Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I think I have reserved my time.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I noted earlier, before I came to the floor, he supported it in principle and we have a difference in principle about what would happen to the bill. This is a minimal technical correction that was recommended to us, and I appreciate the Senator for allowing that to be considered. Let me spend a moment talking about the chairman and his belief that this will not go anywhere. This is a critical juncture for our country, when we are going to make a decision to not do what is right because somebody is threatening that they do not agree with doing what is right and that they will not receive it. In my life of 63 years, that is how bullies operate, and the way you break a bully is you challenge a bully. The fact is, I have just recorded into the history of the House the statements by the chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the House in terms of his guarantee for protecting the funds for PTO, which he turned around and took $121 million out of the funds that very same year that he guaranteed on the floor that he wouldn't do. So what I would say is we ought not worry about idle threats. What we ought to be worried about is doing what is best and right for our country. What is best and right is to give the money to the Patent Office that people are paying for so the patents will get approved and our technological innovations will be protected. I don't buy the idea the House is not going to take this if we modify it. Actually, what 95 percent of the people in this country would agree to is that the Patent Office ought to get the money we are paying for patent fees, just as the FDA should get the money paid by drug companies for new applications, just as the Park Service should put the money for the camping sites--the paid-for camping sites--back into the camping sites. Why would we run away from doing the right thing? I find it very difficult when we rationalize down doing the correct thing that everybody agrees should be done but we will not do it for the right reasons. That is why we have a 12-percent approval rating. That is why people don't have confidence in Congress--because we walk away from the tough challenges of bullies who say they won't do something if we do what is right. I am not going to live that way. I am not going to be a Senator that way. I am going to stand on the position of principle. This is a principle with which 95 Senators in this body agree. We are going to have several of our leaders try to get them not to do that on the basis of rationalization to a bully system that says: We will not do the oversight, but we still want to be in control. In fact, in the process of that, America loses because we have 750,000 patents that are pending right now, and there should only be about 100,000. The bullies have won in the past, and I am not going to take it anymore. I am going to stand up and challenge it every time. I am going to make the argument that if a person pays a fee for something in this country for the government to do, that money ought to be spent doing what it was paid to the government to do. It is outside of a tax; it is a fee. It is immoral and close to being criminal to not correctly spend that money from that fee. If our body decides today we are going to table this amendment, the question the American people have to ask is, Where is the courage in the Senate to do what is best for our country? Why are the Senators here if they are not going to do what is best for the country? Why are they going to play the game of rationalization and extortion on principles that matter so much to our future? I will not do that anymore. Everybody knows this is the right thing to do. We are babysitting some spoiled Members of Congress who don't want to carry out their responsibilities in an honorable way and do the oversight that is necessary. What they want to do is complain that they do not have control. Well, this bill authorizes funds for 7 years. We can change that number of years. We can actually change the actual amount of fees if, in fact, they are not doing a good job. But right now, as already put in the Record, there is no history of significant oversight to the Patent Office, so they would not know in the first place. So what we are asking is to do what is right, what is transparent, what is morally correct and give the Patent Office the opportunity to do for America what it can do for them instead of handcuffing us and handicapping us where we cannot compete on intellectual property in our country. I have said enough. I will reserve the remainder of my time when I finish talking about one other item. There is an earmark in this patent bill for The Medicines Company. It ought not be there. This is something that is being adjudicated in the courts right now. Senator Sessions has an amendment that would change it. I believe it is inappropriate to specify one company, one situation on a drug that is significant to this country, and we are fixing the wrong problem. We probably would not win that amendment. I think it is something the American people ought to look at and say: Why is this here? Why is something in this big bill that is so important to our country? I agree with our chairman. He has worked months, if not years, over the last 6 years trying to get to this process, and now we have this put in. We did not have it in ours. The chairman did not have it in ours. It came from the House. We ought to ask the question Why is it there? Why are we interfering in something that is at the appellate court level right now? Why are we doing that? None of us can feel good about that. None of us can say it is the right thing to do. Why would we tolerate it? It is this lack of confidence in America; it is about a lack of confidence in us. When people know and find out what has happened here, they are going to ask the question. The powerful and the wealthy advantage themselves at the expense of everybody else. They have access. Those who are lowly, those who are minimal in terms of their material assets do not. It is the type of thing that undermines the confidence we need to have. I just wanted to say I am a cosponsor of Senator Sessions' amendment. I believe he is accurate. I think they have won this in court. It is on appeal. They will probably win it on appeal. This will end up being necessary, and there is a way for us to fix it if, in fact, they lose, if it is appropriate to do that. I believe it is inappropriate at this time. I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to talk about an amendment, but also I had one of my colleagues who was sitting in your position as President pro tempore notice an error I made on July 27. Senator Whitehouse questioned my numbers and, in fact, he was right. I said $115 million in regard to the savings on limousines. It was $11.5 million per year, not $115 million. It was $115 million over 10 years. So I wish to stand to put that in the Record that I was in error and Senator Whitehouse as a cordial colleague questioned me on it and I thank him for his accountability. We have before the Senate now a patent bill. There is no question there is a lot of work we need to do on patents. I know the President pro tempore sits on the committee that I do and we have spent a lot of time on this. But I am very concerned, I have to say, about what we are hearing in the Senate about why we wouldn't do the right thing that everybody agrees we should be doing because somebody doesn't want us to do that in the House, and I think it is the worst answer we could ever give the American people. When we have a 12-percent approval rating, and the Republicans have worse than that, why would we tell the American people we are not going to do the right thing for the right reason at the right time because somebody in the House doesn't want us to and that we are going to say we are not going to put these corrections into a patent bill that are obviously important and we are going to say it is going to kill the bill when, in fact, it is not going to kill the bill? But that is what we use as a rationalization. So let me describe for a minute what has gone on over the years and what has not happened. The first point I would make is there has not been one oversight hearing of the Patent Office by the Appropriations Committee in either the House or the Senate for 10 years. So they haven't even looked at it. Yet the objection to, and what we are seeing from an appropriations objection is--and even our chairman of our Committee on the Judiciary, who is an appropriator, supports this amendment but isn't going to vote for it because somebody in the House is going to object to it. But the point is, we have money that people pay every day. From universities to businesses to individual small inventors, they pay significant dollars into the Patent Office. Do you know what has happened with that money this year? Eighty-five million dollars that was paid for by American taxpayers for a patent examination and first looks didn't go to the Patent Office. Yet we have over 1 million patents in process at the Patent Office, and over 700,000 of those haven't ever had their first look. So when we talk about our economy and we talk about the fact that we want to do what enhances intellectual property in our country--which is one of our greatest assets--and then we don't allow the money that people actually pay for that process to go for that process and we have backlogged for years now patent applications, we have done two things. One is we have limited the intellectual property we can capture. No. 2 is we have allowed people to take those same patents, when we have limited ability, especially some of our smaller organizations, and patent them elsewhere. So the lack of a timely approach on that is lacking. The process is broken. Since 1992, almost $1 billion has been taken out of the Patent Office. So we wonder, why in the world is the Patent Office behind? The Patent Office is behind because we will not allow them to have the funds the American taxpayers who are trying to get ideas and innovations, copyrights, trademarks, and patents done--we will not allow the Patent Office to have the money. The amendment I am going to be offering--and I have a modification on it that is trying to be cleared on the other side, and I will not actually call up the amendment at this time until I hear whether that has been accepted. The amendment I have says we will no longer divert the money that American businesses, American inventors, American universities pay to the Patent Office to be spent somewhere else; that it has to be spent on clearing their patents. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record--and I will submit a copy at this time--a letter I received August 1 from the head of the Patent Office.

