Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I want to compliment the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. She has done a good job. She does want to get back to regular order. As we can see, nothing has happened. There is a reason nothing has happened. It is not in her control. Nothing is happening because there are a lot of amendments and they are not sure they want to take votes. Rather than the regular process of offering amendments that are germane and agreeing to a 60-vote level for their passage--having had that agreement--now we are not allowed to offer amendments because supposedly somebody has to agree with them. Well, that is not what the Senate is about. The way we decide whether the Senate agrees to it is to offer the amendment, vote on it, and stand up and defend your vote. It is not the chairman who is doing this, and it is not Senator Shelby who is doing this, it is the leadership. We were criticized because we wanted to read the bill. We now have amendments. We have been waiting to offer amendments. I waited around here an hour last night to offer amendments, and then I had another commitment so I could not do it. I offered to come over here at 9:30 this morning, and could not do it. We have offered one amendment, and we have five other amendments. We could not get a vote. If we stay in a quorum call, people's business will not get done. People will start to be furloughed in the next 2 weeks, and it is because somebody wants to take away the individual right of a Senator to offer an amendment. We are not postcloture, so even amendments that are not germane are adequate to be filed against this bill. I have no animus at all against the chairman. I am thankful she is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I trust her implicitly to move on regular order. This bill is out of her committee and we need to bring amendments to the floor. The idea that we have to have permission from somebody in the Senate to offer an amendment goes totally counter to what the Senate is all about. We have a lot of problems to solve. We could finish this bill. We are sitting here. I could offer all of my amendments in 15 minutes, and we could stack them and vote on them--60 votes, I don't care. The fact is we cannot offer an amendment. If I ask to bring up an amendment right now, the chairman has been instructed to object to that. I understand. I will not make her go through that exercise. I think it is important that the American people know what is going on. It is not out in the open; it is behind the scenes. They are negotiating away amendments so we won't know what could have happened or what might happen. Had we been in regular order, we would have been through with this bill. We are wasting time trying to play behind-the- scenes, nontransparent negotiation about a bill that is vitally important to this country. The process is not working well. I trust the chairman to bring that process back, but she is handicapped by the instructions she has received. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wanted to make a few comments. We have finished our analysis of this bill. The bill has 587 pages and spends well over $1 trillion. We finished at 9 p.m. last night. We have no objection to moving to the bill through a fair and open process. We will be happy to submit our ideas to the chairman and ranking member of the Appropriations Committee. There is a lot we ought to discuss about this bill. However, there is no attempt to filibuster the bill. There was an attempt to do our job, which was to actually read the bill and see what is in it so we would be prepared to offer constructive criticisms to the bill. With that, I leave and I will be back on the floor in a little bit when the managers of the bill come to the floor. If they want to offer amendments and ask unanimous consent to move on to the bill, I am sure there will be no objection. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I was sitting in my office listening to Senator Reid, meeting with my staff on the bill we have on the floor, and I wanted to explain to the American people what this bill is. This bill was published last night at 9:00. We got it at about 9:45. It spends well over $1 trillion. And I agree with the majority leader, it is important that we pass this bill, but knowing what is in it before you can decide where you would like to try to amend it is asking something of Senators that they can't give. So I understand the majority leader's frustration, but I would also make a couple points. In this bill is $8 billion taken out of the victims' compensation fund. That is not tax money. That is money which criminals have paid into a fund to give restitution to children and women around this country for the harm that has occurred from the crime that has been committed upon them, and we are stealing $8 billion from that fund. In this bill, we are taking it away--not tax dollars but fines and penalties--and we are going to spend it somewhere else. You talk about being for women and children? This bill is exactly the opposite of that. Money that is due them we are not going to let them have. We are going to go spend it somewhere else. So knowing those things are in the bill is one of the reasons we ought to read the bill before we can know whether we are going to offer amendments on it. I would also make one final point. The vast majority of this bill passed the Appropriations Committee in the Senate last spring and early summer. There is not one of the things that are in this bill that the Appropriations Committee hadn't already done, and we had a deliberate choice to not put these bills on the floor last time. So if we are in a snit over the problems we are having, it is because the bills didn't come in regular order to the floor of the Senate so there could have been a conference. By the way, the House passed 12 of the 13. Our committees worked 12 of the 13 out. So they came out in regular process. They were not allowed to come to the floor. We have just about finished studying the bill. We have no problems moving on the bill and giving consent to move on the bill once we have looked at the bill. But for the majority leader to say that Members of the Senate can't have amendments after having their staff work since 9:45 last night to look at the bill and attempt to make amendments to the bill, that doesn't fit on a trillion-dollar bill. And when the American people find out what is in this bill that should not be in it, and the options that we can offer of what should be in it, I think they are going to agree that maybe we ought to make some changes. I understand the frustration of the majority leader, but I also understand our rights. This is not about filibustering anything. This is about being an informed Senator who knows what you are doing and knows how to make a decision about how to amend the bill. We can call it something other than that, but it is not. It is about doing our job. The fact is, we got this last night. What I would say to everybody who was fine with us going on it without having read it, I would say there is a problem with their position in the Senate in terms of their oath to do what they were sent here to do, which is to read what you are voting on, know what you are voting, and prepare amendments to what you are voting on. We have this outburst at 16 hours after we got an almost 600-page bill? That doesn't fit with any common sense. We have instructed our side we are willing to go ahead and allow this to move forward but in a process that recognizes that this bill is not perfect, just as both the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the ranking member said. We do not have any problems with it moving forward. We do have problems spending money we don't have on things we don't need, and we ought to be able to offer amendments that would highlight that whether the body agrees with it or not--that would highlight it so the American people can see it. We may not be allowed, based on what the majority leader said, to offer any amendments. He is the majority leader. But if that is the case, we are probably going to be here all through the weekend because that is a right each Senator has and they ought to be able to offer them--especially on a $1 trillion appropriations bill. I hope Senator Reid has a good night's sleep. I will try to call him in the morning and work out an accommodation that will allow this bill to move so we do not have to be here on the weekend. I don't want to be here this weekend, but I will if it is the right thing to get the point out and let American people know. Right now we are having no tours of the White House. I can show you hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars that are under the control of the executive that they could save that are a whole lot less important than tours of the White House. The same goes for us in the operation of our House, in terms of the Senate and the House. I am sorry I irritated Senator Reid. I am sorry he is upset with me, but I am going to do my job. I have been here, I am in my ninth year, and I have always kept my obligation to the people of this country to make sure I am thinking about the long term, I am thinking about priority on how we spend money and the best way, the right way, and offering amendments, whether they pass or not, offering those ideas. That is because that is not