Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN. Oh, very good. Then I withdraw my request and ask that I might be recognized.

Mr. COBURN. Thank you, Mr. President. I wish to spend a few minutes discussing the bill that is before us. Having been a manufacturing manager for 10 years, producing products that came through the medical device industry, and having dealt with the FDA as a manufacturer and then having dealt with the FDA and the consequences of the FDA as a physician over the last 25 years and then looking at this bill that is on the floor today, I think it addresses three things I have talked about, especially in Oklahoma over the last year. Everybody recognizes this Nation is at a critical point--fiscally, internationally. From the standpoint of foreign policy, it has been impacted by our fiscal problems. But there are three structural reasons why I think we are there, and I think we need to learn from them. This bill provides us a great example. The first is, as a physician--and I knew it as a business manager-- you have to fix real problems. If you fix the symptoms that have been created or the circumstances that have been created by the real problems, you will make things better for a while, but you actually will not solve the underlying problem. What happens when you do not solve the underlying problem and fix the symptoms is, you delay the time and you also increase the consequences of not fixing the real problems. Second, if you only think short term, you do not have the planning strategy with which to do the best, right thing in the long term. We consistently do that in Washington. Consequently, the CBO put out the unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security yesterday. It is now $88.9 trillion. It was $77 trillion last year. It was $63 trillion the year before. So we are up $26 trillion in unfunded liabilities that we are going to pass on to our kids in 3 years because we continue to think short term instead of long term. Then, the fourth thing is to have the courage to stand and say: No, we should not do things that address the symptoms; we should address the underlying problems. No, we should not think short term or parochially; we should think long term and address that issue. As to the food safety bill, all my colleagues are very well intended in terms of what they are trying to accomplish with it. But there are some facts we ought to be realistic about. We could spend $100 billion additionally every year and not make food absolutely safe. There are diminishing returns to the dollars we spend. But if you look at what the case is: In 1996, for every 100,000 people in this country, we had 51.2 cases of foodborne illness--the best in the world, by far. Nobody comes close to us in terms of the safety of our food. But, in 2009, we only had 34.8 cases--three times better than anybody else in the world. So the question has to be asked: Why are we doing this now when, in fact, we are on a trendline to markedly decrease it? The second question that should be asked is: No matter how much money we spend, is there a diminishing return? There are a lot of things in this bill that I agree with--a lot. I think foreign food ought to be inspected before it comes into this country and I think those who want to sell products in this country ought to have to demonstrate the quality of it and I think the cost of that ought to be on the person selling the food, not on the American taxpayer. But ultimately that cost will be added to the cost of the food. I think the recognition of peanut allergy is a realistic one, and I understand the purpose for wanting a grant for that. But as I read the Constitution, that is a State function. That is not our function. The other thing that bothers me about the grant proposals--I walked out of the deficit commission to come over here. I have spent 8 months in that commission looking at the problems in front of this country. We cannot afford another grant program. We do not have the money. So we can say we are going to authorize it in this bill, but, do you know what, it is not going to get funded next year because we do not have the money. When the interest rates skyrocket in less than a year from now because of our misplaced spending over the past 20 years and our continued short-term decisionmaking instead of long-term decisionmaking, our situation is going to grow even darker. So this bill provides a wonderful example of how we ought to fix the real problems instead of the symptoms of the problems. The other thing that truly is not addressed is the long-term criticisms the GAO has continually made on our food safety. Senator Harkin has the best idea of all, but he could not get everybody to do it; that is, an independent food safety agency, to where we are not relying on the CDC, we are not relying on the FDA, we are not relying on the Department of Agriculture, that we put them all into one and say: You are responsible for food safety. But he could not sell that. Ask yourself the question: If you had three different agencies stepping all over each other with different sets of rules with agreements between themselves that they will do certain things, and then they do not do them--that, by the way, is why we had the salmonella problem; they did not follow their own protocols to notify the FDA of the problem--most commonsense thinking people would say: Well, maybe you ought to put all those things into one agency, with one boss and one line of accountability and responsibility. So Senator Harkin is absolutely right in where he wants to go. We are going to spend $1.5 billion over the next 5 years on this bill that does not accomplish what we need to accomplish, which is what Senator Harkin wants to do--and he is right--and we are not going to fix the criticisms that have been leveled against the agencies by the GAO for 8 years, in spite of the fact, as I stand here and am critical of different agencies, they actually have done a very good job. That is known by the fact that our incidence of foodborne illness is now less than 34 per 100,000 people. Think about that. Think about all the sources of food we get in this country and the diverse places they come from. Yet only 34 people get a staph poisoning or a nontoxigenic E. coli poisoning or a salmonella poisoning or a Yersinia poisoning or a Shigella poisoning in a year. So that is the incidence of illness. The question is, How do we stop the 10 or 20 deaths a year from foodborne illness? Can we do that? Well, as a physician trained in epidemiology, we could do it. But I will posit we do not have the money to do that because it would take billions upon billions upon billions of additional dollars to ever get there. So we find ourselves in a dilemma. I commend to my colleagues the reports GAO-09-523, GAO-09-873, and GAO-05-213. The GAO does a wonderful job telling us where we are failing, and we ought to address everything they raised in these reports. Even further than that, Dr. Hamburg, around the time we were having the salmonella with the eggs problem, released an egg standard. The bureaucracy took 11 years to develop that standard. That falls on the shoulders of President Bush's administration as well as this one. I am proud of her that she got it out. But the fact is, 11 years to do what you are responsible for, to get an egg standard so we do not have significant salmonella poisoning coming from eggs? Then, lo and behold, after the egg standard is out, the FDA inspectors on farms in Iowa are violating their own protocols, cross-contaminating egg farms, as documented in the press. It is not a matter that we do not have enough rules and regulations. That is borne out by the fact that we are continually seeing a decline in foodborne illness. That is not the real problem. The problem is effectively carrying out the regulations that are there today. So we have a bill on the floor that has 150 to 170 pages--I cannot recall exactly how many it is--here it is. It is 266 pages of new regulations, new rules, new requirements. Let me tell you something else I learned about dealing with the FDA. The FDA overall in this country does a fantastic job. They do. They are very professional. They are very slow sometimes, but they are very professional, and they are very cautious. In this bill is a mandate to require recalls. Not once in our history have we had to force anybody to do a recall. It has always been voluntary, and you can check with the FDA on that. They do not need that authority. Why don't they need that authority? Because if you have a problem with your product in the food system in this country, you are going to get sued. You are going to get fined if you do not recall that product. What is wrong with a potential mandatory recall? What is wrong is it is going to markedly raise the cost of foods. Let me explain why. It is called Coburn's bureaucratic principle: Do what is safe first in the bureaucracy rather than what is best. Here