Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I appreciate the comments of my colleague, and question. The next amendment I would like to call up is amendment No. 767, which requires all legislation to be reviewed before it is considered by the Senate to determine whether duplicative or overlapping programs are created. I ask that that amendment be called up and the pending amendment be set aside.

Mr. COBURN. Here is one that doesn't get anything as far as a blue slip. What we now have is 3 years' worth of reports by the General Accountability Office showing at least $250 billion in questionable programs that are markedly duplicative of one another. This is multiple areas, and I have them now memorized and all the new ones too. It is layer after layer, agency after agency, program after program. This is a bipartisan amendment. All this says is that before we create another program in the Senate, we have a report from the Congressional Research Service: Does this duplicate a program that is already out there? If we continue doing what we are doing, we are going to continue to get GAO reports that we are creating programs that duplicate what we are already doing. It is not the fact that maybe our intent is good, it is the fact that we don't know what is out there now--except GAO does now--and how will we ever know until we put a requirement on ourselves to quit creating new duplicative programs? What the commonsense man would say is that if you have programs that are doing things and they are not working, don't create another one, fix the ones you have. Yet we refuse to do that. Committee after committee refuses to do the oversight. There is a bill sitting right now awaiting our determination, coming from the House, that reformed 36 job-training programs that the GAO said were failing and were duplicative and didn't have the metrics, and they converted those to 6, 36 out of 47 because the committee that did this, the SKILLS Act, only had jurisdiction over them. They created six programs, and they put metrics on it. We spend $19.8 billion on those 47 programs. We are going to achieve wonderful savings. But the most important thing we are going to do with the SKILLS Act is we are actually going to give somebody a skill with the money we spend rather than wasting 80 percent in the job-training programs we have, and that is what the oversight says. When you look at it, that is what it says. For us to not continue adding to the problem, this is an amendment-- it does not have a blue slip problem, so what is wrong with considering this amendment? I ask my colleague, what is wrong with considering this amendment? This is common sense. It works. It will actually cause us to not do stupid things in the future. It will actually help us to be better stewards of the public's money. Yet we are going to object to bringing it up.

Mr. COBURN. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. COBURN. I thank my colleague. I will make my mark on what I am going to reoffer in the future. I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 766 and have the pending amendment set aside.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to let the Senator object ahead of time, as he obviously is going to.

Mr. COBURN. Every 4 years the Federal Government spends $200 million so both political parties can have a party. We are $17.4 trillion in debt as we speak at this moment. That is $50 million a year. The way to get rid of a billion-dollar debt is $50 million at a time. The way to get rid of a trillion-dollar debt is $1 billion at a time. Do we really have the capability right now to borrow $200 million every 4 years for parties for the Democratic and Republican conventions and charge it to our children? All this does is put in a prohibition that we are not ever going to do that again. That is not a wise expenditure of taxpayer money. It is probably not constitutional. It has never been challenged. It certainly does not fall within the enumerated powers of the Constitution, article I, section 8. So it is another way of saving us some money. I would just repeat my point. We have the FAA out there intentionally causing pain and harm to the American public today, and we have the Senate intentionally not doing what will solve those problems-- intentionally not doing what will solve those problems. We are not trying to find the waste. We are not offering bills to eliminate the waste. We are not offering bills to eliminate duplication. We are not trying to refine programs to make them better. We are not trying to save Medicare and we are not trying to save Social Security--the very things that are very important in terms of what is getting ready to happen to us. We cannot point to the administration and say they are cynical without pointing to ourselves as well. Here is $200 million that we spend every 4 years. Why don't we quit spending it? If the political parties--I have never been to a political convention in my life, but if they want to have a party, they ought to pay for it and we should not charge it to Dick Durbin's grandkids or Mike Enzi's grandkids or Tom Coburn's grandkids or anybody else's grandkids, which is what we are doing. We are probably not going to get a vote on this amendment either, which shows again that our focus is not on what is most important for our country; our focus is on us. We have not set about to solve the big problems for our country. This is a no-brainer. There are not many people other than those people in the political hierarchy of each party who would be against this. Yet it is not even going to get a vote. What does that say to the American people? Sure, it is only $200 million. Two hundred million dollars. Two hundred thousand thousands. We talk about millions as if they are nothing. Most of our fellow citizens will have trouble making that amount of money in their lifetime, and we flip it off as nothing. This is a simple amendment. It has been objected to. I understand. I have no animosity toward my colleague. I understand what is going on. But do we really want to solve problems for the American people or do we just want to play this game some more? It is disturbing. It has to be disturbing to the average American. In the last 5 years the average Oklahoma family has truly struggled to get by, and we have been one of the more fortunate States. But they made very hard choices about their priorities. They have had kids go to an instate school who didn't want to because they couldn't afford to go to an out-of-State school. They have driven a car 2 or 3 years longer than they wanted to and put money into an old automobile because they could not afford to go the other way. They have changed the way they enjoy themselves as a family because of what we have done. They have made hard choices. They have gone through the priorities in their lives and said: What is important based on the amount of money we have? That is not just in Oklahoma; in every State in this country they have done that. Everybody has done that but the Federal Government--the Federal Government. And once we do take $182 out of a $150,000 family budget, which I showed an example of earlier, what we are told is, we can't do that. There is no way. It is impossible. We can't do that. Then we have a demonstrated, overt exacerbation of something that was not caused by the sequester, that could have been averted, to prove a point that we cannot cut a penny from the Federal budget. When $100 billion a year in Medicare and Medicaid fraud is ongoing in this country, we are talking about trimming the availability of Medicare services to seniors, and we have not solved that problem. We are not believable anymore; we are not trustworthy anymore. This is a very simple, straightforward amendment. I know $200 million doesn't sound like much in Washington, but it is a ton in Muskogee, OK. I will offer my amendment again and there will be objections. What will probably happen is that I will not have a chance to offer it again because it is not germane to the bill, and then when we get postcloture, it will be ruled nongermane. We will not have a chance for Senator Durbin or Senator Enzi to object in the future because of the rules we are operating under. We are not going to have any amendments until we get postcloture, which means everything I have talked about so far is not even going to be considered. We could consider them. We could allow them to be voted on. We could demonstrate to the American people we are actually interested in trying to solve some of the problems up here, but we decided we will not do that. It is pretty frustrating to me as a Senator, but it has to be terribly disappointing to the average American. I have just outlined about $5 billion worth of savings with the four amendments I have talked about. We are not going to get to vote on them. Now, $5 billion is almost Oklahoma's entire State budget for 1 year. This is easy, simple stuff to do. Mark my words, we will never vote on one of these amendments associated with this bill. Since we don't have real amendment opportunities anymore in the Senate, they will only come forward when the majority leader decides he wants to vote on them. He has been very recalcitrant in offering to vote on hardly anything that will actually make a difference in our future in terms of finances. I am going to talk about the other amendments I wish to bring up. I will not make the Senator from Illinois object to them, so I will just talk about them. Amendment No. 29, which I will not call up, is an amendment on something I think is terribly unfair. If this amendment were passed, it would only save us $90 million a year. Does anyone realize the Professional Golfer's Association is a tax-free organization? They raise billions of dollars every year, but the money that goes into the PGA is tax free--that actually goes into the organization. They are a 501(c)6 tax-exempt organization. Not only does it include the PGA tour, it includes the National Football League, the National Hockey League, and it includes the LPGA. Can anybody tell me why they are tax-exempt other than it is