only my privilege but it is my obligation. With that I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, first, I want to tell the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee that I actually very much appreciate her work. I actually trust her to do the right thing. But we got this bill last night at 9 o'clock. It is a 500-page bill. It has multiple levels of authorizations in it that we found so far--authorization on an appropriations bill. It has what I would consider--and we haven't been completely through it--some things that are totally counterintuitive to where we find ourselves today in terms of spending money. Before I could grant a unanimous consent--and I will; as soon as we get through with the bill I plan on granting unanimous consent. But I want to know, we just heard the majority leader say he can't understand why somebody wants to read this bill. We are talking about in excess of $1 trillion. That is one of the problems, one of the reasons we are $17 trillion in debt. It is because people don't read the bills. I also want to say to my friend from Alabama, I have the greatest praise for him. He knows some of the heartburn we have on this, but we knew that was coming from the House. But to not allow us the time to assess what you have produced by being able to read and study the bill is going against the best traditions of the Senate. It is also going against common sense. How do we know whether we want to offer amendments unless we have been able to read the bill? Are we just to blindly say: Whatever you want to do we are going to approve it because we have a deadline at the end of this month? I am willing to do whatever is necessary to make sure we get a continuing resolution, but I am not willing to do that blindly. I am going to study this bill. We have three Members' staff working on this full time. They have been working since last night. They are investigating and looking at this bill. I will not go into the details of the things we have seen so far, but we ought to at least have the opportunity before we rush into granting unanimous consent to go forward. I plan to allow unanimous consent, but I will not do so until I know what the agreement is going to be in terms of amendments. Even if we read the bill and have some good ideas, we don't know whether we are going to be able to offer any. This is an appropriations bill. We ought to be able to offer amendments with our ideas on ways to save this country money, increase its efficiency, increase its effectiveness, and still meet the deadline that the chairwoman outlined. I hope the Senator understands why we are not in a mood to grant it until we actually know what we are talking about. To ask anything less of us would be asking us to deny the very oath we took when we came here. With that, I yield the floor and thank my colleague John McCain for being here.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I also ask unanimous consent to use an oversized poster.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, there has been a lot made of the sequester and the things that may or may not happen associated with it. Having spent the last 8 years looking at the Federal Government, I wrote the Secretary of Agriculture a letter this week outlining some things they could do that would not put in jeopardy food inspection and other things. In my 8 years of looking at the Department of Agriculture, there is extensive waste and duplication--the GAO has confirmed that--and those things should be cut first and eliminated and consolidated before staffs that are in critical positions are furloughed. The USDA currently has 120,000 employees, and they have over 16,000 offices. Just thinking about 16,000 offices ought to give us some pause. Why would any agency, no matter what their requirements, need that number of offices? The agency notes on their Web site that if they were a private company, they would be the sixth largest private company in America. That is how big the USDA is and how diffusive. Today, there is one USDA employee for every eight farmers--one USDA employee for every eight people employed in the farm area--or, overall, one USDA employee for every 18 farms, primary or otherwise. So weekend farmers have a USDA employee, and for regular farmers--people where it is their primary business--there is an employee for every eight of them. At the end of 2012, USDA was sitting on $12 billion in unobligated Federal balances. In other words, that is money that is sitting in an account that has not been obligated to any purpose, sitting there waiting to be spent, where we have borrowed money--$12 billion--that they have not obligated. One of the things my staff has discovered is the USDA has upcoming conferences in terms of food tasting and wine tasting on the west coast. Now, in normal times there would not be anything wrong with Federal employees traveling to the west coast to both encourage and assess where we are in terms of some of our agricultural production. But I would think maybe this is one of the things the U.S. Department of Agriculture ought to cancel, given where we are and the threat that has been put out there in terms of food safety that has been announced in terms of layoffs or time off for Agriculture Department employees. Two USDA agencies--Rural Development and the Agricultural Marketing Service--are sponsoring the 26th annual California Small Farm Conference next week. In addition to speakers from the USDA agency, the gathering will feature field trips and tasting receptions. ``The Tasting Reception,'' according to their Web site, ``is the most well attended networking event of the conference and showcases the regional bounty from local farms, chefs, wineries, breweries, bakeries and other food purveyors.'' And ``special guest chefs will turn donated local agriculture products into tasty dishes to sample with exceptional local wines [provided].'' There is nothing wrong with that in normal times. There is plenty wrong with sending multiple employees to these types of conferences when we find ourselves in the position we find ourselves in today. These conferences, I am sure, are fun, interesting, and even educational getaways for USDA employees, but food inspecting rather than food tasting should be the USDA's priority at this time. Not just to pick on them, but the thing is Americans are not aware of how expansive and duplicative many of these programs are. In the domestic food assistance programs, as shown on this chart, this is what GAO shows us we have running: 18 different Federal programs across three Departments that spend $60 billion a year. According to the GAO, the availability of multiple programs with similar benefits helps ensure that those in need have access to nutritious food, but it also does increase the administrative costs of these programs. So while our goal is great, with the fact that we have this many programs doing essentially similar work with similar overheads, the GAO's recommendation was to do consolidation. Fifteen of these programs are run by the Department of Agriculture, ranging from SNAP to the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program and the Special Milk Program. According to the GAO, the effectiveness of 11 of these 18 programs is suspect. The reason it is suspect is nobody has done any oversight. No Member of Congress has done oversight on it--not the Budget Committee, not the Appropriations Committee, nor the Agriculture Committee. We also have inside the USDA research and education activities within the Rural Development programs that duplicate, predominately, existing programs of almost every other agency in the Federal Government. Let me say that again. Almost every one of these programs is duplicated in another agency of the Federal Government. In other words, we are layering. They both have the same goals, the same hope for outcomes. One is run by one agency. Here are the ones that are run just by the USDA. According to GAO, the Rural Development program administers 40 housing programs, business, community infrastructure and facility programs, as well as energy, health care, telecom programs, most of which duplicate the initiatives of other agencies, yet under the guise of serving exclusively rural citizens. Rural populations are not excluded from the other programs which are run with the same purpose that serve the general population. According to the Congressional Research Service, more than 88 programs administered by 16 different Federal agencies do the exact same thing these programs do. So we have 88 other programs from 16 different Federal agencies that are targeting rural economic development and needs. It is not hard to see why we are in trouble. The GAO has done the work we have asked them to do. The appropriate committees have not addressed any of these issues. They have not offered any amendments or bills to reduce, consolidate, or at least look at the outcomes and the cost-benefit ratio of having multiple layers of programs doing the same thing. Let me give you some questionable expenditures of what we have seen in the last year: a $54 million loan to build a casino; $1.6 million in loans for an asbestos removal company. It created hundreds of jobs in Guatemala and eventually went out of business and defaulted on the loan. There is $2.5 million in low-interest loans for the construction of the Smithsonian-style Birthplace of