is what I imagine happening with a mandatory recall. Because we have a problem, we are going to recall something and we are going to force a mandatory recall. Even though they may recall it voluntarily, somebody is going to pull the trigger earlier, because they don't want any criticism. There is a great example for that. How many people remember the toxigenic E. coli jalapeno pepper episode? Voluntary recall for tomatoes, because we said it had to be in the tomatoes, so they did that. That cost $100 million to the tomato farmers in this country and didn't save one life, because they got it wrong. They discovered about 10 days after that, it wasn't the tomatoes, but the damage was already done. I can remember I ordered my hamburger in my special place in Muskogee, My Place BBQ, and I couldn't get a tomato on it. The reason we couldn't get a tomato--there wasn't anything wrong with tomatoes in this country; it was because a recall had been suggested by the FDA and the tomato growers responded. So what we are going to see is a heavy hand rather than a working, coordinated foundation upon which we do recalls, as we do now. We have not had one instance ever when a food needed to be recalled that wasn't voluntarily recalled. What I worry about is the fact that we will have recalls that are mandated much too soon on the wrong products at the wrong time. We don't have a track record that says the government needs additional power. As a matter of fact, the FDA doesn't say they need additional power. So let's summarize for a minute. Where is the crisis in food safety, when the science demonstrates that we have the safest food in the world and we are on a trendline to have it even safer? Where is the cost- benefit analysis in terms of what we are going to get from spending another $1.5 billion in terms of lowering that number? There is nothing in this bill to show that. What is in this bill are tremendous new sets of regulations and authorities on top of the authorities that both the CDC, FDA, and Department of Agriculture already have, that I don't believe--and I agree I am in the minority on that, but I am trained in the area of medicine, science, and epidemiology--I don't believe we are going to get a significant cost-benefit from it. We are going to feel better because we did something. But, again, that goes back to the first three principles. If we don't treat the underlying problem--in other words, have the oversight hearings to make sure the agencies are actually carrying out their functions every day on a thorough basis that can be vetted and making sure we are doing the right things to create the opportunities to have safe food--we are not accomplishing anything, but we are going to feel better. But do we know who is going to feel worse? Our kids. Because they are going to pay--if we appropriate this money, and I highly doubt a good portion of it will be appropriated--they are going to pay for it. If you followed last week in international finance, the scare over Ireland's ability to repay its debt, and the pressure it had--and we got good news on the economic front today--good news, and it is welcome news by all of us. But the fact is, what is happening in Ireland and in Greece and Spain and Portugal is getting ready to happen to us. And this is a small example of why--very good-intentioned, well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing, fixing the symptoms instead of the underlying problem. Our answer is more regulation has to be the answer. That is what we did in the financial regulation bill. That is what we did to the SEC after Bernie Madoff. Everybody knows the SEC was alerted several times, but they didn't do their job. Consequently, we put all of these new rules and regulations to not let another Bernie Madoff scandal happen when we should have been holding people accountable for not doing their jobs. I am not against regulation, but I think it ought to be smart, targeted, and focused to real problems, not the symptoms of the problems. It is my personal belief--that we are targeting symptoms and not the real problems with this bill. Senator Harkin has bent over backward to work with me. He is an honorable man. He is interested in food safety and the welfare of this Nation. Nobody should ever say otherwise. But my experience leads me to believe it isn't going to accomplish the very purpose he wants to accomplish, and my recommendation is to go back and work in the new Congress to develop a true food safety center organization within the Federal Government that combines all the factors. Do my colleagues realize right now when we buy a pizza at the grocery store, if you buy a cheese pizza it comes through the FDA, but if you buy a pepperoni pizza, it gets approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture? How many people in America think that makes sense? The other thing with this bill--and I will finish with this and then yield the floor--is this bill wants more inspections. That is great. There is no question that inspections will help; the question is what is the return on the dollars we spend for it. But if we are going to use more inspections, there is not nearly enough money in this bill to do it effectively. That is what we are going to trust. Let me tell my colleagues why I think we have the safest food in the world: because we have the best legal system in the world. That is why we have the safest food, because the market forces applied on somebody selling food into our commerce are so great and the consequences legally are so negative that it is only in their best interests to bring a safe product to the market. When we have food scares, most of the time it is not an intentional act that created the problem, it is an unintentional act. It is a failure of someone in carrying out a protocol that should be established. Under this bill, anybody who sells more than $500,000 worth of food-- that is almost every Amish farmer in America--a co-op of Amish at every farm--will have to have a detailed, laid-out plan, written down, double checked, cross checked and everything else. What do my colleagues think that is going to do to the cost of food? Do my colleagues think as we implement new regulations, those costs aren't going to be passed on? So as we grow the government, if, in fact, we are treating symptoms and not underlying problems--and I don't have any problems with regulations that address real problems--all we are doing is raising the costs and making ourselves less competitive, decreasing the number of jobs that are available in this country, and not truly ensuring an increased level of safety with our food supply. It is hard to dispute the facts about our incidence of foodborne illness. One case is too many. But we don't have the resources to make it where there is not one case, even. It is the same question on homeland security. Can we ever spend enough money to 100 percent guarantee that we won't have another terrorist attack? Anybody who looks at it says no, we can't do that. It is the same with food. For every additional dollar expended, what is the return to the American consumer for that? If it were an achievable goal to eliminate all foodborne illness, I would be right there with you. It is not achievable. It is going to happen. The question is: Can we continue on a slope to continue to decrease the frequency where we have the least amount for the dollars we spend? There is a balance, and we need to be there. I will take the criticism of my colleagues that they think we need to spend this additional $1.5 billion to get it further down the road. But I still raise the question of how we cut it in half over the last 9 years--or 5 years--and didn't spend anything. So we are on a good trend. We are, unfortunately, going to have complications with our food supply, but we have a great legal system where we have bad actors such as the peanut butter factory in Georgia which is now shut down, in bankruptcy, and people are going to jail, because they intentionally violated the rules we have today. But how did they intentionally do it? Because we didn't have effective carrying out of the regulations we have today. I appreciate the great manner in which Senator Enzi and Senator Harkin have worked with me. I have another amendment I wish to offer on this bill. Everybody knows what it is. It is an earmark amendment. I understand the disdain for having to vote on that and I understand the procedural moves that will be made for that, but we are going to vote on it. We are going to suspend the rules to get the first vote, but I can assure you in the next Congress we are going to get an up-or-down vote on it, and it is going to pass in this body because the American people expect it to pass. It is something we ought to put away until we get out of the problems we are in nationally. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that the following letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I object.