under a loophole we have created? So if they were not tax-exempt and they paid their taxes as other organizations that are in the business of making money, the IRS would collect about $95 million more a year from just these four organizations. Professional baseball saw the light and gave this up. They said it was not right. They did it a number of years ago. They said it is not right. Yet we continue to allow the well-heeled in our country to take advantage of the Tax Code as we raise taxes on everybody else. I think this is something we ought to fix. A lot of my colleagues on my side of the aisle don't like this. I think it is inherently unfair that the very profitable sports organizations in our country don't pay taxes on the income their parent organizations make. I am not saying they don't do some positive things. The President talked about paying your fair share. This is one that is not fair. Let's make it fair. Let's collect that money. It is not going to make any difference in what they do. There are a few more organizations to add to this list: The ATP, WTP, the U.S. Tennis Association, Professional Rodeo and Cowboy Association, the National Hot Rod Association, as well as the ones I mentioned earlier also get this benefit. People say this is going to impact their teaching certification or their charitable activities. They already have a 501(c)3. All of these organizations have a 501(c)3. They have a (c)6 just so they don't have to pay taxes. They have a charitable organization for all of their charitable stuff as well as their certifications. This amendment will take the extra $90-some million and give it back to the American people. By giving that money back, it is giving it back to our kids because that is $90 million we are not going to borrow against their future. The final amendment I will mention is on subsidies for millionaires for gambling losses. I will admit to Senator Durbin that this one does have a blue slip. For anyone who reports $1 million in adjusted gross income a year in this country, they have an unlimited amount of gambling losses they can offset against that. I am not a big fan of gambling. If it was a great business, we would all be gambling and be better off, but we are not. Most of us are losers when we try to gamble. The fact is the high rollers in this country get to deduct their gambling losses, and it is a large amount of money. We also don't have any cutoff in terms of taking advantage of a lot of other expenses, which is for a speech another day, but here is one that is not necessarily great for society, yet we incentivize because we give an unlimited availability of deduction for the very wealthy. It ought to be something we change.

Mr. COBURN. I will be happy to.

Mr. COBURN. It is against gains in gambling. The Senator is correct.

Mr. COBURN. Nevertheless, we give an advantage to those with an adjusted gross income of $1 million or more a year. What we have done is given the well-heeled and well-connected an advantage the average American citizen cannot do. I cannot recall, but this morning I read the exact amount of revenue. The point is it is the principle. Over the next few months will--regardless of this bill, its outcome-- the Congress start addressing the real problems facing our country? We just passed $740 billion worth of increased income taxes and payroll taxes at the end of the year. Supposedly we will start cutting $85 billion over the next 12 months. We will see if that actually happens, as we have grown the government 89 percent over the last 10 years, while the average American family income has declined 5 percent over the same time. I made the statement earlier--and it can be checked on any Web site-- if we go by inflation-adjusted dollars, the average American is where they were in 1989. If we look at the size of government, it is almost four times that size. It doesn't seem to me we are accomplishing a whole lot as far as elevating the prosperity of Americans, but we have certainly elevated the prosperity of the Federal Government, and we have certainly undermined the prosperity of our children. I am worried about our country. I am worried about the loss of confidence in this body. I am worried about our abandonment of common sense. I am worried about the fact that we ignore the enumerated power and then we wonder why we get GAO reports that talk about the duplication and things that are not effective. There is a great role for government in a lot of areas in this country, but in many areas we are not effective and certainly not efficient. The reasons our Founders put the enumerated power in was so the decisions that could be made on so many things would be made at the local level so it would be done effectively and efficiently. When we have this year's GAO report showing that there is $98 billion worth of duplicative waste--$250 billion over the last 3 years of duplicative waste--and we don't do anything about it, what we are saying is it is not important. The future is not important, having the confidence of the American people is not important, our kids' future is not important, and don't worry, we will be able to pay all the debt back. I will close with this: There are a lot of biblical principles about paying interest and going into debt. Last year we paid about $223 billion in interest costs. If we took our historical pattern over the last 30 years of what our interest is, we are actually paying the same interest we were 25 years ago on one-fourth the debt. If we took our historical interest rate, which is about 5.88 percent, and applied it to where we are today, what we would see is our interest costs would be $880 billion a year. That is going to happen to us pretty soon. Nobody knows for sure when, but interest rates are not going to stay at zero for the Federal Government. We are not going to have the Federal Reserve continuing to print money, and if we do, then the value of our dollar is going to decline and we will all get taxed through the decrease in value of whatever we have or hold. The point I want to make is that the interest payment doesn't help the poorest person in this country, it doesn't help the single mom, it doesn't help the kid in Head Start, it doesn't help our schools, it doesn't help our military, it doesn't help our foreign service. It doesn't help anybody except the person who has our debt. Don't we have an obligation to not let that happen? Don't we have an obligation to start addressing the very real problems in front of us? Not one dollar we pay in interest helps anybody in America in the long- term net way. Last year the Chinese dumped $250 trillion of our debt. We ought to ask ourselves why. Their perception is that as their currency appreciates, our currency is eventually going to depreciate. As my friends in Oklahoma say, one of the reasons we are doing so well right now is we are the best-looking horse in the glue factory. We look good because everybody else is looking so bad. We are lulled into a position of thinking we, in fact, can get away with continuing to do what we have done for years in Washington when, in fact, we cannot. I appreciate the time on the floor and my colleagues' consideration of my amendments. I understand what is happening. I am not happy about what is happening in the Senate. I think we ought to be working on solving real problems. They are the biggest problems in front of our country. Saving Medicare is important. In 13 months, Social Security disability is going to be out of money. Those people who are truly disabled are going to see a cut in their benefits. We are not going to be able to address that. The time for us to be acting is now. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, reserving the right to object, and I plan to object, I will take some time to explain why I object. What is happening in the Senate is phenomenal, and I want the American people to see this. The Federal Government is 89 percent bigger than it was 10 years ago. We just heard the majority leader say flexibility can't work because we are already dealing with the same amount of money--89 percent more than we were 10 years ago. I didn't vote for the Budget Control Act. I think sequester is a stupid way to cut spending. But I want us to understand exactly what is going on. This is a contrived situation because no effort--zero effort--by the FAA or the Department of Transportation has been made to have any flexibility in terms of how they spend their money. They have made no request for a reprogramming of funds within the FAA. They have over $500 million unobligated sitting in balances that aren't obligated, so none of this had to happen. This has been a created situation. I want my colleagues to think for a minute about the number of people who didn't make it to their aunt's funeral yesterday because of a contrived situation; the number of people who may not get to the birth of a grandchild; the number of business meetings that aren't going to occur because we have created a contrived situation. Our problem is we are continuing to spend money we don't have. So we have taken FAA, we have put the airlines at risk--and they are, by the way, suing the government because they haven't made a good-faith effort to do it in another way--and we have created a situation where we are going to discomfit and inconvenience hundreds of thousands of American people on a political point because we can't cut any spending in Washington. Let me outline for my colleagues a moment what the FAA could do. They could save $105 million by cutting their overhead expenses for consultant supplies and travel by 15 percent. That is one-seventh or one-sixth of all the money they need to keep all their controllers on. They could save $41 million by eliminating funding the President has already recommended eliminating in terms of programs for airports that are on the national plan of integrated airports. They have already recommended doing that, but they are not doing that. They have the flexibility to do that but they are not doing it. That is another $41 million. They can save $6 million on small community air