Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I am taken aback by the chairman's remarks. We now sit at $13 trillion worth of debt, we have 10 percent unemployment, we are 4 years away from being Greece, and we are going to do what we have always done. The reason we can freeze Federal pay is because there is absolutely no inflation in this country. So instead of giving the raise, we don't. Every private sector business out there today is getting extremely more with less--to the tune that the productivity in the private sector was up 6.8 percent. If we had that same productivity in the Federal Government, we could lose 150,000 employees and do the same thing. But we would not accept what is necessary--the necessary pain--to protect this country for its future. The chairman mentioned unobligated balances, but he spoke about obligated balances. We are not talking about money that has been obligated; we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that is not obligated. Last year, at the end of the fiscal year, there was in excess of $700 billion from the previous year that was unobligated, sitting there. So it is about managing our money properly. That is like saying if you have $30,000 in a savings account and you want to buy a new home, you are going to leave it there and go borrow $60,000. No, you are going to use part of that to buy your new home. So we have the same approach that is disgusting America: We can't, we can't. What we can do is borrow against the future of our children. That is what this bill does. So the first time we come out here with two good amendments that will offer a choice for the Senators of this body to actually make a downpayment on change in this country, to make a true downpayment on change, we get the same thing I have heard for 5\1/2\ years: We can't. Let me tell you what we can do. We can cap Federal employees. We have added 180,000 Federal employees in the last 17 months in this country. By the way, their average salary is $30,000 more a year than in the private sector. Their benefits are $40,000 a year, which is twice what it is in the private sector. So capping Federal employees is a great way to start slowing down the growth and cost of government. If the bureaucracy isn't responding, then it requires management changes rather than adding more people. The worst managers in the world always give the excuse: I need to have more people, rather than: I need to be creative about getting more out of the people I have today. We need to change the standard under which we operate our government. We need to expect more, and we need to pay less. The American people cannot afford the government we have. We are unaffordable. The chairman brings to the floor a bill that is more of the same. You can be critical of what we have offered. We don't have the advantages of the staff the chairman has. But this is an honest attempt to pay so we don't charge it to our children. Notice he didn't say anything about the savings of $4.6 billion for not printing this paper every day that nobody reads but reads on the Internet. Yet we are going to spend $460 million a year printing government reports from this body and the White House that nobody looks at in hard copy. I would assume you would take by unanimous consent that we would cut $4.6 billion from the American Government. We didn't hear about that. That is not one of the bad ideas. We weren't attacked on that. This Federal Government has to change if our kids are going to have a future. It isn't going to change until we have the courage and the fortitude to start making the hard choices. What the Appropriations Committee has said is that we are not going to make hard choices, we are just going to borrow the money. How many of you think the war is an emergency? How long have we known, or how long have we been in Afghanistan? It is not an emergency. Here on the chart is the definition of our own rules for emergencies. Nothing in this bill meets that except FEMA--nothing. Yet we have the gall to bring to the floor a bill called an ``emergency'' because we don't want to have to pay for it. We don't want to make tough votes or make choices between competing priorities. We are just kicking the can down the road, and we are kicking the soup that was in the can all over our kids. We lack courage. It is not popular, it is not fun to make the hard choices, but we don't have any leadership that will bring the hard choices. That is why you have this amendment. Had we brought this amendment and we made the choices, we probably would not have gotten much kickback. But we decided we are just going to charge it to our children. Guess what is coming after this. Another $200 billion that isn't paid for. Since the chairman of this committee voted for pay-go, we have borrowed $173 billion outside of pay-go because we voted and said it didn't count, and we had this wonderful celebration that we are not ever going to borrow money again. We are going to live within pay-go. But every time it has been there, we kicked it down the road. Pay-go means nothing. It means the American people will pay and we will go spend it. That is what it means. That is what this bill does. American people--you kids, you grandkids--you are going to pay, and we are going to go spend it. How are you going to pay? Your standard of living will decline. This body--Republicans and Democrats alike--is complicit in ruining the future for our children. It is time we change. We have a committee that makes fun of attempts to try to change things; actually, it stretches the truth. This isn't going to cost one TSA person their job or one FBI person. This government is so fat and so overladen with excess that any smart manager can come in and streamline it and we can save 10 percent and the American people know that. We have 12 million people on SSI and SSDI. Do you know what we have discovered? We have discovered that 