Country Music Cultural Heritage Center; a Tennessee county spent $10,000 of a Federal Rural Development grant to upgrade its tourism Web site; $12,500 went to Milk And Honey Soap, LLC for the marketing of soaps and lotions made from goat's milk and beeswax. These are private businesses, and we are taking taxpayer money, or we are borrowing the money, and we are subsidizing private individual businesses with grants. We also have within the USDA research and education activities: the National Institute of Food and Agriculture spent $706 million last year on research and education activities through more than 45 different programs. Meanwhile, their Agricultural Research Service has budgeted $1.1 billion annually and is home to an additional eight Federal research and educational activity programs. So what we have is layer after layer after layer--most of them well- intentioned. I am not denying that some of these are significant roles of Federal Government. But Congress is the problem because we have not addressed any of the recommendations the Government Accountability Office has given us in the two reports thus far, and the final report that will come out this year on overlap and duplication. Finally, I wish to talk about the USDA's Market Access Program. At the request of Congress, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent more than $2 billion on the Market Access Program, which has directly subsidized the advertising of some of the most profitable companies and trade associations doing business overseas. So we are subsidizing companies such as Welch's, Sunkist, and Blue Diamond. The combined sales are greater than $2 billion a year, and we gave them $6 million last year to advertise their products. It is one thing to promote exports, but we do not do that with every other business in America. Not every business that has $2 billion in sales gets $6 million of the Federal taxpayers' money to promote their products overseas. So we have this disparity. I do not know if this is good policy or bad policy. What I do know is, it is discriminatory in terms of how we treat one group of businesses versus another group of businesses. Also receiving money from the taxpayers for private overseas advertising are trade groups such as Tyson Foods, Purina, Georgia Pacific, Jack Daniels, Hershey's, the California wine industry. They have domestic sales of $18 billion a year. They took in $7 million to promote their products overseas. The Cotton Council, on behalf of America, received $20 million from the Market Access Program and another $4.7 million from the USDA Foreign Market Development Program. So I come to the floor so the American people can see that we have plenty of ways to save money. What we have is an intransigence in Congress to do the hard work and also an intransigence by the administration to recognize the need to lead on eliminating these areas of duplication. Last week on the floor, I put a letter into the Record from the mayor of McAlester, OK. The Presiding Officer is a native of Oklahoma. She knows that town. He had a budget shortfall. He outlined the steps he went through with the help of the city manager to meet that. They did it in a way we would all be proud of. He gave us an example. Today I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the mayor of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in terms of what they have done.

Mr. COBURN. This was a letter I received in 2011 when we started raising the issue of duplication and making tough choices so that we could continue to provide benefits, we could continue to create and support a safety net for those who were truly dependent on it, but we do not waste money we do not have, spending it on things we do not absolutely need. I would put forward that when we have a multitude of programs and they overlap, we as Members of Congress do not have an excuse for not fixing that, because the things that are critical in people's lives eventually are going to suffer. Every dollar we spend on low-priority duplication, every dollar we spend that does not have a metric to say it is doing what it is should be doing is eventually going to be a dollar that is not there to support a food stamp recipient or a Medicaid recipient or housing for the indigent or care for the homeless or implementing Justice grant programs for policing and tribal courts. So it is not a matter of just solving the duplication problem, it is a matter of the arithmetic that is going to hit our country and that by delaying the time at which we decide we are going to address this multitude, which is now 1,400 programs through the first 2 years of reports from GAO and $367 billion of expenditures--and that does not count the other $800 billion that goes out of the Federal Government every year for grants that also address some of these same issues. So the time is now. Sequestration gives us a good time to start looking at priorities. One of the things I am thankful for is that we have tremendous Federal employees. We are starting to hear them speak up now: What can be cut? What is wasteful? They now feel the freedom to not be criticized because they are going to take a critical eye to the way American taxpayer dollars are being spent in their own agency. We are starting to hear from them: Here are things we are doing that we should not be doing. Here are things that are not a priority. Rather than lay off a meat inspector, maybe we ought to do this: ``Cut this, not that.'' You know, we ought to cut out wine tastings for Federal employees and keep the meat inspectors employed. There is no reason we need to furlough the first--with the waste in the Department of Agriculture, there is no reason that any significant program in the Department of Agriculture ought to suffer a furlough or layoff. There is no reason for it because there are billions of dollars there that are not wisely spent--well intended, not questioning motive, but poorly spent with poor return. When there are two programs doing the same thing, let me describe what happens on the beneficiary end of that. People do not know where there is a need. What the requirement is in one program is a different requirement in another program. In terms of duplicative grants, what we have is people who apply for a grant and get it from one arm of the Department of Agriculture and then go over here and make the same application from another arm of the Department of Agriculture, get the same grant, and then go to one of the other agencies that is doing the same thing and get another grant for the same thing--all of them not knowing that each has given a grant for the same purpose. So it is just not good business practices, it is not good management, and it is not good stewardship for the future of our country. So I would ask my colleagues to think about the great work the Government Accountability Office has done. They have done great work for us. We have failed to act on it. It is time we start acting. Come April 1, we will see the final report from the GAO where they now--over 4 years--will have looked at every program in the Federal Government. They are going to be able to give us a list. I have come out here with my big charts and shown the list of duplications. We are going to have three or four more charts that say the same thing. Think about how discouraging it is to the people at GAO who do all of this hard work and to the people who are trying to meet the needs in the individual agencies to know that we are actually duplicating things with poor results. We are not meeting our requirements under our oath. We are not meeting the moral requirements to be prudent with the American taxpayers' money. In the long run, the people who will suffer for it will be the very people we intend to help because if, in fact, we do not respond in a way that creates a positive vision for our country in terms of growth again and a positive vision in terms of responsible behavior by Congress, ultimately the arithmetic swallows us up. I will close with this: If you take today's budget, when the Federal Reserve starts unwinding the quantitative easing they have done--these very low, artificially low interest rates--or if something were to happen where the world economy would look at us and say: We do not think you are deserving of our AAA-minus rating--the difference in interest costs historically is about 3 to 4 percent. Let's take a conservative estimate; let's say it is 3. Our historical average is 5.83 percent, what we have borrowed money at historically over the last 50 years. We are borrowing at under 2 percent right now. Three percent times $17 trillion is $510 billion a year. We all lose when that happens. How do we lose? Because the dollar we are going to be spending on that additional interest cost is a dollar that is not going to help someone who is homeless, it is a dollar that is not going to provide food that needs to be provided for those who are depending upon us, and it is a dollar that is not going to go to match the FMAP for Medicaid. Consequently, the cuts we will make then will be much harsher than the cuts if we decide to do it proactively now. You do not have to have partisan disagreement about the goal of a program, but certainly we should be able to come together and say: We do not want duplication. We want to have good outcomes. We want to put metrics on it to measure it to see if it is working. There