates the P5+1--that is the six of us, the six nations that were negotiating--to actually help Iran build up its nuclear infrastructure during the 15 years before they achieve a 3-week breakout. So we are actually helping them construct their nuclear infrastructure, which then can easily be converted to breaking out for a nuclear weapon. And in return for altering their timetable for nuclear industrial development, the Iranians secured not just international acceptance of that activity but actual assistance in pursuing it. That is incredible. We are actually helping Iran get to the bomb? As we hear from some of our colleagues and others who support this agreement, they say: I am voting for this because this prevents Iran from getting the bomb. Read the agreement. It is not easy to read. It is not fun to read. But it is alarming to read. I was in the Senate during the 1990s and the negotiations with North Korea, and actually, Wendy Sherman, the principal negotiator along with Senator Kerry of this agreement, was the principal negotiator in the North Korea agreement. I remember being told on this floor through the President of the United States, then President Clinton and his Secretary of State and others: Don't worry; we have total verification procedures in place. If they cheat on us, we are going to know it. And when we know it, we are going to stop it. Well, here it is 2015, and North Korea has somewhere between 20 and 40 nuclear weapons sitting on top of ballistic missiles, and we didn't know it. That made me a skeptic going into this thing because it is like deja vu here. We are being told the same thing: Don't worry; we will know if they cheat. We will be able to do something to stop them. This is the assurance that this is a good deal. So that is a hard sale for me. It is a no sale for me. I didn't end up voting for that because I had some real suspicions about whether that would take place. But that actually ought to be a lesson for all of us here--that something that is promised by the President of the United States and his Secretary of State and his negotiating team won't necessarily come true and be the case. So the promises that have been made about what this agreement is and what it isn't and what we will be able to do I measure by what didn't work out really well in North Korea, and yet the same negotiator that negotiated that helped negotiate on this. I don't know if my colleague from Tennessee is standing because I am running long on this, but I have a lot more I would like to say. I am going to try to move to a couple of last things here. Some prominent people have been noted here as favoring the deal. Well, I think Henry Kissinger is someone who probably has some experience, at the age of 90-some years and a lifetime in diplomacy. I don't have to give his credentials. And George Shultz also has some credibility on this. So if you want to listen to one side on this, you ought to listen to the other. These individuals have said: Previous thinking on nuclear strategy assumed the existence of stable state actors. . . . How will these doctrines translate into a region where sponsorship of nonstate proxies is common, the state structure is under assault, and death on behalf of jihad is a kind of fulfillment? Sadly, their views have been largely ignored and not mentioned by anybody else. So if they are going to mention their guys, we are going to mention our guys. Look, the last thing I want to say here before I conclude is there hasn't been much discussion about the consequences for Israel, our democratic ally in the region, which I think should be a core issue. Prime Minister Netanyahu was here and spoke to a joint assembly of Congress. He received standing ovations for standing tall and standing hard and saying the very future existence of my nation is at risk here. He made the point that a bad deal is not better than no deal, that a bad deal could be worse than no deal, and that there are ways around this. We cannot ignore the major risk that Iran will follow through with their often-repeated threats of obliterating the State of Israel--a threat that was just repeated by the Supreme Leader yesterday. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute to conclude.

Mr. COATS. I thank my colleagues. In conclusion, with this agreement, we have paid too much and gained too little. The risks are not adequately acknowledged and not effectively addressed. I cannot support this agreement. I cannot approve the misguided desperation that led to it. I cannot understand those who claim this is a great victory for diplomacy nor those who turn a blind eye to its obvious failings because of the appeal of party discipline nor those who have fallen prey to the Obama administration's manipulation of the deal with the U.N. prior to Congress having any say in this. When I read about the gloating, the boastful joy in Iran--in Tehran, their capital--that all their needs were met and none of their redlines were crossed, I despaired. I despaired because this misadventure has been a failure of vision, a failure of will, and a historic failure of leadership. I fear these failures will lead to great suffering. We have seen this before. Peace at any price is not peace. Peace at any price sometimes leads to tragic consequences. In the last century we saw the loss of tens of millions of lives because the goal was to seek peace at any price. We cannot make that mistake again. I yield the floor.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I intend to speak at much greater length on this issue perhaps tomorrow. I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this colloquy. I will be brief. I know my colleagues are waiting to speak also. First, I want to commend Senator Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Together with his work with Senator Cardin, we have a bipartisan agreement supported by some of the most knowledgeable foreign policy experts on the Democratic side and on the Republican side before us. Had Senator Corker not been able to make that arrangement, it would have been a done deal before the Congress even saw what was agreed to in this negotiation with Iran. I think my colleagues here have been amazed at the difference between what we were told the agreement did and didn't do and what we actually learned it does and doesn't do as we pored over it, word by word, annex through annex, looking at every piece of information here that is relevant to our decision. I am thankful for the work of Senator Corker, who has taken some heat for not doing more. He saved us and saved the American people from not having the ability for us to examine this in detail. That is what this debate here is all about. The American people deserve to know what is in this agreement. The consequences of this for the future of America, for the future of the world are significant and almost mind-boggling. We have to get it right. To get it right, we need to read every word. Here I am, shortly after the delivery of the 157 pages, together with the annexes, over a weekend poring through each sentence, trying to understand exactly what we have here and what we are dealing with, and I am amazed at what I have come up with. Instead of going through the various items--I will talk about more about this tomorrow, and it has been well presented by my colleague from New Hampshire and others this afternoon, including the majority leader--I would like to discuss something that I don't think has been raised yet. That something is the ambiguity that exists throughout this agreement and particularly in the annexes to the agreement. We know that there are two secret agreements which we don't have access to. How anyone can go forward and support an arrangement when you have side secret agreements and you are not allowed to know what they are--that in and of itself should be reason not to support an agreement. But having said that, let me spend a little bit of time regarding these ambiguities and the vagueness of some of the language here that I think have major implications. The annex uses familiar forms of mushy language. I am going to quote here: ``as determined,'' ``where appropriate,'' ``among others,'' ``as mutually determined,'' and ``when beneficial.'' What are the actual obligations that we are undertaking if we vote for this agreement that is full of words like that? This is not clear to me, nor would I think it