Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I believe when I left the floor my amendment was pending, amendment No. 2697. I would like to spend a few minutes to talk about that amendment. I know somebody else has come to the floor here rather quickly and I have about 5 minutes, I have been told by the cloakroom. Congressional creation of the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers, the bill that has been attached to the flood bill, usurps the rights of States' authority over insurance licensing and regulations. Congress established the McCarran-Ferguson Act that States should retain the regulatory authority over insurance laws. While NARAB II was crafted to retain primacy of insurance regulations and enforcement actions within the States, this bill will nevertheless compel States to accept a national license within their jurisdictions. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office stated: . . . the association's authority would exist only through a preemption of states' power to regulate the licensing of insurance producers. This preemption would stem from an exercise of the sovereign power of the federal government. NARAB II provides the President and his or her appointee the authority to nullify the decisions made by the NARAB board but does not extend any of the same rights to the individual States. My amendment will provide a State the opportunity to opt out of participation in NARAB only through the passage of legislation by the State legislature and signature of the Governor, and it will not allow State insurance commissioners to opt out on a whim. To prevent a disruptive transition, this amendment requires a 2-year delay between passage of State legislation and the effective date of an opt-out. So you cannot get out just like that. It is 2 years. In order to maintain the foundation of reciprocity and prevent States from gaming the provision for a competitive advantage, insurance producers located within a State that opts out of NARAB would be ineligible from participating in the NARAB system. So if your State opts out, you lose the privilege of going to other States. The inclusion of this provision would accomplish the bill's goal of streamlining and cost-savings without the continuation of Congress infringing on activities that should be left to the States. The amendment will still allow for the benefits provided by a multistate licensing process to reduce the bureaucracy involved for producers to access customers in other States, which will help increase competition and lower consumer costs--things I am totally for. Actually, I am for this bill, but only with preserving the Tenth Amendment rights of States. The provision will also provide a safeguard from NARAB if 10 years from now it is not working as well as the current consensus has hoped and a State or States no longer wish to participate. As the bill's proponents have already pointed out, NARAB has the support of every State and every insurance producer. They all agree. If that is the case, and this is so popular and such a needed reform, then no State will opt out, and the opt-out provision would be mute, while still protecting the States' rights. I understand the opposition to this, that they think this will not get off the ground. But the very statements that have been made both in the committee and on the floor--that everybody wants this, all the insurance industry wants this, all the State insurance commissioners want this--if that is the case, nobody will opt out and we will have met our constitutional duty of protecting the Bill of Rights for the States. I finish by saying this: One of the reasons we are in extreme difficulty--what physicians would call extremis--is that we have ignored States rights, we have ignored the Bill of Rights, and we have said we are primal. So as CBO said, we are stepping all over this. I understand I probably will not be able to stop it, but it is another indication of why we need the Enumerated Powers Act. That is simply a bill sponsored by 44 Senators that says if you bring a bill to the floor, you have to give the authority under which the enumerated powers would justify you bringing this bill to the floor--to make us pause, just to think about it. I do not think it is unreasonable. People may disagree about whether States ought to have the right to opt out, but if the program is such as has been designed by the authors of this bill and the statements by the people who have spoken on this bill on the floor--if that is the case--putting this amendment in will not harm it at all; it will not ever be used. So it is simply saying, if they want to opt out, it is 2 years after they vote in their legislature and it is signed by the Governor before they can, so there is no disruption. Nobody is going to do that, if it is true what everybody who is supporting this bill has said. It is peculiar and curious to me why anybody would oppose this amendment if, in fact, the facts are as stated by those supporting NARAB II. And I support it. But I think we ought to protect the States' constitutional rights. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with Rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend Rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering amendment no. 2606 on S. 1845, as follows: At the end, add the following:

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want to address my remarks, first, to the chairman and the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee. I think you have done a lot of hard work. You have done something that even though I am not in the consensus, you have done what the Senate was designed to do, build a consensus around a bill. There is no question this bill will pass today. So my congratulations to you and my sincere thanks for some of the things you put in the bill that we have been working on that are good governance projects. So I want to say that from the start. I am not going to talk specifically about the bill. I am going to talk in bigger, broader terms of the problems that are facing us as a country. I have in my hands a book that contains $9 trillion worth of cuts. Hardly anybody in the Senate has read it. They may not agree with 50 or 60 or 70 percent. But there is certainly somewhere in here consensus for us to actually save a whole lot more money than we are doing. In 2009, a young lady by the name of Madeline showed up outside the Senate. This is what she had draped around her neck. ``I am already $38,375 in debt and I only own a dollhouse.'' Since that period of time, we have managed to markedly change that situation for her for the worse, because today, if she were outside, she would have this sign on her neck. It would say $54,602 and she would only own a dollhouse. The point I am trying to make is this hole is getting deeper and deeper and deeper. Although I did not vote for the budget agreement, because I think it could have been done better, it was an agreement and had a consensus as well. My criticism is not that the Members of this body worked a consensus, which is exactly what the Senate is supposed to do, but I think as we have done these things we might have lost sight of the big picture. So I want to share with you for a minute what the big picture looks like, because it is not pretty. According to generally accepted accounting principles, that is not the way we run the government, by the way. We do not use real accounting principles. We use all the tricks and smoke and mirrors we can. This number is indisputable. The unfunded liabilities for the Federal Government are $127 trillion. Think about that. We cannot even imagine how much that is. Our national debt is $17.33 trillion as of last night. I checked it. There are 14 million households in America. If you take the Federal liability per household, it comes out to $1.11 million. So $1.11 million is what the debt plus the liability is for every family in this country. It is growing. I know we cannot solve this problem over 1 year or 2 years. I am so thankful to the Senator who is leading the Appropriations Committee in her position. I have the most wonderful respect for her. She is a listener. She wants to do right. But what we have to do is change the direction of this. It needs to go the other way. That requires everybody. If you think about it, if the average family per capita income--this is what it was last year in this country, $53,000--can you imagine how we are going to leverage and afford just the interest cost on $1.11 million? If you add 5 percent on a million bucks, that is $55,000. That is more--just the interest costs are more than the median family income in this country. So there are parts of this bill that are in front of us that I am highly critical of. I do not like the fact that we play a game with CHIMPs, change it to a mandatory program. To me it is not straightforward to the American people. It is not being honest about what we are actually doing. What we are actually doing is digging the hole deeper. Let me outline some things we could have done that we did not do before we had the budget agreement, before we had this appropriations bill. The GAO over the last 3 years has identified about $250 billion we could take a large portion away from by eliminating duplication and by putting metrics on programs. Now think about that. That is $250 billion a year. I have been out here giving speeches on all of this and everything that is duplicative. But the problem is that the appropriate committees have not met to look at the GAO recommendations. They have not acted on them. They have not responded to them. The administration, I will give them credit; in their budget the last few years, they have looked at those GAO reports and made recommendations in their budgets for elimination and consolidation. But we have essentially ignored them. I know how tough it is to build a consensus in the Appropriations Committee that will get you the votes you need to accomplish that. From the parochial concerns to the budget concerns, I understand that. I am glad we have a number now. I am glad we have a bill that has a number. I think the number is too high if we are ever going to do anything about this. But the fact that we do not do anything that will make a difference in the future in terms of driving this number down--just think. Let's say the GAO is 50 percent right. Let's say they are only 50 percent right. What if we consolidated, put metrics on programs and streamlined them as they recommend and we saved $150 billion a year. That starts going in the right direction. It changes. We start going in the right direction. Now think for a minute. If we have no recessions over the next 20 years and we have great economic growth, 4 percent, we still do not solve this problem. Because the interest costs are greater than the GDP growth associated with our country. I wanted to give the background of why I come out here all the time and raise the issue of why we are stealing the future from our children. Nobody can deny the fact that we have not done the work. The reasons we have not done the work are multiple. But most of it is we just will not do the work. We do not have the leadership that requires us to do the work. Think about Madeline. Let's say she gets a great college education and is in the upper quintile in our country in terms of her earnings when she is 25. With normalized interest rates, she is going to fall behind. So I know we are talking out in the future, but one of the things Thomas Jefferson wanted out of the Senate was for us to be long- range thinkers, not to think about the problem right now, think about what the problem is going to be. In my 9 years here, I have failed in my ability to convince my colleagues that we ought to be worrying about this problem. Because the promise of America was opportunity. The promise of the poor house is no opportunity. What we have set up for the average American family in the future is the poor house. It does not have to be that way. We can fight among the priorities, but the one thing we should not by fighting about, the one thing that we should know that we can fix is why would there be 679 different renewable energy programs? Can anybody give any possible justification for that? It is just $15 billion a year, but if you consolidated them down to 20, you could save $5 billion a year. That is $50 billion over 10 years. Why are there 253 different Department of Justice crime prevention grants? Each of them has an overhead. What we found when we studied this is people get a grant from one, then use the same grant application to go to another grant overhead in DOJ, get the grant from another section, another program, for exactly the same claim. The right hand does not know the left hand. If you consolidated them, one, you would get more money to each individual grant, and, No. 2, you would not have the duplication and fraud and lack of compliance we know these grant programs are loaded with. We have done the work. We have done the oversight. We have actually studied them--or why are there 209? Think about this--science, technology, engineering, and math incentive programs, education programs, 13 different agencies, $3.5 billion a year. Why do we allow that to happen? This is the real face of who it is going to affect. Yet we won't do the hard work. It is not the appropriators' job to do that work; I understand that. But one of the things appropriators could do is say we are not going to fund any of these programs unless we consolidate them and put metrics on them. Finally, if they expected to come out in March--and I am so pleased the chairman wants to run the appropriations bills and to get back to normal--to say to the Judiciary Committee, if you want these justice grants run, consolidate them, put restrictions on them, streamline them, and then we will fund them. So everybody will know, we are prorating 1 year about $480 billion of money for programs that aren't authorized at all. One of the strengths of the Appropriations Committee could be that we could put some demands on the authorizing committee to clean this up. I want to state a couple more. Health care has been in the news. How many of us realize we have 91 different health care training programs spending $14 billion a year? Some of my colleagues probably know that, but in the committee of jurisdiction they have done nothing about it. I don't object to spending $14 billion on health training programs or any of these other things as long as we are doing it wisely, but what I would suggest is for the 91 different programs--which should be probably 4 or 5--the overhead associated with the others is saved for the American