6 out of 100,000 of them are operating commercial vehicles right now, but they are ``disabled.'' We have all sorts of fraud going on. We will not address that. We will not fix that. There is waste--at least $350 billion the American public--maybe not this body--would agree we can cut out of the discretionary in fraud and Medicare tomorrow, and nobody would feel a thing. Yet we have a stoic Appropriations Committee that comes to the Senate floor and tells us we can't pay for it. It is not that we wanted to pay for it, we didn't want to pay for it because the staff on the Appropriations Committee knows where the dollars are, but they weren't told to pay for it. They are not going to be told to pay for the extenders bill that is coming either. What will have happened since February 12 when we passed pay-go? I will tell you what will have happened: $500 billion--$\1/2\ trillion--more in spending that is unpaid for and charged to our kids, and that will happen before July 1. So in 4\1/2\ months, after we say we are going to put in the discipline, that we are not going to spend money we don't have, we are going to spend another $\1/2\ trillion. No wonder the country is sick of Washington. Our behavior causes them to wonder about the future of our country. I don't apologize for offering this amendment. I hope you vote against it because the voters, this time around, are going to be looking at how you vote and whether you are voting to make the hard choices, willing to eliminate things-- maybe some things that are good but not as good as what we need to be doing--and make this a priority. We don't have that courage. My challenge to my colleagues in the Senate is, let's buck up. It is OK to take heat from the special interests, the well-connected and well-endowed. Let's do what is the best and right thing for the country, not the easy thing for us, because this bill, the way it is written now, is easy for us. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. The reduction is in overhead expense; it is not in labor. The definition the Senator is using is an across-the-board cut. That is not in this amendment at all. Does the chairman realize that the 5- percent reduction is in overhead--not direct labor, not actual employees, but the management costs to run the different agencies?

Mr. COBURN. There is an objection?

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, would the chairman yield for a question?

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN. We have before us almost a $60 billion emergency supplemental appropriations bill. This is about the eighth supplemental bill we have discussed since I have been in the Senate--some appropriate, some not. But the thing that I think the American people need to know, given the fact that this week our debt will be $13 trillion--this week--and that does not count what we owe trust funds inside the government, account money we have stolen from Social Security that will have to be paid back; it does not count money that has been taken from the oil recovery fund that will have to be paid back; it does not count the money from the inland waterway trust fund and all of these other trust funds. That is $13 trillion outside of what we have borrowed from ourselves--$13 trillion. So we have before us a bill that is an emergency supplemental appropriations bill, and I thought it would be interesting for the American people to see what the rules of the Senate say about what is an ``emergency'' because nobody can say the war is an emergency. Since September 11, 2001, there has been no emergency other than the fact that we knew we were going to war. And the fact is, we have known that at least for the last 5 or 6 years. Nobody can say that. But when you look at the definition we are supposed to follow--our own rules--about emergency designations, there are five characteristics, and those five characteristics are, one, it is necessary, it is essential, and it is vital. Well, some of this bill is necessary, some of it is essential, and some of it is vital--not all of it is by any means. No. 2: Sudden, quickly coming into being, and not building up over time. Well, this bill certainly does not meet that requirement, except for a very small section of it. An urgent, pressing, and compelling need requiring immediate action. There is no immediate action here on anything, except maybe the FEMA portion for both the upper Northeast and the flooding and Nashville, TN, and its flooding. But we have $900 million sitting in FEMA right now that has not been spent that we can start spending, so we don't have to pass $5 billion right now. Unforeseen, unpredictable, and unanticipated. Well, the war certainly wasn't unforeseen, it certainly wasn't unpredictable, and it certainly wasn't unanticipated. We have known it. So it certainly doesn't meet that definition. It is not permanent, it is not temporary in nature. So we have what we are supposed to be following, and I would portend that 98 percent of this bill doesn't meet the requirements of being an emergency designation. Yet why are we calling it an emergency designation? There is one real reason for that; that is, we don't have to confine it in with the total amount we are authorized to spend. This is outside of what we are going to spend. It is $60 billion that we are going to borrow. We are going to borrow it. We are going to borrow it from the children of the people who are in Afghanistan and Iraq who are fighting this war. The people in this body aren't going to pay it back. We are going to kiss it goodbye and we are going to say: Here is your present, grandchildren. Here is a present for the kids of the warfighter who is over there today, who is sacrificing, his family is sacrificing, her family is sacrificing. But we are going to borrow it from them. And it is not that we haven't done it. We made a big fanfare about that we were going to institute