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

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, today, I, along with Senators LeMieux, DeMint, and Inhofe, am introducing the FAST Act. At the same time, this same bill is being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Peter Roskam. Both of us were present at the White House summit with the President. What the FAST Act does is attack the $100 billion worth of waste and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. In the President's February 22, 2010 proposal for health reform, President Obama endorsed several Republican proposals designed to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. While some anti-fraud provisions were included in the health care overhaul that passed Congress, these Republican proposals were not fully included. Today, along with Senators LeMieux, DeMint, and Inhofe, I am introducing the ``Fighting Fraud and Abuse to Save Taxpayers' Dollars'' or ``FAST'' Act. An identical bill is also being introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Peter Roskam, who also attended the White House health summit. The FAST Act notionally represents the Republican solutions the President endorsed to combat waste in Medicare and Medicaid as, as well as a bipartisan provision to reduce from by removing Social Security numbers from Medicare cards. The status quo in Medicaid and Medicare is unsustainable and unacceptable. American taxpayers lose $60 to $100 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid each year. Congress and the administration must do a better job of working to staunch this flow of taxpayer dollars that goes to crooks instead of providing care. The current system was designed to be defrauded. And under the status quo today, organized crime affiliates and criminal gangs are bilking billions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare each year because it is so easy to defraud the system. HHS' Inspector General told Congress recently that a street gang in California has defrauded Medicare to the tune of $11 million by establishing a fake company and billing Medicare for expensive items like wheel chairs and oxygen supplies. The American people ought to be outraged and should not stand for this. Imagine how we could improve Medicare's solvency if we could recoup two-thirds of the known fraud and abuse in the program each year. We could save $400 billion over a decade, just by preventing fraud. But the loss of taxpayer dollars due to waste and fraud under Medicare and Medicaid not only threatens the financial viability of programs, they erode the public trust. American taxpayers should not be expected to tolerate rampant waste, fraud, and abuse in publicly-funded health care programs. The new Federal health overhaul that Congress passed earlier this year dramatically expands Medicaid, significantly changes Medicare, creates new regulations, and will send hundreds of billions of dollars to insurance companies. Without improvements to current anti-fraud efforts, taxpayers could be at risk to even more money. Congress and the Administration must do a more effective job in combating waste, fraud, and abuse in public health care programs and protecting the American taxpayer dollars. This bill is not a magic bullet, but I believe it offers a common-sense step forward to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in our Nation's largest two health care programs. This bill gives increases data sharing, stiffens penalties, and pilots new ways of combating egregious fraud. I sincerely hope politicians and bureaucrats can put the public interest ahead of their own. Congress and the administration cannot afford to continue to tolerate such fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. I look forward to working with any member of Congress who is serious about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in public health care programs. Just think for a minute what would happen to Medicare solvency if, in fact, we could recoup two-thirds of the fraud and inappropriate payments that are ongoing. It is straightforward. Many of the ideas in this were embraced by the President at our meeting. It is my hope that the Senate will look at this and, in a bipartisan fashion, jump on board to fix a problem that is undermining one of our possible solutions to health care, which is that the Medicare trust fund is belly up. There has been a lot of work done on this by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. It is my hope we will have their consent and cosponsorship for the bill.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, today, I, along with Senators LeMieux, DeMint, and Inhofe, am introducing the FAST Act. At the same time, this same bill is being introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Peter Roskam. Both of us were present at the White House summit with the President. What the FAST Act does is attack the $100 billion worth of waste and fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. In the President's February 22, 2010 proposal for health reform, President Obama endorsed several Republican proposals designed to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. While some anti-fraud provisions were included in the health care overhaul that passed Congress, these Republican proposals were not fully included. Today, along with Senators LeMieux, DeMint, and Inhofe, I am introducing the ``Fighting Fraud and Abuse to Save Taxpayers' Dollars'' or ``FAST'' Act. An identical bill is also being introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Peter Roskam, who also attended the White House health summit. The FAST Act notionally represents the Republican solutions the President endorsed to combat waste in Medicare and Medicaid as, as well as a bipartisan provision to reduce from by removing Social Security numbers from Medicare cards. The status quo in Medicaid and Medicare is unsustainable and unacceptable. American taxpayers lose $60 to $100 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid each year. Congress and the administration must do a better job of working to staunch this flow of taxpayer dollars that goes to crooks instead of providing care. The current system was designed to be defrauded. And under the status quo today, organized crime affiliates and criminal gangs are bilking billions of taxpayer dollars from Medicare each year because it is so easy to defraud the system. HHS' Inspector General told Congress recently that a street gang in California has defrauded Medicare to the tune of $11 million by establishing a fake company and billing Medicare for expensive items like wheel chairs and oxygen supplies. The American people ought to be outraged and should not stand for this. Imagine how we could improve Medicare's solvency if we could recoup two-thirds of the known fraud and abuse in the program each year. We could save $400 billion over a decade, just by preventing fraud. But the loss of taxpayer dollars due to waste and fraud under Medicare and Medicaid not only threatens the financial viability of programs, they erode the public trust. American taxpayers should not be expected to tolerate rampant waste, fraud, and abuse in publicly-funded health care programs. The new Federal health overhaul that Congress passed earlier this year dramatically expands Medicaid, significantly changes Medicare, creates new regulations, and will send hundreds of billions of dollars to insurance companies. Without improvements to current anti-fraud efforts, taxpayers could be at risk to even more money. Congress and the Administration must do a more effective job in combating waste, fraud, and abuse in public health care programs and protecting the American taxpayer dollars. This bill is not a magic bullet, but I believe it offers a common-sense step forward to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in