is clear to anyone in the administration. We questioned the administration on this issue. They have essentially said: Well, this is to be determined at a later date or if this issue comes up, we will try to get some consensus on how to go forward. My own conclusion is that this language is not a mistake. These people who negotiated on our benefit have had a lifetime of negotiating engagement. I assume many of them were attorneys, lawyers that know and understand that a definition of a word or a phrase is everything. You have to understand exactly what it is or you are going to end up with confusion. These ambiguous obligations, I think, were purposefully designed to placate the Iranians, offering them a vision of a robust military nuclear infrastructure, developed not only with the acquiescence of the West but with our material assistance. Further, if we examine the agreement text--let alone the annex text--this same pattern with misleading ambiguity holds. In many of the detailed commitments that are specified in the agreement and the annexes available to us, these conditional ambiguous terms dominate. I couldn't help but notice that this wasn't an occasional occurrence. I asked my staff to go through and look at some of these ambiguous definitions and count the number of them. The phrase ``as appropriate'' or ``where appropriate''--``achieving this as appropriate'' or ``obligated to this as appropriate'' or ``where appropriate''--was sprinkled throughout the text 34 times. ``As mutually determined'' or ``by consensus to be concluded'' occurred 28 times, implying that future agreements or conditional commitments are there as against current commitments. At the same time, the phrase ``Iran intends to'' occurs more frequently than it should in place of affirmative obligations. To any lawyer representing a client, whether you are buying a house, leasing a car, leasing an apartment or entering into a business contract, you can go to that lawyer and basically say: Look, I want an out. Or if you are on the other end of the negotiating process, you can say: Put some ambiguous vague language in there--``to be determined,'' ``as appropriate,'' ``by consensus''--so that if something goes wrong here, I have an excuse to opt out. I think that is exactly what Iran was trying to do. If we come up with what we think is a breach of the agreement, it is easy for Iran to say: That needs to be by consensus; and without consensus, we see that as saying such and such, and you see it wrong. If we press the case with Iran, that, of course, gives them the option of withdrawing from the agreement. At an important time, now having over $100 billion in their hands, now having signed up contracts with many nations around the world--long-term contracts for delivery of oil, minerals or whatever--now having put themselves in a much different position with the sanctions lifted, they may use that exact language as a means of escaping. Or if you turn it on its head and turn it the other way around, Iran says: Well, wait a minute; our intentions are such and such. You didn't understand what we were trying to say to you. Then how are we going to respond? This puts us in a very tenuous position. I can recall a number of times when I told my wife: I thought you were going to stop and pick up milk on the way home. Well, I intended to do that, but I got a phone call. Wait a minute. I thought you were going to clean the garage on Saturday. I intended to do that, but Joe called and said: Let's go play golf. I intended. It was a good intention. That is fine in any kind of a marital relationship or any other kind of relationship. Many of those are just meaningless things. But when you are talking about an agreement that binds the United States on the basis of how its negotiating adversary interprets and uses these words, it can put you in real trouble. I don't think anybody has talked about that yet. I wanted to bring that up. As I said, I am going to be talking about my position and how I came to the decision not to support this tomorrow. This is a sloppily written agreement that can bind the United States to obligations that we are not even yet aware of and that can give Iran an out if it so chooses. It comes to that point in time when, with a 3-month or so breakout toward having nuclear weapon capability, they simply say: Sanctions are gone, we have our money, we have done the research, even some with assistance of U.S. scientists and the members of the negotiating team, we are in a great position to go forward, and we are just going to do it. We can use this language to opt-out of the agreement. That is just one more reason why each of us should carefully try to understand what is and what isn't in this agreement and weigh this as we try to make a judgment in terms of whether we should go forward or whether we have signed on to a very bad deal here and should vote against it. With that, I yield to my colleagues who have been patiently waiting to speak.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, last week I delivered my 19th ``Waste of the Week'' and we actually reached our goal of $100 billion in savings for the taxpayer by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse. This was money spent by the Federal Government, money collected from hard-working earners who paid their taxes, sent them to Washington, and expected they would be used for essential purposes, such as providing for our national security, supporting research at NIH for medical advances that would provide lifesaving techniques and medicines to Americans, funding the rebuilding of crumbling bridges and highways, and any number of things the Federal Government is involved in that the American public agrees are essential functions that could be performed only by the Federal Government. What we want you to do though, they are saying, is be as efficient as you can. If there is excess money wasted on programs that have no place in the Federal budget, let's identify those, let's eliminate those, and either return our tax money and lower our tax rates or use it for something more essential. We have reached our goal of $100 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse identified by nonpartisan agencies--not Republican agencies, not Democratic agencies or firms but nonpartisan agencies--that simply look at numbers, identify the projects, identify the spending, and ask the question: Do we truly need to do that? Particularly at a time when the deficit clock keeps ticking, when we continue year after year after year to spend more than we take in, despite raising taxes, despite looking for ever more sources of income, it is clear we need to take the necessary steps not to spend more than is absolutely necessary to function on behalf of the American people. So today I am on the floor for speech No. 20. We reached the goal. It is just the beginning of August. The Senate has many more weeks in front of it, but we are going to keep going because it is amazing the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that has been identified by some of these nonpartisan groups looking at Federal expenditures. If we can add to our chart, I think we will have to add an extension to that chart or devise another one-- perhaps put another gauge over here--because we are going to keep doing this every week the Senate is in session. Today, as I said, we are looking at No. 20. I looked at two agencies that exist in the Federal Government: the National Endowment for the Humanities, NEH, and the National Endowment for the Arts, NEA. These two agencies are engaged in cultural projects. Some of these are-- people would deem--somewhat essential, but we have looked at two agencies that we think ought to be identified today. The public probably will remember the 87th Academy Awards--better known as the Oscars--that took place in Hollywood a few months ago. Many Americans tune in and watch this high-profile event featuring America's rich and famous. As always, a parade of actors pull up in their stretch limousines and step into the bright lights of the entertainment industry's media--the flashing lights, the march down the red carpet, and stop to have their pictures taken. There, in tailored tuxes and designer gowns--some of which cost, amazingly, over $100,000--everybody is trying to outdo everybody else. The bottom line is Hollywood is not short of money. As Americans watch