pay-go; that we were not going to violate pay-go; that pay-go was going to force discipline on us. So we passed a statute, and the President had a big signing--except here is what has happened since we have signed it. It was signed into law on February 12. On February 24, we violated pay-go. We said the rule doesn't apply; we have a need; we are going to spend $46 billion. So we spent $46 billion outside of the budget. We borrowed $46 billion. Oops. March 2. We don't have the courage to eliminate lower priority parts of the government. We borrowed another $10 billion. All of a sudden, on March 3, then we borrowed $99 billion. Pay-go didn't count. We just said: We waive pay-go. Sixty votes of the Senate. We have no fiscal discipline--$99 billion. April 14. We borrowed $18 billion. Did it again. So if you add those up--and that doesn't count the last one we did. I will bring a more accurate chart tomorrow when I talk about the rest of these amendments. But so far, we have borrowed $173 billion, when we said we are not going to borrow money anymore because we are going to have pay-go that says that will force the discipline on us to put lower priorities off the spending line, to put higher priorities on. So just since February 12--it is now late May--we have borrowed $173 billion. We are going to add $60 billion here, and we have a tax extender package that is coming with another $230 billion. That is $563 billion since February 12 that we are going to spend money--I understand the majority leader is on the floor. Would you like time, Mr. Leader?

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

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 4231 be called up.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado.) Without objection, it is so ordered. Amendment No. 4232

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the bill before us and also call up two amendments. I will call up the amendments first and get that out of the way. I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 4232 be called up.

Mr. COBURN. I will be happy to yield to the leader.

Mr. COBURN. We now have cloture filed on a $60 billion bill. I don't know what the intentions of the majority leader are but the fact is, we are going to limit debate. We have been on this bill about a day or a day and a half, $60 billion. We are going to cut off debate. We are going to attempt to limit amendments and limit the debate. This is a debate this country ought to be having. This is an opportunity for us to do what the American people want us to do. So 30 hours from now we will have a vote on cloture on this bill. We also have cloture to end debate filed as well. What does that mean? That means the American people are not going to get to hear everything that is in the bill, No. 1. That means there will be a very limited number of amendments that will be actually voted on. By rule, we are going to close off our responsibility to Madeline. We are going to say: Madeline, you don't count. We have to get out of here. Don't you know Memorial Day vacation is coming? So we don't want to be here. We have codels leaving Saturday morning. That has to be more important than saving the Republic so we don't end up like Greece. We are only about 4 or 5 years behind them. We are only 4 or 5 years behind Greece. We are going to see this tremendous money flow come into this country because people are worried about Europe. We are going to see it come in from Japan because people will be worried about Japan being able to pay their debts. We will feel all good and fuzzy for about 2 years. After they inflate their currency or debase it or default, the money is going to flow right back out. Guess who is going to be looking over the abyss. The United States of America. We will be at the same point. What is the problem? The problem is their spending as a percentage of their GDP creates an environment where they can't pay for their debt. That is where we are going to be. My first degree was in accounting. I had a business career for 9 years before medical school. I can tell my colleagues, if we truly accounted for the liabilities of this government, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--we refuse to recognize their liability--our debt would be far in excess of $13 trillion. So what we are going to do is say Senators' comfort is much more important than Madeline's future. Let's talk for a minute about what the word ``indentured'' means. That means you are under the control of somebody else. Your ability to have free choice becomes limited because you are indentured. Is there any wonder why we have trouble bringing hard core sanctions against Iran, when the Chinese own $900 billion of our debt and the Russians have $800 billion? Our debt affects our foreign policy. Our ability to support our military is jeopardized by the very fact that we are making a decision today to pay $33 billion for the war effort in Afghanistan by not paying for it. We are jeopardizing our long-term future. The other ironic thing in this bill, this body just passed a financial regulatory reform bill, but we created a commission called the Financial Inquiry Commission. In this bill we are appropriating on an emergency basis $1.8 million for that inquiry commission that is going to give us what went wrong and what we need to do about it in December. We have already figured out we don't need them; We passed a bill without that knowledge, without that look, without that in-depth analysis of what went wrong because we had to get it done. Yet we are going to continue to fund a Financial Inquiry Commission that we are not going to do anything with the results of, and we are going to call it an emergency. How ludicrous is that? The whole purpose of the Financial Inquiry Commission was to guide Congress in what to do. We have already ignored them. We have already decided what we are going to do. That bill