our Nation's largest two health care programs. This bill gives increases data sharing, stiffens penalties, and pilots new ways of combating egregious fraud. I sincerely hope politicians and bureaucrats can put the public interest ahead of their own. Congress and the administration cannot afford to continue to tolerate such fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. I look forward to working with any member of Congress who is serious about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in public health care programs. Just think for a minute what would happen to Medicare solvency if, in fact, we could recoup two-thirds of the fraud and inappropriate payments that are ongoing. It is straightforward. Many of the ideas in this were embraced by the President at our meeting. It is my hope that the Senate will look at this and, in a bipartisan fashion, jump on board to fix a problem that is undermining one of our possible solutions to health care, which is that the Medicare trust fund is belly up. There has been a lot of work done on this by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. It is my hope we will have their consent and cosponsorship for the bill.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I will not object if the Senator would kindly amend her request to include a substitute amendment with a Barrasso proposal to establish a National Commission on Outer Continental Shelf Oilspill prevention.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about where we are. There is no question the chairman of the Appropriations Committee has finished his bills, and they have not come up. But the quality of the work doesn't meet with the depth of the problem we have today, No. 1; No. 2, it doesn't address the concerns of the American public. So we are going to have a continuing resolution that we are going to pass through this body tonight, probably by a vote of about 80 to 20 or 75 to 25. But the signal we are sending is based on our tin ear. We are going to continue spending at the same rate we have been spending. We are borrowing $4.2 billion a day under this continuing resolution. The government now is twice as big, in terms of expenditures, not including the war, as it was in 1999. We are not addressing what the American people want us to address; that is, that we ought to start living within our means. I will not offer an amendment to the bill. There are several amendments. My colleague from South Dakota offered one that will bring us back to 2008 levels, but that is not enough. The fact is, we have to engage the American public in what is rightfully a cogent criticism of the Congress; that is, that we are allowing wasteful Washington spending to go on, not by intent--and I am not questioning anybody's motives--but the fact is, we have not done our job in terms of oversight. We heard Senator McCain talk about the tax cuts and raising taxes during a very soft economic time. The vast majority of the Americans don't want us to do that. I don't know why we are not discussing it, and I don't know why we are leaving town before we send that signal, but that is way above my pay grade. What I will tell you is, I can take any group of Americans and sit down and go through this with them and show them, without question, $350 billion worth of waste every year in the Federal Government. The amendment of my colleague from South Dakota is cutting less than $50 billion from what we are going to spend--in fact, we did it in 2008, other than for homeland security, defense, and veterans. So even though I love what my colleague is doing, it doesn't go nearly far enough compared to what the real need is for us. There are two real needs. One, if we are going to finance the debt we have today, we have to send a message and signal to the world that we are interested in getting our house back in order, that we are interested in becoming efficient, and interested in becoming austere with our taxpayers' money. The second message we need to send is to those who have capital in this country; that they, in fact, can have confidence that we are going to right this ship, and we will start seeing them deploy some of those assets to create the very jobs we so desperately want for the American people who do not have them today. I have been here long enough to know what is going to happen. But what I wish to do is register my dissatisfaction that we are not addressing the real problems in front of our country today. Instead, we are ducking out on tough decisions so we can go home--and I am up for reelection as well--and get to the voters. My question is a much more powerful message than going to the voters; it is us making hard choices that the American people want us to make. This week, the 2010 fiscal year is coming to a close. On October 1, 2010, it will become the new budget year. Here is what we failed to do as a body--our fault just as much as yours. We didn't pass a budget. We didn't set priorities. We didn't decide where to spend and where to save. We didn't pay for new spending--$266 billion in the last 6 months in this Congress on new spending that we waived pay-go on and borrowed it against our children. We didn't pass any appropriations bills. We didn't make any tough choices. We didn't conduct any significant oversight on the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government or the duplication in the Federal Government. We didn't eliminate any duplicative or ineffective programs--not one. We didn't do our job. No wonder America is disgusted with us. What did we do? We increased the debt limit to more than $14 trillion. We added more than $1.4 trillion to the deficit and charged it to our grandchildren. We ignored the Constitution and expanded Washington's reach into our private lives, shrinking freedom and growing government. We put ourselves first and the country second. Despite promises from us that government programs can solve every challenge, taxpayers are getting ripped off. We sent $1 trillion of their income to the Treasury this year just to watch it waste $350 billion. At the same time, we created a lot of new programs, and some people are very proud of them. I am very worried about them. But I give you the credit that you went down the road you thought was right and did it. The real problem is, we are continuing the same old habits. The real issue is, until we truly understand the severity of the difficulty we are in and start acting like we understand it, this ship is going to continue to sink. We are not going to create the confidence in the American public or the $2 trillion that is sitting on the sidelines right now if, in fact, they had a clear signal it would start flowing into investment and capital that would create jobs. Last December, my office spent 3 weeks just looking at duplicative programs. When we passed the debt limit, we agreed with an amendment I inserted that the GAO would give us a list of those. They are starting that work, and this February we will see the first large tranche of that. It is going to take 3 years to compile that because the government is so big. We ought to have a little taste, and the American people ought to have a little taste, of what we didn't get rid of and didn't fix. We have 1,399 Federal programs that serve rural America; 337 of them are considered key. One thousand of them aren't considered key. They are not considered substantive. That is before you even take the test of saying whether they are authorized by the U.S. Constitution. The Federal Government operates 70 programs costing tens of billions of dollars that provide domestic food assistance--70 different programs--and many of them overlap or are inefficient. Most of them cannot demonstrate they are effective. That is according to a recent review by the Government Accounting Office. We didn't fix it. We could have saved taxpayers some of that money. There