Mr. COBURN. I must tell you that we are so fortunate that we have Director Kappos. We have a true expert in patents, with great knowledge, who has made tremendous strides in making great changes at our Patent Office. But he requires a steady stream of money, and he requires the ability to manage the organization in a way where he can actually accomplish what we have asked him to do. Frankly, I have spent a lot of time working with the Patent Office-- not with everybody else who wants an advantage in the patent system but with the Patent Office--and I am convinced we have great leadership there. In his letter, he talks about their inability to update their IT because the money is not there because we will not let him have the money--their money, the money from the American taxpayers. Let me give a corollary. If, in fact, you drive your car into the gas station, you give them $100 for 25 or 28 gallons of gas, and they only give you 12 gallons of gas and they say: Sorry, the Appropriations Committee said you couldn't have all the gas for the money you paid, you would be outraged. If you go to the movie, you pay the fee to go to the movie and you buy a ticket, you walk in, and halfway through the movie they stop the projection and say: Sorry, we are not going to give you the second half of the movie even though you paid for it--inventors in this country have paid the fees to have their patents examined and evaluated and reviewed. Yet we, because of the power struggle, have decided we are not going to let that money go to the Patent Office. The amendment I have says we are going to allow that to happen. If money is paid and it goes into a proper fund that is allocatable only to the Patent Office, it cannot be spent anywhere else and has to go to the Patent Office. Some of the objections, especially from the House Appropriations Committee, are that there is no oversight. The reason there is no oversight is because they have not done any oversight and neither have we, so you cannot claim that as an excuse as to why you are afraid. This patent bill will give an authorization for 7 years for the fees. We can change that if we want, but the fact is that we are never going to know if we need to change it if we never do oversight, which we have not done. Nobody has done oversight on patents. I am talking aggressive oversight: What did you start? What was your end? How much did you spend? Where did you spend the money? What is your employee turnover? What is your employee productivity? What should we expect? None of that has been asked. I believe it is probably pretty good based on the fact that I have a lot of confidence in the management at the Patent Office, especially what I have seen in terms of performance for the last couple of years versus before that, but the fact is that oversight has not been done. It is not just the Patent Office. It hasn't been done anywhere. Very little oversight has been done by the Senate, and it is one of the biggest legitimate criticisms that can be made of us as a body, that we are lazy in our oversight function. Of the $3.7 trillion that is going to be spent, we are going to have oversight of about $100 billion of the total. The amendment does a couple of things. Let me kind of detail that for a moment. One of the things is that by returning the money to the Patent Office, the Director thinks he can actually cut the backlog in half. In other words, we have over 700,000 patents that have never been looked at sitting at the Patent Office now, and he believes that in a very short period of time they could cut that to 350,000. From 1992 through 2011, $900 million has been taken from the PTO. In 2004 Congress diverted $100 million, in 2007 it diverted $12 million, last year it diverted $53 million, and it is $80 million to $85 million that is going to be diverted this year. In 4 years out of the last 10, Congress gave the Patent Office all the money because it was so slow, so lethargic in terms of meeting the needs of inventors. The only thing we have in the current bill is the promise of a Speaker and the promise of a chairman that they will do that. There is nothing in law that forces them to do it. There is nothing that will make sure the money is there. No matter how good we fix the patent system in this country, if there is not the money to implement it, we will not have solved the problems. In June of 2000, the House debated the PTO funding, and an interesting exchange took place between Representative Roybal-Allard and Representative Rogers, who was a cardinal at the time. Representative Allard discussed the problem of PTO fee diversion and the need for user fees to pay for the work of the agency. She asked--in the documentation of the Congressional Record, she asked Chairman Rogers if 100 percent of the user fees would go to the PTO, and Mr. Rogers stated that the fees would not be siphoned off for any other agency or purpose and remain in the account for future years. But according to the PTO, in fiscal year 2000, $121 million was, in fact, diverted. So when we have the chairman of the committee say we should not doubt the word of the Appropriations Committee, yet we have in the Record the exact opposite of what the Appropriations Committee said was going to happen, we should be concerned and we should fix it to where the money for patent examination goes for patent examination. So we have a clear record of a statement that says it was not going to happen, and, in fact, $121 million was diverted from the Patent Office. Finally, from 1992 to 2007, $750 million more in patent and trademark fees was collected than was allowed to be spent by the Patent and Trademark Office. Had they had that money, we would have a backlog of about 100,000 patents right now, not 750,000. We would have intellectual property as a greater value in our country, with greater advantage over our trading partners because that money would have been effectively used. On July 12, former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin wrote to Senators Reid and McConnell noting: The establishment of the Patent and Trademark reserve fund in H.R. 1249 would be ineffective in stopping the diversion of the fees from the U.S. Patent Office. In other words, what is in this bill now will not stop the diversion of the fees. Just so people think I am not just picking on one area, this is a bad habit of Congress. It is not just in the Patent and Trademark Office that we tell people to pay a fee to get something done and we steal the money and use it somewhere else. For example, in the Nuclear Waste Fund at the Department of Energy, utility payments by individual consumers pay for a nuclear waste fee. That money has been spent on tons of other things through the years rather than on the collection and management of nuclear waste. To the tune of $25 billion has been spent on other things. The Securities and Exchange Commission is a fee-based agency. Since the SEC was established, it has collected money via user fees, charged for various transactions in order to cover the cost of its regulation. The primary fees are for sales of stock, registration of a new stock, mergers, tender offers. It also collects fees for penalty fines, for bad behavior. They go into the Treasury's general fund, and amounts collected above the SEC budget were diverted to other government programs. In 2002, Congress changed the treatment of the fees of the SEC so they would only go to a special appropriation account solely for the SEC. SEC would not have access to the fees, however, should it collect more than its appropriation. In the Dodd-Frank bill, Congress again changed the treatment of the fees and required some of the fees to go to the General Treasury and others to the reserve fund. As a result, lots of complaints with the SEC, and they still do not have access to their funds. Thus, like the PTO, if Congress chooses not to provide all the funds in the initial appropriation, they will not have them. In the 2012 budget justification from the Securities and Exchange Commission, they noted it had significant challenges maintaining a staffing level sufficient to carry out its core mission. From 2005 to 2077, SEC had frozen or reduced budgets that forced reduction of 10 percent of their staff and 50 percent of technology investment. What happened in 2007 in this country? What were the problems? So the diversion of the money from the SEC actually contributed to the problems we had in this country. So it does not work. Finally, one that is my favorite and that I have fought against every year that I have been here is the Crime Victims Fund, and that is a fund where people who are criminals actually have to pay into a fund to do restitution for criminal victims, and we have stolen billions of dollars from that fund. They are not taxes, they are actually restitution moneys, but the Congress has stolen it and spent it on other areas. The morality of that I don't think leads anybody to question that that is wrong. Amendment No. 599, as Modified Now, if I may, let me call up amendment 599. I ask that the pending amendment be set aside and ask that the amendment be modified with the changes at the desk.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Senator for this. This is a minor technical correction.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Yes.