public. We could save a significant amount of money for Madeline. Because the real story is our excesses, our lack of work, our lack of consolidation, our lack of streamlining, our lack of elimination and duplication, our lack of demanding the metrics so that we know the programs we are funding out there are working. We are not going to pay the price for it, nobody in this room. The people who are going to be paying the price for it are Madeline's generation. How are they going to pay for that? What is going to happen? What is the real cost associated with that? It is not a pretty picture. This is what it is: It is a markedly declining standard of living. Most people don't know that median family income in real dollars in America today is at the exact same level it was in 1989, and it is going backward. Even with a growing economy, it is going backward. The assets available to a family are declining while the obligations for that family are increasing, and we are responsible for that. It is not something we can't fix, it is something we choose not to fix. I also would say that I have one large concern in this bill. We increased NIH back to $1 billion. We are still not where we were 2 years ago, but we started with $800 million more at the Defense Department, duplicating programs that are already running at the NIH. We are making my list bigger, not smaller. We are going in the wrong direction. We have great people at the NIH. We have a great leader in Francis Collins. They have markedly improved the management of their grants, their oversight of their grants. Yet we are going to take $800 million and move it over to another set of overhead--with people not nearly as experienced, not nearly as knowledgeable. We are going to be spending money in the Defense Department to study things we are spending money for for the exact same type of thing at NIH. So we are not going to get great value for this money. What we are going to do is waste it. That $800 million should have gone to NIH and every other nonmilitary- related medical program over there. That money should have gone to the NIH. When we talk to the Senators who started this, both Tom Harkin and our former colleague, now deceased, Ted Stevens, they would admit to us in private that it was a mistake to ever start it this way, because we are wasting a ton of precious dollars that could be used to save somebody's life, but somebody has a reason for that. I don't know what it is, but I will say in this bill we have $68 billion of appropriations for the Defense Department that have nothing to do with the defense of this country. We don't get all of these savings if we take it out of the Defense Department, but we get $3 billion or $4 billion if we take it out of the Defense Department. That $3 billion or $4 billion could fund NIH back at a level it should be funded or protect Madeline from further decline in her standard of living. I have made my point. I understand my perspective is not in the majority, but I will guarantee my perspective is with the majority of Americans, that we ought not to have 679 renewable energy initiatives. I don't think we would find anybody in the country who would disagree with me that they ought to be consolidated. They ought to be run efficiently. They ought to have metrics on them, as well as the other hundreds of sets of duplications. We are going to get another report next month from the GAO, actually in March. It will be their fourth. They are so discouraged because they do all this hard work, make recommendations, and then we sit on them. We don't act. If I were to have a challenge to my colleagues, it is first to read the reports over the past 4 years and look at the data that shows where we are really wasting money. Then, please, for Madeline and the sake of her generation, act on it. Don't ignore it. I know it is not easy work. It is hard work. I have done oversight for 9 years in the Senate. But it can be done, it should be done, and the Madelines of America are worth it. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I came to the floor to spend some time on the unemployment insurance, but I have to comment, after hearing my colleague mention his esteemed favor of the bill that will be in front of us, I have to say my perspective is totally different. We have a 1,500-page bill that nobody has read, other than my staff, and we have read it completely and outlined it completely. We have a bill that is dishonest, because you still have changes in mandatory funding and programs and you create $17.9 billion out of nothing, which everybody on the Appropriations Committee knows allows you to spend $17.9 billion but not pay for, and you transfer that sleight of hand to our children. But it doesn't seem to bother anybody on the Appropriations Committee that we actually lie to the American public about how much we are actually going to spend. The bill actually spends about $63 billion, the way you have written it, more than we did last year--about 6\1/2\ or 7 percent. The bill is loaded with parochial benefits, which is the pleasure of the appropriators, I understand, but it doesn't pass muster in terms of no earmarks. But there is one point that I agree with. This has been an agreement between Republicans and Democrats to bring the bill to the floor. And it will pass because it is an agreement, because people did work together. Whether I like it or not, they worked together and came to a conclusion. The only problem is there are going to be no amendments, so no way to be honest with the American people on this $17.9 billion that is supposedly paid but isn't. It is truly an untruth. It is dishonest. It has no integrity with it whatsoever. It undermines every Senator up here who is going to vote for this bill because you say one thing and you are going to do exactly the opposite. I was just given a poll as of today. The No. 1 problem Americans see in our country is us--the U.S. Government. Twenty-one percent of the people in this country identify us as the problem. Is it any wonder, when we tell them we are going to do X and then we don't do X? For example: We had a budget agreement, and then we changed the budget agreement because we couldn't live within our means and we wouldn't raise the revenue to be able to do that. Then we come to a new budget agreement that is much higher--don't honor the previous budget agreement. Then we put an appropriations bill on the floor that is going to fund all the Federal Government until September 30 and nobody has totally read it. They pick out the things they like in it and then talk about it. Is it any wonder why 21 percent of the people think the Congress, politicians, poor leadership, corruption, and abuse of power in Washington are the No. 1 problem with our country? You know what. They are right. It is an abuse of power to vote for a bill that you know spends $18 billion--$17.9 billion--more than what you are telling the American people it is going to spend. You do it through sleight of hand, and you pass muster with the powers that be, but it is not honest with the American public. So we are going to do it again. We are not going to have a government shutdown, everybody is going to get to go home on break and spend a week away from here and say: Oh, look at us, we are not at loggerheads anymore. The only reason we are at loggerheads is because we have abandoned the process of the Senate through the majority leader who does not allow the Senate to force consensus. For the life of me, I don't understand why my colleagues on the other side of the aisle accept it. They get no amendments either. So we have 1 person out of 100 who decides what amendments will be acceptable and what will not. Jefferson has to be spinning in his grave because he wrote the original rules for the Senate. It had nothing to do with one person deciding. As a matter of fact, until 1917, one person stopped everything in the Senate if they didn't have consensus. So the whole goal was to trade what you would like to do to give somebody else the ability to do that. When we have a czar running the Senate, we no longer have that ability. The whole purpose for having a bicameral legislature, with a minority rights provision protecting it, was so we would generate consensus so that their views could then be sold to the American public. This isn't about me being able to offer an amendment. This is about the 4 million people in Oklahoma not having a say in the Senate. I mean, there are some bright people in Oklahoma who have some good ideas. But those ideas cannot be heard in this body anymore. They are not my ideas. It is not my vote. It is their vote. And yet 54 of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle acquiesced their right for their States to offer their State's ideas as we debate issues in this body. They give that away and say one person gets to decide. It has never been that way in the Senate--never before. The prime example of that is the unemployment bill. If this were really a priority for the majority leader, why are we doing it now instead of before it expired? All the weeks of time in quorum calls in the Senate we could have been doing this. It wasn't a priority. It is a political priority. I actually think we ought to extend the unemployment insurance, but I think we ought to do it in a smarter way, and I certainly think we ought to pay for it. I can sit and show $9 trillion of waste and spending reductions that 80 percent of average Americans would agree with. Yet we can't find $20-some billion out of all this mess of a Federal Government to help people who are not employed. My colleague from Delaware mentioned job training. The only thing that has happened based on the GAO reports of this government on duplication is that the House took it to heart and they took the job training programs and they converted the 47 job training programs, spending almost $30 billion a year, and they passed the SKILLS Act, which consolidated those into 6 programs that actually have metrics. When you study our job training programs, regardless of whether we fund them, here is what you find. All but three of them duplicate one another--all but three--and not one of them has a metric on whether they are actually training people to do a job, giving them a life skill. So the House passes that bill and we won't even take it up. You save money and you actually improve what the Federal Government is trying to do in terms of that. So if we were to expand unemployment insurance or continue the emergency in the sixth year, might we not want to do something about the quality of the jobs programs that are available for the people who are on unemployment? Might we also not want to give people back their dignity by having them do something in their community for the earning of that? There have been no tax dollars paid by any worker for this program. They didn't contribute anything to it through their past unemployment or FICA fees. Would we not do better if we did what Norway has done, where they show that people will start hunting for a job earlier if you plus up the benefits early and taper the benefits later so that they start looking for a job long before they run out of benefits? What the studies actually show, especially the three States that have now been disqualified from this, is their employment numbers went up, their unemployment went down, and the number of people needing assistance actually went down as well. So it is one thing to say we want to help people; it is totally different when it is all in a political contest about the next election. That brings me to my final point. I believe children need to have a good start toward school. But as the Senator from Delaware just mentioned, we are going to add $1 billion to Head Start, and that is going to give us 90,000 new kids in Head Start. If anybody does the math on that, $11,000 per year for a Head Start Program? Think about that. Give the money to the States and let them run it themselves outside of the Federal Government and they will do it for $4,000 or $5,000. Because it is a Federal program, it costs twice what it should. Or if you did it through the States, you could do $180,000 versus what we are doing. So we are going to have a debate. Hopefully we will get back to the unemployment insurance. But if we want to have that debate, it has to be paid for. We owe that to the very people we say we want to help. And, No. 2, you have to have the input of everybody, not just one person in the Senate. I will finish up by saying this: When you see this poll, where 21 percent of the country thinks the biggest problem in the country is us, the government--the corruption, the abuse of power, and the poor leadership are the specific things that were mentioned in this poll-- what we ought to do is look inside and ask ourselves: Why is that? That is because we concentrate on the political and not on the people. We use them as pawns to advantage our own political careers, our own elections, and the long-term best interests of the country get sacrificed. What this poll shows is the American people are pretty darned smart, because they see the problem, they know what it is, and they know what is going to happen. So we are going to pass a bill that is going to spend over $1 trillion, with all sorts of favors in there--not truly earmarks, but as close to them as you can come--with new programs by the appropriators instead of the authorizing committee. That is the other thing in this bill, programs written by the Appropriations Committee instead of the authorizing committee. We are going to pass this bill, and this number is going to jump from 21 percent to 25 percent. The jig is up. We can no longer come down here and say with honesty: Here is what we are doing. Because what we are doing is not honest. And what the American people are saying with this is: Integrity matters, straightforwardness matters, truth in budgeting and spending matters. At least if we are going to do this, let's own up to what we are doing. Let's not be dishonest with the American public about the numbers. Mr. President, I yield the floor

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, on December 19, 2013, Chief Warrant Officer Two Billings gave the ultimate sacrifice to our country while serving as a U.S. Army UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter pilot in support of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Chief Warrant Officer Two Billings' sacrifice brings great credit upon his family, his home State of Oklahoma, and his country. On January 9, 2014, a U.S. flag was flown above the U.S. Capitol in honor of CW2 Randy L. Billings and for his sacrifice to our Country.''