service--flexible. They could reduce the Airport Improvement Program. They have plenty of flexibility there. That is up to $926 million. They could do that. They could reduce or eliminate--and they would have to have our help to do this--the Essential Air Service Program where at many airports across this country we are paying a $1,200 subsidy to fly less than 10 people a day out of an airport less than 90 miles away from a major airport. So to say there is no flexibility, they do not want any flexibility. And the fact is our country is headed toward bankruptcy. Let me talk about OCO for a minute. It is true OCO money is in the budget, because we thought we were going to have to spend it. But every penny of that money will be borrowed money--borrowed money. So if we weren't going to spend it, we are saying now we are going to go over here and take care of sequestration? A 4-percent cut in the Federal budget--4 percent. It is only 89 percent bigger than it was 10 years ago and we can't find 4 percent within the FAA? Let me outline a few other things going on at the FAA. They have posted requirements for nonessential employees since sequestration started. They have made no efforts at flexibility. They have made no efforts to do what they could do to keep the most number of controllers working. This isn't going to happen. We are not going to borrow money anymore against the future of our kids when in fact we have other ways to do it. I will make my final point. The President is the CEO of this country. He can make this happen with the least amount of inconvenience for the American people. The question is: Will he or not? Will he or not? Will we play this political shell game with the lives and perhaps the safety and certainly the inconvenience of the traveling public in this country to make the point there is no way we are going to cut any spending out of the Federal Government when it is 89 percent bigger? And, by the way, it is 48 percent bigger under President Obama. It is a real choice. America is going to get a real choice: Can we in fact respond in a prudent way to run this government in an efficient manner and eliminate low-priority items and put money for items such as NIH in a priority? We can. The question is: Do we have the will to do that? What we are hearing from the majority leader is: No, we don't want to cut anything. We will take some funny money that doesn't really exist, and if we use it, we are going to borrow, and that will take all the pain away. There won't be any oversight, no streamlining, no priorities made in terms of how we spend money. Every other American family and business has had to make those decisions. Yet we are refusing to do it. When we asked the President: Do you want the flexibility, he said no. He would veto the bill that gives him the flexibility to put high priorities up here and low priorities down here. That tells me it is all political. It doesn't have anything to do with the FAA; it has to do with creating an event so we won't do what is in the best long-term interests of the country. With that, I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I voted for it.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, the reason patients can't get their chemotherapeutic treatments has nothing to do with the budget. It has everything to do with the administration's CMS and payment recognition. I have been working on this issue for 3 months. It has nothing to do with the sequester. It has to do with what the CMS has ruled in terms of appropriate payments. The majority leader is a wonderful man. He has a different view of what it takes to get our country back in shape. He has actually split with the President this afternoon, because the President said the only way he would, in fact, turn off sequester is with a tax increase, and the only way this can be considered a tax increase is spending money we weren't ever going to spend anyway and acknowledging we are going to charge it to our children. So, in essence, it will be a tax increase-- just not on us. It will be on every child. It doesn't have to be this way. The President could agree for flexibility. His Secretaries could ask for reprogramming authority. But they have not done that. Why have they not done that? Because, in the President's own words, he wants sequester to hurt. What a position for the CEO--the leader of this country--to say: I want to teach you a lesson. I am not going to use judgment and prioritize and categorize things that are most important and find things that are least important; I am going to reject all attempts at flexibility. I wish to make one other point. The President keeps saying we have saved $2.5 trillion. The majority leader just said the same thing. What the American people ought to know is $1.2 trillion of that ``savings'' is for increases that were planned that aren't going to happen. Let me say that again: $1.2 trillion of the savings is for spending increases that were planned that aren't going to happen. Everybody who runs a family budget or runs a business knows that is no savings. You didn't save any money that you were going to spend but then didn't spend. It wasn't saved because you never spent it. But it is a wonderful way Washington accounts that is different than the way the rest of us have to live our lives. So let's go back and review. We as Republicans agree we ought to fund the most important functions of our government, and we believe there ought to be priorities to that. But we also believe we ought to save the future for our children. The answer to that problem we found ourselves in--sequestration--is to give the administration the flexibility for making priority choices just like the rest of us do. If they don't want to use it, then they don't want to use it. But the fact is we will not pass that. The same tools that we would all use ourselves, we will not pass that. Why is it we will not pass that, to order things in priority, to do what is most important first? I would tell you the conferences and the amount of travel for which the FAA spends are a low priority compared to keeping controllers working. We haven't seen any cut in those programs--none. As a matter of fact, the President's budget recommended taking $800 million out of the airport improvement program--if you will read his budget. That was the President's recommendation. So now we are really at odds with the President because he says we can save that $800 million. It is flabbergasting to think there is absolutely no common sense in Washington and that we will not do the things that are in the best long-term interests for the people of this country. So what we do is we create a situation that is going to tremendously impact our Nation-- both the business and the common citizen who is traveling--and we do it for political gain to prove a point, not because we have to--because we are going to make sequester hurt. The security the American people want is to know the future is OK. The future isn't OK with us operating the way we are operating. I know government isn't easy and I know it is messy, but there are some absolute truths. The absolute truth is we can't spend our way out of debt and we can't borrow our way out of debt, and we are taking $88 billion over the next year out of the $3.7 trillion budget. If we are not capable of doing that, none of us should be here, either party. What we fail to recognize is what the real risk is for our country; and the risk is that we are running out of time and the ability to continue to borrow in the world. The only reason we look good today is because everybody else looks worse. We are the only rose in the bud vase that is not wilted right now, and that is going to change. When it does, the consequences for our kids, for our families, for our economy, for our GDP is going to totally change. If we went back to historical interest rates today, when we quit printing money--which we will eventually have to do--it will add another $650 billion a year to our expenses. It does nothing for anybody. So this small 4.5 percent that the administration refuses to even work on to make it less painful to the American public shows what kind of trouble we are in. I am disappointed, as is I know the majority leader, that we can't work out a way to solve this problem. But there are two totally competing philosophies; one ensures a productive, successful America, the other shows an America drowning in debt. There has to be a point in time when we say: Can't we run this government more efficiently, more effectively, and do it in a way that preserves the future for our children? I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that I be recorded as cosponsor on the Grassley amendment No. 725.