Mr. COBURN. I would make note there is nothing we can do now new because the House has adjourned. So even if we were to pass this, nothing would happen with it. I have been assured that from the majority leader's office. I agree with the Senator from California that any action on the mediation board is probably inappropriate for this bill. I would not disagree with that. But my reservation--and I plan on objecting, and I think the good Senator from California knows that--is both in the House and the Senate, by significant votes, we passed limitations on essential air services by majorities that said we could no longer afford to spend thousands of dollars on individual seats, on subsidies for people who live 110 miles from an airport or 140 miles from an airport. But what we could do is make sure--to major airports--that those under 90, those above 90, we could still do that. So I understand we have placed people in difficult positions, but it is us as a body, not individual Senators or parties, that has done that because we have failed to do our work. So I object to this unanimous consent request, and then I offer one of my own, noting that if this unanimous consent request is agreed to, it will go directly to the President, not to the House. So I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 2553, which was received from the House, and I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Let me finish, if I may. I will yield to the Senator in a moment. The fact is, we will not tell the truth to the American people. The first truth is, if we will be honest with them, they will understand the necessities that will have to be brought forward to be able to solve the problem. But denying what the problem is, we will never get consensus in this country and the embrace of the American people to do what everybody in this body knows is eventually going to have to be done. In 5 years, we will not have a Medicare system that is similar to the Medicare system we have today. It is absolutely unsustainable. We will never be able to borrow the money to do it. We are going to get a debt downgrade no matter what we do. So rather than continue to be dishonest with the American people about the status of where we are, we ought to embrace them and call for the very things that made this country great--the sacrifice of the citizens to rebuild the potential for our future, recreate a renewal in our country that embraces the things that made us great--a true free enterprise system, with a limited government that will actually allow people to be rewarded for their hard work and their blood, sweat, and toil--get that back and have the government take a fair share of that. On the upside, it should be more; on the downside, it should be less. I agree. The question is, Will we do it or will we continue a charade to the American people, continuing to tell them we are going to cut $900 billion out of the discretionary budget when, in fact, we are going to increase it 832? There is only a $2 billion difference between Senator Reid's plan and Speaker Boehner's plan on discretionary spending. Both are untruthful to the American people. Both of them take the American people as a lap and say we can wink and nod at them and tell them something that is not true and walk out of here saying we spent less money. We are only going to spend less than we planned to spend, which was too much in the first place, which was unsustainable. Our deal is that we don't have the courage to actually make the cuts listed in here. We don't have the courage to eliminate the waste, and we don't have the courage to eliminate the duplication. Why? Because every one of these programs has a political backing. We are politicians. Unfortunately, too often, we are that instead of statesmen. It is time for us--both sides--to lead this country, to lead the country in a vision of here is the real truth of our problem. Now let's have a debate about what should be the No. 1 priority. How much should we spend on defense? Should we continue to allow contracts to go way overrun? Should we continue to allow requirement creep in contracts--not just in defense but in homeland security, HHS. The same problems we have in defense we have in all the other big agencies. We buy $64 billion worth of IT every year in this country, and $37 billion of it is wasted, totally blown. Why? What have we done about it? Not one thing. We don't look at the high risk for the GAO on IT. Every year that happens. The Census Bureau spent $600 million on a device that never worked. There was no penalty for the company that did it. We paid it anyway. It was a cost-plus contract, and the reason it never worked is because we had requirement creep all the way through. We don't have any grownups making the purchases for this country-- nobody with experience. So we are doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. We need to be doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons, considering that we make sure we take care of those who need it and demand participation from everybody else. We need to cap the total number of Federal employees--not because we want to but because we don't have any other choice. We don't have to let anybody go; just through attrition we can downsize the Federal Government. We waste $15 billion every 5 years on managing properties in this country that we own that are vacant. Yet we are spending that money on them. We cannot get a real property bill through. How valuable to us is $15 billion? We have to start paying attention to the pennies, nickels, and dimes. We will not do it. Unnecessary government printing--including us. I have been trying to get the elimination of this for 3 years. There are millions of dollars we can save by not printing the copies of this every day, which nobody looks at--except I did see my good friend from Illinois looking at a vote last night. But he could have gotten it online out of his BlackBerry. We are tearing down trees to print paper we don't need. Mr. President, how much time do I have?

Mr. COBURN. Yes.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, Let me reclaim my time. There are absolutely no cuts in what either Senator Reid or Speaker Boehner proposed in discretionary spending. The spending will rise $832 billion over the next 10 years in the discretionary accounts. Only in Washington is that a cut. Quite frankly, I am willing to work with my colleagues. I have been out there. I said we have to move and eliminate some of these loopholes; we have to reform the Tax Code. I am willing to take heat from my side on that. What I am not willing to take anymore is a Senate that will not work on the details of the specific problems. What I am trying to do is outline where the problems are. Where is the leadership? We didn't do it when we were in charge either, I say to Senator Kerry. There has been a failure of leadership in this country, in this body, to attack these very problems. When we have 47 job training programs and none of them are working well--because that is what we do know, because the very few times they have been looked at, they don't work--and we are spending $18 billion a year and we are not fixing them, the American people have to say: What is wrong with you all? What we have to do is evaluate the effectiveness of every program in the Federal Government. We have to limit the overhead cost to Federal programs. We have put ideas out there--and this is $9 trillion worth of cuts--not Washington cuts but American cuts--money we are not going to spend that is less than what we are spending today, not money we are not going to spend that we would have spent more the next year. These are real cuts. Each one of these is in here, backed by the facts, not biased. We could disagree with where we make cuts but not with the facts in here. All the facts come from the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, the OMB, the President's budget, in terms of his recommendations and why, and the CBO. We will not go there. My problem with the Senate is that we will not do our work. We are as guilty--and this is not partisan to me. Our country's future is at stake. When we have two bills--one last night and one today--that are literally lying to the American people when they say cuts, I think it is unconscionable.

Mr. COBURN. I don't disagree that those negotiations are going on as we speak. I am not a party to them. I don't know if the Senator from Massachusetts is. I suspect the Presiding Officer is. We are not going to decide that. That will come to us for a decision. Look, I worked for a long number of months with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. I put my name on a bill that doesn't fix it, but it was something to get us moving. It is better than where we are today. I agree with the Senator. But that is not good enough. We are not good enough yet to be where we need to be if we are actually going to solve the problem. Let me finish going through this. We need to end no-bid contracts in this country. To give a specific example, before he left, Senator LeMieux got through on the business bill prescreening of payments on Medicare payments, so we don't just pay them and then go chase the fraud. We got through a bill that required the Centers for Medicaid Services to put in a program to look to see if they ought to pay the bill. What they did is signed a cost-plus contract for $77 million with a firm that has never done that before and didn't take a fixed-price contract from firms that have already done it before. Tell me how we let that happen. Yet it happened. When we had testimony in the committee, they said it was a fixed-price contract, only to write back and say it was not a fixed-price contract. We need some common sense in our government. We need to disclose the text and cost of legislation prior to passage. We need to identify duplicative government programs. We have done that in here. There are hundreds of thousands of them throughout the Federal Government. We need to eliminate them. We need to mandate congressional oversight. That is where our leaders have failed on both sides. They have not mandated the committee chairmen to do the oversight required to solve this problem. We need to freeze the size of this government. We cannot afford the government we have. The debate is about what will happen in the future. What will be the revenue increases and the spending increases? Nobody is talking about decreasing the size of the Federal Government. We can't afford this government. We can't afford to continue to spend the money we are spending. I will close with this. If we continue to be less than straightforward with the American people about what we are doing, about the Reid bill--and the reason I wanted to debate the Boehner bill is I wanted to make this point on the Boehner bill--when we call something a cut of $900 billion, just because the CBO says we are going to spend $900 billion less than what we were planning to spend, but it's still $832 billion more than what we are spending now, that is not a cut anywhere except in Washington. We ought to admit it. If that is the best we can do, the American people need to know that is the best we can do. But we can't play the games anymore. I have another colleague, I think, who would like to speak, and with the remaining time, I would yield to her. Is the Senator from Alaska interested in speaking?