are 14 programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education related to foreign exchanges and designed to increase opportunities for students to study abroad. Why do we have 14 programs? Why not have one good one that meets the needs of Americans? We fund 44 job training programs, administered by 9 Federal agencies across the bureaucracy. The cost is $30 billion a year, and we don't know what the overhead is because we have 44 programs instead of 2 or 3. We didn't address any of that. There are 17 offender reentry programs across 5 Federal agencies, costing $\1/4\ billion. There has been no oversight. In other words, we have not looked where the problems are. We have not looked to say: How do we make this government more efficient? What we have done is to say we are going to raise taxes--or at least we are not going to vote on raising taxes until after the election. No matter whether you are middle income, lower income, or upper income, it makes no sense for us to say we need more money here, when we will not do the very simple job of eliminating the waste. I don't question the motivation for job training programs; I think they are necessary. I don't question the motivation for food programs; I think they are necessary. But 44 and 70 different programs, with 70 sets of bureaucracies and 44 sets of bureaucracies? Then we are going to tell Americans they should pay more tax, when we will not even do the simple thing to save $100 million here or there. With a $30 billion program, if you save 10 percent, that is $3 billion. So all you have to save is one-tenth of 1 percent or three-tenths of 1 percent. We will not even do that. I have a book full of duplicative programs. It is available to anybody who wants it. We ought to ask what kind of rating or grade would the American people give us--Republicans and Democrats alike--in terms of running the government, funding the government, and working to make the government efficient and effective. I don't think we have any good defense. I think people's intentions around here are excellent, but we never get around to the hard work of holding the bureaucracies accountable. Senator Carper had a great hearing today on the Defense Department and the fact that the Defense Department is trying to get where they can manage what they are doing by measuring it with a significant system, in terms of IT. It is just $6.9 billion over budget. Where is the oversight on that procurement? What the GAO said is the following: The management was ineffective at looking at those programs. The management was ineffective in the testing of those programs during their development. The management was ineffective in terms of the procurement of those programs. When I asked the heads of every branch in the military whether they agreed with that, they said, yes, they agreed they were ineffective. We don't have anything in the appropriations bills to change that effectiveness. We didn't have anything in the Defense authorization bill to change that effectiveness. We are just going to let it go on, and next year it will be $7.9 billion or $8.9 billion over. So we are not doing our job. That is not to question my colleagues' motive; it is to raise the awareness that the jig is up. The American people know we are not doing our job. They want us to start doing our job--both Republicans and Democrats. We have several colleagues on the floor. Rather than take more time, I just note that I am consistent in terms of coming down here and worrying about our future. I have done so for 5\1/2\ years--much to the chagrin of a lot of my colleagues. I wish to leave you with one statement. Our children deserve to have the same opportunities in this country that we have experienced. By us failing to do the very duties that are called upon us in a rational, straightforward basis, of doing oversight of the Federal Government and making the hard choices, we abandon our oath, but, more importantly, we steal the heritage that was given to us. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to speak in morning business and will confine my remarks to the objections I just made to the leader's motions.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I am simply amazed that, when we are borrowing $4.2 billion a day from our grandkids--that is what we are borrowing, $4.2 billion a day--we are going to run a $1.4 trillion deficit, and we have a unanimous consent request to move to things that spend more money, money we do not have that we are going to borrow from the Chinese or Russians to be able to pay for it, and we are going to spend the money overseas. There is no question that we should try to develop consensus in our body, but the first consensus we should have is the priorities of the problems that are facing this country. The problems that are facing this country are so big and so massive that our attention ought to be focused on those large problems, not on five separate bills that have been proffered for special interest groups. I don't understand the motivations. What I do understand is that the American people get it, even if we do not. The fact that we are going to make attempts for political purposes to put bills that are not paid for and that will add to the $4.2 billion a day that we borrow on the floor when our economy is languishing because we continue to grow the Federal Government, continue to build regulations that affect and diminish the desire for people with capital to invest it in our economy--and we force people out of this country to build their plants and manufacturing facilities because of our regulations and tax codes, I do not understand. My objections--I will not spend the time exactly outlining my objections to all these bills, but my overall objection is the priorities we are setting in the Senate. We ought to be about creating confidence so people will invest in this country rather than continuing to undermine that confidence with superfluous, well-meaning bills that are put up for political purposes instead of addressing the real problems that are facing our country. Out of a courtesy to Senator Reid and the agreement I just made with him, I will not offer my unanimous consent request at this time, but I will later today after he has had a chance to read them, on the following five bills: The Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act. Mr. President, 140,000 veterans in this country have lost their second amendment rights. It has never been adjudicated that they were a danger to themselves or anybody else. Yet a bureaucrat somewhere has taken away their second amendment rights. This bill has come out of committee twice. Senator Burr is the lead sponsor on it. We treat veterans as second-class citizens when it comes to their second amendment rights. We ought to pass that. I will ask that later. The Firearms Fairness and Affordability Act. We make firearms manufacturers pay their taxes every 2 weeks instead of quarterly like every other manufacturer in this country. But we penalize them. We ought to treat them the same as everybody else. The earmark transparency bill gives one Web site so everybody in America can see where the earmarks are, who offered them, what the basis for them is, whether they were competitively bid. That is something America would like to see. Then there are two tax cheat bills, for us as Members of Congress and our employees and then other Federal employees. So I will not offer those unanimous consent requests at this time, but I will later in the day. Again, there are important, big problems in front of this country. We need to be about addressing those rather than special interest favors at this time. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. The earlier statements of this will solve the problem, but yet we are not going to find the money. It should be 100 percent that we are going to find the money to do this.