this, they see the Oscars that are being offered. Then we look at that and say: What in the world is a $25,000 check from the Federal Government to Hollywood doing in this process? It is hard to understand the concept that Hollywood needs support, needs a handout from the Federal Government, but they are developing an Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Hollywood. Somehow they have applied for a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Now, that is not a major amount compared to our budget problems here and the money we deal with, but the American public ought to be saying: Why in the world are we giving a penny to Hollywood to support the building of a museum? It is simply because the process is open for anybody to submit for a grant. But who is reviewing these things? Who is looking at this? Does Hollywood truly need taxpayer money to construct a museum of motion pictures through the National Endowment for the Arts? We also discovered that the National Endowment for the Humanities got engaged in one of these efforts, spending considerably more--$914,000-- to support a conference entitled ``What is Love? Romance Fiction in the Digital Age.'' The conference was full of speakers networking with each other and even giving the opportunity for adults to design and color their own title page. Again, I am asking why. Why, given our $18.5 trillion debt growing every day, do we have to give away a nearly $1 million grant to support a conference on how in the digital age to develop romantic books? While it might be fun to go deeper into this and examine just exactly what goes on at this conference, that is not really why I am speaking on the floor today. I am simply here to ask why. Is this necessary? Is this the kind of thing we need to be supporting and doing with hard- earned taxpayer dollars that are sent to Washington, not for these purposes? So today, the cumulative runs close to $1 million--$939,000--of taxpayer savings that would go onto our gauge, and we add yet another increment to the gauge in determining how tax dollars are spent. We are going to continue doing this. This is a small one today. You can see we had some major chunks and major dysfunctions in the Federal Government, but I think it is important for every Senator to be able to go home, talk to their people, and say: We are making every possible effort we can to be efficient and effective with the money you sent to Washington, and we are looking into every dollar to make sure it is spent on essential functions of the Federal Government. It is astounding how much is being sent, used, and wasted, how much fraud and waste takes place. We will continue to identify that each week. That is our waste of the week. We will be back each week after our August recess when the Senate is in session to continue to identify ways in which we can save the taxpayers' money. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

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

Mr. COATS. Madam President, William Wilberforce is a man whom I have, over the years, looked to as a role model and an example of what public service should be and what public servants should be. Wilberforce served as a Member of the British Parliament from 1784 to 1812. After an early career marked by what he described as doing nothing of purpose, Wilberforce then went through a transformational period of self-reflection. He emerged with a deepened faith, greater moral courage, and an unshakeable passion for ending the slave trade. He said: So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the [slave] trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition. It took Wilberforce 20 years of blood, sweat, tears, and even death threats, but he succeeded in pushing the House of Commons and the House of Lords to put abolition into law when the Slave Trade Act of 1807 passed. I believe today, just 2 hours from now, we will have a William Wilberforce moment facing the Senate. Through a series of video releases over the past few weeks, the American people have learned about the shocking and barbaric practices Planned Parenthood uses to terminate innocent human lives. In several different videos, senior Planned Parenthood officials openly and candidly discussed the organ harvesting of fetuses. In one video, the senior director of medical research for Planned Parenthood explained the process by which aborted body parts are harvested. I am not going to describe that process on the floor. I talked about it last week. But for those who have seen the video and those who have read about the practices, it is abhorrent to hear the cold, calculating consideration of how best to disassemble, to tear apart, to rip apart a growing life so that they could harvest certain body parts and then sell them for research. And they were negotiating prices. It was like describing to somebody how they could go to Home Depot and pick things off the shelf: Let's see what this costs; no, maybe we can get a better price for this. But in this case we are talking about living human tissue being taken, harvested, and sold from aborted babies. So let's consider for a second what is the bottom line. The bottom line is we are talking about an organization that is embracing the dismembering of human life with taxpayer support. Millions of Americans who have seen these videos are outraged by the cavalier attitude that Planned Parenthood has about human life. Americans from all walks of life, Americans of different faiths and, maybe, even of different political parties abhor this. Then we learned that our tax dollars, our hard-earned tax dollars, are sent to an organization that practices these methods. Surely, we can come to a conclusion that this is something that violates the faith and beliefs of many millions Americans and is subsidized by the Federal taxpayer? Now, over the past few days, we have heard many who say they object to what Planned Parenthood is doing here. But, you know, we can't afford to stop funding many of the very important women's health services that Planned Parenthood provides. And this is an important consideration because I am sure every Senator here believes in ensuring that all women, regardless of their status and regardless of their financial situation, deserve to have access to vital services that health care providers provide. The bill before us that we will be voting on today, offered by the Presiding Officer, Senator Ernst of Iowa, addresses these concerns. Her legislation would transfer money provided to Planned Parenthood to a whole range of women's health care providers. I have the bill here in front of me. It is very simple, a very basic bill. I want to read from this bill: State and county health departments, community health centers, hospitals, physicians offices, and other entities currently provide, and will continue to provide, health services to women. Such health services include relevant diagnostic laboratory and radiology services, well-child care, prenatal and postpartum care, immunization, family planning services including contraception, sexually transmitted disease testing, cervical and breast cancer screenings, and referrals. The bill goes on to say that such entities provide services to all persons, regardless of their ability to pay and provide services in medically underserved areas and to medically underserved populations. So what is being offered here and what we will be voting on this evening doesn't take anything away from women's ability--regardless of their financial situation or where they live--to have the services that are needed and need to ensure their health and the future health of their children. In the United States there are five times as many community health centers as there are Planned Parenthood operations. In my own State, we have 108 community health centers in urban and rural areas all throughout the State of Indiana--5 times the amount of Planned Parenthood facilities. So the issue of denying women needed health care simply is not the case under this legislation. The barbaric practice of conducting abortions in a way that promotes harvesting fetal organs or profiting from such practice has no place in a modern society. Planned Parenthood's practices, I would suggest, should not receive a dime of taxpayer money. The question is, Do we want taxpayer dollars to continue to support an organization that treats human body parts like a product on the shelves of a store? Today the Senate will decide if we fight for what we believe is morally right or whether we stand by and allow the trivialization of life to continue. I am here to urge my colleagues to vote yes on this vitally important piece of legislation that we will be taking up in less than 2 hours. I yield the floor. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, once again, I am on the floor for the ``Waste of the Week.'' Each week since February, I have come to the floor to discuss an issue of waste, fraud, and abuse--misspent taxpayer money identified by neutral agencies of the Federal Government that didn't have a partisan bone to pick in this or by inspectors general of various agencies or by the agencies themselves. In February, I said I am going to come here every week throughout the duration of this session, and I am going to try to achieve a goal of $100 billion of waste. I wasn't sure we could reach that goal, but today is a very special day because we are going to highlight by the end of my speech over $100 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse that the taxpayer is covering with hard-earned pay at home. Over the past several months, I have highlighted a variety of examples from the serious, such as the illegal procurement practices at the Veterans' Administration, to the ridiculous: taxpayer funding, under grants, for massages of rabbits to determine whether a massage after strenuous exercise made them feel better. I don't think we needed to gather a bunch of rabbits and pay, with a $387,000 grant to an organization to mechanically massage the backs of rabbits. I think if you stop anybody on the street and ask: Do you think a good massage would make you feel a little bit better, especially after a strenuous exercise--I think the answer would be yes. Actually, I thought I might want to sign up for this until I found out that when the experiment was over, they killed the rabbits. So I didn't want to put myself in that position. Then, from the young taxpayers who receive (improper and fraudulent child tax credit refunds) to the old, the active Social Security numbers that were assigned to individuals over the age of 112. Obviously there aren't too many people in the country, if any, over that age. These people had obviously died many years before--on and on it goes. We are deluged with examples of waste, fraud, and abuse, which brings some chuckles and brings some ``Can you believe we are actually doing that?'' But the bottom line is that people are working hard every day to make ends meet to pay the mortgage, to buy the groceries, to save money to send the kids to school, and they are sending taxes to Washington and the bureaucracy is doing stuff like this. It is a bad break for taxpayers, and it is shameful for government not to take measures to stop this waste, fraud, and abuse from happening. I am trying to disclose to the public this is how your taxpayer money is being spent so they will put pressure on their Members and say clean it up. Fortunately, we have been able to do some of that, but there is a long way to go. Today I want to discuss errors with payments under the earned-income tax credit. Let me go back and explain this. The earned-income tax credit is a refundable tax credit that offsets income tax owed by low- income taxpayers. Congress originally approved the earned-income tax credit in 1975 to offset the burden of Social Security taxes for low- income workers and provide an incentive for them to work. It is a good motive. To some extent, it has worked. The way it works is this: When the credit exceeds the amount of taxes due, it provides a lump-sum payment, after you file your taxes, to those who qualify for the program. People who work and earn less than a certain income level qualify for this refund from the government. According to the Congressional Research Service, this tax credit is the largest need-tested, antipoverty cash assistance program the Federal Government runs. So whether you think this is a right program or not, the questions are: How is it being run? And is it efficient and effective or is it making mistakes? We are talking about Big Government. Mistakes are usually big mistakes, if there are some. In 2011, the IRS identified more than 6.6 million potentially erroneous earned-income tax credit claims that went to households that didn't qualify. Individuals were telling the government they are working and earning and therefore eligible for the earned-income tax credit bonus check, but at the same time they were telling other agencies, such as the Supplemental Social Security Program, that they are not earning that much or not working or don't have income. Some are getting double checks--one for which they're qualified and one for which they're not. When we add all of that--the latest year that has been identified is 2013, and the tax credit costs to taxpayers during that year amounted to $60 billion. Of those, $14.5 billion were erroneously sent out checks by the agency, the IRS. If we can put in place measures that can provide accountability and verification to this program, we could save the taxpayer up to $14.5 billion a year. So with that, we add to our gauge an additional $14.5 billion. As everyone can see on this chart, this gauge is climbing up each week. This chart shows the amount of money saved through the various programs we have identified. We have now eclipsed the $100 billion level, and we are just a little ways past the middle of the year. I could take the charts, stick them in the back closet, and say: Thank you. I made it to my $100 billion mark, and I have made my point. But I will keep on going. Every week the Senate is in session for the remainder of this year, I will be back down here for the latest ``Waste of the Week'' so we can embarrass, disclose, and let agencies know that they are wasting taxpayers' dollars, and we, as a Congress, need to do something about that. Some people may say that $100 billion in comparison with the total Federal budget is a drop in the bucket, but $100 billion is almost incomprehensible. Maybe Donald Trump understands what $100 billion is, but I don't. In terms of that magnitude of money, it is a small portion of what we spend here. We can do so much more in terms of identifying issues and programs that will save the taxpayer money. Federal spending is out of control. We know that, and this highlights some of that. The real issue is much worse. While States such as mine, the State of Indiana, have created balanced budgets, eliminated debt, and provided surpluses, which they can use to return to the taxpayers or save for a rainy day, the Federal Government has not done that. This is a huge challenge in front of us. This is just a small piece of trying to identify some of the problems and challenges that we have, and by identifying them, we can save the taxpayer money by making reforms to these various programs. With that, I will yield back the floor, but you can count on me being here every week for the rest of this session with the ``Waste of the Week'' for as long as the Congress and Senate are in session. 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, in recent weeks, the American people have learned the shocking story of the barbaric practices Planned Parenthood uses to terminate life and to harvest organs of innocent human life. In a video released earlier this month that has gone viral--as it should have--the senior director of medical research at Planned Parenthood explained the process by which she harvests aborted body parts to be provided for medical research. I quote her: We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna to see if I can get it all intact. Additional videos have been released--I am told more are to come-- with Planned Parenthood officials discussing the organ harvesting of fetuses. Unborn children. Beating hearts on the sonogram, on the screen. Human beings. Despite the stunning impact and outrage of millions of Americans, Planned Parenthood's response to the release of these videos is this: Blame the messenger or the videographer, but let's not address the practice of harvesting aborted body parts. Ross Douthat writes for the New York Times. I urge every Senator to read his July 25, 2015, column, entitled ``Looking Away From Abortion.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.