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I have been listening in my office for the last several hours to the debate. I think there is one thing that has not been brought out in the debate. When Washington says it is going to cut spending, it is untruthful with the American public, because both the Boehner bill and the Reid bill increase discretionary spending over the next 10 years by--one of them $830 billion, and the other $832 billion. How is it that we can, with a straight face in this body, talk about a cut when, in fact, CBO says we are going to actually increase the spending in the discretionary accounts over the next 10 years nearly $1 trillion. You have heard the debate in the House, in the Senate, of a spending cut. And, of course, that goes to what the heart of the problem is in our country; words get twisted around to the advantage of the politicians but to the disadvantage of the American citizens. We are in trouble financially. Most people will agree with that. We have programs that are in difficult straits. As a matter of fact, they are broke, they are not just in difficult straits. Here are the ones that are broke. Medicare Part A trust fund. Worst- case scenario this year to 2016. That is the fund that solves and pays for hospitalizations for our seniors. We have heard a lot of statements said about Medicare. The average Medicare recipient paid $130,000 into Medicare. The average Medicare recipient takes $350,000 out. How long do we think that can continue? How long can we continue to tell seniors that we can continue a program based on its utilization rates, based on its reimbursement rates, based on the tax rates, that has a $220,000 difference between what goes out in benefits versus what comes in? It is broke. Medicaid is broke. The reason it is broke is because the States are broke trying to take care of it. We mandate what they must do, and yet the States are choking on Medicaid, and we are choking on matching the amount of dollars. Under the Affordable Care Act, it is now estimated 25 million more people will go into Medicaid. So it is broke. The Census. It was broke before it started. It cost twice what it did 10 years ago, $8 billion more than what was estimated. Fannie and Freddie. We know they are broke. They are $190 billion-- that you have now committed for, to pay to get them out of hock-- Congress created that $190 billion. That is where we are today. It is going to be $300 or $400 billion that we have to pay--we will be required to pay, citizens of this country. Social Security. People say it is not broke. We have $2.5 trillion worth of IOUs. Well, the fact is, that money is gone. Congress stole it, spent it on other things. Now we lack the ability to go into international financial markets to borrow that money to put that trust fund whole. So why do we need to reform Social Security? So we can make sure it is there in the future. What we do know is in 2032 now, according to the trustees, everybody on Social Security will only get 77 percent of what they are promised, and every year after that it will decline, so that when my kids are on Social Security, they will get about 40 percent of what the average Social Security recipient gets now. We know we can fix it. We know we can fix it and make it sustainable forever. But we will not do that because that is politically difficult. The U.S. Post Office is bleeding every day. Yet we have not fixed it. We are going to do a gimmick to buy some time. But the fact is, we have set it up under a system when they negotiate labor contracts under the arbitration system. They cannot consider the financial health of the Post Office. That would be like paying somebody to mow your grass and saying, they will set the price on it and you cannot negotiate what the price is. Yet they are going to lose $8 to $10 billion this year and more every year going forward, and we have not fixed it, not done anything. Cash for Clunkers. Absolute--when you look at the dollars--and the home buyer program, the new home buyer program--they actually had a negative effect on the economy. That is what the studies show now. So we blew through all of that money. The highway trust fund--what is used to build highways and roads and bridges in our country--is broke. We are looking for $13 billion to try to make it whole, and all we did was transfer the last 3 years to that. Rather than reform it, we did not do anything about it. The new government-run health care program. Here is what we know. The new studies show that over half of the employers in this country will drop their insurance for the people who presently have insurance at work. Hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxpayer money is going to be required to subsidize the exchanges those people are going to go into, because the penalty for dropping somebody's insurance is economically too low to keep employers from doing that. We have all of these programs that are broke, and we have a discussion about the debt ceiling, but we are not talking about what is the real problem. This government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. Twice as big. It would be great if all of it were constitutional, it would be great if it were all effective, it would be great if it were all efficient, and it would be great if we could afford it. But the fact is, we are where we are today, with a $1.6 trillion deficit, because we cannot afford the government we have. So we have not concentrated on the very areas where we can find mutual agreement. We have had three bipartisan bills in here where we have cut money, significant money, billion here, $5 billion here, $7 billion here, $3 billion here, go through the Senate with vast majority votes, only to go nowhere, because the allowance for the debate on the underlying bills was stopped. The bills were pulled. So what do we do? Well, the first thing we do is we look at what the problems are. What are the problems? We have 100 different programs with 100 sets of bureaucracies for surface transportation alone. Why do we do that? Why have we not fixed it? That is a question the American people ought to be asking. We have 82 programs to improve the quality of our teachers, run by the Federal Government across 7 different agencies. Only one of them is at the Department of Education. Why are we doing that? Where is the assessment of how well they work? Where are the metrics to say we should be spending this money in this way because we are getting a return? Not one of them has a metric on it. Not one of them has ever been measured on whether it is effective. We have 88 economic development programs in 4 agencies, for which we spend $6.8 billion, and we have another 100 economic development programs in 6 other agencies, for which we spend another $4 billion, and not one of them has ever been measured to see if it improves economic activity. And if, in fact, it does, why do we have 188 separate agencies to stimulate economic development? I mean, this is not complicated stuff. It is common sense. Every American, other than the Congress, would fix that. We have 56 programs to teach financial literacy to the American people. First of all, I question whether we ought to be teaching anybody financial literacy as a government when we run it so poorly. But if, in fact, we do, why do we have 56? And, oh, by the way, not one of them has ever been measured to see if it effectively teaches somebody financial literacy. We have 47 job training programs which cost $18 billion a year, 9 different agencies, 9 different sets of bureaucracies, and all of them but three overlap with the other. That is according to the Government Accountability Office. Why? Why would we do that? We have 18 programs for food for the hungry. That is something we all want to be involved in. Eighteen? Why 18 sets of bureaucracies? How well are they working? Are they effective? Could we do them better? The question has not even been asked by Congress. We have homeless programs for both prevention and assistance--20, 6 different agencies. So you have 20 different sets of bureaucracies that are designed to do the same thing. Disaster response and preparedness, inside FEMA alone. Inside FEMA alone, we have 17 different programs, inside that one agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. I ask the question: Why? Why hasn't it been a priority for us to work on this?

Mr. COBURN. Yes.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. No objection.

Mr. COBURN. Let me end with this. It costs us, to educate a student on our military bases, an average of $51,000 a student. If we look at the locations where all those are located, the cost outside is one- fourth of that. We could easily do that and pay the community. But we will not. I will end with this. We can solve our problems. There is $9 trillion worth of specific savings in this. We do not have to agree with all this. We do not even have to agree with half of it. If we agreed with one-third of them, we would be well on our way. The fact is, nobody wants to be specific. We need to be specific. Everybody wants to talk in generalities. Nobody wants to make the hard choices. Hard choices are what we are here for. Our time has come to stop living the next 30 years on the backs of our kids. It would be my hope that as we go through this process the next 2 weeks, we will see a renewal in the spirit of our country that says: We are going to live within our means, we are going to reward self-reliance, we are going to reward individual accountability, we are going to reward personal responsibility, and we are going to put the role of the government back where it should be both at the Federal and State level and have commensurate policies that will reflect that, that will renew our country, that will create jobs, that will create opportunity for the future of our country. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, we have a lot in front of us as a nation. Our perception is that our country is anxious, and I think it has good reason to be anxious, but it doesn't have anything to do with the debt ceiling debate. It should be anxious because we are not listening. We are not paying attention to the anxiety and fear and worry that the country they know and the freedoms and liberties they have are slipping away from them. They are slipping away because we are putting America into debtor's prison. We are slowly losing our ability to make free choices about our future because we failed to be responsible in the past with the money the American people have given us. We have had a lot of debates and a lot of statements over the last couple of weeks, but no one ever talks about what the real problem is. The real problem is we are spending money on things with good intentions that don't accomplish their purposes. We are spending money we don't have on things we don't absolutely need, and the programs we do have, we fail to oversee to see that they are running both efficiently and effectively. As a consequence, we find ourselves in the midst of an economic downturn with a $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion deficit, borrowing $4 billion a day. That means every day and a half, we borrow more money than the State of Oklahoma spends in a year. We hear all of the political speeches and all of the fingerpointing, but we don't hear the real solutions to our problem. Let me explain what I mean. Everybody agrees we are going to have to make some cuts, but not everybody is honest about the numbers associated with those cuts. Everybody agrees we are going to have to tighten our belt, but nobody wants to offer specifically where to tighten our belt. What I wish to do today is offer specific places where the government today--right today, in this body and the one across the Capitol--could make a big difference in the outcome of our future by cutting specific programs this week and next week. That is the one rare thing we never hear in Washington. Everybody says we need to cut, but when it gets down to talking about what to cut, nobody wants to come up with any cogent ideas because they don't want to take the political heat, because every program, no matter how well intended and how inefficient, has those people who are going to fight for that program because it has money coming into the coffers for something. The other point I wish to make is the reason we are anxious and the reason we are worried is we have abandoned the very principles our Founders gave us that would keep us healthy, and that was the Constitution and its enumerated powers section, which spelled out very succinctly what was our responsibility and what was the States' responsibility. So we have whole departments. One, for example, would be the Department of Education that Thomas Jefferson said if we ever have the Federal Government doing anything on education, we would have to change the Constitution. That is a direct quote of his. He was one of our Founders. He, as well as Madison and Monroe and others, wrote extensively about what their intentions were in the Federalist Papers. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be walked, like in a dream state, into the contention that the Constitution does not make any difference and that it would, in fact, if we paid attention to it, limit our opportunities for the mistakes we have made. The mistakes we have made--though well-intentioned--are that we can be the answer for every problem in America. We cannot. What made our country great was self-reliance, individual freedom and initiative, personal responsibility and accountability. That is what built our country, in a system that said: If, in fact, you work hard, the opportunity is there for you to gain, for you and those you love. Now we have a government that at every place, for every decision that is for the economic benefit of those individuals who would grab that dream, they are confronted with layers upon layers of bureaucracy, with rules and regulations, to the point where no longer are they presumed innocent by the Federal Government, they are presumed guilty, and they have to prove themselves innocent to the bureaucracy to be able to accomplish that which would set them free, that which would put them ahead, that which would establish an opportunity to gain the wealth this country promised. I put forward a week ago last Monday $9 trillion in potential cuts. Now, I know people are not all going to agree with me, but every one of these cuts is backed up with a government study that says what we are doing in these programs is not effective. Whether it is the Congressional Research Service, the inspector generals, the Government Accountability Office, OMB, or the Congressional Budget Office, there are over 3,000 footnotes to the 600 pages that are in here that explain very well why we should not be doing this $9 trillion worth of stuff. I understand we can have a great debate on whether, one, it is our constitutional responsibility. Some of it certainly is when it comes to defense. No. 2, we can have a great debate on what we think are priorities, those things that fit within the Constitution that are our responsibility. But we cannot debate the facts of the outright waste, the outright fraud, the outright abuse, and the outright duplication of multiple sets of programs. This is far from a complete list, as shown in this chart. But over the next 10 years, we could save $150 billion to $200 billion just by eliminating duplicative programs. We have over 100 programs on surface transportation. That is 100 sets of bureaucracies, 100 offices, 100 sets of regulations, 100 sets of rules. The question we ought to ask is, If we have responsibility on surface transportation, why in the world do we have 100 different programs? We have 82 teacher improvement and training programs run by the Federal Government. Nobody will come down here and answer me why. It is indefensible we have it. Yet nobody will come down here and join me to eliminate it. We have to be asking the question: Do we have good reason to be anxious when we will not do the obvious? We have over 180 economic development programs, but we have 88 economic development programs that we spend $6.8 billion a year on run by four separate agencies, and not one of them has a study that shows they are effective in developing economic activity--not one of them. So why would we continue to send money into programs with good intentions that are not working? Yet we have over 180 of them, 88 within four departments. We have not been able to find all the rest of them, but we know they exist. That is 88 sets of bureaucrats, well-intentioned Federal Government workers doing what this Congress and Congresses before us have told them to do but not accomplishing the purpose for which that money-- almost $7 billion a year--is sent. We have 80 other separate programs for transportation assistance. You see the little community vehicles, the ones to help those who have a disability. Why do we have 80 separate programs? Nobody can answer that. It is easy to figure out how they happen. They are well- intentioned. We ought to help people who cannot get around. The question that ought to be asked is, Is that a State responsibility or a Federal responsibility? If it is a Federal responsibility--that is debatable, but if it is, why would we have 80 separate programs? We have 56 different programs run by seven different agencies to teach Americans financial literacy. We have to ask ourselves the question: How can a government that is running a $1.6 trillion deficit and has $14 trillion of debt--and our debt-to-GDP ratio is 100 percent--how do we have any authority to teach anybody about financial literacy? That is No. 1. No. 2, where is it in the Constitution that we are responsible for teaching people financial literacy? That is both a State function, a city function, and a family function. Yet we have 56 programs, and not one of them has a metric to study whether it is effective--not one of them. Job training: We spent $18.8 billion on job training this last year. We have 47 different programs. The Government Accountability Office says, of those 47 programs, all of them overlap except 3. So based on the study of the people we pay to study this, the most we should have is 4 job training programs. And we are going to spend almost $19 billion on that? Here is what we know. The results cannot justify that we are spending the money because the results do not show performance. Yet we are spending $18 billion. We have 20 different programs for homeless assistance and prevention. That is a great role. We all want to help the homeless. We want to do whatever we can to get them in a stable situation, to assist them. But 20 different programs? Why would we do that? Why wouldn't we have one? And why wouldn't only the one program be administered through a State if, in fact, it is our role? I happen to think that is the State of Oklahoma's role to take care of the homeless people in Oklahoma, not the Federal Government's. But if it is the Federal Government's role, why would we have 20 programs? Food for the hungry: 18 separate programs, 5 different agencies. Again, I am all for helping those people who need to have food. Why would we have 18 sets of bureaucracies, 18 different sets of rules--18 different sets? And 2 of these actually work; 16 do not, but we have not eliminated them. We are still sending the money out the door. Disaster response and preparedness inside FEMA: Just for disaster response and preparedness, there are 17 programs just inside FEMA. That does not count all the disaster response and preparedness programs in all the other government agencies. That is just inside FEMA. We have to ask the questions: What are we doing? One, what have we done in the past? And what are we going to do about the problems that are in front of us today? So I would propose that we are off base, and we have a good reason to be anxious about us because we will not address these problems. When we bring amendments to the floor, they get routinely defeated. Why is that? Is it that we are being dishonest about the facts or is it we are protecting the politicians so they are not attacked by the very people who are benefiting indirectly--not directly, but indirectly--from these programs, the bureaucracies and the other quasi-governmental agencies that feed off these programs? So where do we go to start fixing this $1.6 trillion deficit? I had some wonderful employees of the Social Security Administration come to me about a year and a half ago, and they said--and they wanted to remain anonymous; and I understand why--they said our disability program is broken. We are giving disability checks to thousands of people every year who are not disabled. So we started looking at it in the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and here is what we found. If we take veterans totally out of the mix--this does not apply to veterans--1 in 18 people in this country today is collecting a disability check. As a physician, I have done all sorts of disability examinations. What we are finding is about 40 percent of the people who are on disability are not disabled because the law says to be disabled in this country, and to receive a check from the rest of us for that disability, there can be no job in the economy they can do. Yet we have judges who never deny anybody when they come through the disability program. We have people on disability who are working full time at other jobs. Once they are eligible for a disability check, 2 years after that they are eligible for health care. So now we have undermined the system that was designed to help the truly disabled by having thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people collecting a disability check, which means there is not going to be a check for somebody else. The disability trust fund, which we pay into when we work--as well as SSI, which is a separate fund that comes just from our tax dollars--is belly up. Next year, the Social Security disability trust fund runs out of money. The reason it is running out of money is the Social Security system does not say: If you were disabled and now you are not, why are you still taking the money when you are back at work? They do not do their job because the leadership at Social Security does not demand that the job is being done. So we have significant ways of improving that to make sure we are helping those people who are truly disabled. But we cannot get anybody to help us get that law passed. To say we want to clean up Social Security disability does not mean we do not care about the people who are disabled. It means we care about those who are going to be disabled in the future, so we will have a dollar to help them when that need arises for them. So it is just one of those areas. It has not been looked at in 25 years. The Social Security system--once you are on, you are on. They rarely take anybody off. The fraud associated with collecting a disability check and working for cash in our economy--and working not for cash, even working full-blown jobs--we had three instances where we had the Government Accountability Office film people, two of whom actually worked as salaried employees for the Federal Government, who were collecting disability at the same time they were collecting checks from the Federal Government as a Federal employee. And it is not small; it is big. So there is $60 billion over 10 years that we could save just by reforming the Social Security disability system. That does not say we do not want to help people who are disabled. It says we want to do the best for our country and help those people who are disabled. But we have undermined self-reliance. We have found people who want to take advantage of our charity and love and care. So, therefore, they cheat the system. We have an incompetent bureaucracy that does not take them off the system, and we have an incompetent system of jurisprudence within the Social Security Administration that puts people on who should never be on. But the attack comes that we do not care about people if, in fact, we want to fix this program. Social Security: Everybody says