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I rise to speak on the issue the Senate is considering. It has been an interesting 3 or 4 weeks as we have considered and talked and thought about how we address what is best for our country and how we do that in a way that will protect the Constitution and protect individual rights and protect States rights. A lot of ideas have been thrown out, many of them with great infirmities in terms of either impacting Second Amendment rights, impacting 10th Amendment rights or the infirmity that they will not do anything to actually solve the problem. I come from a State that is very pro-gun. I am very pro-gun. I own a multitude of weapons. I know how to handle them, I know how to fire them, and I know how to safely store them. The issue in front of us is, how do we protect this Second Amendment right and the Supreme Court's rulings that have affirmed our individual right to self-defense and our individual right to freedom? I believe I actually have an answer that the Senate could coalesce around. As I talk to the most avid gun owners in Oklahoma, many of whom are opposing me trying to reach a compromise, the one question on which they agree with me is this: What if you could know as a gun owner or whoever you are--if you have a gun and you are going to sell it, what if you could know that you are not selling that gun to somebody on the ``do not buy'' list? We have all these words going on now. Background check--there is no background check with the NICS list. It is a check against people who are prohibited from buying. It is not a very good list, by the way, because the States have not complied, the courts have not complied with people who have been convicted of felonies. We have a lot of problems in terms of a ``do not buy'' list. We have to think of this list like the ``do not fly'' list that Homeland Security has. Nobody wants to get on an airplane with somebody who is on that ``do not fly'' list because they are on that list for a very good reason. Most gun owners--as a matter of fact, I have not met one yet who wants to sell a gun to somebody who is on a ``do not buy'' list, which is called the NICS list. So how do we do that? How do we do that in such a way that we do not raise the cost, limit the freedom, or otherwise impede a free activity that is available, guaranteed under our Constitution? The other thing I have learned is that the easier laws are to comply with, the more compliance you will get. My proposal is very simple and straightforward. Let's create a way that whoever is selling a gun in this country can know they are not selling it to a criminal, they are not selling it to somebody who is prohibited, which is an illegal alien, a child sex abuser, a felon-- those people. How do you know? And can we do that in a way that doesn't inhibit commerce, doesn't inhibit your rights as an individual under the Second Amendment, doesn't inhibit the rights of a State under the 10th Amendment? How do we do those things? You know, it is not hard. With our rights come some responsibilities. What if I could tell you that you could take out your cell phone and go to a portal and you could get a certificate that says--on your cell phones or printed out on your printer--that you are not on the list, and with that would be a PIN number, so that whomever could be selling you a gun would say, ``I am going to check your PIN number to see that this is not bogus, now show me your ID,'' and you could actually confirm whether somebody was on the list? That is how we control it. We make it easy. We don't put up large hurdles. I find myself caught between both extremes in this debate. I actually think it is smart policy to make sure we put in place something allowing law-abiding citizens to do the right thing, to actually make a difference. If we were to do that, a large percentage--not all of them--of the transfers of weapons and guns to people who should not have them would stop. The emotion associated with all the violent events over the last 3 or 4 years tends to cause us to lose sight of some pretty commonsense principles. We are not going to stop all gun violence in this country. People who are going to do illegal things are still going to do them. We cannot stop it all, but we can do straightforward, simple things that can make a big difference in lessening the availability of weapons to people who should not have them. The other thing we can do is we can make it so that veterans do not automatically lose their Second Amendment right because for a short period of time, due to their service, they were incapable of managing their financial affairs. That is the right thing to do. We can do this. That is in this proposal. But what I fear is going to happen is nothing. So what we are going to be offering when there is a time to allow other amendments is my amendment No. 727, which does the following things: It reauthorizes the ``no buy'' list at an appropriate level. It creates reforms to the grant system so that States will comply with reporting those people who are dangerous to themselves or somebody else, so we incentivize States to do that. We create a protection for the Second Amendment rights of veterans. We require the courts to submit to the ``no buy'' list those who are convicted of violent felonies. We require some transparency in State reporting so we can know whether a State is actually complying by reporting those who are a danger to themselves and other people, those who are truly mentally infirm. That is because one of our big problems--if you take Virginia Tech, the individual who committed that crime was known by the State to be a danger to themselves or somebody else. Yet they did not report it to the ``do not buy'' list. We incentivize that. We allow for exceptions for people who are already authorized in their State to purchase guns, whether it is a concealed carry permit or whether it is what the State may use to say: Here is your authorization to say you are not on it. In other words, we give States primacy protecting the 10th Amendment. If they want to go further, they can, but we also allow them to innovate, which is one of the things our forefathers wanted us to make sure we did when we did things in Washington. We create a consumer portal that is easy. We also create penalties if you misuse that portal for some other purpose. We enforce a destruction of those records into that portal so that the government cannot use that as a list to know who is purchasing guns. So we eliminate the concern over record-keeping and its assault on the Second Amendment. We also sunset this, so if it actually doesn't make a marked improvement--which I think it will--in 5 years, it goes away and we do something different. The other thing is we limit the ATF's ability to grossly violate the intent of previous laws in terms of demand letters on federally licensed firearm dealers. I daresay there is a difference in culture on guns in this country depending on where in the country you are, but there is a place to be found in the middle, in the Senate, for doing something that is common sense. What we are proposing is something that is simple, it doesn't cost any money to speak of, it is easily accessible, it is verifiable on both ends of the commercial transaction, it does nothing to eliminate the Second Amendment provisions in the Constitution or take away 10th Amendment rights of States, and it will actually decrease transfers of weapons to those who are on the ``do not buy'' list. Is it a comprehensive plan? No. Will it solve the problem? Yes. Will it work? Yes. Some of the criticisms we heard--if there is no record, how do you know they did it? If 90 percent of the people in this country--which is what the media are all quoting--want us to do that, 90 percent of us think there ought to be an enhancement to the ``no buy'' list in terms of utilizing it, that same 90 percent of the people are the gun owners in America. So if 90 percent is the number, then you are going to have at least 90 percent compliance with this very simple, straightforward way that you can know you are complying with the law. The other area that is confusing is that people want--and why they want--a record of a gun. It is for the investigation of a crime. Well, guess what. The best way to not ever have that crime is to have an effective check on the ``do not buy'' list. It will not eliminate all crime, but they say the infirmity with ours is that the weapon cannot be traced. That is right, it cannot be traced. The vast majority of used weapons are not sold through gun dealers or at gun shows. They are sold by average, everyday Americans to somebody else. If we don't want the straw purchasers, felons, or illegal citizens buying them, then what we ought to do is set up something that 90 percent of Americans are going to comply with. It is not hard to do. It is easy to do the right thing. It doesn't please the gun control groups, and it doesn't please the hard Second Amendment rights groups. If we think about it and actually make it easy for people to know that they could not sell a gun to somebody on the ``do not buy'' list, America would comply, and we would actually see a positive outcome of this debate. I am amazed at the misinformation people have about guns when they come to the Senate floor and talk about them when they have never fired some of those weapons, have never held them in their hands, and do not know what they are designed for. I plan to come back tomorrow when I will bring up this amendment for consideration. Our Founders had a Bill of Rights, and we have a Constitution. It was really designed for moral and good people. In that bill, as affirmed by the Supreme Court, was a Second Amendment right, and that is not going away. That right is not going to go away. Even if we were to take it away, the Supreme Court would probably bring it back. We really ought to be leading and talking about what the real problems are in our country. What are our real problems? One of the real problems is that we are not a moral and great people anymore compared to what we were when our Founding Fathers drafted those documents. We are in some moral decline, and that is because of an absence of real leadership at a lot of levels and in a lot of areas in our country. We ought to recognize that we cannot legislate away the evilness about us. We cannot fix it all with a law. We fix it in the way we live our lives and the way we treat one another and how we reach out to give our lives for another person every day. One of the crucial things is that we have become self-focused as Americans rather than Nation focused, and that is why we have seen this moral decline come upon us. What I think our country is looking for is real leadership on the principles which matter, that change people's minds about what they do and how they do it. We are getting into a much larger debate than guns. Evil is out there. That criminal element is out there. That mental illness is out there. We are not going to address all of that with a few laws on guns. We are going to address that by character-based, morally led, morally affirmed leadership at all levels throughout our country. As a physician, I am trained to fix the real disease, not treat the symptoms. This debate is about symptoms. It is an important debate. There are things we can do, but the real disease is our moral decline as a country. The historians talk about it. John Taylor, the Scottish historian, talked about it. It is about the decline of all republics and what happens to them. America is built for a good, moral people. We have to have the leadership that calls us back to that. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I would note to my colleague from the State of Delaware, if I heard him correctly, we just now have had a hearing on a nominee for the DC Circuit Court. He is not even on the Executive Calendar because he has not even been voted out of the Judiciary Committee. So the Senator makes a lot of great points. But I think the fact we are talking about a potential judge who has not even cleared the Judiciary Committee yet may be a bit premature. He will get a fair hearing. I think we have noted that more judicial nominees were approved in the last two Congresses than the two Congresses before under the last 4 years of the Bush administration. I rise to say this evening there has been a lot in the news. One thing that has not been in the news very much is the third and final report of the Government Accountability Office in terms of looking at duplication within the Federal Government. I hope as the American people listen to this, they will take a couple things away. No. 1, we have a great organization called the Government Accountability Office. They have done a wonderful job. We mandated this 4 years ago. They have been on time with their reports. What they have shown us has been tremendously revealing. The first thing I want Americans to note is Congress has failed to act on the first two reports--no substantive action whatsoever. One significant thing in the Senate was the elimination of the ethanol mandate. With this report today comes an estimated $98 billion a year in savings. What we take by looking at this report could potentially yield us $98 billion in savings by eliminating duplication in what they just found in this one report. Let me go through it for 1 minute. They found 679 different renewable energy programs across 23 agencies--not across the Energy Department. If we are going to have renewable programs, that is where we should have it. Across 23 different agencies of which we spend $15 billion a year, they found instances where we are giving grants from different agencies to the same projects for the same thing, spending three times as much money as we should be spending on the one project even if we did not have that. So the potential for us to work our way out of the consequences of the sequester is at our fingertips. Here, drug abuse prevention and treatment, 76 separate programs, not run through the Department of Health and Human Services, run through 10 different departments with overlap that shows no metrics but multiple agencies having programs doing exactly the same thing: $4.5 billion a year. That is half the size of my Oklahoma State budget a year. Catfish inspection. I saw in the President's budget today three different agencies where one has to meet the requirements before they can have their catfish inspected. The only thing they did not recommend in the budget today is getting rid of the Agriculture Department. They approve your cheese pizza. But the FDA approves your pepperoni pizza. So if you are a pizza maker, you have to comply with one agency on one type of pizza and another agency on a different type of pizza. Defense foreign language support. Those are people who come in and help us learn other languages, interpret for us other languages so we can have an effective response and not have a communication error. We have 159 different programs in the Pentagon alone. What they are estimating is that we could save tons of money. We do not know exactly how much it costs because the Pentagon does not know how much they are spending on it, which is another one of the problems. The GAO report said this week one of the reasons they cannot estimate the savings more accurately is because the majority of the agencies have no idea what they are spending on these programs. The question I have had is, why not? If they do not know what they are spending, why are we not doing something about it? Higher education assistance: 21 different programs, four different agencies--not all in the Education Department, which is from where I think we would do education assistance, $174.7 billion a year. That includes Pell grants. That includes student loans, the cost associated with student loans. Veterans employment training. We have six programs, not all of them run by the Veterans Affairs Department but run by the Veterans Affairs Department and other agencies. We are spending $1.2 billion. Here is what we know. We are running these programs, and veterans unemployment, even though they have a skill when they come out of the military, is higher than what the average is in the country. So it is obviously not working. Also, in the report is something that is very important to me. Let me find it, if I might for a moment. GAO's report exposes a government office that does some good things. It is called the National Technical Information Service. It was established in 1950 and tasked with collecting and distributing certain reports. Despite the fact--here is what GAO found: 75 percent of the information that NTIS supplies, all you have to do is Google it. You do not have to go to NTIS. All you have to do is Google it. So 75 percent of their budget is spent providing reports to other government agencies and other people that you can get with the touch of your iPhone. Why would we continue to do that? This is just one example that I bring up. We are continuing to fund an agency where three-quarters of what they do has no bearing on it. If it went away, it would not affect us at all. The other thing is they charge other Federal agencies a fee for this information that the other Federal agencies, at a touch of their computer, can get for free. It is another case of inefficiency. What else did the GAO report show? What the GAO report showed is that we have done nothing of significance in the last 2 years based on what they have recommended we do given their first two reports. Our office calculates, based on the three reports that GAO has given us, that we could save in excess of $250 billion a year if we would follow the recommendations of the Government Accountability Office. If you are sitting out there wondering why we are having tax proposals increased in the President's budget and that we are having such a hard time with the sequester, you only have to look at one place; that is, Congress. Congress refuses to follow and do the oversight. We have had GAO do a lot of it. We refuse to pass amendments that eliminate duplication. We refuse to make the tough choices. So, consequently, we are spending $250 billion a year--that is $2.5 trillion over 10 years--that we should not be spending. Where does the money come from to pay for that? It comes from our kids. It doesn't just come in dollars, it comes from a reduced standard of living and limited opportunities in the future because we don't have the courage or the work ethic to address the very real issues which are in front us, on the tips of our fingers, where the money is, where we could actually save money. We have had almost 1,000 days since the first report came out. We have done one significant thing in the Senate; we have eliminated the ethanol tax credit and saved $6 billion the first year and about $4 to $5 billion afterward. This is the one thing we did. We fought tooth and nail while we did it, but we did it. This is one bill to save $6 billion in 3 years out of $250 billion. No wonder the confidence level in the Congress is at 13 percent. What we are actually doing is throwing away our kids' future as we fail to address these issues. When we are spending money we don't have on things we don't absolutely need, and we are borrowing money against our children's future, I can't think of a greater immoral act of the Congress. It is not red hot lit up as some of the more controversial issues such as the gun bill we are doing or immigration; however, I will state it will have a profound effect if we were to address it in terms of the future of our country, the health of our country, and the job-creating capacity for our country. Yet what is it about your Senator or your Congressman which keeps them from having the courage to challenge the status quo? I know what it is. It is the desire to get reelected by not offending anybody. We don't have tough oversight hearings. We will not allow bills through committees which actually eliminate waste. There is a bill that has passed the House sitting on the docket right now called the SKILLS Act. It takes 47 job-training programs and puts them into 6. It saves billions of dollars a year and puts metrics on the outcome. We will not even bring it to the floor even though it saves $5 to $6 billion a year in addition to markedly improving the outcome of our job-training programs. It is not here. It passed the House. The House is doing oversight in every committee right now. The Senate is not. The House is reading the GAO reports and acting on them. They are not right 100 percent of the time, they are right about 95 percent of the time. Nothing is going to be done about it unless we have an oversight hearing to actually discover information. Nothing actually happens unless we write a bill to change things. Yet this is not the emphasis in the Senate. There can be no greater emphasis than for us to get out of the financial troubles we are in. There can be no greater emphasis than for us to create an environment which produces jobs in the country when we stop wasting money at the Federal Government level. Our answer is more government--not less, more. Our answer, according to the President's budget, is more taxes, not less. I commend the President. He has $25 billion worth of programs he wishes to eliminate in his budget, $25.8 billion. He could send over what the GAO said and eliminate $250 billion a year. The problems are not really with the President, it is with us: our intransigence to do our job and keep in our focal point what is most important. What is most important is our future and the capability for us to create