is in conference. We are going to pass a financial regulatory reform bill ultimately that is devoid of the recommendations of that commission. But we are going to do the typical Washington thing. We are going to continue to fund the commission, even though we are not going to use its results. Why is that? What does just $1.8 million out of a $60 billion bill, what does that mean for her? Multiply that times thousands of times every year, the stuff that we are doing that isn't a priority. Nobody can agree it is still a priority that we ought to borrow $1.8 million to fund that commission. You can't argue that is still a priority because we have already made up our minds on financial regulation reform. But that happens thousands of times a year, billions and billions and billions of dollars. These two amendments are tough amendments. I am not deceiving myself to think that all of a sudden grown-ups are going to show up in the Senate. They are not. Let me tell my colleagues what they do. The first amendment will reduce our own budget. We gave ourselves a nice stellar raise, not salarywise but for our own budgets. We are going to reduce that budget for Members of Congress. We are going to disclose on the Senate Web site the cost of borrowing money and how many times we violate our own rules, pay-go. There should be nobody who voted for pay-go who votes against that because if it is good enough for us to use, it is good enough for the American people to see. We are going to dispose of unneeded and unused Federal Government property, whether it is military, whether it is buildings, whether it is lands--things we do not use, do not need but we are spending $8 billion a year taking care of. We can get tremendous savings from that. That is what any other right-minded person would do. They would get rid of the stuff they are not using so they do not continue to send money down a rat hole. We are going to rescind uncommitted and unspent Federal funds. We have hundreds of billions of dollars setting that are not even in the pipeline, and we are going to borrow more rather than more efficiently use money we have. That is the first amendment; it is $60 billion, $60.5 billion. The second amendment is $59.6 billion. It is a 1-year freeze on bonuses and raises and other salary increases for Federal employees. They make 45 percent more than everybody else in this country doing exactly the same thing, on average. We are going to cap the total number of Federal employees. We have added 180,000 Federal employees in the last 18 months--180,000. We are going to collect unpaid taxes from Federal employees. We have Federal employees who are working today who owe the Federal Government $3 billion. We ought to collect that money. It ought to come out of their paychecks. That is undisputed debt; that is not the disputed portion. That is the undisputed portion of what they owe the IRS. For everything except DOD we are going to ask for a 5-percent efficiency gain in administration. Do more with less. Everybody else in this country is doing more with less, except the Federal Government. We are going to say: No, we cannot do that? Why not? It is interesting, on the Debt Commission we had a good discussion with Dave Cote, who is the CEO of Honeywell, explaining that every year they do more with less. They spend less dollars to get more out. They have less people to produce the same amount. It is called efficiency. It is called productivity-- except we will not apply that to our own government employees. We are going to reduce nonessential government travel. It is billions of dollars a year. If we are in a financial pinch--and I would love for somebody to debate me that we are not--why would we not limit travel to that which is only essential? We are going to rescind money that Chairman Obey in the House recognized on the WIC Program is not being used. We are going to strike $68 million in U.N. emergency funding for the next fiscal year. Most of the Members of this body voted for an amendment that required transparency in the U.N. We give them over $6 billion a year. Twenty- six percent of the budget for U.N. peacekeeping is ours; we pay for it. Yet with an audit of their moneys, half of their moneys--over 60 percent of it--was found to be fraudulent. So we passed an amendment out of the Senate, unanimously, that required transparency from the U.N., except when it got to the conference committee it was not there anymore. I will tell you, the American people deserve to know where their money is being wasted at the U.N. So we ought to clip that. We ought to cut that back. We ought to say: You give us transparency; we will give you money. You do not give us transparency; we will not give you money. We are going to eliminate bonuses for poor contractor performance. Do you realize the Federal Government pays bonuses for companies that never complete their contracts? Two years ago, the Pentagon paid out $4 billion in bonuses to contractors who did not meet the standards for the bonus, but they paid them anyway. Well, that makes a joke of the contracting process. It also makes a joke out of us that we would allow that to continue to happen. So on these two amendments you will have plenty of opportunity with which to make a decision on whether you want to be on the side of Madeline or on the side of the elitism in Washington--the group that does not care what America thinks. We know better. The group that says: We are not in an emergency. We are not in a problem. We can continue to spend money and not make hard choices. There is an emergency, and the emergency is our very survival, our economic survival, our survival as a republic. I will close with the following: If you study the Roman Empire or if you study the Athenian Empire, you will find common threads among both. The No. 1 common thread is they fell after they became indentured in their own fiscal policies. They could