cannot be any disagreement on that. That is plain, good-old common horse sense. Yet there has been no action in 3\1/2\ years on any of these recommendations by the Government Accountability Office. Now, the administration has paid attention. I will give them credit. In a lot of areas where they have seen it, they have done what they can do, but we have not. I do not want the heritage of my time in the Senate to be when we were the Congresses that failed to meet the challenge. I believe our country can cheat history. If you look at history, it is not great for republics. They have all failed. But we have the opportunity to cheat history, and the way we do it is by getting off our rears and starting to do the job we were sent up here to do, which is oversight and legislate the elimination of waste, abuse, and duplication. We can do that, but it requires leadership. It requires leadership on the part of Senator Reid, on the part of Senator McConnell, every committee chair, every ranking member. It requires leadership that we are going to do that. I am proud to say that Tom Carper, chairman of Homeland Security--we have a plan to oversight all of homeland security over the next 4 years, the whole thing, and the rest of the government as well because we do not really believe the rest of the committees are going to do it. So we are building our staffs for oversight to grab this information, to make cogent recommendations and legislation, where we can, that will actually address these problems. We are way past the starting point of when we should have begun. It is not too late, but it requires us to make a decision: Are we more interested in the parochial benefits of allowing programs that are not effective or duplicative to continue to run because we will not get any blowback or are we courageous enough to say that we are going to do what is right for the right reasons for the long-term well-being of our country? I believe that is the feeling of most of the Members of the Senate. I just think we need the leadership to call us back. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, with a $16.5 trillion national debt, the Federal Government needs to spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently and reduce costs during these tough fiscal times. In 2011, the Federal Government owned nearly 660,000 vehicles. Although the size of the fleet decreased slightly from the previous year, it had still increased significantly over the past several years. Between 2006 and 2011, the Federal Government fleet has grown by more than 29,000 vehicles. A 2012 Government Accountability Office, GAO, report examined the increase in the number of Federal vehicles, excluding postal and nontactical military vehicles. According to the study: ``Since fiscal year 2005, the number of federal non-postal civilian and non-tactical military vehicles has increased about 7 percent, from about 420,000 to 449,000 vehicles.'' On February 28, 2013, I introduced bipartisan legislation that would save millions in taxpayer dollars by reducing the amount the Federal Government can spend on buying and leasing nonessential vehicles. In its recommendations, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform strongly endorsed trimming the Federal vehicle fleet, and estimated it would save approximately $500 million. This bill would reduce by 20 percent the Federal funding available for the acquisition and leasing of new Federal vehicles. It would also require agencies to maintain this funding level through 2017. Like the Fiscal Commission, however, this bill exempts the U.S. Postal Service from the reduction. It also provides an exception for vehicle purchases critical for national security reasons. Similar legislation passed by voice vote in the House of Representatives in September 2012. This legislation would simply do what most American families are doing on a day-to-day basis. The Federal Government has to learn more with less. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support this commonsense legislation. I want to thank my colleagues for the opportunity to speak on the Senate floor today in support of this bill.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I want to spend a few minutes this afternoon talking about what is going to happen on March 1, something we have known is going to happen for 18 months. Nobody really wanted it to happen this way, but I want to make the case if we give the administration the flexibility, we can easily swallow $85 billion a year in reductions. I am going to go through a small set of oversight reports I have actually done in the last year or so talking about waste within the Federal Government. We looked at the urban area security grants of the Department of Homeland Security. We looked at the Department of Defense, the programs that were in the Department of Defense which don't have anything to do with defense; that is $67 billion a year. Let me say that again: $67 billion a year is spent in the Department of Defense which has nothing to do with defending the country. We outlined the 100 most wasteful projects, we put that out in December of this year, a treasure map. We looked at the Market Access Program and what it is actually doing to some of the wealthiest agricultural businesses in this country. It is subsidizing their export of sales. Money for nothing, all of the money that we spent that hadn't actually accomplished anything. We did a report on that. Next we did a report on the subsidies for the rich and famous because we do have a mixed-up Tax Code, and over $30 billion a year in benefits goes to a very small number of people in this country inappropriately through our tax cuts. The discussion and disagreements we are going to have on that will be about what do you do with that. Everybody agrees we probably ought to fix that. Do you fix it by just raising taxes or do you fix it by reforming the Tax Code and actually getting greater taxes coming into the Federal Government? The other point I wanted to make is there are a lot of things we may sequester that I have been talking about for years, which actually haven't gotten any traction, but I suspect right now will be getting some traction. The first one is the grant programs in the Department of Homeland Security. In one area, the Urban Area Security Initiative, which is a component of the Homeland Security grants, we spend $170 million a year on one grant program. What we did when we looked at it is we found tremendous amounts of waste that have nothing to do with increasing the security in the communities where this money was spent. Let me give you a few examples: domestic drones that have limited capability, can't fly over anything that is populated because they are not reliable enough. Also, underwater robots, snow cone machines, security upgrades for spring baseball training programs and stadiums, color printers, BearCat vehicles for communities of 20,000 people who will never have a need for that piece of equipment. Yet we spent it because the people making those pieces of equipment are so good at helping cities get grants whether they need them or not, they apply for them. Columbus, OH, bought an underwater robot, $98,000. They don't have a facility, a true natural lake or other lake in which they could actually utilize this piece of equipment, but they bought it anyway. Spring training in Arizona, $90,000 to install video surveillance at the Peoria Sports Conference Complex. The Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres have their spring training there. Here are Urban Area Security Initiative grants which are supposed to be spent on security. What we found is a large portion of the money across the country is not being spent on security; it is being used to augment aspects of what communities need. This is a good way to trim $700 million through these grants. While I am at it, what we do know is the Department of Homeland Security, 6 months ago, had $8 billion in unobligated balances. Secretary Napolitano made a decision--and her basis was for stimulus, economic stimulus--she would take the requirements off of those grants and push that money out the door. They were only able to push $3 billion out the door, so there is still $5 billion sitting in Homeland Security in unobligated money from last year alone that hadn't been spent. This addresses many of the issues that we are talking about in terms of the sequestration. The Department of Defense, in terms of the ``department of everything''--let me outline for you a minute. Not all this money could be saved because they are doing some things, but they have no business being at the Department of Defense, with $67.9 billion over 10 years in nondefense spending; nonmilitary research and development, $6 billion a year. And education, the average cost to educate a child on base in America--not our foreign bases, not where we actually need private schools--is over $51,000 per year per student. We could consolidate that program, as we do at all but 16 bases, and over 10 years save $9 billion. There are STEM programs, 103 different STEM--science, technology, engineering, and math--programs within the Pentagon alone. Consolidating those would save $1.7 billion over the next 10 years. These are programs not necessarily initiated by Congress either, I might say. They do have the flexibility on a lot of these programs to make those changes. The Department of Defense tuition assistance program totally duplicates our veterans assistance program. So you can do in-service, have access to tuition while you are in-service and then have the identical access to tuition afterward, and you can claim them both. So we have multiple duplications there. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to give an educational benefit to our troops, but we don't need to do it twice. That is a significant $5.4 billion. Alternative energy. We have a Department of Energy. Their whole goal is to work on alternative energy and renewable energy and efficiency within energy. The Department of Defense is spending $700 million a year on research in alternative energy that totally duplicates everything we are doing everywhere else. So there is $700 million we should not be spending at the Pentagon for something that is already being done somewhere else. We also know we have a benefit for our military families called the PX and commissaries. But when we go out and price products, what we find is you can actually buy at retail stores at a lower price than you can at the commissary. For the cost of running all those organizations, we could give every troop an additional $1,000 a year and save $5 billion over the next 10 years. We could give them $1,000 more, and they would be able to buy at lower prices from a commercial vendor versus a commissary. Overhead support and supply services. Over 300,000 military members are performing civilian-type jobs. In other words, these are Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force personnel trained as warfighters, and we have them doing nonmilitary jobs at the Pentagon. We could put civilian employment in place and have these military people available to be warfighters and save $37 billion over the next 10 years just in the differential in what our total costs are for the two different types of employees. So when we talk about a sequester taking $85 billion, I have just cited over $85 billion over 10 years just by looking at a few programs. So we hear the number, and we think about the Federal Government being twice the size it was 11 years ago and that we are 27 percent higher in terms of discretionary spending in nondefense and that even if the sequester goes through, as it is now planned for the military, the military expenditures will actually still be greater next year than what they are this year. So it is important that we talk honestly with the American people about where we are on these projects. Let me just for a second talk about a report called the ``Waste Book.'' We put it out every year. We gave 100 examples of the most egregious ways tax dollars were wasted last year. Examples include $450,000 for an unused airport in my State and $325,000 for robotic squirrels. This was a grant issued to study what we already know about robotic squirrels and their interactions with rattlesnakes. I can't see that as a priority for us. At a time when we are running $1.2 trillion deficits, we don't need to be spending money on that type of research. We spend $91 million a year giving--you won't believe this one-- charitable status to the NFL, the PGA, and several other sports entities. So on the profits they make, the PGA defers taxes coming to the Federal Government in terms of $91 million a year. Now, I don't know of a pro sports team that isn't in the business of being profitable, yet the organizations they send a lot of this money through we are allowing to hide that money through the Tax Code. That is $91 million a year. Why are we doing that? Another example: $27 million was spent by the State Department on pottery classes in Morocco. The whole project was an abject failure, but the real question is, Why are we spending $27 million on pottery classes in Morocco? Could we spend $27 million and have a better effect for the Moroccan people than a failed pottery class program? The answer is, certainly. The size of the State Department is twice the size it was 5 years ago--twice the size in terms of total expenditures. The other thing we talked about is the subsidy for the rich and famous in terms of what is out there. On average, we found $30 billion a year that millionaires--people who make at least $1 million a year-- enjoy in benefits from tax giveaways and Federal grant programs. That is $30 billion a year. That is $300 billion. That is over one-third of what we are talking about on the sequestration. Yet we have done nothing on that. This has been out for a year, by the way. Here are some more examples. We have $74 million spent on unemployment checks that went to millionaires last year. That is right, $74 million went out to people who made $1 million, but we still paid them unemployment. We spent $316 million on people who are making more than $1 million a year farming. We sent them $316 million worth of subsidies and $89 million for preservation of their ranches and their estates. These are people making an adjusted gross income above $1 million a year. We sent them $9 billion in retirement checks, we sent them $75.6 million in energy tax credits for their homes, we sent them $7.5 million for costs and damages due to emergencies, and we also gave them a writeoff on their gambling losses in excess of $3 billion. The other thing I found very unusual as we looked at this is that people making an adjusted gross income in excess of $1 million were given $16 million in government-backed education loans. That is right, $16 million in government-backed education loans. One of the other areas we did a study on was the Market Access Program. We have all heard of Sunkist and Welch's and Blue Diamond. In 2012 we paid them $6 million from the taxpayers to help them sell their products overseas. These are hundred-million-dollar corporations, minimally. They are billion-dollar corporations. We don't do that for the rest of all the corporations in this country, but because they happen to be associated with an agriculture program, we decided to subsidize the overseas products of the very well-to-do corporations. That may be a laudable goal, but at a time of tight priorities, it is not a laudable goal. Over $2 billion has been spent on this program, which has indirectly subsidized their advertising costs. So $2 billion has gone to very profitable agricultural companies that, if we were to look at their 10-Ks, their SEC reports, they are doing just fine. They don't need the Federal taxpayer to do this. The California wine industry, which had domestic sales of $18 billion in 2009--it is higher than that now--got $7 million, and the American cotton industry received $20 million and received another $4.7 million from a separate USDA market access program. Finally, I wish to talk for a minute about more than $70 billion in Federal funds that has been left unspent years after it has been appropriated. We have $70 billion sitting out there in accounts that has been obligated but not spent, now older than 5 years old, which means it is never going to be spent. So that money is sitting in a bank account somewhere that we could pull back, if we had effective management, because people didn't use the money in a grant, they didn't use the money in a program, and yet we have failed to do that. So we are borrowing an extra $70 billion every year to fund the government when we have $70 billion out there in accounts that should revert back to the Treasury. At the end of this year the Federal Government had $2 trillion in unexpended funds. This is according to OMB, not the Congressional Budget Office. The Office of Management and Budget says that two-thirds of this money was obligated, but a third of it wasn't obligated. So you have $650 billion in unobligated balances sitting in the Federal Government accounts that we are not shuffling around to direct to the things that are most important. Let me finish, but first I would like to make one other point. I got a letter this week from the mayor of a medium-sized town in my State. It is from the mayor of McAlester, OK. I am going to enter this letter into the Record because in this letter we see a demonstration of the kind of leadership that is needed when there is a financial problem in front of you. Let me read this. The City of McAlester is currently working hard to rebalance our budget after a sudden downturn in our revenues over the past two months. As you know, municipalities in Oklahoma are required by statute to maintain a balanced budget. In other words, it is a law in Oklahoma that you have to have a balanced budget. So what has he done? Continuing to read: The first step we took was to implement a hiring freeze. So they reassigned workers. And with a revenue shortfall projected at $1.2 million, they took every other expense account category, including supplies, repairs and maintenance, fuel, utilities, travel and training, consulting services and legal services, and reduced their budgets. In other words, they responded. The mayor continued in his letter: None of these cuts are without pain. But all will be accomplished while maintaining essential city services. Now, for McAlester, a $1.2 million budget cut is a bigger hit than we are talking about with sequestration. If the mayor of a community of 25,000 people can make the adjustments to serve his constituency without decreasing services, why can't we? Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter to which I just referred.