Mr. COBURN. I want to continue my point, if you don't mind. You have always been courteous to me and I will be courteous to you, but I wish to continue for a few minutes and then I will give my colleague the chance to respond.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I object and ask unanimous consent to be recognized after the majority whip finishes.

Mr. COBURN. So wait a minute. If we can find the money.

Mr. COBURN. I will allow that in a few minutes. If this bill is that important, and the majority whip says we will fund it if we can find the money, rather than saying we are going to fund this because this is a priority--and he has the power to make sure that gets done. Don't let anybody kid you. If he wants this bill funded, he can get it funded. So the point is, either it is going to be funded and it is going to get spent and the argument about authorizations is bogus or there is going to be a real question on whether it is going to get funded. If there is a real question about whether it is going to get funded, then the importance of the issue isn't nearly as great as we have explained it to be, which goes back to an argument we have had for the 6 years I have been here. I understand you don't agree. I am a hardheaded guy from Oklahoma who actually believes we ought to make hard choices, we ought to downsize the government rather than grow it; and when we have an issue such as food safety, what we ought to do is hold accountable the agencies--let me say it again--we ought to hold accountable the agencies, because I am not sure that we don't have enough rules now. What I think we have is not enough effectiveness of the agencies and the dollars they spend. With the exception of foreign inspections, which I fully support--I fully support--anybody who wants to sell food in this country ought to pay for the inspections and we ought to be able to certify that it is safe. I have no problem with that. There are a lot of components of this bill I agree with. But I refuse to agree to a unanimous consent request until we start looking at the real problems underlying not just the FDA and USDA but the Pentagon, Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice. The waste in this government and our refusal to look at that waste and eliminate it so we can do good things is one of the reasons--not the only reason, one of the reasons--we find ourselves $13.4 trillion in debt. Ideally, how would we go about this? Because one of the complaints is: Coburn, you stop things in their tracks. How would I have done it differently? So I think I owe you an explanation. First of all, the tomatoes were never contaminated. They were thought to be contaminated. It was the jalapenos. So we, our agencies, identified falsely a food that wasn't contaminated. So the agency is responsible for the $350 million cost for the tomatoes. That is a very important point. The incompetency of the agency cost $350 million, which is a very different story than my colleague from Illinois talked about. It was jalapeno peppers. So how should we go about this? Before we do one other thing on food safety, every one of those agencies ought to know we are looking over their backs all the time. That is the first thing. We should have routine oversight hearings on the appropriate committees three to four times a year. The second thing we ought to do is we ought to say, GAO, we want to know everybody who has anything to do with the quality of food in this country as far as a Federal agency and we want to know their line responsibilities, we want to know their authorities, we want to know X, Y, and Z, and their effectiveness. Because a GAO study at the Department of Agriculture, as well as the FDA, says they are incompetent at most of this stuff. I will be happy to give my colleagues the quotes. They lack the competency to carry out--how else do you explain that the FDA cost the State of Florida $350 million by falsely claiming that tomatoes weren't any good? That is incompetence. There is no excuse for it. There was no hearing held to hold them accountable. It is ignored in this bill. So how would we go about it? We would find out everybody who has anything to do with food safety. Then we would do what Senator Durbin wants to do. We would eliminate the duplication. We would make one line authority: This agency is responsible for all the food safety in this country. That is a marvelous goal, Senator Durbin. This bill delays that happening. He is on to the right thing. We need to get there, I agree. But when you go to Piggly Wiggly or Homeland, as we have in Oklahoma, and you go to the freezer section and buy a pizza for Friday night when--in Oklahoma, you are going to play dominos after high school football is over. If you buy a cheese pizza, the Department of Agriculture is responsible for that. But if you buy a pepperoni pizza, it is the FDA. I may have them reversed. I do have them reversed. The FDA is responsible for cheese pizzas. How does that make sense? It is a symptom of the disease in Washington. First of all, it is stupid. Second of all, it is inefficient. Third of all, it guarantees the two agencies are not going to be talking to each other. The Food and Drug Administration and the USDA have--I think my number is correct; I may be wrong--187 agreements for how they work across the field. Except you know what happened with regard to the egg situation. Nobody paid attention to the agreements. We have the rules. USDA did not tell the FDA. Then, finally, we have an egg producer--the State of Iowa has done tons of stuff to say this guy's quality is poor. Did USDA do anything about it? No. Did the FDA do anything about it? No. USDA knew there was a problem. It did not need any more inspections. They knew there was a problem. They did not communicate it to the FDA as per their protocol. What do we have going on here? We have a mess. As well-intentioned as this bill is and as hard as the Senators have worked on it on both sides of the aisle, it does not fix the cancer in the lung that caused the pneumonia that caused the fever, cough, chills, and malaise of the patient. Until we start drilling down to get to the real problems, the real issues of food safety, we are going to spend a lot of money. We are going to create a whole lot more regulations. We are going to have another 200-plus page bill. What we ought to say is, time out. Let's do some things. Let's have a one-page bill that can pass by UC today that says we are going to do safety inspections on foreign foods. Done. We can do it. That takes care of our foreign food. A good portion of our seafood is imported. It is farm raised. It is important. We can do that tomorrow. We can have sanctions and penalties and criminal penalties for Federal bureaucrats who do not follow the rules of their own agencies. Everything was in place on the egg situation. We did not execute. We did not carry the ball down the field. Here is what we know about the DeCoster Egg Farms. They are a habitual violator. They have had eight known run- ins or citations from State and Federal regulators. They were designated by the State of Iowa as a ``habitual violator.'' Robert Reich called the state of the farms simply atrocious. USDA inspections--I have