no longer support their military. Their elected bodies refused to make tough choices. We are sitting here saying: Europe, you have to make tough choices. You have to get your spending in line with your productivity. We are talking with a hollow ring to our voice because if there is anybody who needs to get their spending in priority, it is us. I am not against paying for the war. I am not against supporting our troops. I am not against the FEMA money we need. I am against us not paying for it, and I am very disappointed we have cloture filed this evening because what that means is the American people are not going to see how we as individual Members vote on tough choices. I am going to have two tough choices out there. It remains to be seen whether we get a chance to vote on them through the majority's ability to cut off debate. But we ought to. We ought to do what is the best, right thing for the country. We ought to be able to come together and agree we should not abuse the emergency designation; that we should not abuse pay-go; that, in fact, we should not delay making the hard choices because the choices are just going to get harder. They are going to get harder every year we do not do this. Now is the time to start doing it. If we choose not to, then what we are saying is: Madeline, as to your future, we are going to steal it from you. We are going to steal opportunities for a future like we have had. We are going to take those, and we are going to indenture her to an economy that does not grow, with opportunities for an education that will be limited, including the ability to own her own home. All those things will come around. We only have three ways to get out of the problem we are in. The first way is we can default. Everybody says: Oh, no, you cannot say that. You cannot talk about that. Well, when Moody's is getting ready to downgrade our bonds from AAA, that is the first sign we are moving in that direction. The second thing we can do is have the Federal Reserve inflate our way out of it to where that means the life savings of everybody are going to be debased, and their purchasing power is going to go away or markedly be reduced. Or we can do the third thing: Not let either of those two bad things happen by making hard choices ourselves on what we need to be doing--by eliminating the junk, the waste, the duplication, and the fraud in the Federal Government. It is there. It is there to the tune of $300 billion a year. So when this extender package comes--whether it comes this week or next week or the week when we come back--there is plenty of money to pay for it, too, if we will just stand and be counted, not as Senators but as Americans who would like to see the future bright for their Madelines. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. So $\1/2\ trillion since we famously passed pay-go, and we are going to waive it six times, and when we haven't waived it, we have declared something an ``emergency'' so we do not have pay-go law applying. The budget rules go out the window because it is an emergency--except we do not meet the criteria for emergencies by our own definition. So what is this all about? Is it about playing a shell game with the American people, to say we are going to do one thing and then turn around and, before July 1, in 5 months--less than 5 months--we are going to borrow another $\1/2\ trillion after we tell the American people: Oh, no, we are not going to do that anymore. We have an emergency. There is no question this country has an emergency. Do you know what it is? It is a $13 trillion debt we have today that is going to be $23 trillion 8 years from now. We have a debt that is going to suppress our GDP by 1\1/2\ to 2 percent in what we could normally grow because the government's debt is such a burgeoning hangover on the capital markets. Yet we don't have the ability to do what we promised the American people we would do. You know, I feel as if I ought to read the signing statement of President Obama when he signed pay-go and the statements of all of my colleagues that said: This is the answer. Except that will not do any good. The only answer is for the American people to hold us accountable. I obviously can't. For 5\1/2\ years, I have been trying to tamp down spending, to have us make a position that we are going to go to the lowest priority, cut the lowest priority out so we can fund the highest priority, and we have refused to do that. So does it have real consequences, what we are doing today? There is no question this bill is going to pass. There are votes in this body to pass and add another $60 billion. What are the consequences? Well, the consequences come about to our children. You have seen this sign before. This is Madeline. This photo was shot of Madeline as she walked around Capitol Hill. I actually had a visit with her and her parents. When we first put this up here, she was only $38,000 in debt. That was less than 6 months ago. Less than 6 months ago, she only owed $38,000--per man, woman, and child in this country. She is at $42,000 now. When we finish what we do before July 1, she will be close to $50,000--per person in this country. If you extrapolate what the budgets are going to be over the next 8 years, she is going to be close to $200,000 in debt. And that does not count the unfunded liability. When this little lady is 28 years old, her responsibility, both in terms of debt and unfunded liability, will be $1,113,000. We never think about it in terms of young lives and how we are impacting them. We can always rationalize away the ability to make hard choices. That is what we are doing. Does anybody in this body not think we couldn't squeeze $60 billion out of $3 trillion? Could we not do that? Are there things less important than fighting the war? Are there things that are more important about our future and less important about irritating some special interest group