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, PEPFAR has been and remains one of the most successful foreign policy achievements of the United States in the 21st century. This unprecedented humanitarian effort has touched millions, either through providing lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment, keeping together families impacted by the disease, caring for orphans, or improving the lives of others affected and infected by this horrible disease as well as tuberculosis and malaria. In an era of war abroad and deep political divisions at home, this program is one that has bipartisan support here and has generated good will toward the United States abroad. Every American should be proud of the success of this initiative as it represents what is great about our Nation and has restored hope for so many. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee worked hard to get S. 1545, the PEPFAR Stewardship and Oversight Act, through this Chamber. I thank Chairman Menendez and Ranking Member Corker for their cooperation and attentiveness in the process. This bill, which became law on December 2, is a positive step toward increasing program transparency and accountability in PEPFAR's annual report. It also renews and strengthens several components of the last reauthorization, including Global Fund governance provisions and the requirement that more than 50 percent of PEPFAR's appropriations to be spent on treatment and essential medical care. This latter component, the treatment spending requirement, is one of the key accountability provisions my colleagues and I fought for in the past. In short, PEPFAR is required to spend at least 50 percent of its appropriations on essential medical treatment and care. Members on both sides of the aisle voted for authorizations with this treatment floor. Congress sought to prevent the program from straying from its core mission of treating and caring for patients. If PEPFAR were to lose sight of this goal, the result would not just be a waste of money, it would be lives lost on account of mission creep. We cannot let PEPFAR become another well-intentioned but unfruitful and nebulous international development program. This statutory treatment floor has changed somewhat over the last decade, but the purpose has remained the same throughout: to focus more than half of PEPFAR's total appropriations on essential treatment and medical care. Unfortunately, as I will discuss in a moment, the Office of the U.S. Global Coordinator, OGAC, at the Department of State has not been following this law. Rather, it has excluded a significant portion of its appropriations from the calculation and is now spending less than is statutorily required on treatment and care. The original PEPFAR authorization in 2003, P.L. 108-25, first included a treatment spending floor that said, ``Not less than 55 percent of the amounts appropriated pursuant to the authorization of appropriations . . . shall be expended for therapeutic medical care of individuals infected with HIV, of which such amount at least 75 percent should be expended for the purchase and distribution of antiretroviral pharmaceuticals and at least 25 percent should be for related care.'' Similarly, the full reauthorization of PEPFAR in 2008, P.L. 110-293, included a treatment requirement that said, ``More than half of the amounts appropriated for bilateral global HIV/AIDS assistance . . . shall be expended for . . . (1) antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS; (2) clinical monitoring of HIV-seropositive people not in need of antiretroviral treatment; (3) care for associated opportunistic infections; (4) nutrition and food support for people living with HIV/ AIDS; and (5) other essential HIV/AIDS-related medical care for people living with HIV/AIDS.'' This version expanded somewhat on the original category of ``therapeutic medical care,'' but Congress maintained a minimum percentage of appropriations intended for direct care and treatment services. Lastly, the recent PEPFAR legislation, S.1545, now P.L. 113-56, reiterates and even clarifies the treatment requirement further. This new law says more than half of the funds appropriated for activities under section 104A of the Foreign Assistance Act--which contains all of PEPFAR's functions ranging from drug treatment to training health professionals and capacity building--need to be going to these five categories of essential medical treatment and care. None of these definitions from laws in 2003, 2008, or 2013 has allowed for an exclusion of certain components of PEPFAR's funding from the treatment calculation. No appropriations bill has implemented an exception to the calculation. The charge and requirement has always been to examine total PEPFAR appropriations in a given year and ensure at least half goes to services in these five categories. As I said previously, PEPFAR management has not been abiding by the letter of the law. The Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the Department of State has been excluding several spending categories from the treatment and care calculation. A smaller denominator makes it easier for the program to meet the treatment calculation. In reality, hundreds of millions of dollars more should be going to treatment and care if the law were followed. Millions more patients could be receiving lifesaving antiretroviral treatment. A Government Accountability Office report released in March 2013 highlighted how OGAC has been excluding a significant portion of PEPFAR appropriations, categorized as ``Other'' activities, from this calculation. In fiscal year 2008, this ``Other'' category accounted for about 15 percent of PEPFAR country budgets, or $574 million. By fiscal year 2012, the category increased to 21 percent of PEPFAR country budgets, or $710 million. Over the same timeframe, total spending on treatment and care decreased from $1.8 billion to $1.4 billion. This ``Other'' category includes spending for health systems strengthening, strategic information, management and operations, and laboratory strengthening. OGAC told GAO it had excluded the ``Other'' category based on OGAC's interpretation of the intent of the treatment spending requirement. They have also not included any of OGAC's administrative costs. As one directly involved with PEPFAR throughout my time in the Senate, I can say firmly the treatment spending requirement was intended for all of PEPFAR's appropriations, not just a portion. PEPFAR's operational plan for fiscal year 2011 shows that PEPFAR received about $5.0 billion for all bilateral activities, including headquarters administrative costs. To be meeting the treatment spending requirement as written, PEPFAR should have planned to spend about $2.5 billion on treatment and care. Instead, it spent $1.6 billion. That figure about $900 million short of what should be going to direct treatment and care services that fit the categories already in law. I understand the need for PEPFAR to invest in some capacity building and other ancillary development. A nation needs labs to check HIV test results, for example. Labs and clinics need health professionals, and a host government needs to be able to track the program results. However, we have seen time and again how development programs get off track, lose focus, and fail to meet their goals. They spend money on activities that are noble but ineffective. For example, in 2012, the U.S. Agency for International Development used millions of dollars to fund an economic development program in Morocco that included pottery classes, even though Moroccans have been making pottery for thousands of years. Not only so, but the classes were poorly designed. The instructor only used materials not available in Morocco, and the class's translator was not fluent in English. Ultimately, the development program failed. To prevent mission creep and failure, Congress put a treatment and care requirement in law to ensure more than half of go to direct treatment and care services, which have a clear and measurable impact on the lives of those living with this HIV/AIDS. I call on PEPFAR to follow the letter of the law when it comes to spending on treatment and care. All PEPFAR appropriations should be entered into the denominator of this equation. No funding will be lost from doing so. Rather, hundreds of millions of additional dollars will be going to essential treatment and care. Millions of new patients could start receiving new life. I will continue to monitor whether PEPFAR is following this definition in the future. Given that 26 million people worldwide need antiretroviral treatment, we cannot afford to let PEPFAR get off track.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Massachusetts be recognized for 5 minutes and that I follow with my comments until I complete them.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, to comment on my colleague from Massachusetts, he is correct that the tax credits for wind energy are expiring, but he is incorrect in his ascertainment that all tax credits are the same. The tax credits in the oil and gas industry are deferred tax payments, and the $7 billion they collect this year, in terms of deferred payments, in terms of intangible drilling costs, will, in fact, be made up for with $7 billion of payments from 10 years ago. So the net-net is zero, whereas the wind industry has a tax credit which the American consumer subsidizes to the tune of a significant amount, the value of the electricity that we get there. So it is viable--if we were to put the wind energy tax credit the same as we have in the oil and gas industry, I would happily support it, where it was a delayed capture of later revenues flowing back to the Treasury. But that is not what we want. We want to give a refundable tax credit directly to wind energy. It is not the same. The apples are not the same. I came to the floor this evening regrettably having to come and make this statement I am making. In the last month we have seen a lot of things happen in the Senate, which have led to other things happening in the Senate. I do not think anybody is happy about it. But today, the leader is taking the unprecedented step--I say that underlining the word unprecedented--of having the Senate vote on a nominee who is currently under active investigation. I have no premonitions or knowledge about the specific facts of that investigation. But what I do know, in checking with the Senate historian, the Senate library, and from the history of the Senate, is that it has never been done before. It has never been done. So my reason in coming to the floor is, No. 1, to defend my position and what should be the position of the Senate, and to make the case to my colleagues that we are doing a disservice both to this nominee and to the position he will fill. By all letters of recommendation, Alejandro Mayorkas is an honorable man. President Obama is nominating him to be Deputy Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new Senate rules, the minority has essentially no right to stop the majority from forcing through a nominee who possibly, just possibly, may be unfit for office on the basis of this investigation. Nobody is saying he is. They are not saying no. They are saying wait. This is, in fact, the very act the Republicans were afraid of when Leader Reid facilitated the change in the Senate rules by breaking the Senate rules. The Senate is going to cast this vote without knowledge, full knowledge, of advice and consent on his fitness for his position. We can do nothing to stop that. We realize that. The precedent we are talking about is historic. Holding this vote in light of an active investigation into serious relevant allegations of misconduct by any nominee appears to be virtually without any precedent in this body. We searched extensively for any precedent, for the decision to hold a vote on this nomination. The Congressional Research Service studied this. It has never happened before. Never. In fact, they discovered the opposite. The Senate has established a history and followed a practice that should lead us to postpone consideration of any nominee under investigation. Here are some examples they found. In January of 2005, President George Bush nominated Ken Tomlinson to be Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. An active inspector general's investigation into allegations of unethical behavior by Mr. Tomlinson led the Senate panel to delay action on the nomination for over 18 months. He was never confirmed. Later that same year, President Bush nominated Roland Arnall to the post of U.S. Ambassador to The Netherlands. At the time Mr. Arnall's firm was being investigated by regulators in 30 States for predatory lending. Then-Foreign Relations Committee chairman Republican Senator Richard Lugar consented to a request by Democrats that October to delay voting on the nominee because of the investigations. Senator Joseph Biden spoke out in favor of the delay, as did Senator Paul Sarbanes, who cited longstanding precedent for delaying a vote until the nominee was ``clear.'' Mr. Arnall was eventually voted out of committee, after Republicans concluded the investigation did not target the nominee personally, but he was not confirmed by the full Senate until the following February, 7 months after he was nominated, when his company agreed to end the investigations by settling the cases against him. My friend President Obama, who nominated Mr. Mayorkas, was a member of the Foreign Relations Committee at that time. Then he seemed to agree that nominees facing investigations should not receive a vote. A 2006 LA Times story on Mr. Arnall's confirmation quoted then-Senator Obama's spokesman as saying: Because a settlement has been reached, Senator Obama will not seek to block his nomination. A vote on another Bush nominee, Lester Crawford, was delayed for 2 months in 2005 while the inspector general of the Food and Drug Administration probed claims, allegations, that Mr. Crawford had an affair with a coworker and gave her preferential treatment. Once again, the OIG's review was complete. The OIG concluded that the allegations could not be substantiated, and the HELP Committee voted to confirm him. In 2004, the Senate Banking Committee did not schedule a vote on Alphonso Jackson to serve as Chairman of the Department of Housing and Urban Development until the HUD inspector general determined Mr. Jackson had not violated the Department's workplace violence policies as subordinates had alleged. All of this advises us strongly to delay a vote on Mr. Mayorkas until the OIG investigation into his alleged actions is concluded. I would suggest that we should learn from history and not move forward with this nomination. If