Mr. COBURN. The final point I would make is the following: A little more than 3 years ago we passed an amendment that I offered that forced the Government Accountability Office--the government's accounting office--and the Comptroller General to identify every program in the Federal Government, and not only to identify it but to outline where we have duplications and overlaps. And they have done a wonderful job. We are going to get the last third of that report about a month from today, April 1, but what do we know so far? We know we have about $370 billion in the first two-thirds of this where they say there is massive duplication. There is $370 billion worth of expenditures a year. I have talked with the President, and he disagrees with me on this, but when you think about it, we have 47 separate job training programs, of which all but three overlap. They are highly ineffective in total. So why don't we have two or three? We spend almost $19 billion on those programs. We could spend $9 billion, cut it down to three programs, put metrics on it, and make sure it is working. The reason I know it is not working is I looked at every job training program in my own State, and the ones that are most successful are the ones that are totally State run without any Federal Government interference. The ones that are federally run--and some are good, I will give you that, but most are not--most are not successful in efficiently and effectively giving somebody a life skill and getting them into employment. We have 253 different, duplicative Department of Justice grant programs spending $2 billion a year. If you are needing a grant, you might apply to DOJ in one of these 253 areas and then you might apply again over here in another area for the same thing. And the fact is that the Government Accounting Office says: We don't know if people are double- and triple-dipping. As a matter of fact, what did we find? We have people getting the same amount of money from different grant programs from the same grant application. So what we have is a tremendous problem. We just discovered in the State of Oklahoma that we have a housing administrator for a city that has no houses. There are 3,700 housing administrators in the United States--probably closer to 4,000 because we are still counting. Some of those have very big responsibilities. I don't mean to diminish them at all. But couldn't we consolidate those, especially in areas such as rural Oklahoma and the other rural States so we spread that overhead and have fewer housing administrators? We have 56 financial literacy programs. Think about that for a minute, 56 different programs for the Federal Government to create a program to make you financially literate. First of all, there is a problem with that because we are not financially literate, borrowing $1.2 trillion a year. No. 2, we don't know what the words efficiency and effectiveness mean in the Federal Government--or, at least, have limited knowledge of that. And, finally, why do we have that many financial literacy programs? There is no sane answer to that question. As I outlined in some of the others, 160 housing assistance programs, $170 million a year. We have 53 programs across 4 agencies to help entrepreneurs. The Federal Government is helping entrepreneurs? Our entrepreneurial spirit is not very active and not very successful in terms of what we are doing within the government, and yet we spend $2.6 billion on it. We have 15 different separate unmanned aerial aircraft programs within the Federal Government. We are going to spend $37 billion on that. Why do we have 15? Maybe two or three, because we have different requirements, but 15? So we have the massive amount of duplication that is going on within the Federal Government which implies massive amounts of duplicative administrative and overhead costs. I would bet that one-third of what is happening in the sequester, if you consolidated programs--didn't eliminate any, just consolidated the management--you could save one- third of what the sequester is just from the administrative overhead associated with those. So when you hear discussions about we shouldn't be doing the sequester, that the sequester is going to be painful--and it is; I don't deny that. But it doesn't have to be. All it takes is a small drop of common sense, both in Congress and the executive branch, to work our way through these problems. My hope is the President will work with us on giving him flexibility in terms of managing this. Remember, $85 billion really isn't 85. It is only going to be about 44. That is what we are talking about. It is disproportionately heavy on the defense. I have a lot of colleagues on my side who disagree with me on the waste that is in the Pentagon, but I have seen it, I have looked at it, and I have had a lot of people inside the military call and talk to me about the waste that is there. We now have an admiral for every ship we have in the Navy. Nobody else has that anywhere else in the world, and with that comes an average of 200 other employees per admiral. The question is, Can we do this? Should we do it? And can we do it in a way that is best for the American people? We are going to cut this money one way or the other. It is not because a Republican wants to cut it or because the President wants to cut it or because a Democrat wants to cut it. We are going to cut it because the math in our future is going to force us to cut it. I know people don't think discretionary programs are much of the problem with what we are spending money on, but I would surmise that well over 15 percent of everything we do in discretionary spending--including the Pentagon--is not effective or efficient. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I rise today in strong support of the nomination of Magistrate Judge Robert Bacharach of Edmond, OK, to be the next judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Bacharach is well-qualified for this position and has received widespread support and accolades from across the State of Oklahoma, including members of academia and members of both the Oklahoma and Federal Bar Associations. In fact, last year, the Oklahoma Bar Association passed a resolution praising Judge Bacharach's legal abilities and supporting his confirmation. This broad array of support is indicative of his exceptional legal background. Judge Bacharach received his B.A., with high honors, from the University of Oklahoma in 1981 and his J.D. from Washington University School of Law in 1985. Judge Bacharach began his legal career as a law clerk for fellow Oklahoman, Chief Judge William J. Holloway, Jr., on the Tenth Circuit; thus, he is already quite familiar with those chambers. Following his two-year clerkship, he joined the outstanding Oklahoma-based law firm Crowe & Dunlevy, becoming a shareholder in 1994. After 12 years of private practice, he was appointed by the judges of his district court as a United States Magistrate Judge for the Western District of Oklahoma where he currently presides. In addition to serving as a magistrate judge, Judge Bacharach also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Law and received a number of outstanding awards and recognition for his years of scholarship and service. In addition to his clear legal qualifications, even more important to my decision to support Judge Bacharach's nomination are the strong testimonies to his integrity and commitment to service outside of his judicial role. He is currently the Vice President of the Federal Bar Association (FBA) for the Tenth Circuit and formerly served the Oklahoma City Chapter of the FBA as President, Vice President, and a member of the Board of Directors. Furthermore, Judge Bacharach serves the Oklahoma legal community beyond his professional capacity. One of his primary areas of service to his colleagues is through his involvement with the Oklahoma Bar Association's Lawyers Helping Lawyers Committee, which helps attorneys who are experiencing personal problems such as depression, alcoholism, and drug dependency. He has served on the committee for three years and also joined the Board of Directors of the Lawyers Helping Lawyers Foundation. Judge Bacharach serves Oklahoma outside of the legal profession as the Director and Executive Committee Member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Oklahoma City and on the Board of Trustees of the Temple B'nai Israel. I believe Judge Bacharach will uphold the highest standards and reflect the best in the American judicial tradition by joining the Tenth Circuit as a distinguished and respected member of the Oklahoma legal community. The Judiciary Committee received many letters of support for Judge Bacharach's nomination, including recommendations from judges, deans and professors from Oklahoma law schools, several bar associations, and attorneys from Judge Bacharach's former law firm, Crowe & Dunlevy. Equally important to Judge Bacharach's qualifications is his judicial philosophy. I believe his record and his hearing testimony demonstrate that he respects the limited role our founders intended judges and the federal government to play in our constitutional democracy. Based on all of these factors, I believe Judge Bacharach will be an excellent addition to the Tenth Circuit, and I urge my colleagues to support his nomination. I offer my congratulations to Judge Bacharach and his family on this momentous occasion of his confirmation and