opportunity in the future for our children and our grandchildren. I have been fighting this for 8 years. There is a lot of oversight which has been done, tons of reports. The American people are going to eventually learn everything that is in this report because there is an app coming out which will be on people's cell phones very soon, and they may find out anything about everything where the government is wasting money. They will be able to look at an address in their own city and see how much money a company, business, or that farmer received from their Federal tax dollars. They will be able to see that in about 3 months. When the American people discover our incompetence, it will not matter that we didn't offend somebody. They are going to see we didn't do our job. We are not doing our job because we are not addressing the things we actually have some control over. What do we do now? Here is what GAO explains: Although Congress had made some limited progress in addressing the issues we have previously identified, additional steps are needed to address the remaining areas to achieve associated benefits. A number of the issues are difficult but not impossible. Implementing many of the actions will take time and sustained leadership. The key word there is ``leadership.'' Who is going to lead in the Senate to solve our problems? It is not party identified. Real leadership about solving the real problem is in front of us. It is time for each congressional committee in the Senate to undertake the waste and overlap identified by GAO within their jurisdiction, begin writing bills to consolidate and eliminate these programs, and put metrics as far as performance on every one of them. It is also time for the White House to put real muscle into their proposal coming in through OMB. I am thankful we will have a new OMB Director. She will be terrific. She has the skills, dedication, and qualifications. I praise the President for nominating her. She will fly through the Senate because she is superqualified for the job. Also, she knows what she is doing. But it will not matter what she does if we don't respond, if we don't do our work. Gun Control Mr. President, I would like to take the time now just to spend a moment or two on the guns issue. I spent a lot of time over the last few months thinking about Sandy Hook. I actually met with a large number of those people today. I am an A-plus-rated member, a lifetime member of the NRA. I firmly believe in the second amendment, and I firmly believe in the tenth amendment. We are hearing a lot of politics about the gun situation. What we are not hearing is how do we really keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. This is what we need to be addressing. Whether this would prevent a Sandy Hook, nobody knows. There are some things we do know. What we do know is the vast majority of people who are convicted the first time of a gun crime didn't steal their gun, and they didn't buy it from a federally licensed firearm dealer. They bought it from one of us. The very fact we are going to have a piece of legislation go through here which will not solve the real problem of keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally impaired and felons is a shame. There are ways we can do that. I haven't spoken to one owner I know who hasn't agreed with the fact that they would like to know if they sold their gun--they don't want it to go into the hands of a felon or somebody mentally impaired. Yet we are hung up on records. The proposal which comes from Senator Toomey, Senator Manchin, and Senator Kirk is a step forward. I will not deny it. However, tell me how a record which will only be looked at after a crime is committed is going to help anybody who is a victim of a crime. It is not. If we really wish to solve this problem, what we need to do is put into the hands of Americans who are law abiding the ability to know they didn't sell their gun to somebody who is on the NTIS list. Give me the ability to know when I sell my gun to a stranger that they are not on that NTIS list. This has been rejected out of hand because there is no record with it. The reason there doesn't need to be a record is because we are putting an onus on responsible citizens doing the right thing. Also, the government has no right to have a record of when I transfer a gun. They do have a right to expect me to be a responsible citizen when I sell my gun. The question is, Are we as a body going to take something which is far less than appropriate to actually keep guns out of the hands of felons and mentally impaired and call it a day? This is what is getting ready to happen. Are we going to make a difference and not impair second amendment rights at all and not impair tenth amendment rights because we give States supremacy on that? If they want to give us something more or different, they may. We are going to go through a great deal of debate and have all these amendments. I thank Senator Reid for making it an open amendment process. I called and spoke to him last night. I said I was happy to support going to this bill provided we use the regular Senate procedures and we actually are able to offer amendments which are germane to this bill in any number of ways. He is going to allow this process. I take him at his word he will allow this. When it is all said and done, will we have made a difference to those families who are wanting us to make a difference? Would we have made a difference? If we don't allow responsible citizens the ability to know whether they are selling their gun to a felon or a mentally impaired person, we haven't made any difference. We have made a lot of noise, but we haven't made a difference. Let me tell you why the Toomey-Manchin proposal will not work. The largest gun show in America is in Tulsa, OK. It is called the Wanenmacher Gun Show. Tens of thousands of people come to it twice, maybe three times a year. The sale will be impeded by requiring an FFL license, which is to say a gun dealer at the show will be required to do a background search against the NTIS list for somebody who purchases a gun at the show whether they are buying from that dealer or not. The first thing which will happen is the Federal firearms licensed dealer will say: I want a fee for transferring this gun, for doing the work--and rightly so. I don't blame him. What is the option? The option which will happen is the people who are going to make the deal buy the gun. Subsequently, 2 or 3 days after the gun show, they will buy the gun because they will not be at the gun show anymore. Look at the opposite side of that. If we had a portal or we could get a certificate which says someone is not on the NTIS list and are able to buy a gun anytime, anywhere, somebody selling a gun would have a pin code to make sure their identity is correct and see their ID. Whether a person is in a gun show or outside a gun show, the responsible gun seller will know they didn't sell a gun to somebody mentally impaired or a felon. We will have all sorts of statements, but what we are going to do isn't going to decrease guns in the hands of felons and the mentally impaired. We can say we need to win. If we want a bill to get through the Senate and get through the House which will actually make a difference in people's lives, that felons and the mentally impaired aren't empowered to buy guns, we need to do something different. My friends in the second amendment community don't even like my proposal. I understand this. But there is no impairment when all you need to do is go to your cell phone to receive a clearance to know somebody is not on the NTIS list. We get to decide. Are we going to do it in a way which smells good, looks good, but doesn't do anything? Are we going to fight to do something which actually makes a difference? I hope we choose the latter. I am not convinced we will. The reason Senator Manchin couldn't get me to agree to what he had agreed to with Senator Toomey is because I don't think it is going to work. I think the vast majority of gun purchasers at gun shows are going to wait to buy them later from the very same people who were going to sell them at a gun show so they do not have to pay a fee and wait 3 or 4 days on a background check. If that happens, what good have we done? How have we made a difference? We haven't. It is a sad fact, as a practicing physician, and having done training and surgery, I have had to operate on a lot of people who ended up with the consequences of a weapon being used on them. Oklahoma has a gun culture, and I own multiple guns. I cherish my second amendment right. But with that right comes some responsibility to do the right thing. Liberty without responsibility isn't liberty, and it will not last unless we attach responsibility to it. So if we really believe in the second amendment, and if we really believe in the tenth amendment, we will relook at what we are going to do in terms of gun transfers. There is a way to do it that will actually make a big difference in people's lives in this country, and it may actually get through the House. What we are proposing, what we are seeing proposed right now, is never going to pass the House. Consequently, we will have done something in the Senate with no long-term consequences and actually making a difference for the American people. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer for the time. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, with a lot of consternation, we are worried about how the sequester affects everybody--the Defense Department and all the other agencies. But in fact the Pentagon spends $67 billion on things that have absolutely nothing to do with defense. All we will be doing is creating a deficit-neutral reserve fund to move this nondefense spending--either move it or eliminate it from the Defense Department.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, first of all, I ask unanimous consent to use oversized charts. I don't actually like to use oversized charts, but I cannot get all the information I need to present on one regular chart because I am looking at one subject area.