do not touch Social Security. This Congress and the Congress before it has stolen $2.5 trillion from the money we put into Social Security. They have written a little, bitty IOU note and said: Well, when you need the money, we will pay it back. What does that mean? That means the full faith and credit of this country has to be good enough that when we get ready to pay the $2.5 trillion back, we can borrow the money at an acceptable interest rate to be able to pay it back. So what do the Social Security Administration trustees say we need to do? They say we have to make it sustainable. And, oh, by the way, wouldn't it be nice if the poorest people on Social Security could get a little bump so we could help those who are truly dependent on it and make it sustainable so we never have to discuss Social Security again? Even with the baby boomers, we ought to do that. So what we have done is designed a solvent path over 75 years based on Social Security where we are likely to achieve it. We did not raise anybody's taxes. We help those the most who are in need the most, and for those who are the most well off, we said: You cannot have quite as much. In other words, we means tested it. We said: If you are very wealthy, you will eventually get your money out, but not like everybody else will. The people who need it the most, we are going to help the most. It alters the retirement age just to go along with life expectancy. It does not alter life. It alters that 2 years over 60 years. But the fact is, our life expectancy is far advanced from what it was when we first started Social Security. When we first started, we had almost 50 people working for everybody who is on Social Security. Now we have less than five, and it is not going to be long where we are going to have less than three. It is not sustainable unless we change that. So the point is, I understand Social Security is important to people in this country. But if we do not change it, in 2035, we are going to get two-thirds of the benefits you put in. We are not going to get any more than that. So do we fix it now and make it sustainable forever or do we just wait until it goes belly up, knowing we cannot borrow the $2.5 trillion that was stolen from it and let it go belly up? The typical politician says: I do not want to do that because I do not want to take the heat to have to explain that to people on Social Security or coming on Social Security. I do not have any problems trying to explain it. It is the right thing for us to do. We have to fix it, and we can fix it, if, in fact, we are going to save our country. That is one of the things we have to do to make sure the people who buy our bonds, loan us the money, recognize we have a salvageable situation. Ignoring Social Security--it is our second biggest issue now, other than health care--it is our second biggest issue. To ignore it and not fix it says we will not be able to borrow the money for it or anything else. Let me spend a minute going through a couple things we can do next week that would save a lot of money--not hard, not controversial. The question America ought to ask is, Why have we not already done it? Let me give some examples. We ought to quit paying unemployment compensation to millionaires. Do you realize last year we paid $20 million out in unemployment compensation to people who were making $1 million that year. Is that nuts or what? Unemployment is to help those people who are in need who are unemployed. It is not to give money to people who do not need it because they are unemployed. Yet we spent almost $20 million last year paying people unemployment compensation who made $1 million last year. We could save $1 billion over 10 years if we quit making payments to dead people. You say: Oh well, you do not make payments to dead people. Yes, we do--$100 million a year that bureaucracies pay to people who are dead and a good portion of it we never get back. It is gone. We do not follow that up. We know we can save $5 billion a year minimum--minimum--if we just eliminated some of the overlapping programs I talked about. That is a very conservative estimate. It is probably more akin to $25 billion a year. But let's say it is one-fifth of that--$5 billion a year. That is $50 billion. That would keep us from borrowing money for 14 days just by eliminating duplication in government programs. We could eliminate $2 billion over 10 years by eliminating sweetheart contracts and bonuses to contractors who work for the Federal Government who do not earn their bonuses. Yes, we do that. We pay bonuses to people who both do not perform and do not perform on time. You would not do it. If someone came in to do something for you on a fixed price with a bonus based on quality and time and they did not meet it, you would not pay them the bonus. But your Federal Government does anyway. We could save $1 billion over 10 years by collecting unpaid taxes owed to us by our own Federal employees. Taxes that are owed, they have been adjudicated, there is nothing else going on, it is final, it is set, but we do not take the money out of their pay. That number is growing every year, the amount of money they owe. We could save $3.82 billion by reducing the amount of money Congress spends on itself by just 15 percent. Would it be too much to ask of the Congress to tighten its belt by 15 percent and save 1 day's borrowing? No. I turn back, on average, about $500,000 to $600,000 a year on what is allocated to my Senate office. I do not do that to be able to say I do it; I do it because I do not need it because I know how to run an office efficiently and pay people effectively. But the fact is, we have too big a budget, and we need to trim it. We need to lead by example. We could save $480 million a year just by having HRSA, the Health Resources and Services Administration, pay the right prices for drugs in their programs versus paying too high prices--prices higher than what they contracted for. One-half billion dollars does not sound like much. But $\1/2\ billion over 10 years, that is $5 billion. That is one three-hundredths of what our problem is right now in terms of the deficit. We could save $5 billion by eliminating unnecessary government printing. We could do that tomorrow--$5 billion. We could get $15 billion back by getting rid of unnecessary government buildings we are not using, that are costing us $8 billion a year to maintain. I cannot remember the exact number. I think we have 63,000 facilities right now the Federal Government owns--63,000 that are underutilized or not utilized at all. That is 12,000 more than we had 2 years ago, and we are signing new leases for buildings all the time and abandoning the buildings the government owns. The Federal Government should dispose of excess property within 5 years. According to President Obama's own administration, we could save, at a minimum, $15 billion. Every time we have tried to do this, somebody stops it in the Senate. We can end subsidies for ethanol blending. We voted on it, had 74 Senators vote on it, but it did not happen. That is $2 billion we could save this year if we passed it tomorrow. We can decrease the number of limousines owned by the Federal Government, save $115 million. We could reduce the Federal vehicle fleet, $5.6 billion. The Federal Government--you will not believe this number--the Federal Government owns 662,000 cars--662,000. The average mileage on them is less than 20,000 miles. The fleet has grown by 5 percent and the cost of maintaining and servicing the fleet has grown over 25 percent in the last 2 years--$4.6 billion a year just maintaining these 600,000-plus cars. The amount of vehicles in our fleet could easily be decreased by 20 percent. We have all the capability of having GoToMeeting, of having Internet, of having live chats, of having telecommunications with visual conferencing. We have all those things available. We do not need the cars we have. Even the Obama administration agrees we can do that. We could save $43 billion by decreasing travel by government agencies--same reason. We spend $15 billion a year on travel--$15 billion. Anything that is not mission critical and that could be done through teleconferencing ought to be done. We advertise. The advertising budget for the Federal Government, $5.6 billion a year. They do not pay for public service ads. These are ads outside of public service ads--$5.6 billion. We spend $1 billion a year hosting government conferences. The Federal Government now owns 685 million acres in the United States. The cost to maintain that, we are not funding. The land is falling in worse disrepair. We are adding land every year. There is lots of land we could give up that is not a precious resource, is not a heritage area, is not forest, is not a park. Yet we own it. We could save a lot of money by not having so much land and put it back on the tax rolls. We could save $4.1 billion just on our last 2 years' average, in terms of slowing down and not buying additional land, unless there is a direct necessity for the Federal Government to have it. We could save $19 billion over 10 years by combining the PXs and exchanges on our military bases--$19 billion just by putting them together. That is what we could save.

Mr. COBURN

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

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wanted to spend some time talking about what is coming forth Saturday morning. As a member of the Gang of 6, I am wanting us to solve our problem. But the best way to solve that problem would be the bill that is going to be voted on Saturday morning. Why is that? We are borrowing $4 billion a day, and I have enough gray hair to know that regardless of all the good intention and regardless of all the statements of the Members on the floor that we will never live within our means in Washington until we are forced to live within our means, and just because a constitutional amendment would take probably 4 years to pass--given what the American people think about it--isn't a reason not to go on and do it no matter what we do about our short-term problem coming up August 2. So the very fact people would say we are not going to pass the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act because it won't happen in a period of time is exactly the same approach that got us $14.3 trillion in debt, that has our credit rating at risk and puts us in the kind of problems we have today. I have offered a plan I think is even better. I know not many of my colleagues will, but here is a plan to cut $9 trillion over the next 10 years. It is the only plan that specifically states what you would cut, where you would cut it, and why you would cut it. It is backed up with the facts. Nobody else can claim it. You don't have to like all of them, but what we do know is if something doesn't come out of this body between now and August 2 that cuts at least $4 trillion, this country is going to see significantly increased interest rates as a cost of that. What so often happens is you hear wonderful words and wonderful speeches on the Senate floor but nobody putting their name on where you would cut. Well, I put my name on $9 trillion worth of cuts. It pinches everybody in this country. Everybody. But you know what. We are all in this. We have lived for the last 30 years on the backs of those who are going to pay the taxes for the next 30 years. It is time we start paying back. It is time we start giving back. The Senate is a different place today than when I came to the Senate. When I came to the Senate, the idea was not to block legislation but to discuss legislation, to have the courage and the backbone to vote against something and go home and tell your constituents why you voted against it, to offer amendments you thought would improve legislation and defend those amendments, and to vote for a bill you thought was in the best interest of the country and be able to defend that. What has happened in the last 3\1/2\ years in the Senate is we don't vote because the politicians of the Senate don't want to go home and explain their