wish him well in his new endeavor. Judge Bacharach's nomination got caught up in the political shenanigans the majority leader and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee carried out at the end of the last Congress. Never before has a circuit court nominee come to the floor without notification of the very members of the Judiciary Committee who sponsored their nomination in the committee. So it was purely a political trick. And for that I think the Senate owes Judge Bacharach an apology for the delay. I have no doubt he will be confirmed, and I doubt there will be anybody who will vote against him. That leads me to two other comments I wish to make. I have sat on the Judiciary Committee for four Supreme Court nominees, and so what I am about to say may strike some people as hyperbole, but it is not. The four Supreme Court nominees who appeared while I sat on the Judiciary Committee displayed great qualities, and what I am about to say doesn't diminish their characteristics or qualities at all, but I must say that Judge Bacharach has the two qualities that are at such a high level that we should want each and every judge who sits on our Federal bench to have them. The first is personal integrity. Now, those words are used a lot in our country, but this man has demonstrated it with his life, with his commitments to other people, his commitment to helping other people, with the way he spends his time, with his commitment to his family and to his faith. You cannot find a blemish on this man in terms of his personal integrity, and very rarely can we say that about anybody. He is actually a stellar individual, exactly the type of individual our Founders had in mind, someone who has the kind of personal life that exemplifies the characteristics and qualities that built this country, a love for the law, and an understanding that the rule of law is the glue that holds our society together. That leads me to the second quality. I have interviewed a lot of candidates for the Supreme Court and for judgeships and circuit court positions, and I have never met anybody who knows the Constitution, its limitations, and its intent better than Judge Bacharach. I think he quite assuredly impressed every member of the Judiciary Committee with his knowledge, his insight, and his background. So Judge Bacharach brings together the two qualities that are so important and represent the upper end of all the candidates I have seen in my 9 years in the Senate of those whom we would ask to fulfill some of the most important positions in our country and in our society. I believe Judge Bacharach is the first judge I will have voted for whom I have no doubt of his absolute fidelity to the U.S. Constitution. So I sleep well at night. I wish we had 100 Judge Bacharachs--100--to put on the bench today. I don't believe he can be influenced by anything other than stare decisis, precedence, and the U.S. Constitution and the statutes. His personal life gives reflection and insight into how he is going to be a judge, how he will carry himself, how he will act in this position of power. When you meet him, what you find is one of the humblest of men with one of the greatest intellects I have ever known in my life. So I will just say that I fully support his nomination. I congratulate him because I know he is going to be approved, and I say, Mr. President, bring us more Robert Bacharachs. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, this is an amendment that follows GAO recommendations with which the Justice Department agreed in terms of an audit on the duplication within their program. As a matter of fact, I have the data where the Justice Department actually concurred with the GAO on it. The purpose of the amendment is to eliminate the backlog in DNA testing, both in terms of rape kits and CODIS. The Cornyn amendment improved the bill but does not direct the money necessary. It is a small percentage, less than 2 percent over 10 years out of that bill, less than 2 percent of 1 year's spending. We spent $40 million for 10 years on these grants and what we are asking for is .4 of 1 percent to help solve the backlog on all the DNA cases.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, this is simply an amendment that says if a woman is raped and there is an article of indictment against the rapist, she ought to have a right to know the sexually transmitted diseases that rapist carries. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. The people who oppose it oppose it on the grounds they might not get as much money unless they actually keep a woman from getting raped twice--once by the system we set up and once by their attacker. If Senators vote against this, what they are saying is they don't have any compassion for the women who don't know the status of the person who raped them. Therefore, they go under treatment; they go through unknown and severe psychological stress, having to be repeatedly tested. We put this in the bill the last time at 5 percent. All we did this time is raise it to 20 percent to try to reduce this behavior in the States. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee voted for this last time. So to say what we are doing is not in the best interests of women is wrong. If someone really thinks women ought to get raped twice, vote against this amendment.

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend some time outlining some amendments I have to the Violence Against Women Act, but I also ask unanimous consent to use oversized charts, and even with the size I have, on the one chart, you can barely see it, in terms of the grant programs.

Mr. COBURN. I would also like to comment on the Trafficking Prevention Reauthorization Act of 2012, which is the Leahy amendment. When we first started working on this issue, it was 2001 and $31.8 million, with one or two Federal agencies involved. With this bill, we are going to create eight different agencies with responsibility for this. That is absolutely crazy, and it duplicates exactly what we have done in every other area of the Federal Government, which I will show here in a moment. It shows what we have done in the Justice Department in terms of grants. Now, we spend $3.9 billion a year out of the Justice Department on 259 different grant programs, many of which--as a matter of fact, the majority of which overlap one another. We have found--and this is not my data, this is GAO data--that we have multiple entities making a claim for a grant in one area, and then they go over and make a claim for the same thing in another area. Guess what. The Justice Department doesn't know that. They have no idea what is going on with their grant programs. They do not do any followup, they do not put in any metrics, and so therefore the $3.9 billion or the $40 billion we have spent on these programs in the last 10 years has been highly ineffective. These grants are well intended. I don't doubt that. The amendment of the Senator from Vermont, Mr. Leahy, on the Trafficking Victims Protection Act is very well intended. I am not disputing that. But we find that the vast majority of money in that amendment goes overseas for trafficking prevention and protection, not here in our country where it is coming across Interstate 35 and Interstate 40 through my State, coming from the west coast to east and from south to north. When we find that the vast majority of money will be spent outside the country, especially in light of our present budgetary situation, we ought to reconsider this amendment. We ought to refine it down to one or two agencies, not eight. We ought to put line responsibility and transparency in it, and we ought to put in metrics to make sure the money we are spending is actually going to be measured so we will know whether we have been effective in spending the American taxpayers' dollars. So I am opposed to the Leahy amendment because although well intended, it is a very wasteful throwing of the mud up against the board and hoping to hit something. It is not organized, it is not well thought out, and it is certainly not efficient in terms of the way the money will be expended. Let me spend a moment on these three charts. I am going to have two more when GAO issues its release on April 1 of all the duplication in the Federal Government, but I want you to notice something here: the Department of Justice grants, 253 different programs not just run by the Department of Justice but 9 other agencies besides them, spending $3.9 billion a year. Now, one might say: Well, that is OK. But let's look at the organization because we have this chart, which the Department of Justice doesn't have. So here they are, layer upon layer of administrative costs for all these programs--very well intended, all of them, but highly inefficient. Now, what are we doing with this bill? We are going to add more to it. We are not going to add a lot of metrics to see if what we are doing actually works. The other thing we are doing with this bill is we have an authorization that is far greater than the amount of money we are ever going to spend on it. Now, why would we do that? Is it political? Could it possibly be political, that we are going to authorize way above what we know is ever going to be spent? Yes, it is. We know we are not going to spend what is authorized in this bill. Authorizations ought to be what we intend to be spent, not how we intend to soothe someone with what we say we are going