because their program did not get funded? Which is it? I vote with the kids and the grandkids. They supposedly have a voice, except we routinely ignore it. That is what we are doing with this bill. I am not saying we should not fund the war. I am not saying we should not create the money for FEMA for the projects we need. I am not even saying we should not help Haiti where we can. What I am saying is that we ought to pay for it by making hard choices that every family right now is making. They are having to make choices between what is an absolute must and everything else that is not. They don't have the luxury of an unlimited debt service because their credit card company has already said: You can't have any more. Their bank has already said: No, you can't borrow any more. Their house and its equity has been maxed out. They don't have any other choices. So they make the hard choices. We are kidding ourselves if we think we have another choice. We don't have another choice. We are just delaying the time at which we make the choice. The pain associated with delay is going to be twice as great as the pain of doing it now. John McCain and I are offering two amendments. The whole purpose of the amendments is to give the body a couple of choices on how to pay for this. It is not easy, it is not fun. But is it necessary? Is it necessary for the health of our Nation? Is it necessary that we start acting in the way the American people expect us to, which means we are going to get rid of the things that are not as important as the things in this bill? I understand that is novel because the Congress has only had one net rescission in the last 16 years. It occurred with the 1996 appropriations bill where we actually cut total government spending in 1996. We had the will to do it. The appropriators had the will to do it. But we don't have that will anymore. The environment we face as a country is three or four times more severe for our future than it was in 1996. So what is the disconnect? What is the disconnect that we would not make hard choices? I am not going to say my choices are the best choices; they are just my choices. But it ought to be rolled back to the appropriators that this bill should have never come to the floor unpaid for. They know more about spending than anybody in this body. They are more qualified to make the cuts. But they chose not to make the cuts in lower priority items to pay for this bill. What is the choice? The choice is to indenture our children and grandchildren. That is the choice we are making. When we choose not to do it, we are choosing proactively to indenture our children and grandchildren. We are better than that. What is so sacrosanct? Do you realize in 2 weeks in December we found 640 instances of duplicate programs that had exactly the same goals with multiple sets, 70 programs for food and nutrition for hungry people. Why do we have 70 programs to help poor people get food? Nobody can rationally explain why. We just have it. The reason we have 70 is because we used to have 40. We didn't have any metrics on it so somebody thought we ought to have another program for feeding hungry people. So we put another program together. Then we funded it. But we didn't have any metrics on it. So then we did it again, and we continue to do it. There are 640 different instances just like that, 70 programs to feed the hungry across 6 different agencies--not just 1 but 6, none of them with metrics, none of them working to see if they actually work, no oversight hearings by the Appropriations Committee to see if they work or the authorizing committee to see if they work. We have 70. There are 105 to incentivize kids to go into math, engineering, science, and technology, 105 programs across 9 agencies. That is just 2 examples out of the 640 sets of duplication we found. Where are we going to eliminate some of that? When are we going to accomplish what the American people are asking us to do? It is not about eliminating food for the hungry. It is not about eliminating incentives. It is about eliminating the management structure for 70 programs or 105 programs so we can have one or two good ones, and we can have metrics on them. I yield to the majority leader. Cloture Motions

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my letter to Senator McConnell dated May 18, 2010, be printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I rise today to express grave concern regarding the misplaced priority of annually deeming this day, May 18, HIV Vaccine Awareness Day. This year marks the 13th annual observance of a day that epitomizes our government's inability to set priorities with the Federal dollars this body is entrusted. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, Web site: This annual observance is a day to recognize and thank the thousands of volunteers, community members, health professionals, and scientists who are working together to find a safe and effective HIV vaccine. It is also a day to educate our communities about the importance of preventive HIV vaccine research. As a practicing physician and former cochair of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS, I believe the development of a safe and effective HIV vaccine should be among our Nation's highest health care priorities. HIV/AIDS continues to devastate communities in the United States and around the world. In the United States, more than 50,000 people become infected with HIV each year. Approximately 40 million people are living with HIV around the world, with more than 5 million new infections each year. To date, more than 25 million men, women and children are believed to have died from AIDS worldwide. Unfortunately, we have not yet developed an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine--nor are we close. At a time when our national debt is approaching $13 trillion and patients suffering from HIV/AIDS are being