Mr. COATS. I will share a couple of excerpts from his piece. Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat says: And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn't just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood. It's a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience--the reasoning that notes that it's precisely a fetus's humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one's own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just ``products of conception'' or tissue for the knife. For those who defend the role of Planned Parenthood, Douthat writes that reflecting on the content of these videos ``gets you uncomfortably close to . . . that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.'' I wish to repeat that again. He writes about the barbarity of what has taken place here and the videos of the response of Planned Parenthood--the description of what actually is happening to a child on the way to birth, seen in the ultrasound, hearing the beating of the heart, and then talking about the methods used so that certain parts of that body are not crushed and so that other parts of the body can be harvested for other purposes and sold--sold for money. That this is part of what Planned Parenthood is all about is just stunning. Douthat said that even though people want to ignore it, even though they want to talk about it and blame the videographer--that he took things out of context--how can you take what is said and happened out of context and provide any rationale or justification for what is being done? He said: But surely that is the moment when you start to ponder the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is actually dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism. That is a hard thing to accept, he said. But, as difficult as that is, Douthat states that we must acknowledge that what is being discussed in these videos is human beings, and the nice, idealistic medical personnel at Planned Parenthood have spent their careers crushing, evacuating, and carving up that human life for parts to be sold on the market. It is important that this body let Planned Parenthood know the American people do not support these inhumane practices. Congress should debate this issue. It should vote. It should vote soon. It should not leave here for our August recess until we send a clear message to Planned Parenthood that this is totally unacceptable, that the taxpayers of America will not fund with 1 cent of their tax dollars this barbaric practice, provided through an agency that pretends to be offering sound health care advice to pregnant mothers. Every Senator should have the opportunity to affirm that life is sacred and a precious gift, and it must be protected. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleague from Oklahoma for his recent statement. I also understand he is willing to help relieve me a little bit, as I am the next Presiding Officer. I appreciate that. I will relieve him of that responsibility as soon as I finish my remarks. Wasteful Spending As many know, I have, since February, been coming to the Senate floor--now 18 different times--to highlight waste, fraud, and abuse within the Federal Government. The Senator from Oklahoma was talking about his committee, which he runs in such an efficient and effective way--I am particularly taken with the overregulation under this administration. It resonates with me. It is killing our farmers. It is killing our small businesses. We are all for safe, sound, cost-effective regulations that address safety and health. No one is trying to undo those, but we have an agency that is running amuck with ideological determinations on the basis of what ``they think is best'' for the country, regardless of what numbers come up, what impact they have--what negative impacts. No one has better led this effort than the Senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Inhofe. I thank him for that. But today I have come to talk about waste, abuse, and fraud. I have been down here 18 times since February, once a week. I could be down here every day. I could be down here every hour. It is astounding the amount of taxpayers' hard-earned dollars that has to pay for what has been categorized by neutral agencies--not on a partisan basis at all-- as total waste, total fraud, and total abuse. So here I am again, trying to do the best we can to make this government more effective, more efficient, and more focused on the essential things it needs to do--wiping out, eliminating the abusive use, the wasteful use, and the fraudulent use of hard-earned tax dollars. Today, what I would like to speak about relates to the so-called Affordable Care Act. I think we found that a better title would have been the ``Unaffordable Care Act.'' But last week in the Senate Finance Committee, we had the Director from GAO--a member from GAO, Mr. Bagdoyan. He is the Director of Audit Services at the Government Accountability Office. It was a fascinating hearing, but he came to report to us about abuses that are taking place or could take place with the Affordable Care Act enrollment. It is amazing. I would like to go over that. His audit team--this is his job. His job is to audit the spending of taxpayer dollars. In this case, they looked at the Affordable Care Act enrollment process. They wanted to see whether the procedures that had been agreed to, to prevent people from abusing this in a fraudulent way--if they had been implemented at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, CMS. So what they did is run an undercover so-called secret shopper investigation to test the internal controls of healthcare.gov to review how the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services handle this new program. Particularly, this investigation was designed to determine how effective the administration's Federal health insurance exchange is protecting against fraudulent applications. So it is a very narrowly focused test and a very legitimate test to see if the agreed-upon measures and criteria for qualifying to enroll in health care, the ObamaCare bill, have been put in place. There are millions of people who have selected ObamaCare plans through healthcare.gov. Eight million Americans in 34 States have selected plans, and 87 percent of those have qualified for premium subsidies. That alone adds up to tens of billions in subsidies each year, all coming through healthcare.gov. That is an issue in and of itself. I am not here necessarily to address that. We can address that at another time. But the key question was, if applicants misrepresent themselves with fake facts in order to receive those subsidies, would the folks at healthcare.gov find those, catch them, and keep them from qualifying. Unfortunately, the answer is a resounding no. The GAO, the Government Accountability Office, found that 11 out of 12 fake applications received approval. For this investigation, GAO created false identities and used them to apply for premium tax subsidies through the Federal health insurance exchange. They used fake documents or, in several cases, no documents at all. It was just a test. So they would learn that either those applications would be turned down or that those restrictions which were designated--that those running healthcare.gov knew what they needed to do and did what they needed to do. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services accepted 11 out of the 12, accepted the fake documents, for some didn't even attempt to verify their authenticity, and as a result they enrolled those applicants. They granted them thousands of dollars in premium tax subsidies. Specifically, CMS awarded $30,000 in advanced premium tax credits to 11 of those 12 fraudulent applicants in 2014 alone. As 2015 began, CMS then terminated coverage for 6 of those 11 fake individuals, noting that they had not properly registered or provided necessary documents. So it seemed then that, OK, the program turned out to work and CMS finally caught on to the fact that they were issuing subsidies for fraudulent applications. Well, that optimism was very short-lived because GAO then called CMS pretending to be those individuals who had been turned down, and in five of the six cases, they were able to get their coverage and subsidies restored without submitting any paperwork. The system handles millions of applications with billions of dollars of subsidies, and they did not design a mechanism to identify fraud even though they had been told they were not identifying the fraud and not putting the measures in place to do so. Part of the problem is that the law is so gargantuan, it is nearly unworkable. But there is no excuse for these compliance numbers when billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. Unfortunately, the administration continues to measure success by the number of people who have signed up for ObamaCare. Last year, the administration rejoiced when reaching its enrollment goal and lauded it as proof the exchanges were working just fine. However, given the results of this investigation, I wonder what percentage of those enrollees were real people providing real information and how many were people providing no information or false information. When the test revealed that 11 out of 12--that is a pretty high percentage. You can multiply that out over what you think might be happening in the enrollment process, and there could be very substantial amounts of taxpayer money being paid in subsidies to people who do not qualify. Careful oversight of these programs for Federal benefits is of utmost importance, whether it is CMS on ObamaCare or whether it is any other agency in government that is providing benefits to individuals. I have listed many of those in my ``Waste of the Week'' speeches. This government needs to--must and Congress must do better in terms of oversight to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent effectively and efficiently, and if not, returned to the taxpayers so they don't have to send them here to be wasted in the first place. Clearly GAO used only a small number of claims, but imagine what hasn't been looked at or identified and what those numbers would be. This is a canary in a coal mine. If this isn't an alarm bell of dysfunction, I don't know what it is. Today I am not going to speculate on how much money has been wasted because of the acceptance of false applications, but I will put $30,000 of documented abuse of subsidies that were paid for under the GAO investigation. So it is just a little bump on our gauge as we head toward $100 billion, and I have been told that next week's waste of the week will take us to our goal of $100 billion. We had hoped to reach that goal by the end of this year. We are way ahead of time. And, as I said, I could come down here every day or maybe every hour, given the waste we are finding in this misuse of taxpayer money. I thank the Chair again for helping me out on the time situation. I look forward to relieving the Presiding Officer in the chair. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. COATS. Madam President, I repeatedly have come down to the Senate floor to talk about our budget issues. Earlier this morning I talked about my 18th waste of the week--looking at waste, fraud, and abuse in terms of government spending and a waste of taxpayers' dollars. The first 4 years of this 6-year term that I am enjoying and participating in, I have been consumed with the issue of our continuing deficit spending and increasing national debt. I was part of a group working directly with the President in an effort for many months with his top people to reach an agreement on how to address our long-term budget situation. It is no secret that under this administration the national debt has almost doubled. It is staggering to think that over the 230 or 240 years of the life of this country we have gone from $10.6 trillion to now $18.8 trillion of debt. It is going to have consequences. As chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, we recently released some information entitled ``Ten Things to know about CBO's Long-Term Budget Outlook.'' This is something we spent a great deal of time debating years ago, but it has fallen under the radar. We are obviously dealing with issues that are important. This Iran deal that has just been signed by the administration deserves intense concentration and consideration in terms of how we address it. We also have the continuing economic malaise and slow recovery from the recession. We have a number of issues we need to address, such as highway funding, health care, and so forth. These are all important issues. But underlying all of this is a fundamental issue that has not been addressed, and if it is not addressed, it will have significant and adverse consequences for the American people, not just for future generations but even for our own generation. I keep trying to bring us back to this gorilla in the room that we ignore and keep thinking we will deal with it later. It has been passed on, and the so-called can has been kicked down the road election after election, through different Presidents and resulting in more and more negative consequences for the American people. Our Joint Economic Committee just recently released ten things we need to know about the Congressional Budget Office's long-term budget outlook. No. 1, the United States cannot rely on borrowing forever. This is not a complex issue. If you continue to borrow more money and don't pay your bills, eventually the tax collector is at the door. With the tax collector being at the door, this means eventually investors will demand higher and higher interest rates because we don't have the confidence the United States is going to be able to pay its bills. No. 2, mandatory spending skyrockets. We all have known the spending for Medicare and Medicaid and entitlements is running amok and it needs to be addressed on a long-term fix. No. 3, according to CBO, ``The large amount of debt could also compromise national security by constraining defense spending in times of international crisis or by limiting the country's ability to prepare for such a crisis.'' Look at the world today. It is aflame. Yet we are cutting our defense at historically low rates of readiness in terms of dealing with this. So while the threat increases daily and is right there before us, we are slashing our spending on defense and national security because we cannot afford it due to the entitlements eating all of this up. No. 4, bankruptcy looms for Social Security. We stand here and pretend like everything is fine and everybody is going to continue to receive their Social Security checks, no problem. CBO projects that bankruptcy looms for Social Security. The report that just came out from the trustees has basically said that within a relatively short period of time Social Security is going to hit bankruptcy. What does that mean? That means dramatic cuts in Social Security benefits to people who have counted on using Social Security to help for their retirement or dramatic tax increases to cover the deficit. There is a portion of Social Security--the Social Security disability benefits--that the trustees said is going broke next year. We are more than halfway through 2015, and CBO projects that by the end of 2016 the Social Security disability fund will be going bankrupt. That is what has been said here. If you don't trust my words, read the--not my favorite newspaper but one that usually gets its facts right--the New York Times. Today's New York Times has a major article: ``Social Security Disability Benefits Face Cuts in 2016, Trustees Say.'' I will quote a couple of items which are written in this issue: Eleven million people face a deep, abrupt cut in disability insurance benefits in late 2016 if Congress fails to replenish Social Security's disability trust fund, which is running out of money. That statement was issued by the administration. Officials expressed concern about the program as they issued their annual report on the financial condition of Medicare and Social Security, which together account for 40 percent of all federal spending. The trustees of Social Security . . . said the disability trust fund would be depleted in the last quarter of 2016. After that, they said, benefits would automatically be cut by 19 percent because revenues, largely from payroll taxes, would be sufficient to cover only 81 percent of scheduled benefit payments. Folks, we have been warning about this for years, not doing anything about it, and we now have this report from the trustees who oversee these funds, and the report, as published by the New York Times today, says this thing is going broke next year and cuts will be 19 percent because we don't have the money to pay for it. You would think the alarm bells would be sounding. You would think we would finally understand we are hitting the wall on spending and that we would finally step up and do something about runaway entitlement mandatory spending or everybody will end up paying the price. I will add one more point from the New York Times: The trustees, in their report, said that the squeeze on the disability program was ``but the first manifestation of larger financial imbalances facing Social Security as a whole, as well as Medicare.'' Where is AARP? Where are the people in retirement who say don't touch a penny of my Social Security or Medicare benefits, when the trustees say don't worry, we will not have to touch a penny of it; the program is going broke on its own. For all of us who have been pleading to do something to address this issue, it is not even being talked about. Yet anybody who comes to the floor and says this kind of stuff is immediately pilloried by AARP: Oh, they are going to go off and cut our Social Security. No. It is going to automatically happen because we haven't addressed the issue. So don't criticize us for trying to address an issue that will cut your benefits by 19 percent or cause the program to go broke. Support those who have had the courage to stand and say: Folks, we have to do something about this. If you want to continue and guarantee Social Security benefits when people retire or give them Medicare coverage when they retire and need it, something has to be done now or there will be massive cuts. That is not just a Republican or conservative standing and saying that we are spending too much money and we have to cut back on that; the trustees who oversee the programs are warning us and saying you have to do something or everybody is going to take not just a haircut but a major cut. A couple of other things came out on the budget term outlook. The Federal debt has nearly doubled since President Obama was elected. It now stands at 74 percent of the economy. The Federal debt has nearly doubled since the President was elected. What a legacy. Why in the world would a President of the United States with a responsibility to oversee the fiscal basis of what makes this country work and to commit to people that he will address problems as they occur--if this was a private business, it would be in bankruptcy. Nobody would buy the stock of this business. Nobody would buy bonds of this business. Nobody would invest in this business because it is totally dysfunctional and it is totally going broke. Yet the Federal Government has