to spend, yet knowing full well we will never spend the money. It is a very shameful sleight of hand because these are important issues. As a practicing physician, having delivered over 4,000 babies, I have seen violence against women in lots of ways. I have done a lot of counseling, spent a lot of time there. And any dollar we take from the American taxpayer, we ought to make sure it actually does something very positive. I have several amendments to this bill. I didn't get all the amendments I wanted. One was denied, and I will explain to the American public what it was. It was to eliminate $200 million in expenditures for campaign conventions for the Democrats and Republicans. It passed here with 94 votes, but they wouldn't allow it to be voted on here. It passed the House. So here is a way to take $200 million and let the parties run their own conventions rather than the American taxpayers paying for the parties. But that wasn't allowed. So we haven't moved forward yet in the Senate, where people can actually offer what they think will be good-government amendments that will save this government money and do what the vast majority of the American people want us to do. Just look at this chart. And I want to add one other thing. There is only one agency of the Federal Government that, at the end of the year, if it doesn't spend its money, doesn't get to keep it. Guess what department that is. It is the Department of Justice. We have set them aside. So even though we don't have good controls on the grants, we don't have oversight. We haven't eliminated the duplication which the GAO says is tremendous in terms of its goals. We had an opportunity to do that on this bill. We didn't do it. At the end of the year, whatever they don't spend they get to spend where they want to spend outside of the appropriations process of Congress. It is time we change that. It is time we know where every dollar is going. Now, I admit this is a dizzying poster, but it equates well the lack of certainty, intelligence, and planning of Congress. Congress created that. Think about that: 250-plus different grant programs, most of them overlapping and doing the same thing, with multiple grantees hitting multiple grants. Since we don't oversight them, and the agency doesn't oversight them, and they don't know whether the money has been spent on what it was supposed to be spent, we have no idea if we are accomplishing something good other than appropriating money to go to grants that go to the cities. The other problem I have with this bill is that there is a federalism concern. One of the reasons we have been running trillion-dollar deficits, one of the reasons we are close to $17 trillion in debt, one of the reasons we have $86 trillion in unfunded liability--and if we used generally accepted accounting principles and measured our debt like every other country, we would be at about 120 percent of our GDP, and we would be in excess of $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. And one of the reasons is because we step all over the enumerated powers of the Constitution. If we were to take this act and look at it, 98 percent of it is for State violations of laws. Nobody will dispute that. Where in the Constitution does it give us the right to go down to the State level and direct and mandate how States are going to respond to their own tort and civil laws? Whether it is the Presiding Officer's Commonwealth of Virginia or the State of Oklahoma, what gives us that right? I am for fixing these problems, but there is a bigger problem about to swallow our country, and we continue to blindly follow our hearts rather than putting a measure of common sense with our desire to do well. So I have a couple of amendments. Amendment No. 15

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 15.

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, one of the things the VAWA legislation fails to do is to address the duplication and overlap within the very grant programs and nongrant programs of VAWA operated by the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services. It doesn't address those. At the beginning of every Congress, I send to each and every Senator information outlining the criteria that I would use--seven others joined me last year--in terms of determining legislation. Last Congress we sent this out, and what I will tell you is that this legislation significantly violates one of the principles that we have to do for us to get out of the hole; that is, to eliminate duplication and consolidate what is in front of us. So this legislation does do some small consolidation. I will readily and freely admit it hasn't come close to eliminating all the duplication. There are several VAWA grant programs that are so broad that they duplicate one another, providing multiple opportunities, as I said before, to double-dip into Federal programs. They also duplicate significant programs with Health and Human Services. So you can get a grant at Health and Human Services and you can get a grant at the Justice Department. So the whole proposal of this amendment is to force the Department of Justice to make recommendations on what is duplicated, what is effective, and capture those savings to more quickly address the deficits we have in terms of DNA collection and identification. We have hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence that could significantly change both the cost and the time period in which we address both violent crime and nonviolent crime. According to the GAO, we wasted billions of dollars over the last 10 years in these grant programs. So what this amendment says is we are going to put it to the Justice Department--they know where they are--to come forward, save this money, and let's direct this money to clean up the CODIS system, the DNA backlog, and bring it forward and infuse that money into both technology and catch-up so we are timely. Why is this important? It is important for a lot of reasons. Sitting in those hundreds of thousands of cases is the very clue to solving hundreds of thousands of cases and others that we don't even know may be connected. The second reason it is important is there are people sitting in prison today who are innocent, and that data collection and DNA input could clear them of a wrongful conviction. So what this is asking the Justice Department to do is to identify every program. By the way--and most people don't know--there is only one Federal agency that actually knows every program they have. That is the Department of Education. Go call anybody at the Justice Department and nobody over there can tell you. We know, because we have studied it, but they don't know. They can't even publish all their programs. They don't put it out. Consolidate unnecessary duplication and apply the savings toward resolving rape cases and DNA data cases and with the remainder that is left over to go to reducing the debt. It is simple. Nobody in America except the Federal Government would run programs like this. Nobody would blindly create more programs rather than make the ones they have work now, except that is what we are doing. So this is simple, straightforward math. I don't expect it to pass. We have only had one amendment pass in the Senate in the last 2 years trying to eliminate duplication, and therein lies the problem. We are afraid to do what is best because we would rather protect a constituency of one of these small grant programs than fix them all and still solve the general intent of why we put the money out there in the first place. We are conflicted. So when GAO, at the end of March this year finishes the review of the Federal Government--which we had to mandate by an amendment that I put into law--we are going to see in excess of $200 billion a year in duplicative costs that shouldn't be there. I want you to think for a minute. If you look at every one of these grant programs, every one has an administrator. Every one has a staff. Every one has grant approval people. Most of them have grant investigators--most don't. Some have fund managers--most don't. So each one of these has a bureaucracy. And when the vast majority is duplicating one another, we are saying we are well intended, but we are spending money on the process, not on the problem. The intent of this amendment is to strike that balance between truly getting to the solution to a problem and at the same time solving another problem, which is the CODIS and the rape backlog. In the bill--and I am thankful that the Cornyn amendment is there. The grant system previous to the Cornyn amendment said the vast majority of the money had to be spent on why you can't get the DNA data up rather than working on the backlog. What this will do is force us to get caught up. This creates $600 million of savings over a period of time that will then be applied to solving this problem once and for all. But there is great savings to come from that because what it means is we are not going to double-pay for things that we intended to solve. I get dizzy looking at these charts. I have one for every branch of the Federal Government now. We actually know what is going on. Actually, we know what is not going on because we know what Congress intended, and we also know what isn't happening with the dollars that are coming from that. Amendment No. 13

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set the pending amendment aside and call up amendment No. 13.