it was true for the Senate then, and if it was true for Senator Biden, if it was true for Senator Obama, if it was true for their colleagues and many Senators who maintain this precedent until today, it should be true for us now. Last week, when Mr. Mayorkas was considered by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, my chairman justified moving forward with the nomination by asserting that the DHS OIG had not identified any criminal wrongdoing by Mr. Mayorkas. At present, the DHS OIG is only considering allegations of conflicts of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement, and appearance of impropriety. In none of those situations I identified were the nominees under criminal investigation. Yet the Senate delayed its vote until each investigation was finished. Since the DHS OIG has not completed its investigation, we do not know if there will ultimately be any criminal findings. I doubt that there will. We do know, based on the precedent that I cited, an investigation into any potential wrongdoing, whether criminal or not, is enough for the Senate to delay a vote on an important nominee, or at least it used to be. Of course, the Senate recently changed. The majority leader exercised the so-called nuclear option, changing the rules by breaking the rules, granting my colleagues the new power to push administration nominees through the confirmation process with a simple majority. The leader is attempting to use this new power to push through scores of nominees in the last few days this session. But scrutiny and judgment should not be diminished in a partisan rush to get one's way. Forget the rest of the nominees; this is one where an open investigation is currently underway. With this nominee before us, Mr. Mayorkas might do well to wait for all the facts. As we all know, the DHS OIG is also currently under investigation. This office is reviewing the leader who recently resigned. They are reviewing allegations of conflict of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement of EB-5 investor visa program, and an appearance of impropriety. They are all serious concerns. I hope they aren't true, but right now we don't have all of the facts. While I understand OIG is not currently aware of any criminal activity, since the investigation is still open and several interviews remain, that could possibly change. As I understand, however, the OIG plans to complete its investigation and release its findings in a few short months. Until then, we won't know what is only an allegation and what will be proven by evidence and facts. Most concerning to me is the fact that the White House failed to alert me or the committee chairman to the fact that Mr. Mayorkas was under investigation, which they had an obligation to do. In fact, the letter from White House counsel conveniently doesn't confirm or deny whether the President was aware Mr. Mayorkas was even under investigation. It is unclear to me why Chairman Carper wasn't troubled by the White House being less than honest with him about a nominee he was expected to fast track for nomination. I have spoken to a number of whistleblowers within DHS who have concerns about Mr. Mayorkas' fitness for position. These whistleblowers have made serious allegations about how Mr. Mayorkas has overseen and influenced the EB-5 program. They are only allegations, but they do raise questions. They raise questions about his allegiance to DHS's core mission to prevent terrorism and enhance security. A number of the allegations extend well beyond the EB-5 program and raise concerns about the fitness for the No. 2 position in DHS. They include the following: attempts by Mr. Mayorkas to obstruct the investigations by Congress; allegations of preventing program integrity measures requested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; intimidation of employees who questioned agency policies; susceptibility to political influence; failing to properly enforce program integrity mechanisms, resulting in potential threats to national security. Whistleblowers who spoke to the Wall Street Journal said that Mr. Mayorkas fast-tracked approvals of certain EB-5 applications over objections regarding the suspicious source of funds to rebuild the casino in Las Vegas which, in fact, was noted in a recent article by the Washington Times. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article by the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. COBURN. I understand that some of my colleagues on the other side are frustrated that whistleblowers have not come forward to speak to them. To be clear, I have communicated this request to the whistleblowers and have invited those whistleblowers who have spoken to come to my office to speak to the majority, twice. But they have told me that they have the fear they will face retribution if their identities become known and that they will lose their jobs. Putting myself in their shoes, I can't blame them. I cannot provide them with protection. They have also heard Members of this Senate dismiss their serious allegations. For example, the Senator from Delaware referred to the whistleblower allegations as rumor and innuendo. If you were an official who had come forward with serious concerns about improper behavior, potentially putting your livelihood at risk, would you feel comfortable speaking with somebody who has already dismissed your allegations as rumor and innuendo? So we will leave it to the inspector general's office to consider whistleblower allegations and all of the evidence to determine whether any inappropriate or criminal activity took place. Again, we will know that judgment in a short 2 months. However, we do have other information that raises serious concerns about this nomination. The committee's business meeting last week to consider Mr. Mayorkas is a perfect example of why the Senate should wait for the OIG's investigation to be completed. At that meeting the chairman gave a lengthy opening statement that made a number of concerning and inaccurate statements which served to denigrate the 650 employees at the Office of Inspector General at Homeland Security. The office deserves some criticism, that is for sure, as our Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight has determined. Rather than rely on their insights, he came up with some of his own. There are actual misstatements of fact, and they only serve to further obscure a complicated and difficult situation. For example, the chairman claimed that 3 days before the confirmation hearing on July 25, information about the OIG investigation was leaked to Congress and the media in a highly irregular manner. As he knows, and his own committee record should indicate, the existence of the investigation was not leaked to Congress in a highly irregular manner, it was emailed to his staff, as well as mine, as an official communication by the DHS OIG congressional liaison office. If there was anything irregular about the situation, it was that the White House had not already confirmed there was an investigation ongoing. We had a right to that information, and it had been improperly kept from us. In the face of the White House's inappropriate omission, the OIG chose to inform us. I am sure it was a hard choice, but I believe it was the right one. If they had not done so, we would not have known of the investigation of the sort which the Senate, in normal times, would have given great weight to and not moved forward on. As DHS often tells us: If you see something, say something. The chairman also repeatedly faulted the OIG for refraining from interviewing Mr. Mayorkas until the end of its investigation. This appears to be a criticism borne from a lack of experience and knowledge of the investigative process. Quoting: To my amazement, Director Mayorkas has never been contacted about this EB-5 investigation. Later he said: I cannot understand why they [OIG] have not talked to Mr. Mayorkas. It is common practice to investigate the central figure in an investigation closer to the end of an investigation after evidence has been reviewed and collected. There are many reasons for this practice. One is that you do not know what to ask the subject until you have gathered all the information you can about his or her alleged misconduct. Another is that it minimizes the impact of the investigation on the subject, which can be an understandable concern when investigating a busy top official such as our present nominee. Early meetings can result in having to hold several interviews with the same official, asking questions about topics or allegations which could eventually be dismissed without their testimony by not identifying exculpatory evidence beforehand. While the scheduling for this interview was upsetting to the chairman, it should not be to Mr. Mayorkas. He is a seasoned prosecutor and familiar with the process of the investigations, and he knows what to expect. The chairman also claimed at the committee vote that the OIG has repeatedly given him deadlines and had missed them. The chairman inferred that we could not trust their word on when this investigation could be completed. Specifically he said: ``I was . . . informed that the investigation was likely to conclude in October.'' Later he claimed: ``We have no guarantee this investigation will simply not drag on and on . . . it has already slipped several times.'' Later he added: Each time we get an estimated timeline for completion, the date slips. First we were told October, then perhaps December. And as of last week, the IG said there were at least several months of work remaining. None of this is true. According to my office records of the conversations with the inspector general, we have no record or recollection that the inspector general ever promised a date certain of completion in October. Neither do we have any record indicating the IG suggested December. Unless the IG communicated to the chairman these deadlines in the private conversations which he arranged without my knowledge or involvement, these statements appear to be simply false. I would also say I cannot imagine the chairman or staff would engage in a private conversation with the inspector general regarding a sensitive investigation into a political official. Such conversation would be a breach not only of our practices but could raise ethical concerns of exerting undue influence upon an official proceeding. I urge him to correct the Record or show us in detail the conversations where the IG made these points and promises. The chairman also stated this fact, and news outlets erroneously reported this inaccurate claim, that the investigation was being handled by only one investigator and two assistants. His quote was: ``We learned that there is one investigator assigned,'' he claimed, ``one investigator and two research assistants.'' This is not true. The OIG has told our staff the case has a lead investigator--and that is true, an absolute common practice for investigations and most investigative and sensitive endeavors--but they were further told that the OIG had a rotating team of investigators, experts, research assistants, and staff help on various aspects of the investigation. This is a common practice, assigning leads to individual investigations but sharing a larger pool of assistant investigative resources. It is followed, to a great extent, by our own Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I don't understand why the chairman's characterization would stray so far from the facts established in conversations involving both our staffs or from common sense. I am also disappointed that it characterized the investigation as having a ``lack of progress,'' which was ``unacceptable'' and ``unfair, not just to Mr. Mayorkas but to a Department full of people who need leadership, and to a nation that is counting on the Department to help protect them.'' The truth is it is not uncommon for investigations of senior officials to last a year or longer and is not a matter which should be rushed by anyone, certainly not the chairman of the authorizing committee. This is the kind of rhetoric which causes concern in some quarters that the chairman and others are applying inappropriate pressure on an agency's internal processes and deliberation. Political pressure is simply not helpful to anyone. In fact, it can actually hinder the investigation and weaken public acceptance for the findings, particularly if they exonerate Mr. Mayorkas. People may allege, as they have already, that the Office of Inspector General waters down and weakens its finding in response to political pressures such as this. If the OIG investigation results in a clean bill of health for Mr. Mayorkas, how many Americans, how many DHS employees, will wonder if the chairman's repeated disparaging remarks were indicative of a political pressure applied which improperly swayed the results? No one is served by his comments. What is more, they are not a reflection of the shared concern he voiced with me in our joint correspondence to the inspector general. I simply do not understand why he would intervene in such a vocal, public way, which could cast doubt and suspicion on the results of the investigation. The other thing about this vote is it is unfair to Mr. Mayorkas. I have talked a lot about process and the need to know the findings of the DHS OIG report before we vote on Mr. Mayorkas. But no one seems to understand just how unfair this vote is to the nominee. By pushing his nomination through both the committee and the full Senate, Senator Carper and Leader Reid have denied Mr. Mayorkas a chance to win bipartisan support. I have only voted against one nominee who has come through our committee, only 1 out of 20. I would like to be able to vote for Mr. Mayorkas if, in fact, OIG shows him a clean bill. The reason it is sad that he can't win bipartisan support is that under the new Senate rules it is possible for my colleagues to confirm him without a single Republican vote. When they do that, they will be delivering to the Department a nominee who arrives with only his party's support, and he will be trailed by a cloud of doubt and discontent. The allegations against Mr. Mayorkas relate mainly to his management of the EB-5 immigrant visa program in his role as Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. As I understand it, the investigation into Mr. Mayorkas began in an unconventional way by one person speaking out after their heavily documented concerns were dismissed. To me, this only adds validity to the allegations. In the course of its investigation, the DHS OIG discovered other allegations of impropriety, including conflicts of interest, misuse of position, mismanagement, and the appearance of impropriety. Those