a copy of the inspections--routinely noted unsafe and unsanitary conditions without communicating any of those concerns to the FDA. What we had was a failure to execute. It was seen. It was known. What we had in place did not work. But this bill does not fix that. It does not fix that. I have treated a lot of people with toxic e. coli in my life. That is what causes kidney failure. Salmonella hardly ever does that. It is not a fun disease to have. There is nothing in this bill that says we are going to prioritize pathogens. You see, e. coli, compared to all the rest of the pathogens, is much more important in terms of hospitalization, death, morbidity, and mortality. So any food safety bill ought to work on the most ravaging problem first, not treat them all the same. Yersinia pestis, shigella, and salmonella cause enteritis, that is true. Rarely will you have long-term effects from those. But from toxic e. coli, it is a whole different actor. We ought to prioritize what we do in food safety through the food safety problems that cause the major problems. We do not do that. I know I have disappointed my colleague from Illinois. I know he has worked hard on this bill. We have some very stark philosophical differences about how to make the government work better. I hope through the next few years to convince him more often than not to go in a different direction. I know Senator Harkin's heart is one of the softest and best in our body. If somebody has a problem, I don't care what it is, he is interested in it. For disappointing my colleague, I sincerely apologize. For standing on my principles and what I believe, I do not. I do not see a great future for our country if we do not start changing the way we do things, whether it is drilling down and looking at what the real problems are with the agencies and doing the appropriate oversight and taking priorities and getting rid of things that do not work and making things that do work work better. I worry about my grandkids, and I worry about all of our grandkids. With them at $43,702 today per man, woman, and child in this country, we cannot do it anymore. I am not going to do it anymore. I will be as compliant as I can be living within my principles, but I am just not going there. For that, I apologize. I apologize for disappointing my colleagues, but I sincerely regret we could not have solved some of these problems along the way. I yield the floor and yield to the Senator for a question, if he wishes.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, again, if I truly felt this bill was going to solve those problems, I would be out here supporting it. I do not think so. We have an inherent disagreement. The Senator from Illinois can file a cloture motion any time he wants to proceed to this bill. He can file it today, and we can have a cloture vote next week--we are not going to be doing anything next week anyway--and we can go to the bill. File the cloture motion, if that is how he feels about the bill and he thinks I am dead wrong. File the cloture motion, get the votes, and do it. What we are hearing is we want it to pass in a short period of time so there cannot be the real debate there needs to be on the problems in this country on food safety. That is what we just heard. We have been talking about this issue. We could have been here tomorrow debating this bill. The fact is, they did not file a cloture motion. They filed cloture motions 179 other times this Congress, more than any other Congress in the history, and the vast majority of them less than 24 hours after the bill was introduced. If the Senator really wants to have the debate, put the bill on the floor, file cloture, and have the debate. I will debate this for 30 hours. Washington is great about saying they are fixing things. They are great about passing bills. They are not great about fixing things because they fix the symptoms, not the real disease. That is the problem with this bill. It does not drill down and fix the real disease. My hope is that we can fix the real disease and that we will have the legitimate, tough hearings on why and how and what is needed to be changed in the agencies, not more regulations, not more money, but holding the agencies accountable, which we have not done. That is how Washington works. If there is a problem, we do not look at what we are doing already, we just create an answer for what we think needs to be done rather than holding people accountable. That is why we have a $3.9 trillion budget. That is why our kids are bankrupt or getting ready to be because we continue to make the same mistakes. I do not apologize for my principles on this issue. If, in fact, we will ever get to where we fix the real problems in the Congress, my colleague will find me as docile and compliant as any other Member of the body. But do not tell me to treat pneumonia with an aspirin because that is exactly what we are doing with this bill.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, what is unfair in this country is the fact that we label bills to fix things and fix a lot of the symptoms, but we do not fix the underlying problem. We are going to spend several hundred million dollars when the bill ultimately goes through, and much of it will be well applied, but the underlying problem will never be fixed. The Senator mentioned we have 12 agencies--12 agencies across this government--responsible for food safety. What I would contend to my colleagues is that the same amount of money we spend now, if we spent it wisely, would give us a much safer food supply. All through the course of this debate, I have had staff at every meeting raising the consistent objections I have raised. At every meeting, one of my staffers has been there. They were ignored. I am not stopping this bill because it was ignored; I am stopping the bill because I do not think we are fixing the true underlying problem. Let me give you an example. Here is what Dr. Hamburg said. This is on the egg rule. We believe that had these rules been in place at an earlier time it would have very likely enabled us to identify the problems on this farm before this kind of outbreak occurred. How long did it take them to develop the rule? Ten years. It started with President Clinton asking that this be addressed. Robert Reich went and inspected and said it is unbelievable what has happened. And what happened is, he initiated it with the FDA, the start. Somebody ought to ask the question and hold accountable FDA taking 10 years to get a rule so we have safe eggs in this country. We did not ask that question. So the next thing that comes up after we pass a bill like this is that we are going to see another problem because we are not fixing the core problem. Let me read to you from the oversight hearings the Senate has conducted on food safety. I think I have them here. There was a full committee hearing on October 22, 2009, ``Keeping American Families Safe, Reforming the Food System.'' There was a full committee hearing developing a comprehensive response to food safety on December 4, 2007. And there was a Senate Appropriations Committee oversight hearing on Hallmark/Westland meat recall--a special hearing. There was not one hearing that said: FDA, what are you