positions. So if you are not voting, you are not accountable and you are not responsible. That type of behavior is exactly the opposite behavior we need to have. So Saturday morning, when Members of the Senate vote against proceeding to cut, cap, and balance, they will display either courage or cowardice. I am not talking about simple words. There is only one plan that has passed the House of Representatives that raises the debt limit and addresses what is said to be needed by the rating agencies, and that is cut, cap, and balance. And to not allow proceeding to that debate whether you agree with it or not--you can change it through amendments. You have the votes to change it through amendments. But to not allow it to proceed so the American people can see their elected Senators and their real positions and what they know has to be done-- you know, what happens around here is we say things so we can protect our political careers. You know what that does? We are not only bankrupting financially, we are bankrupting our country's history and heritage. The heritage of this country was sacrifice, and that means even sacrifice of political careers to do the right thing right now for the country. I believe if you were to pass something like this, we would lower our debt by at least $2 trillion over the next 10 years, the economy would absolutely boom, and we would quit undermining self-reliance and enforcing dependency. We would hold accountable a Pentagon that is wasteful, we would eliminate duplication of hundreds of programs that all do the same thing with multiple layers of redundancy and administrative bureaucracy. If we were to do that, this proposal will never come to a vote in the Senate nor any of the aspects of it because Senators don't want to make those hard choices, and that is what the debate about cut, cap, and balance is all about. It forces Senators to go back to embrace the heritage of this country and make the hard choices. If you don't pass a balanced budget amendment and you don't force the discipline, the political expediency of this country will continue to run and the problems will not be solved. I would also say raising the debt limit doesn't have anything to do with our real problems. That is just the symptom of the problem. The problem is not living within our means. Somehow thinking the U.S. Government is different than all the State governments, all the city and county governments, every family in this country, every business in this country, and every other organization in this country that has to live within its means, I refuse to believe the American people will not hold Members of the Senate accountable for not giving them a chance to put those fixed parameters on us and their government for the future. We are going to hear all sorts of reasons why we can't do that, why we won't do that, or we may not hear many at all. What we will see is voting against the procedure with no comment whatsoever. My plan is if that happens, to be all over this country to make sure every citizen of every State of every Senator who does not allow them to proceed is aware of that. I want to personally make them aware of that. Because what you are doing is denying the liberty and the freedom of this country to hold you accountable to do the right thing. So we are going to see. I wanted to spend a few minutes saying that the only thing that is possible right now to solve the problems in front of us--even though I have endorsed a $9 trillion plan and $3.7 trillion plan--the only thing is this $6 trillion plan. It has passed the House of Representatives. They voted to increase the debt limit and they put significant cuts into our budget for next year. They put significant caps as we go forward and they said we have to vote to pass a balanced budget amendment. Right now that is the only thing that will get us out of a jam. You know what. That is not hard to do. The first point, we are going to cut another $111 billion at least next year, no matter whether that passes. We are going to cap spending in the years that go forward whether or not that bill passes. But the difference is as soon as we get our balance again, the politicians who don't want to make hard choices will be back to not making hard choices and we will get in trouble again. That is why it is absolutely critical that this country's citizens have the ability to hold us accountable within the parameters of living within our means. We will hear all sorts of reasons why we can't do that, that it might hurt the poor. Nobody here wants to in any way intend anything other than support for those who cannot help themselves. That is their excuse, we can't do that. Well, let me tell you what is going to happen in our country. The very programs that help the poor are going to be diminished in the future through fiscal necessity when we are mandated to make cuts to be able to borrow more money. So it is a false statement because by not voting for a balanced budget amendment, what you are saying is I want to plan one thing but I know something else is going to happen. I paraphrase a statement by Martin Luther King that I think describes this place more than anything I have ever known and it was this: Vanity asks the question: Is something popular? Cowardice asks the question: Is it expedient? Character asks the question: Is it true and right? We have tons of vanity. We have tons of cowardice. We limit ourselves on courage and character. As we listen to the debate over the next 2 days on this motion to proceed on the only thing that will solve the problem in front of us today, I want my colleagues to listen for political expediency, I want my colleagues to listen for vanity, and then I want them to search hard for courage and character because we will see an absence of it from those who oppose this. They know this will solve the problem. They know this is one of the few things that can pass the House of Representatives. Yet we are not going to have it come to the floor for an amendment process, for a full debate, and for a vote. We are not going to allow it to have a vote because we are political cowards. We do not want to truly address the problem because it might affect our political careers. That is a sad commentary on the heritage of this country--a sad commentary--but it is a commentary to be expected; otherwise, we would never have gotten into the position we are in today. Let me talk about some details of what we can do. We are going to hear all sorts of reasons why we can't do things and all sorts of reasons why we couldn't come up with $9 trillion. But when the American people truly know what is going on--if they go and read about it in ``Back in Black''--when they find out about the background of all the waste, all the duplication, all the stupidity that goes on in our government, all the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility in bureaucratic agencies, all the silly decisions that get made that spend billions of dollars and don't help anything--the Tax Code. Tax earmarks and tax credit and tax expenditures are nothing but, most of the time, corporate welfare or socialism. The greatest tax in the world comes when we allow the Federal Reserve to print money which devalues our assets through inflation and the earnings on those assets. So the greatest tax in the world that is coming in America is we are going to devalue the dollar and inflation is going to go up and what we can earn on our assets is going to be limited by the interest rates, and the differential is that which we actually lose in real value of what we own every day. The other thing I would point out is, through the tax earmarks and tax credits in our Tax Code, anybody who doesn't get one of those is actually paying for it. So if a person doesn't have an ``in'' up here, if a person doesn't have a lobbyist, if a person doesn't have some special interest looking out for them and they are not getting one of those, they are paying for them through the increased taxes. It is inherently unfair. Let's look at duplication for a minute. It is interesting to look, as we have gone through the government programs in a detailed fashion, at the GAO report. We have 100 different programs with 100 sets of bureaucracies for surface transportation. Why do we have that? Because Congress has mismanaged. That is why. Because of expediency, because of vanity, because of wanting to get reelected, we create another program, another program, another program. It looks good and sounds good, but nobody ever does the research to see where they overlap. Nobody ever requires us to ask if this program is effective, and nobody ever looks at the Constitution to see if it fits with article I, section 8 of the Constitution--the enumerated powers we are supposed to live by and which we blow by all the time doing things. Today, the Judiciary Committee passed a bill for State prisons called the Second Chance Act. When we passed it the first time, I finally let it go because it was supposed to be a demonstration and a limited program. It is now going to get reauthorized for 5 more years. It legitimately has zero role for the Federal Government, and we are going to spend $600 million which we don't have. We will borrow. It is well intended, but it is not our role. It is the States' role. We have hundreds of thousands of examples such as that, where we have ignored what the Constitution says so we can look good politically. We have teacher quality programs. Teacher quality programs--82 different programs by the Federal Government to improve the quality of our teachers. Thomas Jefferson was truly the father of education in our country. He worked for years to establish the University of Virginia. He was committed to the fact that a great education will produce great benefits, not only for the individual with the education but for their family and our country as a whole. Here is what he said: For the Federal Government to become involved in education would require a change to the U.S. Constitution, and he happened to be one of the people who wrote it. What have we done since the beginning of the Department of Education? We have spent $2.6 trillion on education in this country at the Federal level and every parameter measuring a metric on the progression of our kids in school is worse or the same after that $2.6 trillion. Hey, it is not working. The reason it is not working is a person can be a teacher at home and the Federal Government looks at that person and they don't know what to do, but we can hire that person to do the work in Washington and all of a sudden that person knows what they need to do. So we have this massive bureaucracy that has ruined our education because we spend all our money filling out forms and requirements and meeting mandates and we have taken the power and control of education away from the parents and teachers, the very people who care most about the success of the kids. So $2.6 trillion with nothing to show for it, other than for the politicians to feel good about themselves and to say we were doing something. We have 88 different economic development programs, with $6 billion just in four of them. Not for 1 of those 88 programs is there a metric anywhere that says it is money well spent that gets a positive result for the country. There is anecdotal evidence that says it worked here or it worked there, but we don't know what we are doing. We are throwing money we don't have at things we don't know are working and when we go to vote for them to eliminate them, the Senate votes against it because it might bother their political position. It might bother their next election. We don't do it. We don't address it and do our job. I will never forget in one of the committees I was on last year, two separate times bills were brought up in committee that were doing identical things that we were already doing in the agencies. The Senators and their staffs didn't know it. Had I not raised objections, we would have created more agencies. Eighty programs for transportation assistance--80. If it is our role, why do we need 