allegations could speak to a candidate's fitness for public service, especially if he is not fully cleared to help lead the Department of Homeland Security. It is wholly unreasonable to ask Senators to endorse the nominee's fitness for service until those questions are answered. In an attempt to discredit the investigation, some people have cited the problems plaguing leadership in the DHS OIG office, the inspector general in particular. In fact, the Financial and Contracting Oversight Subcommittee of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is currently conducting and will release soon their bipartisan investigation into a number of allegations. While I agree those allegations surrounding OIG leadership are troubling, the problems of one person do not invalidate the work done by an office of over 650 people. OIG work in every agency should be taken seriously. In January of this year, Senator Carper joined me and members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in sending a letter to President Obama urging him to fill the vacant inspector general positions at a number of key agencies, including DHS. In that letter, we said, ``Inspectors general are an essential component of government oversight.'' We do a disservice to that statement when we preclude the opportunity to, at a minimum, review the work done by the DHS OIG, draw our own conclusions, and then vote accordingly without all the facts before us. Even more concerning, by denigrating the open DHS OIG investigation, the Senate is sending a message to other OIGs that their investigations don't matter. Obviously, that is incredibly significant given our dependence on these watchdogs to oversee the huge government agencies and bureaucracies created by this body. We must respect and support the work done by inspectors general. In my opinion, the damage being done to the DHS OIG and the respect of IGs throughout the government by holding this vote is far worse than any damage done by the office's current leadership. The results of this investigation are not the only unknown regarding Mr. Mayorkas's service as Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Despite a number of concerns regarding national security and criminal vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program, we know the program expanded drastically under the nominee's hand and we have not yet seen evidence that he pursued significant regulatory changes to address the weaknesses that were known. Two months ago I personally asked DHS and other agencies for an answer on how the administration is dealing with the concerns, and I have received no response as of yet. These include an October 18 letter in which I requested information from Acting Secretary Rand Beers on EB-5 national security concerns identified by the agency itself in a draft report. I received no response. The same day, I also asked Acting ICE Director John Sandweg for the same information. I received no response. I also requested information from National Security Adviser Susan Rice regarding known national security concerns created by the EB-5 program. To date, I have received no response. Just last month, on November 1, Senator Grassley and I requested information from Acting Secretary Beers on how the agency is addressing the known national security concerns with EB-5. Again, silence. No response. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record these letters requesting information.

Mr. COBURN. Given that we are considering promoting Director Mayorkas to be second-in-command at DHS, it is appropriate that we consider how he managed this program and whether he addressed criminal and national security concerns, including exploitation of the EB-5 regional center program by terrorists, spies, and other threatening actors. These weaknesses were apparently the subject of repeated examinations by the administration. I have repeatedly pressed the administration for more information regarding the weaknesses in the EB-5 program under Director Mayorkas and what actions it has taken to remedy those weaknesses. The chairman has declined to join in this inquiry. Why is that? Why would the chairman decline to join in finding out the truth? I have not received documents or any of the information I have requested. At the same time there is no public record of steps Director Mayorkas has taken to address EB-5 concerns. For example, to date, USCIS has failed to promulgate any regulations shutting down regional centers being exploited by criminals or terrorists. This raises serious concerns with me. When Congress created the EB-5 program in 1990, the goal was to stimulate the U.S. economy through job creation and capital investment by foreign investors. To that end, the original program--called the basic immigrant investor program--required immigrant investors to invest $1 million in a commercial enterprise that would create or preserve at least 10 jobs. The investor was initially granted conditional permanent residency, but after 2 years and proving the creation of 10 jobs, they were eligible to become a permanent resident. In 1992 Congress authorized a second EB-5 pilot program allowing immigrants to pool investments through DHS-approved regional centers. In seeking approval from DHS, the regional center submits a proposal to DHS detailing how it plans to promote economic growth in that region. By investing in a regional center, immigrant investors can take advantage of relaxed job standards to measure both direct and indirect job creation. While direct jobs are actual identifiable jobs for qualified employees, indirect jobs are considered those created collaterally by the investment. While the regional center program was set to expire at the end of 2012, last September it was reauthorized for 3 more years. Despite known national security concerns, no changes were made to the program by the Judiciary Committee. In total, over 25,000 people are currently in the United States through the EB-5 program. Since its inception, the EB-5 program has been plagued with wide-ranging problems. Mr. Mayorkas took over this program in 2009. There has been a notable expansion of the program since he took it over. It now sees $3.3 billion passed from foreign investors in exchange for visas to reside in our country. Yet the serious security weaknesses have persisted, as well as alarm among senior officials. These problems include the agency failing to determine if the program is meeting its basic goal of creating 10 jobs per investment and defrauding would-be immigrants with breaches of national security with suspected terrorists using the program to enter the United States. In 2012 the national security staff coordinated a review of the EB-5 regional center program by five agencies focused on vulnerabilities relating to the financial flows and securities offerings that routinely accompany the investment component of the EB-5 program. That draft report raised major concerns with the investments being made by EB-5 investors. For example, the investigation found one regional center filed false documentation in an attempt to support the creation of jobs. The same report also noted investments being made to a business that never existed and could never exist, headed by an individual using a pseudonym due to a criminal record of importing counterfeit products into this country. The draft review noted the high risk that EB-5 program participants may attempt to use the program as a tool or a channel for money laundering, tax evasion, or other illicit financial activity. This type of activity was aided by the fact that known criminals are not statutorily prohibited from owning, managing, or recruiting regional centers. We just reauthorized that. This national security staff draft review also references another interagency review looking at the national security threats associated with the EB-5 program, stating that the vulnerabilities relating to possible infiltration by terrorist groups or foreign operatives are also before the NSS and are being addressed by the interagency task force. Understanding we have only seen a draft of the national security staff's forensic audit and have not seen information about the interagency review of possible infiltration by terrorist groups or foreign operatives, I wrote to Susan Rice, the National Security Adviser, on October 18 requesting that information. She has not addressed any concerns. She has not answered our letter. The Department of Homeland Security also conducted its own internal assessment of the EB-5 regional center program, examining criminal and national security vulnerabilities. In response to an apparent tasking from DHS Secretary, ICE prepared a review of the program. Here are the vulnerabilities they noted and identified: export of sensitive technology, economic espionage; use by foreign government agents, espionage; use by terrorists; investment fraud by regional centers; investment fraud by investors in this country; fraud conspiracies by investors and regional centers; illicit finance and money laundering. The agency's own draft analysis makes clear that the EB-5 regional center program can be exploited by terrorists, criminals, and foreign operatives. Further, it identified regional centers as a means for facilitating espionage at the highest levels by foreign governments. To that end, the review by ICE proposed that the regional center program be sunset--be done away with--because there can be no safeguards that can be put in place that will ensure the integrity of the regional center model. As I stated before, I sought more information about DHS and ICE's internal review of the EB-5 program. I wrote to Acting Secretary Beers on October 18 requesting information about the findings of this review and what actions were taken in response. I have not yet received a response to my inquiry. Recently, we received a draft DHS OIG EB-5 regional center audit. It is my understanding that we are soon to get this final report. In the draft, it includes the following statement: USCIS--under Secretary Mayorkas--fails to ensure regional centers meet all program requirements. USCIS--under the nominee, Mr. Mayorkas--inconsistently applies program regulations and policies. USCIS doesn't always properly document decisions and responses, giving the appearance the program is vulnerable to inappropriate influence. This is all under the guise of a nominee whom we will vote on late tonight. Since the program is so poorly run by USCIS, the draft DHS OIG determined USCIS is limited in its ability to prevent fraud or national security threats that could harm the United States, nor could the agency see where the EB-5 program was improving the U.S. economy and creating jobs for U.S. citizens, as intended by Congress. This draft report also outlines a number of recommended actions for the Director. Last week Senator Carper asserted it was Congress's fault that the EB-5 program was susceptible to fraud and national security threats because it hadn't provided the proper statutory authority and that new statutory authority which was included in S. 744, the immigration bill, would have solved the problem. But the draft DHS OIG report makes clear that under its existing authority, the agency has the ability to issue regulations to deny and even terminate regional centers identified as fraudulent or national security risks but has failed to do so. They also recommended that the Director provide USCIS with the authority to deny and terminate EB-5 regional center participants at any phase of the process when known connections to national security or fraud risks are identified; that they should make explicit that fraud and national security concerns can constitute a cause for revocation; that he should give USCIS the authority to verify that foreign funds were invested in companies that create U.S. jobs and to ensure requirements for the EB-5 regional center program are applied consistently to all participants. None of these recommendations request any additional congressional authority; therefore, it is at least arguable that the action could have been taken by Director Mayorkas to prevent national security vulnerabilities in the EB-5 program. That hasn't happened. The draft report also recommends that other corrective action should be taken by Director Mayorkas as well. Since USCIS failed to properly apply its existing EB-5 policies and procedures, DHS OIG recommended developing a memorandum of understanding with the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and the SEC ``to provide expertise and involvement in the adjudication of applications and petitions for the EB-5 regional center program.'' A third recommendation in the draft report related to the failure of the agency to maintain any metric as to whether the program was actually achieving its intended purpose. The DHS OIG asserted that Director Mayorkas should ``conduct comprehensive reviews to determine how EB-5 funds have actually stimulated growth in the U.S. economy in accordance with the intent of the program.'' That hasn't been done. Finally, the draft report directs Mr. Mayorkas to ``ensure quality assurance steps to promote program integrity and ensure that Regional Centers comply with the Code of Federal Regulations.'' The implication there is that they don't. All of these recommendations raise serious concerns about the way Director Mayorkas was overseeing the EB-5 program and, in turn, should be considered as a qualifying factor to determining his fitness to be second in command in charge at the Department of Homeland Security. To summarize, we know the national security staff and the Department of Homeland Security conducted reviews of the investor visa programs Mr. Mayorkas has been overseeing since 2009. These reviews found that the program created a danger to national security--including the threat of exploitation by spies, criminals, and other national security threats. I and others have asked for more information about the potential national security vulnerabilities in the EB-5 regional center program, and we have received no answers. What we do know is that Director Mayorkas dramatically expanded a program that the administration and even DHS itself apparently believes to be a threat to national security. And according to a draft report by the inspector general, he did not take all of the actions which he should have taken and which were at his disposal to fix these vulnerabilities and to make sure this visa program wasn't bringing spies, terrorists, or other terror threats into the country. Finally, I would say this vote is not fair to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is the agency we trust to secure our borders, make our skies safe, and to