Mr. COBURN. First of all, I wish to thank the chairman of the Budget Committee for bringing a budget to the floor. It is great that we have done it. We know the outcome of this budget vote already. The final budget vote will not come until sometime in the middle of the night. But in that budget we are going to spend $47 trillion. There is a dispute between how we look at it and how our colleagues on the other side look at it, but there is at least $1 trillion in tax increases. The new debt over the next 10 years is $7.3 trillion despite $1 trillion in tax hikes. The debt that has been added since the last budget passed this Senate is $5.5 trillion. The spending increase above the projected growth over 10 years is $645 billion. The spending increase in this budget next year above today's budget level is $162 billion. The deficit increase next year relative to the fiscal year 2014 projection by CBO is a $95 billion increase in our debt--we are not going the other way. The growth rate in the Federal budget over 10 years is going to be 60 percent, and in the mandatory programs it is going to be 80 percent, so we are going to have the government growing at least 7 percent a year, continuing to grow at a rate faster than our economy, at a rate faster than personal income. The net deficit reduction over that 10 years over what was projected may be $270 billion. The deficit reduction achieved through spending cuts will be zero in this budget--zero through spending cuts. The deficit reduction through elimination of duplication, fraud, and waste in this budget is zero. The date this budget balances is never. I am bringing these charts to the floor because I want the American people to know how we are not doing our job. We are going to get a vote on a lot of these things, I have told my colleagues. I haven't been allowed to offer a lot of these amendments on bills that have come to the floor, so we are going to vote on them tonight and into the early hours tomorrow morning. The reason it is important for us to vote on them is because the American people need to know whether or not we are going to act on them. Let me start to go through some of the programs and see if it matches any type of common sense that anybody in America might have about how we could go about helping American citizens. Three years ago we forced the GAO to do a duplication study of the whole Federal Government. We are going to get that last report about 1\1/2\ weeks from now. They will have looked at the whole Federal Government. This is just the data based on the first two reports. Let me just go through it rather quickly so my colleagues can see. We have 15 unmanned aircraft programs, 5 agencies, $37 billion a year. Why do we have 15 of them? Does that make sense to anybody? We have domestic food programs, 18 different programs, 3 different agencies, and we are spending $62 billion. We have 21 different homeless programs--21 different homeless programs. It is great that it is only one through one agency. Why do we have 21 separate programs? Each one of these programs has a bureaucracy and office staff and overhead and administration. Why not have one or two? Transportation services for transportation-disadvantaged persons: 80 separate, different, distinctly designed programs in 80 different agencies. Why not in the transportation agency alone? Why not run it out of the department it should be run through? Job training and employment, 47 programs for the able-bodied, 9 different agencies, and it is actually $18.9 billion. We have actually done all the oversight on this. In Oklahoma, we have 17 federally-run job training programs in a city that has less than 15,000 people and has 400 people unemployed, 17 separate offices run by the Federal Government. Teacher quality, 82 separate teacher training and quality programs, not run within the Department of Education but run within the Department of Education and nine other agencies. How does that fit? When we are in a time when we are trying to make hard decisions to protect the future of this country and a fiscal balance, why won't we address this? None of this stuff has been addressed. This has been known for 2 years. None of it is in the budget. It is not even in the House budget. Food safety, 30 different programs, 15 different agencies, $1.6 billion. Do people realize if we buy a cheese pizza at the grocery store it is controlled by the Department of Agriculture, but if somebody buys a pepperoni pizza at the grocery store it is controlled by the FDA? Does that make sense to anybody? Why would we continue to be stupid? And we are the ones being stupid because we will not address these issues. Military and veterans health services, we have four agencies running that. I would think we would want the VA to run that, not the VA plus three other agencies. Economic development, we have 80 programs, 4 different agencies, and $6.5 billion a year. U.S.-Mexican border region water needs, all right, we have Arizona on that border, we have Texas on that border, and we have California on that border. We have seven different agencies that control that. Why? Why would we do that? Financial literacy programs, I would make the point that we are not very good in financial literacy within the Federal Government because all one has to do is look at our budget. There are 13 different agencies, 15 programs, plus the new Financial Consumer Protection Board is going to create another one--another one. We are spending $30 million a year on that. Green buildings, 94 different programs, 11 different agencies, spending $1 billion a year. Housing assistance, 160 different programs, 20 agencies--20 Federal Government agencies--spending $170 billion a year the overhead that is associated with all of this, the duplication that is associated with it, the complications, the paperwork. Department of Justice grant programs, 253 of them: They are within the Department of Justice, but they are run through 10 other Federal agencies, not the Department of Justice. Diesel emissions, 14 different programs, 3 different agencies. Why three? Why do we have to interact with three different agencies to have our diesel emissions controlled, and why are there 14 different programs? Early learning and child care, 50 programs, 9 agencies, $16 billion. Surface transportation, 55 programs, 5 agencies, $43 billion. Support for entrepreneurs, 53 programs, 4 different agencies. We have small business, but guess what. We have one at Agriculture, we have one at Treasury, we have one somewhere else I can't remember; $2.6 billion. Science, technology, education and math, we all agree it is important. The Pentagon has over 100 programs. The Pentagon itself has over 100 programs. Then we have another 105 or so programs spread across the rest of the agencies. Thirteen different agencies have a science, technology, engineering program. Why is that not within the Department of Education? As I finish this, I will not go to the next chart just on the basis of time. I outlined a whole bunch of different programs, and not one of them has a metric on it that says we are successful or unsuccessful--not one of them. So even the agencies that have these multiple programs, running across multiple agencies, have no endpoint to say: Are you doing anything? What we have discovered on job training is we are real good in job training with Federal programs of employing people in job training. We are terrible in terms of giving them a life skill that will give them a lifetime work capability. Let me take a short time to show some examples. Looking at this chart, we can see why we have such big charts. Here are the Federal preschool and daycare programs. So if someone wants to provide that to somebody, look at the maze of bureaucracy they have to go through just to qualify. The pink areas on this chart show the different departments that run them. The blue areas are the subagencies created out of the green ones. So we can see, in Federal preschool and daycare, we have the General Services Administration, that has four programs; we have the Department of Agriculture, that has this multitude of programs. But even if you have it at the Department of Agriculture, you cannot do anything because you have to talk to the Department of Education too, because they are interrelated in how they are controlled. Early learning. The Justice Department has a multitude of programs. The Department of Health and Human Services has a multitude of programs. We even have a tax expenditure program for childcare and early learning. The Department of Labor has their own. We can see what has happened to us is we have not done the oversight, the work to eliminate the problems that are causing us to spend at least $200 billion more per year than we need to spend. Here are the Federal programs for surface transportation and infrastructure. We can see why this is so big. Here is the Federal Highway Administration and here are all their subprograms for it. Then over here is the Office of the Secretary. Then we have the Federal Railroad Administration; we have the Maritime Administration; we have the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. If you are a State transportation director, you have to meet the bureaucratic requirements of every one of these programs. I talked about science, technology, engineering, and math. Look at what we have. What we have is a maze where nobody in the government knows what the other agency is doing. Nobody knows what somebody over here in the Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship funding is doing compared with the New Era Rural Technology Competitive Grants Program. Here is the other thing we have found as we have gone through all these programs: We have people who apply for a grant and get it from one of these programs and then turn around and go over and apply for the same grant from another program. It is easy to see, when we continue to see multiple programs--here, even to get efficient in our Federal fleet, we have 5 different programs, 20 different agencies, just to try to get fuel efficiency within the Federal Government. We started out with electronic health records systems for veterans and the military. We have 10 different programs within that--not 1 program, not 2, but 10. Just one other. Here is a chart with green buildings. We listed that: a multitude of agencies, a multitude of programs. Every department in the Federal Government has a green building initiative separate and apart from a central area where it ought to be and probably associated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. That ought to be who is running it, but it is not. We have all these things. All these require rules for you to comply with if you are going to get a building permit or you are going to have any Federal contracts. It makes no sense. I will end. Mr. President, how much time do I have?