printing presses down in the basement and they keep printing out dollars. That decreases their value to cover our debts, and they continue to tell people to go ahead and loan money to the States. We are also going to keep taking your taxes, but buy our bonds and don't worry because we are going to pay them back--not at this rate. We are heading toward the wall, we are in the crisis, and we are not doing anything about it. No. 6, and the last point. Hopefully, CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, made correct assumptions. Their warnings are based on assumptions and hopefully we will make some efforts and prevent some of this, but if they are off by just three-quarters of 1 percentage point, it will result in a dramatic change of raising the Federal debt from 111 percent of the economy by 2039 to 159 percent of the economy. You know who has those numbers? Greece. Japan is careening toward that catastrophe. If you want to see a model or example of what happens to a country that allows its debt to run unchecked and to hit the 100-percent mark of its total economy, just take a look at what is happening in Greece. None of us wants to see that happen, but we have far too few alarm bells sounding in this country because it is happening. This isn't just Republican or conservative propaganda. This is the Congressional Budget Office. It is not Republican, it is not Democratic, it is totally neutral. It is math. It is numbers. It has nothing to do with ideology. It has everything to do with numbers that ought to be driving us to deal with this issue, standing up to our constituents and saying, regardless of the political consequences, folks, just do the math. It is pretty simple math. If we don't do something, everyone is going to pay the price. For those organizations--and I call out AARP--that scare people with mail and phone calls and everything else saying that they are going to cut your Social Security and take some money away from your disability benefits, that is not what we want to do. We want to guarantee what we have promised to people, but if we don't take these actions, it will automatically happen. So we need the support of everybody who has concern not just about my generation, who are retiring in record numbers, but about the future for our children and grandchildren. What is this country going to be if we can't take these steps? I get exercised about this, and it is why I came back. It is one of the two main reasons I decided to run for the Senate again. I was worried about terrorist attacks and the nightmare of a marriage between weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups impacting our country and the world. But while we seem to be struggling to address the terror issue and having some success--at least we are aware of it on a daily basis--we are letting this fiscal crisis go by without even talking about it. I think everybody is exhausted. We have had exhausting exchanges. We have had bipartisan Democrats and Republicans working together and pleading with the President and the White House, starting with Simpson- Bowles, which was a bipartisan effort. The Gang of 6, the Committee of 12, the supercommittee were all bipartisan efforts. I was part of the dinner group, which was an effort to plead with the President to do something together to address this problem and being turned down time after time after time. Now we are sailing toward the end of this Presidency, and obviously nothing is going to be done even though the Social Security trust fund is going to expire on the President's watch. They will come up with some gimmick and shift some money around and so forth, thereby just putting us further in debt and kicking the can down the road. They have to cover this because politically they will not allow this to happen, but they will do it in a way that makes our situation even worse. As the President careens toward retirement and his legacy, one of those legacies will be questioned by people for years and years into the future: Why didn't we do something when we had the chance on a bipartisan basis with support from both parties? Why was the President so adamant about not doing anything to address this problem? Time is running out. Social Security disability will collapse under the President's leadership before he escapes at the end of 2016. You can tell how frustrated I am, but I will keep coming down here and talking about this stuff and hopefully--well, we don't want it to happen under a crisis. We don't want to be days away from bankruptcy, so we move some money around in the Federal budget and so forth and so on, take it from Peter to pay Paul, put us further in debt, and then kick the can down the road. I feel for the next President, whoever that might be. They are going to get a can of worms because we didn't do anything about this during this tenure. With that, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, back home this weekend in Indiana I took the time very carefully to read through all 159 pages of the agreement made with Iran, as well as a lot of supporting material written by the foreign policy experts who had an opportunity also to look at this. I read it carefully because words mean a lot. As concerned as I was when we started this process, I became much more concerned after reading through the fine print that is now called the agreement with Iran. Yesterday we returned to Washington to start the session this week. I had the opportunity as a member of the Select Intelligence Committee to look over the classified annexes of this. There is still one outstanding, which we will be looking at as soon as we receive it. The more I read, the more concerned I am that we have struck not a good deal, not a passable deal that we have to accept, but a bad deal--a bad deal that is clearly worse than no deal. Four Presidents--three previous Presidents and this current President--have declared over the years of their service that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. Each person, each President used that very word ``unacceptable.'' But this deal intends simply to slow down Iran's march to nuclear weapons capability. Even the White House has conceded now that it will not permanently stop Iran's nuclear ambitions. This, in and of itself, should raise major questions and concerns about this agreement. But perhaps more concerning is what the negotiations conceded in order to reach an agreement with a regime--a regime that calls America its enemy, brazenly violates U.N. resolutions, sponsors terrorism, threatens Israel's existence, is led by individuals who proclaim ``death to America,'' and is responsible for more than 1,000 military deaths since September 11, 2001. This is the regime we are dealing with. Six of the major powers in the world, led by the United States--or at least we thought they would be led by the United States--having all the leverage of their status in world affairs, were negotiating with a country that violates all that I have just listed, that cannot be trusted, that simply is in a weak position given the sanctions, thankfully, that the Congress has imposed and other Presidents have imposed and is put in a situation where it should have the weak hand. It turns out they had the strong hand against the weakness and the lack of will and resolve of the six nations--France, United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, China, and Russia. That group was on one side of the table with the leverage that group would have against Iran, which has not gained the trust of anyone except its loyal followers--a nation that is staggering because of the sanctions that have been imposed--and which ends up being the strong hand working against the weak. The will and resolve to stand tough to achieve an agreement that was in the benefit of not just the United States but the world for a more secure Middle East and prevention of nuclear weapon possession by Iran has been negotiated away. Clearly, in the coming weeks we will be talking about various aspects of this agreement. The time is limited today, so I will just go into a couple of issues. The period covered by the deal is way too short. There was the promise that Iran would not have the capability to develop nuclear weapons, and it is specifically now on a pathway to acquiring them. President Obama has admitted that in these future circumstances, Iran's breakout time to nuclear weapons will be essentially zero. That is what he said some time ago. But, of course, now the President, the Secretary of State, and the White House are making public statements saying: Well, that is really not what we meant. And they said a number of things to reassure the American people: Trust us; everything is going to be OK. What particularly grabbed my attention was the inspection regime. Clearly, on any kind of agreement of this type, there has to be as tight a regime of inspections as possible. We know Iran has cheated in the past. We know they are going to try to cheat in the future. They are going to try to interpret every nuance and every word in this agreement as something different than what we will describe. Therefore, verification of their ability to live by the word of the agreement, as bad as it is, has to be verified completely. When you look at the sections necessary to accomplish that, it raises real concerns. I will spend more time on this floor later, given the constraints here, to talk about this inspections regime. But let me address an issue that has just come to light. I was sitting and plowing through this agreement. When I came to section 78, it started listing the timeframe for how we would proceed if we found that there was information