doing, how are you doing it, and why are you doing it that way? There was not one hearing that said: USDA, why in the world can't you get your act together? We did not do the structural oversight that is necessary to fix these problems. I am not denying that this bill will have some positive effect. But it will not solve the problem. So we will pass a bill, and then we will still have contaminated food, but we will have answered the questions of late. We can't keep running government that way. I appreciate sincerely Senator Durbin's efforts. We come from vastly different backgrounds. I don't question his integrity, his desire, or his goodwill to try to solve the problem. As he told me on the phone, I can't be involved in everything, so, therefore, I shouldn't participate in this. That is the implication. I am not saying the Senator said that, but the implication is, you can't be involved so, therefore, you can't know enough to be involved. Well, having run a $70 million-a-year business in the health care field, having managed hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of people, and being trained as a physician in practice for 25 years, I know a heck of a lot about food safety. What I do know is if you don't fix the problems in the underlying agencies that are responsible for food safety, it doesn't matter how many bills we bring up. There is a prohibition in this bill. Section 403, Jurisdiction Authorities: Nothing in this act or an amendment made by this act shall be construed to alter the jurisdiction between the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Health and Human Services under applicable statutes, regulations, or agreements regarding the products eligible for voluntary inspection under this agreement. We actually are doing something wrong here--not just right. We are telling them they can't shift stuff around to solve the problem. Not only do we not do the vigorous oversight that is required to actually fix the real problems; we put up a roadblock, a silo back up and say, By the way, you can't do any of this together. That is in the bill. What has happened? The FDA Commissioner says had we put this rule out, this probably wouldn't have happened on the egg recall, salmonella enteritis. It wouldn't have happened. Where is the answer from the FDA? Where is the oversight hearing of the FDA on why it took them 10, almost 11 years to get a rule out on egg safety? That is my core objection. I want us to solve the problems. I don't have any problem with the issues about foreign inspection. Mandatory recall I don't have a problem with, although we have never had a food supplier in this country that has not recalled when asked to recall. So having a mandatory authority is a false claim because nobody has ever not recalled when they were asked to, because it is in their best interests to recall. My problems are characterized by this chart, when you think about the egg recall. The USDA knew what was happening on the farms in Iowa but said nothing to the FDA. The FDA didn't look to see, and Congress didn't want to hear about it. So we have a bill before us that does a lot of good things, but it doesn't fix the real problem. That is my basic complaint. We are treating the symptoms of the disease. My colleagues have heard my analogy before, but I am going to make it again. If you come in to see me, as a practicing physician, and you have fever and chills and cough and body aches and are short of breath, and I give you something to take care of your fever and chills; I give you something to suppress your cough; I actually make you feel better, but I don't diagnosis the fact that there is a pneumonia in your lung, you are going to get better for a little while and then you are going to get really sick. Then you come back. I have treated your symptoms the first time, and then I treat your pneumonia and I get you over that. Then I don't follow up after that to see what the real cause of the pneumonia is, which was a little tumor in your lung that caused blockage which caused the pneumonia. If I continue to treat symptoms, all I do is delay the time in which we get to the final fix for your problem. My analogy is I think that is what we are doing. I believe we have not been thorough enough. The intentions are great, but I don't think we have been thorough enough. I understand foodborne illnesses. I have treated a lot of them. I have had a lot of them. When I was in Iraq for 30 days, I had it for most of the time I was there. The other question this has raised is we can't keep doing this. We can't afford to keep doing this. We have more than enough money at the USDA and the FDA to do everything you want to do in this bill--more than enough. That is one of the things the American people are asking of us. We are going to make this point on a food safety bill, and I am fine with the heat I will take from the groups and the press on it, because I think the underlying principle is more important. It is easy to pass a bill that looks as if it does something. And even if it does something, if it passed on what we are going to spend when we don't address what we are spending wisely, we will never get out of the jam we put our kids in. To Senator Durbin's point: Yes, it is an authorization bill. The Senator from Illinois and Senator Harkin, as well as every member of my caucus and every member of your caucus, get a letter the first of every Congress saying I would absolutely object to any bill that increases authorizations in this Congress that are not offset with a reduction in less important, less priority items. I offered to do that to the majority leader. I offered to give that to him 2\1/2\ weeks ago. He hung up the phone on me; wouldn't even say goodbye. I said, I will give you a list. How about the $500 million the U.S. Department of Agriculture pays out to dead farmers in crop payments--to dead farmers who have been dead 6, 7, 8 years, still paying crop payments. We have plenty of money to pay for it. We don't want to do the hard work of getting rid of the things we should. What America is screaming for now is they want food safety, but they want security for their kids as well. If we continue this bad habit of ignoring the actual idea that there is a limitation on how much we can spend, we will never solve any of the critical problems, whether we have clean food or not. I do honor my two colleagues who are in the Chamber. They are men of great intent, honest intent, caring hearts, but I disagree on how we have gone about this. This isn't the first time I have heard the wonderful eloquence of Senator Durbin. He is great at what he says and how he says it. He is a very bright man. He makes his case well. But there are important things in this country that we are ignoring, and this bill is an example of it. Why in the world won't we fix the real problem? Why won't we ask--you know, the one thing that should happen--it amazes me. There is not a hearing scheduled on why it took 10 years to have an egg safety standard. We have allowed this. We have allowed it. The other point I wish to make is, yes, the money has to get appropriated. I agree with that. But we are going to spend this money. Senator Durbin, we are going to spend it, aren't we?