put on waiting lists for life-saving drug treatments, we simply cannot afford to misspend $1 million a year to make people aware of a nonexistent vaccine. Furthermore, this well-intentioned propaganda campaign is being funded at the expense of HIV vaccine research itself. Regardless of the intentions, the unfortunate fact is that finite resources intended for HIV vaccine research are being siphoned away for a project without any potential scientific benefit. With no effective vaccine likely anytime soon, it seems silly, or worse, to waste funding that could be much better spent on research or scientific investments that could one day lead to a vaccine. The discovery of a vaccine or cure, after all, would be the best way to thank the researchers and volunteers. As every cent counts in this endeavor, it is unconscionable that precious dollars are being squandered by NIAID's well intentioned but unnecessary public relations campaign. Between 2001 and 2005, NIH spent more than $5.2 million on this ``HIV vaccine awareness'' campaign, not including staff time or travel expenses. It is reasonable to assume that the federal government continues to waste over $1 million annually on HIV vaccine awareness, despite the fact that no vaccine exists and scientists believe that it is unlikely that a HIV vaccine will be developed anytime soon. Some of the HIV Vaccine Awareness Day events supported in the past include various lunch and dinner receptions, a fashion show in Massachusetts, a bar night in Tennessee, a bar event and entertainment contest in Washington, and other gatherings and media events. Clearly, this awareness campaign serves no obvious public health or scientific value. There is no doubt, however, that development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine should be a national priority. HIV/AIDS continues to devastate communities in the United States and around the world. At least 56,000 Americans become infected with HIV each year. More than 33 million people are living with HIV around the world, with more than 2.5 million new infections each year. To date, more than 20 million men, women and children are believed to have died from AIDS worldwide. The development of a safe and effective HIV vaccine should be among our Nation's highest health care priorities. It imperative that not a single dollar of the Federal funds set aside for the development of an effective HIV vaccine is wasted. This year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, highlighted what he called ``significant progress in HIV vaccine research during the past year.'' The study he referred to was a clinical trial in Thailand finding a vaccine to be 31 percent effective at preventing HIV infection. Unfortunately, the results of this study have been found to be statistically insignificant and the findings of the study have received much skepticism. This latest clinical trial is the latest in a long line of promising but unsuccessful attempts at creating an HIV/AIDS vaccine. Dr. Fauci in recent years has conceded publicly that no one has been very close to developing a vaccine that would prevent infection. Over the past 5 years, in fact, two large clinical trials of HIV vaccines have failed to demonstrate efficacy of the candidate being tested. The disputed Thailand trial aside, this is still the case today. Most scientists involved in AIDS research believe that an HIV vaccine is further away than ever and some have admitted that effective immunization against the virus may never be possible, according to a survey conducted released in 2008. A poll of scientists reflects the declaration made at a NIH ``summit meeting'' in 2008 that was ``tantamount to an admission that almost no progress has been made in the search for an AIDS vaccine in the past 25 years and that something close to new start is necessary.'' The government scientists announced that ``more of their budget needs to be spent on basic lab research and less on testing the current crop of vaccines, none of which has proved useful in human trials.'' In light of these failures and daunting prospects, Dr. Fauci pledged to re- evaluate the use of all $1.5 billion his agency spends on AIDS noting that ``we are going to have to justify what we are doing.'' Dr. Anthony Fauci has noted that while Federal funding for the National Institutes of Health, NIH, continues to increase, it will not increase as quickly as it has the past decade, and as a result, NIH must concentrate on more promising research. Fauci said the heads of NIH institutes such as his had been told to reexamine the entire research portfolio to ensure ``the most bang for the buck.'' The AIDS vaccine candidates that don't show early results in clinical trials could be shut down, he said. That may mean cutting back some AIDS vaccine research even though virtually all health experts agree a vaccine will be the only way to stop the pandemic of a virus that is incurable, always fatal and that continues to spread worldwide and in the U.S. As I have done in the past, I am sending a letter today to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to inquire about this misuse of funds. It is my sincere hope that the Department of Health and Human Services will cease spending Federal dollars on this misplaced priority and reinvest these HIV/AIDS dollars into actual research or care. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record my letter dated May 18, 2010, to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes kind of general talking. I wish to give an example because this is a very big bill with a lot of hard work by the Banking Committee and their staffs. I want Members to compare this bill to a loved one who gets pneumonia. They go to the doctor and they have a cough and a fever and chills. They feel terrible. Think about it. If you would take your loved one to the doctor and the answer you would get is: I think I can take care of that. I can give you something for the cough that will suppress the cough and I will give you something to take care of the fever and I will give you a little something to take care of the pain in your chest. You go on home. You come back if you don't get better. Of course, 2 days later your loved one ends up in the hospital with raging, now bilateral pneumonia and sepsis, bacteria in the blood. This bill is kind of like that. It is kind of like a doctor treating symptoms instead of the real disease. The real disease was Congress. The real disease was poor underwriting standards, actually no underwriting standards. The real disease was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the real disease was the rating agencies that haven't been controlled effectively by this proposed legislation. This legislation does nothing for the real disease. It treats a lot of symptoms. It grows government gigantically. It will create more bureaucrats and rules than we can shake a stick at. But it does not fix the underlying problem. When people dispute that, ask the following question: If you are at home, working and paying your mortgage, guess what. The reason we are not fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is so you can continue to pay more taxes so Freddie Mac can solve those mortgage problems through your tax dollars and other people not being responsible for theirs. That is what is going on here. That is why you are going to see $500 billion in additional losses with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, because we are going to get them to keep going until we have satisfied all this, not doing the hard work, not recognizing that we are actually going to need $5 or $600 billion more in taxes or we are going to borrow that to take care of this problem. So everybody who is out there today who is working hard, paying the mortgage, and keeping up is going to get to pay extra because we are not going to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in this bill. That is why this amendment is so important. We decided in this country a long time ago that we were going to set forth a policy to help people own homes, except we overdid it. We created incentives that would bring out the worst nature in people. If you don't believe that, look at Long Beach Mortgage, where 90 percent of the mortgages they wrote prior to them folding were totally fraudulent. Where was the oversight? There wasn't any--the Office of Thrift Supervision, but we didn't oversee the Office of Thrift Supervision. We created the symptom and a set of incentives and now we want to leave them right there. This underlying bill does not address the three main diseases that caused the problems we have. Congress genuflects and redirects any criticism from us to the greedy banks or the greedy loan originators, but they never say anything about us not doing oversight. They never say anything about us not reforming Fannie and Freddie when we knew what was coming in terms of their losses and also the financial difficulties they had. We have a bill that doesn't fix it--a lot of hard work, a lot of good intentions, but it doesn't fix the core problems so they will not occur in the future. As the Senator from New Hampshire said, if you combine strong underwriting standards and transparency associated with limiting the loss the American taxpayer is going to take on with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you will do something. But the way the bill is now, we will have created big theatrics. Everybody will shake hands and holler and dance around when the bill passes, except the dirty little story will be that we didn't fix the real disease. When that loved one in ICU with double pneumonia and sepsis dies, we go after the person who didn't fix it, who should have fixed it, who had the knowledge to fix it, and we say: You are liable. Well, we are liable. We ought to be fixing this. The very fact is we are not. The McCain amendment is a commonsense amendment. I understand the reservations. They don't want another $400 billion of recognized debt. They don't want to account for the losses that are continuing to flow, $20 billion so far in the first quarter of this year, out of those two institutions. The Senator from New Hampshire way underestimated the cost to the American taxpayer and what it will ultimately be by not fixing this. My appeal to the chairman of the committee is to seriously look, give us good answers on why we are not fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. What are the real reasons we are not fixing that? What are the real reasons we are not creating strong, transparent underwriting standards so the problem doesn't occur in the future? What is the real reason? What is the real reason we don't hold accountable the rating agencies and take away the conflict of interest thoroughly--not partially but thoroughly--from the rating agencies? The rating agencies are supposed to be a check. Had they been doing their jobs, we wouldn't have had all these securities sold that were worthless or were nonperforming. But they don't do their job. We didn't do our job. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn't do their job. Yet we are not going to address the core issues that created the setup and framework we are now experiencing as an economy. To me, that creates a tremendous amount of liability on our part. We ought to have to be in explanation of every ounce of our being on why we don't fix the real disease that caused this problem. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I wish to make an inquiry of the Chair as to the interpretation of the rule we passed, because it is my understanding that the rule doesn't require you to publish, but it does say the majority and minority leader are no longer obligated to honor your request for a hold if you have not. I ask for the Chair's opinion on that.