to suspect Iran was cheating on the agreement. You have heard 24 days is the maximum, which, by the way, is longer than just about any agreement we have entered into in an arms agreement. For many of these, it has been 9 hours. Everybody knows that we have given up anywhere, anyplace. We now have to have Iran's approval before we move forward with a convoluted, byzantine process in terms of getting to a point where a resolution is made. We now know, reading through sections 78 to 82, I believe, that it doesn't add up to 24 days. It adds up to 54 days. We are talking nearly 2 months or more. I was interested to open up the Wall Street Journal this morning: ``Iran Inspections in 24 Days? Not Even Close.'' As I was sitting there, it was being pounded into our heads by the Secretary of State saying: 24 days, that is all it is--24 days. We are on top of this. We can get it resolved. Don't worry; they can't move their stuff somewhere else or cover their tracks or remove evidence of what we suspect is a violation of the agreement. Over and over and over the Secretary of State and the President of the United States said 24 days. First of all, 24 days is not a good deal, as I just mentioned. It ought to be 24 hours or less--anytime, anywhere. What did we do to anytime, anywhere? We stretched it out to 54 days. Despite what the administration has said about this, I cannot believe that the clear reading--read sections 78 to 82, I believe it is, and add it up. It is 54 days of time if all time is used to come to an agreement. What can you do in 54 days when you have been accused of cheating? You remove the evidence. That is exactly what they will do. This is a huge revelation here that is now in print. The administration keeps insisting that this is not the case: Don't worry, folks; we have it covered on inspections. That simply is false. So let's say we find out they are cheating. When our negotiators abandoned their position on gradual sanctions relief, they opted instead for this so-called snapback provision that would punish Iran for noncompliance, for cheating. Read the agreement. There is a convoluted, byzantine scheme for such a return to sanctions that would be exceedingly time consuming and is not politically realistic. It is an illusion--and more on this later. The arms embargo is lifted, and on and on it goes. I listed just a couple of very deeply concerning issues here that need to be discussed. Unfortunately, we have been put in a box by this administration. They ran straight to the United Nations to get approval for this without America's elected representatives and the American people having an opportunity to have the deal presented to them and for them to make the decision. So five of the six nations involved here-- even if the United States comes to the point where we defeat this effort, if it is possible to do so--now have the full green light to go forward. Germany rushed over with contracts in hand with their Commerce Minister and heads of major corporations are signing off deals like you wouldn't believe. Those aren't going to be snapped back. We now have an opportunity to review this pending deal, and I would urge every Member of the Senate to take the time to sit down and read this agreement through carefully. Look at what the experts--the foreign policy experts--have said about it. Look at where the flaws are, and let's sit down and discuss it. Let's look at those top secret classified annexes--every Member here has the opportunity to do that if they so choose--and bring forward to the American people--that which we are allowed to bring forward that is not classified--the flaws of what has turned out to be an agreement that simply is not in the interest of the future of the American people. My time has expired. Let me just wrap up by saying that the President has defended this deal by challenging critics who put forward alternatives. How about this? How about exercising American leadership and making it clear that crippling sanctions will be maintained and strengthened if Iran nuclear activity continues? Congress should reject this bad deal. We then can enact more vigorous sanctions to persuade the Iranian leaders to reconsider their position or persuade the Iranian people to reconsider their leaders. Mr. President, I apologize for going over my time. I yield the floor to my colleague from North Carolina, and I see my colleague from Maine is waiting to speak.

Mr. COATS

Mr. COATS. Mr. President, the last 6 months of this Senate I have been coming down here every week to talk about the ``Waste of the Week''--examples of waste, fraud, and abuse within the Federal Government. I can't believe this is No. 17. We are continuing to rack up significant savings to the taxpayer. We can eliminate these documented and certified wastes that have been determined through the various government agencies, inspectors general, and others. Today we turn to a rather serious topic regarding the receipt of taxpayer dollars by criminals who are avoiding felony arrest but are still receiving benefits at taxpayers' expense. Here is a little history. The Social Security Act currently prohibits those fleeing justice from receiving Social Security and other Federal benefits. Congress first addressed this issue in 1996, when it banned fugitive felons from receiving Social Security benefits. It then expanded this prohibition in 2004 to also apply this ban to Social Security disability insurance and World War II benefits. Unfortunately this law has run into some conflicting opinions by court challenges, which have weakened the effects of the law and led to a lack of clarity in terms of what the original language and original intent by Congress was supposed to be. To address this problem--because it is a problem, and there is lack of clarity--I have this week introduced legislation to amend the Social Security Act to clearly state--to clarify--the intent of the law that prohibits fugitive felons from receiving Social Security retirement and disability benefits. My bill would clarify this law and return the implementation of the policy to its original intent. Now, let me be clear. The government should not be providing benefits to those avoiding prosecution, custody or confinement for a crime or attempt to commit a crime that is considered a felony. But we are not talking about individuals who get speeding tickets or make a mistake on their taxes. This legislation applies only to those with an arrest order for felony charges. The crime must be of enough serious magnitude to carry with it a minimum sentence of 1 or more years in prison. So we want to be careful here that we are not imposing this restriction of receipt of benefits on someone who doesn't qualify under the law, and that is another clarification that we want to make. Furthermore, the bill retains the ability of the Social Security Administration to continue or restore benefits if the individual can show good cause--such as that they were exonerated of the crime or perhaps were victim of an identity theft or other legitimate reasons to not lose benefits. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this commonsense fix could save taxpayers $4.8 billion over the next 10 years alone. So the bottom line is this: We pull out our chart with our ever- growing gauge of money that has been wasted through fraud and abuse within the Federal Government. We are climbing very quickly to $100 billion. I thought it would take a year to get there if I did one a week. We are going to have to make a major extension to this chart or redo this because we are closing in on $100 billion of wasted taxpayer money documented by Federal Government agencies in investigations. So passage of this bill would add $4.8 billion to our chart. We have come across so many instances of bloat, waste, fraud, and abuse. I could be down here every day the Senate is in session. I could be down here every hour the Senate is in session--such is the staggering amount of dysfunction occurring through this bloated bureaucracy called the Federal Government. Here we are, trying to protect taxpayers of our States who are stretched to the gills in terms of what they have to pay not only in Federal but State or sales--you name it--or real estate taxes that roll up and consume so much of everybody's weekly pay. The least we can do--while we need to make major fixes to our fiscal problems here--is take those that have been identified by legitimate neutral organizations--inspectors general of the United States, various agencies--bring those to light, and then do something about it and not just come down here and make a chart and add some red ink, but actually introduce legislation, which I am trying to do on some of these pieces so that we can remedy this problem. So meanwhile we have an administration here that has refused over and over to sit down and work out a long-term fiscal debt reduction program, which this country desperately needs because the debt clock is still ticking away like crazy. If you want to see it, go to my Web site at coats.senate.gov. We have the clock right there. We haven't talked about it much down here lately. We made a big push earlier. Too many people have thrown up their hands and said that under this administration it is not going to happen. That probably is right. But the least we can do then, until we get new management in the White House, is to find these issues of waste, fraud, and abuse, and do something about it now. So that is what we are trying to do. I look forward to being back here next week with the latest edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' I thank my colleague from Maine for her patience. I yield the floor.