help our Nation protect us from terrorism. We know the Department has faced many challenges and has often struggled to execute its responsibilities over the past 10 years since its inception. And DHS has some of the lowest morale in the government. This week the Senate voted with strong bipartisan support to approve Jeh Johnson's nomination to be Secretary of the DHS. I was proud to support his nomination. He is the kind of leader DHS needs to help it address its many challenges and to fulfill its mission of making our Nation safe. He needs a strong second-in-command in whom he and all employees can have full confidence. It is this body's job to vet those leaders and ensure they are beyond reproach. With the cloud of this investigation and with many of our unanswered questions about Director Mayorkas's tenure as the Director of USCIS, we do not have full confidence that he should be in second command at DHS. By voting on him now, this body is sending the wrong message to all DHS employees. Right now, we cannot--let me repeat--we cannot determine whether Mr. Mayorkas is fit or unfit for this important position. Finally, I would say this vote is not fair to the American people in confirming a nominee for such an important position who has not been properly vetted. The American public depends on us to fulfill our constitutional mandate to properly advise the President on certain executive branch nominees. Here, we are not doing that. We are not doing that. In fact, we are voting to install a nominee who could be seen as unfit to serve in the No. 2 position at DHS. Now, he may be fit, but this agency is tasked with protecting our country from terrorists. It is our responsibility to guarantee to the American public that the leaders at DHS are beyond reproach. In this vote, Leader Reid is not only ignoring the rights of the minority but the longstanding precedent of the Senate. He is ignoring history, and he is inviting us all to do the same. But history has a difficult way of teaching its lessons. It was long the purpose of the Senate's procedures to remember these lessons so the country does not have to suffer such lessons again and again. My final comments are these: Those who are going to vote for Mr. Mayorkas do so at the risk of not knowing what the investigation shows. They also do so at the risk of obviating the oath they swore when they came to this body: to fairly and appropriately evaluate their decisions about advice and consent. My hope is that Mr. Mayorkas is cleared. But, unfortunately, he won't have my vote and that of several of my colleagues because we don't have the information with which to make that judgment. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I want to spend a few minutes talking about the bill we are going to vote on this afternoon. I am starting my 10th year in the Senate. During that period of time, my No. 1 goal in coming to the Senate was to try to right our financial ship and almost everything I have done in the Senate has been related to the fiscal consequences of our dereliction of duty as Members of Congress--of both parties. There is nothing partisan about that statement. We have seen different Presidents and different parties control both bodies, always to the same result. We have before us a bill today that is a purported compromise. I want to describe who it is a compromise for. It is a compromise for the politicians. It is not a compromise for the American people because what it does is increase spending and increase taxes. The net effect, even if you take all the budget gimmicks that are in this bill that are not actual savings, and even if you believe people 10 and 11 years from now will actually hold true to what this bill pretends to have us do, which is what we are not doing--something we did 2 years ago through this bill, we are still going to spend more money than we would have and we are going to charge people revenues, some $24 billion--$28 billion, pardon me--increased revenues which we are not calling tax increases but Americans are going to pay that so it is money that is going to come out of their pocket. What we have before us is a bill that is a political compromise for the parties in Washington to keep us from doing what we really need to do--the hard things. I am going to go through some criticisms of this bill. It is not meant to reflect on any one individual. It will apply just as much to the Republicans as it does to the Democrats. But we have a bill that supposedly fixes things until past the next election so we do not have to face these gigantic problems of ``deadlock.'' The other thing I would note as I go through this is it is my contention we do not have a problem getting along. It is my contention we get along way too well. We get along way too well; otherwise, we would not have a $17.7 trillion debt. We would not have $124 trillion in unfunded liabilities. And we would not have debt per American in this country which is now $57,000 per person and unfunded liabilities that are over $1 million per household, not including that debt repayment. How did we do that? We had to agree to do that. Both parties had to agree to do that. The President had to sign it. My contention is we get along way too well, when it comes to ruining the financial future of our country. My main criticism--I do not criticize compromise, I criticize compromise that ignores the facts of our financial situation. I want to make a point. I put a book out yesterday. It is called the ``Yearly Wastebook.'' I do it every year. I do it somewhat in jest but to make a very real point. I outlined over $31 billion, what I think and I think most Democrats would agree and that the American public, 95 percent of them, would agree with this--that when running a $700 billion deficit, maybe we should not be spending these moneys on these things which go far further in actually solving our problems for compromise in terms of creating a solution to the long-term problems and giving the American people what they want. We really do have a 6-percent approval rating, right? That is true. I think we have earned it. This bill, I believe, proves it because we did exactly the opposite of what the American people would like to see us do. We solved our problem as politicians but we made their problem worse. We did not fix the things that are obvious to fix. I was on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, I was a member of the Gang of 6, I have worked in a bipartisan fashion with anybody who will work with me to try to solve the big problems in front of our country, except we as a body, and the House, really don't want to solve them because the thing put at risk when you really solve them is political careers, and as a group of politicians, the people in Washington care much more about their careers--by their actions it is proven--than they do about the long-term fiscal health of this country. That applies to both parties. So when we have a deal brought before us that will avoid confrontation come January 15 and we have all sorts of budget gimmicks in it that are not truthful, they are not real, in the hopes that somebody will grow a backbone 9 and 10 years from now and actually keep their word to the American public--and we are demonstrating right now we can't even keep our word from 2 years ago--why would we be proud to vote for that? Does it solve a real problem? No. It puts a real problem off and actually makes the problem worse to the tune of $68 billion. Through this bill we will borrow an additional $68 billion, $50 billion of it, close to, in the next year and $20 billion some after that, and in the year after, and then hope and pray that Congresses that follow us will do what we suggested. Everyone in this body knows that is not going to happen. So when you vote on this bill you are voting for your political career, you are voting for the Washington establishment, but you are not voting for the person out there who now has a $57,000 debt they are servicing, and their family, $1 million per household in this country in unfunded liabilities. It will pass. I have no doubt it will pass. I feel like John the Baptist in the wilderness. But mark my words. If we continue to do what we are doing today, we will be remembered as the people who could have fixed the problem and didn't; who could have made the courageous decisions and chose not to; who could have stiffened their spines and said we don't care what Republican extremists or liberal extremists say, the future of our country is more important than any political career in this town. And what we have before us is just the opposite. Why wasn't in part of this agreement some of the $250 billion that GAO has identified as waste, fraud, duplication, and mismanagement? There is not one thing in this bill that addresses one thing that GAO has recommended to Congress over the last 3 years--not one. So we have the ``Wastebook''--$31 billion of what I would consider--and it is not partisan. There could be a difference in terms of agreement about what is important and what is not. But, again, I would say in terms of the ``Wastebook,'' it is: Should we be spending money now when we are borrowing money, in light of the fiscal situation that we have, on some of the things that we outlined? It is a listing of 100. It has $31 billion worth of savings. I will outline a few of them for you. We are going to be taking up NDAA next. None of the amendments that I offered are in the NDAA. Every one of them was structural to the Pentagon to make it more responsible and accountable to its constitutional duty, which it has not performed, of giving account to Congress on how it spent its money. For example, the Army commissioned a contract to have a warfare overseeing blimp. They spent $297 million on that blimp. It flew for a short period of time in this country. We sold it back to the contractor for $300,000. I have two questions: No. 1. Whoever signed that contract and made that decision, did they get fired from the Federal Government? Did they get demoted in rank? And, No. 2, was the contract actually executed to the requirements that the military set out for it? It is called accountability. The answer to both of those is no. There is no accountability. So we are going to have an NDAA bill come through that requires them to meet an audit. They have been required since 1992 to meet an audit. They did not do it in 2014 and they will not do it in 2017 and they won't do it in 2018, because there is no hammer on the Pentagon to make them do it. That is because all hammers have been taken out because we don't want to force them to meet their constitutional responsibility. It is too hard. We never told them it was too hard to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. But it is too hard for them to follow their constitutional duty to report on how they spend their money. What I would put before us is, if you cannot measure what you are doing, you cannot manage what you are doing. What is obvious from the waste, fraud, and abuse, contract failures within the Pentagon, is they have no clue on what they are doing. All you have to do is take the Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier, the littoral combat ships, the F-35--all of those major defense programs are at risk, over budget, behind schedule. I am not talking a little bit over budget. We did not do the oversight; we have not forced that. You will never get control of those programs until you make them be able to account for what they are doing. My first training, my first degree, is in accounting. I understand the reason accounting is important is because it tells you where to go to manage your problems. The Pentagon cannot do that. The Pentagon ordered--at the insistence of us, by the way--some airplanes for Afghanistan. Guess what we have done. We have taken delivery here and we have sent them straight to the Arizona desert, just $422 million worth of them. By the way, the ones that did go to Afghanistan, we are going to cut up, destroy. We are not going to send them to Africa for relief missions. We are not going to send them somewhere else. We are going to cut them into pieces, another $200 million worth of airplanes. And by the way, since the Afghan Air Force wants the same thing America has, we have already given them two C130-Hs, and we are going to give them two more. That is another $400 million. So what we have done through poor management is waste over $700 million on one item. There is nothing in this bill that corrects that. Yet this bill is going to come to the floor--the NDAA--and not one of us who actually knows what really needs to be done in terms of changing the financial picture in the Pentagon is going to have an opportunity to influence that bill--not one of us. It doesn't have to be that way. That bill came out of committee in May of last year, but we have chosen to operate that way. Camp Leatherneck, which is in Afghanistan, is a $34 million new camp for troops, and it sits abandoned today. It has never been occupied. Who was the general or colonel who authorized that in anticipation of our drawdown? Who executed the order to build it and then ordered that we abandon it? Is there any accountability in the Pentagon or in any other agency? Are we doing our job of holding them accountable? The ``Wastebook'' is not all about the Defense Department, but I brought a couple of those up just so we could see what is going on. The ``Wastebook'' is about poor judgment across all the agencies. You may disagree with me about some of what is in the ``Wastebook,'' but the question you have to ask yourself is: At a time when we have done what we have done to the American people in terms of unfunded liabilities, in terms of individual debt--the average family now has over $220,000 worth of debt that they have to pay back which we borrowed--should we spend money the way we spend it? We spent $978,000 to study romance novels. Certainly that is a priority right now in our government. Everybody would agree with that; right? Sure they would. They would agree with it. Yet we put that contract out last year and spent money to study the background of romance novels, both on the Web and off, and why people write them. We didn't just study about them here, we studied about them everywhere. How about $400,000 to Yale University, by the National Science Foundation, to actually study whether people who align with the tea party have the cognitive capability in terms of science? Guess what. We spent that money and the professor got the biggest surprise of his life. Here is what the study said: People who are aligned with the tea party have far exceptional cognitive abilities when it comes to science, math, and financial aptitude. It totally