Mr. COBURN. Nobody in their right mind will agree that what we are doing is smart, efficient, effective, and associated with common sense. But yet when it comes to doing the hard work of oversight and eliminating these duplications, nobody in the Senate wants to do the hard work of eliminating them. A conservative estimate is that we send out $670 billion worth of grants a year. A conservative estimate is that $200 billion of that is totally wasted, and we are sitting here squabbling about raising taxes. This budget raises $1 trillion over 10 years. If we would do our hard work in terms of Mr. President, there is so much distraction in the Senate I cannot talk.

Mr. COBURN. If we would simply do our job, we would not have to have tax increases, we would not have to have spending cuts that will gut our military, although I can show a lot of waste in the military too, to the tune of $50 billion a year. But if we would just do our job and actually look in detail--the way GAO has recommended and the way Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has oversighted through the years, thanks to the leadership of Lieberman, Collins, Carper, and those who preceded them--what we will see is we have all this research, we have all this knowledge, we have all this stuff we know we can do, but we have no leadership in the Senate to get it done, and we bring a budget forward that perpetuates everything I just showed. There is no mandate for every committee to eliminate total duplication in this budget. There is no mandate in this budget to consolidate like programs and eliminate cross-agency interference and duplication. There is no mandate in this budget that every grant program ought to have a metric on it to see if it actually accomplishes something. There is no metric in this budget to give the agencies the power and the resources to actually administer the grants effectively so we know what they are doing--none of that. This is all ignored. As long as we say the only problem is saving Medicare and saving Social Security and saving the Defense Department, we are going to continue to waste $200 billion a year. I do not know what it is. I do not know if it is that I am not an effective communicator or if people have other priorities. But our grandchildren are totally dependent upon us eliminating so much stupidity. Yet nobody--the Appropriations Committees do not want to. Most of the authorizing committees do not want to. They will not do the hard work of eliminating the duplication. I did not show the housing. I showed the total amount we spend. Do you realize we had paid a housing administrator in Oklahoma for 2 years in a town that had no homes. Picher, OK--we cleaned it out because of lead contamination. But we kept paying the housing administrator for Picher for 2 years--until I found it. I said: Why are we paying this guy? There are no homes. Those little things, multiplied by a billion times throughout government programs, happen every day, and then we tell Americans we are going to raise your taxes because we will not do the hard work of oversight. We deny our oath when we do that, but we also deny the best tendencies and the tradition of this country. We can do a whole lot more with a whole lot less money if we would take care of this problem. But leadership is lacking on doing it. As long as we have our eye on the ball of saving Medicare and saving Social Security and do not have our eye on the ball of the things that are spending money that we are getting no value for--or very limited value--we are going to continue to be in trouble financially as a country, even if we do save Medicare and Social Security. Every dollar the American taxpayer pays into this country should be precious to us. Our foreign aid budget, we never talk about it. Our foreign policy has not been reauthorized for years. There has not been a full-time inspector general in the State Department in 6 years. We have seven open spots for inspectors general to actually look at this stuff and to advise us and advise the agencies. We are failing to do our job. My only wish for my colleagues is to get informed, and if they are on a committee, they do not have to solve it the way I solve it, but just solve it. It makes no sense to continue to duplicate things. As a matter of fact, in job training, here is what GAO said: Of the 47 job training programs for nondisabled people--we have another 53 for the disabled--of the 47 all but 3 do exactly the same thing. Either GAO is lying or they are not. If they are not lying, why wouldn't we, in the next 2 months in this place, fix those programs to make them where they are actually giving real skills, for a real livelihood, to people who need real job training. There is no effort at all to do that. The House just passed a bill, and it barely passed because every one of these squares that we show on any one of these charts has a constituency. In other words, they are dependent on money coming from the Federal Government. So even though it is not efficient and not effective, our colleagues do not want to irritate anybody getting that money because we are more interested in getting reelected than fixing the long-term problems of our country. All you have to do is go to our Web site, coburn.senate.gov, and you will need a strong anti-emetic for the rest of the week if you read the waste and fraud and abuse and thievery that is going on with Federal Government programs. This budget does not address any of that waste. Do you realize $200 billion out of $670 billion is $2 trillion over the next 10 years. If we just fixed that, it would help pull us out of the big hole. That is $2 trillion that has a very low economic multiplier in our economy versus $2 trillion that might have a bit. I will end on this last point: Last year we gave out $4 billion to foreign countries that own more than $100 billion of our debt. Ask the typical American--we are borrowing money from China, and we are giving them foreign aid. They own $850 billion of our debt. Why would we do that? We are in debt, we are scrambling, we are borrowing $40 million a minute, and we are taking the money we are borrowing from China and turning around and giving it back to them in foreign aid. Why would we do that? It just shows how out of control all the processes are in Washington because we fail to be informed and hold the administration-- whether it is a Bush administration or an Obama administration, all of them are guilty. The reason they are guilty is because we are not raising the question. I will tell my colleagues, they are going to get a vote on a lot of this stuff. A lot of my amendments have bipartisan support. But we are going to vote. They get to vote on whether they think we ought to eliminate duplication. They are going to have 17 separate votes on that. I am going to try to wind those into two votes. Vote against fixing it and then go home and tell Americans you want to raise their taxes $1 trillion, and you do not want to eliminate the stupidity going on in Washington.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the chairman and the ranking member for the time.

Mr. COBURN. Would the Senator, through the Chair, take a question? Does the Senator know the number of agencies in the Federal Government that actually know how many programs they have in their agency?

Mr. COBURN. There is one agency in the Federal Government that knows all its programs. Only one. The Department of Education. They actually publish it every year. They actually have done a great job. I compliment them. Not one other Federal agency actually knows all of the programs that run under their auspices.