80? Oh, by the way, has anybody measured to see if any of the 80 actually work? The answer is no. We have none that have a report on whether they are effective to the goals of what they were set out to do because there is no oversight carried out by Congress. We were so busy earmarking for so many years, everybody forgot to check to see if what we intended to do is working, and we still aren't doing it. We have 56 different programs to teach the American people to become financially literate--56. The Federal Government is teaching financial literacy when we can't balance our budget. We have multiple programs. We don't live within a confined budget. The first principle of financial literacy is living within your means. Yet we have this many programs--56--to teach American citizens to be financially literate. Job training. Here is one of the best. This is great. We have 47 job training programs that cost $16 billion a year. All but three overlap one another. That is what the GAO says, and there is not a metric on one of them to see if they are working. When we talk to the people who go through the program, half of them say it is a waste, it is a joke. I have actually talked to them. Yet we are spending that kind of money, in excess of $15 billion a year, on job training programs. There is no question we need job training programs, but we need job training programs that work. Why would we need 47? So when somebody tells you we can't balance our budget, you ought to blow a hole right through them with your thought that says you obviously don't know what is going on in the Federal Government. Homeless prevention/assistance, 20 different Federal programs. We should be helping people who need our help. I am not denying that. But how we help and the mechanisms of the way we help ought to be frugal, efficient, and effective. I have served in Congress--I am in my 13th year, 6 years as a Congressman, 4 years out of here to get a breath of fresh air, and now my seventh year in the Senate. What I know is, we don't know what we are doing, and it is obvious looking at our budget. It is also obvious looking at the dysfunction of the Senate and the leadership in the Senate, that we--we haven't had a budget in 2 years. The one thing any financial counselor will tell you is the first thing you have to know is where you are and set up a plan. We have had no attempt to bring a budget to this body in well over 2\1/2\ years--no attempt. What does that tell us? It goes back to vanity. It goes back to cowardice. It goes back to us not doing what we are intended to do because we care more about our position than we care about the country. There are 18 programs to feed the hungry. We have 17 disaster response/preparedness, just in FEMA--17 different programs, of which 11 overlap. FEMA didn't set those up. The bureaucracy didn't create those; we did. Every one of these programs was created by a Member of Congress. So we can't blame administrations and we can't blame Presidents. What we have to do is blame Congress. We have 130 overlapping programs in the Department of Agriculture; 18 overlapping programs in the Department of Commerce; 230 overlapping programs in the Department of Education; 17 in the Department of Energy; 36 in the Department of Human Services; 32 in the Department of Homeland Security; 60 in the Department of Housing and Urban Development; 40 in the Department of the Interior; 53 in the Department of Justice; 35 in the Department of Labor; 6 in the Department of State; and 180 governmentwide if we look at all economic development programs. We just listed the 88 that run through 4 of the agencies. Is it any wonder we are going belly up? The problem is us. The problem is we have a solution now that has come to us from the House and we are not going to let that solution go forward because politically--politically--it is uncomfortable. Politically, we don't want to allow the people of this country to decide whether we ought to live within our means and put a bridle with a bit in our mouth that says, whoa, you are not going to continue to destroy the future of this country and the prospects for our children anymore. When I came to the Senate, I came after having read a book called ``Running On Empty.'' It was written by a man by the name of Pete Peterson. He was bipartisan in his criticism of both parties, and he was absolutely accurate. We are in trouble because parties matter more than the country, because control matters more than the country, because political careers matter more than our children or our grandchildren. So I go back to talk about what is possible. A lot of people would disagree with what is in here; this $9 trillion of what the House has sent us would take about 60 percent of it. But here is what I say to my colleagues who don't want to vote on a balanced budget amendment, don't want to vote on cut, cap, and balance. Where is your plan? I have listed 625 pages of specific cuts, elimination of duplication, elimination of waste, elimination of fraud, and 3,000 footnotes that looked at every program throughout the Federal programs--looked at every CRS report, looked at every OIG report, looked at every GAO report, looked at every OMB report, and looked at every other outside report we could find. The fact is, we could solve our problems tomorrow, America. We could solve them tomorrow, with good old-fashioned common sense that the vast majority of Americans have and is sorely lacking here. We do not have a fiscal crisis. We have a commonsense crisis in this body and in the leadership in Congress. We lack common sense, we lack sound judgment, and we need the hard bit of a bridle put on us through a balanced budget amendment to control us. Because human nature is human nature in whatever we do today, we will be back to our bad habits tomorrow. Even if we pass cuts, even if we cap spending, if we do not have a balanced budget amendment that forces us to live within the constraints of our revenue, we will be back here again. What does that mean? That means the future of America is suspect. It does not have to be. We do not have to go the way of every other republic. We do not have to fail over fiscal issues. We can cheat history. The American people are the greatest people in the world because they are a blend of all the people in the world and they desire freedom and opportunity and that is limited because we have limited it. We, through our profligate spending, our inattention to detail, our failure to do oversight, have undercut the potential of our country. Let's restore it. Let's restore it Saturday morning by moving on to this bill and allowing ourselves to have a debate, offer amendments, and truly debate--have what the Senate has not had in a year and a half: a real debate about the issues of our day and the reasons behind it. But I would caution the American people. Remember what Martin Luther King said as you hear that debate: Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? But conscience and right and good asks, is it right? I tell you, it is not right to have multiple programs doing the same thing, wasting our kids' future. It is not right for the Congress not to do oversight and eliminate programs. It is not right for us to spend money we do not have on things we do not absolutely need. It is not right for us to take the control of our children's education from the parents and teachers who have their best interests at heart and place it in a bureaucracy that has no compassion whatsoever, even though it feigns that it does. It is not right. It may be politically expedient, it may be popular to some people, but it does not make it right. As you look at this, here is how you get $9 trillion, and you can pick any part of that to meet this cut, cap, and balance or you can come up with your own. But the fact is, nobody wants to lay on the table what they think. I have already been roundly criticized in the press for certain aspects of this by people who disagree. That is fine. I am planning on defending everything I put in here. With the best of my knowledge and a great staff that spent thousands upon thousands of hours on this, we came up with a way to solve America's problems, and we can do it. America can be bright, can be growing, can be developing jobs, if we get the government out of the way and limit the role of the Federal Government. I see my colleague from Delaware, one of my great friends. We hear that said a lot here, but he is a great friend. It is not the conventional, common greeting. I believe I am over my time. I will be back to the floor to finish this conversation. But America needs to know we do not have any problem we cannot fix. What we lack are leaders who will fix it. That is our deficit. It is a deficit of courage. It is a deficit of will. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. They are eligible, and there are some reasons for that. But that is not what this debate is about. We are not questioning it. We are just saying on this basis we are not using science how we have used it in every other aspect of veterans' disability. Now we are going beyond science. When we look at the total number of studies, rarely 3 percent or so show any association, and association does not imply any causation. So we have the Secretary who has made a decision to commit this country to $42 billion of additional expenditures not based on sound science but the fact that he can do that, and that is what I think is wrong. If the veterans committee thinks there is the science to do that, they should bring a bill to the floor and do that. But the science is not there. I have looked at it. I have read it. It is not there. The Institute of Medicine says it is not there, and they say disability ought to be based on causation, not on association.

Mr. COBURN. I wish to make one point. The Institute of Medicine did not recommend this. As a matter of fact, their recommendation was that causality ought to be the only way in which we would do this. I would ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Arizona. We want to make sure any veteran who has a positive causation factor from any aspect that would lead to any disability, that we meet that need. That is not what this is about. This has been looked at two times by the Institute of Medicine. The first time there was no study--none of the studies they cited showed even positive association. The last time we had two that showed some positive association but absolutely no causation. There is a big difference in science. Something can be associated with something and doesn't mean it causes it. On that basis, the Secretary committed this country to make payments to people for disabilities that are not associated with their service. The point is, in a limited budget going forward, if we are paying for disabilities that are not associated with service, that means we are going to have less money available for those veterans who do have a disability. We have heard, No. 1, this will reverse all that has come before. It will not. It is prospective only. It will not change the presumption that if someone was in or above Vietnam they have the presumption of being exposed to Agent Orange. That will not change at all. The previous scientific diseases that were based on causation will not be eliminated at all. But, in fact, those that are not associated with causality will be eliminated. Will they be eliminated in the future? If the science at some point in time shows us that there is a causal relationship between that exposure and disease, then we can do something about it. But now we are throwing money at disabilities that are not associated and not caused by veterans' exposure to this herbicide. I ask, given where we are in this country and the fact that we are going to have a tough time funding veterans programs in the future anyway, that we ought not spend a dollar on something that is not directly caused by a veteran's exposure to Agent Orange so that we have that dollar to pay for those who truly were exposed and truly have a disability. I yield back to the Senator from Arizona.