surprised the professor because the whole purpose was supposed to undermine people who are constitutional conservatives. Yet we spent $400,000 on that study. Those are just a few of the small examples of the silliness which goes on. People say: Well, $400,000 isn't much; $900,000 isn't much. The State Department spent $500 million during the last week of the fiscal year. What did they spend it on? Does anybody know? To buy brand-new crystal stemware for all the embassies throughout the world. We didn't need new stemware, but we had to spend the money, so we spent it. Just think about that. We are responsible for that. We allowed that to happen. There is no oversight here. There is no aggressiveness in terms of controlling costs, and our default position is our agreement on this budget which doesn't address any of those problems. The American people are going to be asking questions about why we get along so well. The political story is not that Washington spends out of conflict and partisan bickering because the facts don't lie. We get along way too well. We are going to get along so well that we are going to pass another bill that solves the problem for us, as politicians, but, in fact, actually hurts the American people. I am not going to be a part of that, and I am going to keep yelling from the canyons and from the mountain tops until we start doing what we are supposed to do because this is not going to change. It is my hope that some of us will wake up and start looking at some of the real facts. So $30 billion can make a big difference. If we just eliminate the items in this ``Wastebook'' for next year, we would be able to take care of one-third of the sequester. There are just 100 items here. I can give you 300 items. I can give you $150 billion worth of stupidity every year, but we choose not to do anything about it. We choose not to do anything about it because you have to be a committee chairman in order to have an oversight committee dig into this stuff. You actually have to do the hard work to find out where the administration is spending the money. President Obama doesn't want money to be wasted this way. He needs our help. Yet we will not help him. We will not help the American people. Consequently, the future of our country is at risk when it should be gloriously great. It is at risk not because of the American people; it is at risk because of us. We ought to change that. I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, there will be an objection to a rollcall vote because the opportunity to amend this bill has not been made available to Members of the Senate. I have two specific concerns with the bill--I am writing my whole letter right now on this bill--and until they are addressed, I am going to hold this bill until I have an opportunity to make them known. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I came to the floor to talk about several other things, but after hearing the majority leader and my colleague from Delaware, I think the revisionist history needs to stop. This place ran from 1917 under a process where any one Senator could stop anything. That was changed by a two-thirds majority of those present voting to a number less than that. The point I am getting to is that we are in this process because the rules weren't good enough to accomplish what the majority wanted to accomplish and the majority leader wanted to accomplish. Majority Leader Byrd didn't have any trouble when he had the same vote number. Majority Leader Daschle didn't have any trouble. Neither did Frist or Dole. None of them had any trouble. As a matter of fact, what we have seen and what has happened is a lack of effective leadership in building bipartisanship. The Senate wasn't designed to be the House, as my colleagues have recently made it. The Senate was designed to absolutely protect minority rights. And what happened the week before we went on Thanksgiving break actually hurt the majority more than it hurt the minority because now the majority has lost the ability to hold their own administration accountable. The majority leader used the words ``reasonableness'' and ``clarity.'' Reasonableness is compromise. Reasonableness is allowing amendments on major bills. Clarity is the ability of Senators to offer their viewpoint on $600 billion bills. Reasonableness would be to say that every Member of this body ought to be able to contribute important ideas to the Defense authorization bill or to the farm bill or to any other major piece of legislation. So we have gone down this road. It can be stopped. All this can be stopped, but it cannot be stopped without the recognition of the damage done to this body by a very frivolous act. The revisionist history I am talking about is with the DC court. There is no difference in what the President is doing on the DC court than what Roosevelt decided to do or attempted to do. Everybody knows the workload there is enormously small compared to all the rest of the courts. Everybody knows there are also judicial vacancies that are much more important than those. So what is the reason for this? It is so we can continue to have executive orders and bureaucratic rules and regs come through that are going to get challenged because they are not within the consent and the vision of the laws that are passed, and, in fact, they can be enforced by a stacked court. My colleagues can't claim anything other than that. We know that is what is going on, and they know that is what is going on. That is going to be there forever. That is a legacy of the Obama administration, and it is a planned legacy. So it is not about what is claimed to be Republican obstructionism. It is about changing the very nature of our country. It is about changing the rule of law. It is about whether the President will be an emperor or be the President. And my worry is that we are moving fast and quickly toward an executive branch that has decided and has stated very proudly: If the Congress won't do it, we are going to do it anyway. Where does that fit in with the rule of law? And we have heard that three times from this President. In fact, they are doing it-- ignoring law. So now the very court where those laws will get challenged is going to be stacked with his nominees, and we refuse to admit this very same point was made by senior members of the Judiciary Committee when the Republicans were in charge. No one can deny that history. It is out there. Senator Schumer did it, as well as others, knowing that court should not be filled. Now, we know it is going to get filled. We understand what is happening. What is at risk is the future of our country and whether we will really have balance between the powers of the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative branches in this country. What we are seeing is a reshaping of that. It is a dangerous trend. It was something our Founders worried about, and we have seen executive orders and executive privilege taken to new heights that have never been seen in this country before by this administration. So let's be clear what we are talking about. This isn't about obstructionism. This is about you limited our rights. You also very well limited your own rights in the ability to extract information. We just heard Senator Grassley spend 1 hour on the floor talking about the lack of response from this administration. There is no tool for you to get answers anymore, there is no tool for any of us to get answers anymore, because we can no longer hold any nominations because they will go through. So there is no power. We have given up the one significant power to hold the executive branch accountable. Not only that, but we have diminished the minority rights that are part of what the Founders created to force compromise--to force us to compromise, to bring us together. There is not ill will. There are damaged hearts in this institution today. We understand the strong beliefs on the other side, but we don't understand the lack of moral fiber that is associated with avoiding and violating what has always been the tradition of the Senate--which is, you change rules with two-thirds votes of those duly elected and present. Rule XXII still stands. It just has a precedent in front of it. So for the first time in our history in this body, one group--because they couldn't achieve compromise and wouldn't compromise--has forced a changing of the rules, not through two-thirds of duly elected and sworn members but by fiat and by simple majority. What is next? We are going to make it the House. That is what is next. That is coming. I know that is coming. So consequently what is going to happen in our country is we are not going to have significant deliberation. We are going to have laws changed at public whim, rather than the long-term thinking and an embracing of what the Constitution says. The whole purpose for this body is to be a counter to the House in terms of response to political and public demand; to give reasoned thought and forced compromise, so that what comes out of here is a blend of what both the public wants, but also what the public might have lost sight of in terms of a short-term view versus a long-term view. You are putting that at risk. It is coming at risk. The very the soul of the country can unwind right here in the Senate. So what remaining powers do we have as minority Members--and you may get to find that out someday--is to use the rules that are there to our benefit. In the past, nominations were agreed upon between the majority leader and the minority leader, and they were ferreted out and moved. We have had 21 nominations come through the homeland security committee. I voted positively for 19 of them, against one, and voted present on one today. I would say that is about 90 percent that I am in agreement of moving the nominations. We actually force compromise on our committee. We actually work to compromise on our committee. But that is because of the leadership of Senator Carper to create an atmosphere where you can have compromise and you can have back and forth. We don't have that leadership in the Senate as a whole. The Senate has never seen these problems. But it is not about the rules. It is about the leadership and who is running the place. Most of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle haven't been here for a long time. They have never seen it in the majority work. Seventy-seven times the majority leader over the last 7 years has filled the tree and barred amendments. That is more than all the rest combined in the entire history of the Senate. Is that about us or is that about him not wanting to allow the place to work? He is a good man. But the problem is that leadership matters, and this place is not functioning. I will make one other statement I think needs to be made. I believe that climate does change. I believe that climate is changing all the time. Global warming has been disputed now. It is undeniable; it is not global warming. We are now into a global cooling period, and that is OK. You can have cooling. But the fact is the science is still nebulous on all the claims being made. I have said before on this floor, I am not a climate change denier. But I am a global warming denier, because the facts don't back it up. We heard what the majority leader had to say about the importance of getting things through on climate change. There may be important things we need to do, but we ought to be doing them together rather than in opposition. If that were the attitude, that we would work together, if we would have an open amendment process--a truly open amendment process where the majority leader isn't picking our amendments and deciding what we can offer--pretty soon you are going tell us what we can say on the floor. You are going to determine what I can say on the floor. This is the first step in this process. That is the ultimate conclusion to this process that you have started. So it is about leadership, and it is either there or it isn't. Right now, it is not there. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I enjoyed listening to my colleague for Texas. I will just comment to him, we are just beginning to see the series of untruths about what the President and his allies have said about this bill. I practiced medicine for 25 years, I delivered over 4,000 babies, I had a broad-ranging general practice, and I was belittled on this floor for the statements that are now coming true by the very colleagues who voted for the unaffordable care act. Let me just outline for you four things that are going to be untrue. You cannot keep your insurance. Whether you like it or not, you are not going to be able to keep your insurance. You cannot keep anything. I am going to read a story in a minute about a young man who could not afford his employer-based plan but went shopping, had a vasectomy so he could qualify for his insurance because it did not have maternal coverage. They did not want more children. His wife wanted to stop working. He had a wonderful plan. He cannot do it now. Now he cannot get insurance because he cannot afford it, and he makes about $500 too much to qualify for any subsidy. So you cannot keep it. The second thing is you cannot keep your doctor. I am experiencing that right now. MD Anderson in the Senator's own State is not covered by any of the plans. I have had a recurrence of cancer. My doctors now are at MD Anderson. I cannot use them under the unaffordable care act, unless I want to go and spend $70,000 or $80,000 on my next procedure out of my own pocket. I will have to go somewhere where the care is not what I would deem it. The third untruth is every family is going to save $2,500. It is going to be about the opposite. Because everybody is going to be spending about $2,500 more. Then, finally, what I was belittled on, that the quality of care is going to go down when they said the quality of care is going to go up. Access is going to be harder, not easier. So when the American people really find out--the intention behind trying to fix health care was a good one. The system was broken. We do need to do things. But the untruths associated with this attempt to micromanage people's lives in a market--that was not perfect--I want to tell you, this is going to be so much worse than what we had in terms of real care and real outcomes. When it comes to individuals, most important is the relationship between the doctor and the patient. It is not just for the patient. The doctor having a relationship with the patient makes for much better judgments in terms of the quality of care they give and the insight into caring for the whole of that person. We are wrecking that. We are going to wreck that.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield.

Mr. COBURN. I have not researched it yet. I guarantee my colleague, I will research it, and I will find out. But the fact is, the leading cancer centers--Sloan-Kettering, the same thing--the leading cancer centers in this country probably could not reach an agreement at a price low enough that would pay for their costs for this advanced cancer care, so they did not offer them a contract because they would not cut their prices enough for the insurance. So here is the main point. We promised to increase access. What you are really seeing is decreased access. I cannot go to Chris Logothetis. The No. 1 urologic oncological specialist in the United States--I cannot go see him under my insurance. I can. I am fortunate enough. I had a career before I was in the Senate. I will pay. But think about how many people are not going to be able to see Chris Logothetis and go to MD Anderson and have their life saved through the latest advances in pure biochemical and medical research put forward by a lot of people from Texas; some money from the NIH, there is no question; some from the Milken Institute, private money that has gone into research. We all seem to think that NIH is the only one who funds research around this country. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who fund tons of it. So as to this idea of access, we can say you are going to have access. It is just like in Medicaid. Oklahoma chose not to expand Medicaid, and I agree with that. The reason is we are never going to send the States the money. It is an impossibility, if you look at our budget situation, for us to ever keep the promise that the unaffordable care act said we would do for the States. But here is what is happening: People who are going to be signed up for Medicaid--and there is a whole other story about people who are put in Medicaid who are not eligible and will not be able to sign up who the whole system has kicked wrongly into Medicaid--you can sign up for Medicaid. Where is your doctor? Seventy-five percent of the doctors in California are not even going to sign up for the Affordable Care Act. In Oklahoma, a recent survey said, of the doctors over age 52, 60 percent are retiring in next year. Age 52--our best doctors, the ones with the most experience, with the most gray hair. They have seen it all. They have the best differential diagnosis. They are hanging it up. Now we have all these rules coming with the Affordable Care Act on what you have to do on electronic medical records. You have ICD-10-- 66,000 codes now versus 10,000 that the doctor is responsible for picking. What we have is a mess on our hands. The final fifth lie is the denial of the problems that ObamaCare, the unaffordable care act, has caused and sticking our head in the ground and saying: Well, it is not causing any of those things. It is going to be the most disruptive thing that has ever happened in this country to one-fifth of our economy.

Mr. COBURN. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. COBURN. Sure. One of those things is adverse selection, where sicker people raise the costs for everybody in the pool. But if, in fact, you looked at the Nation as a whole, and you had a law that said for any insurance company that is cherry-picking only healthy people, a portion of their profits will go into a pool at the end of the year for people with high-risk illnesses, that is what Switzerland does. It works wonderfully. What it does is it changes the behavior of the insurance company. They cover everybody. So the whole idea behind insurance is to spread the risk. We did not have good risk rating. There is no question we need to address it. The Senator was on a bill with me, the Patients' Choice Act, which actually would not have created any of this mess and actually would have created a market with some of the parameters that would have spread the risk and had real indemnification in the country, but also would have had market forces driving it and still let you choose what you want. The biggest problem with the unaffordable care act is it takes any discretion away from you about what is best for you and your family. It does it two ways. One is in terms of the details of what you can and cannot buy. I have 63-year-olds who have to buy maternity coverage. But the final point I would make in that regard is that it takes away your ability to do what is your free and correct right to not buy health care if you do not want it. What is freedom about? You have to buy health care? We say: It does not really do it. It just charges you a tax, right? Even though we said it was not a tax, we somehow got it twisted around, and the Supreme Court says this is now a tax. I have not figured that one out yet. I hope the Senator has. What does that have to do with freedom? If I choose to not buy a product--what if I choose not to buy high-definition cable? Is there a penalty for that? In other words, does Washington really know better? I think we have seen in the last 10 years, in my experience in the Senate, we are really the last ones to know, and the common sense of the American people is far greater than most of the ideas that were ever thought about coming out of here, other than some of the original founding documents that our Founders had. So I would make one other comment on Medicaid. There is a recent study out of Oregon, which has done a good job of expanding its Medicaid. But when they went to look at what the difference was of expanded Medicaid, what they found out was that you were still, in Oregon, better off if you did not have Medicaid. You were better off if you had no insurance at all than if you had Medicaid. That is because we downward select through Medicaid, because of its pricing, to not the best of the health care system. So when they looked at the control of diabetes, when they looked at high blood pressure, when they looked at the control of heart disease and congestive heart failure--when they looked at all those things-- they found one thing that was better: the treatment of anxiety. That was it. So in Oregon, when they actually looked at the study-- and part of that is because, even though you say you got Medicaid, if you do not have a great doctor-patient relationship, where someone can get in your face who loves you and cares for you and cares about your health, and says: You have to do these things to change, you are going to change. So there is no impact. So running it from Washington versus having real markets with a real safety net like the Patient Choice Act, which had a real safety net so that people are auto-enrolled who are irresponsible against catastrophic illnesses, is not a much better answer. The other thing that is going to happen--I predict in April--is that you are going to see another uproar in this country. That is when the seniors in this country pay their taxes and they find out that the little meager interest income they got off their savings because of what the Federal Reserve is doing, or the few dividends they got, 3.5 percent of that is going to now come to ``pay for ObamaCare,'' because that is called investment income--3.5 percent. So whatever your tax rate is, if you have any earnings on an investment, you are going to be paying that. You know, I will never forget Christmas Eve morning 2009--not having an opportunity to go over the Patient's Choice Act or have it voted on through the raw, brute political force of this body and ignoring the rights of the minority. We voted on the bill that many of us predicted--I am not worried about the exchanges. They will get that fixed. That is just the incompetency of management. They will get it fixed. It will eventually work and work well. What will not work is the rest of it. It will not work. Just look at centralized management everywhere else in the Federal Government. It is inefficient, most of the time ineffective, oftentimes complicated by fraud or incompetence. We are going to do that to one-sixth of our economy. We are doing to it one-sixth of our economy. The other thing that is going to happen in April of this year is people who have a health insurance policy through their employment, not buying through an exchange, are going to see their personal contributions through their employer rise significantly. That is because the insurance industry is going to have to pay for all of this. They are going to have adverse selection in what is being signed up on the exchanges. The insurance companies that sell to the medium-size businesses and the smaller businesses who are not in a risk plan, they are going to be raising the costs for small businesses. So what is probably going to happen is that those small businesses are either going to markedly increase their employees' share or they are going to drop insurance all together and pay the fine--pay the tax or pay the fee, whatever it is. Pay the penalty. But the individuals, the people who we said we were helping, then will not be with the insurance that they had. They will be back to an exchange with a price, even with subsidies that are greater, 1. No. 2, with a copay that is greater--2. And, No. 3, with a massive deductible which is at 6,000 or 7,000 bucks, and all you really have is catastrophic coverage. Why did we not just do that? Why did we not just write catastrophic coverage for everyone in the country and let the market work on the rest of it? That does not allow the elites in our society to make decisions for you. That is what we have done. Let me share another story. This is from Tina Wilkerson. Tina called in. She has been a school cafeteria worker for a long time. For the last 14 years she has worked 40 hours a week for 10 months out of the year. She works for a food contractor company. She has now been changed to a seasonal employee because of ObamaCare, so that her employer can avoid the ObamaCare mandates. It was costing her about $400 a month for a health care premium, which included medical, dental, vision, plus life insurance, plus a short-term disability policy. She went to the Web site, looked at plans. With her subsidy, she pays $645 a month premium, with a $12,000 deductible, does not have vision care, does not have dental care, does not have life insurance coverage, and does not have disability coverage. That is middle income in Oklahoma. Here is someone who, because of what we have done, is now far worse off--far more exposed in her attempt to do good. I will give my colleagues credit. Their ambitions, their goals are worthy; they were worthy. But the results are a disaster and will become much worse of a disaster. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the fact of what is really going to happen in the medical world. I have four former partners. I go by there sometimes on Friday and visit. You cannot believe the morale in the medical community today--unbelievably negative. You talk about worried. Think about the average physician. They have an undergraduate degree. They spend 4 years in medical school. They then spend 3 or 4 years in specialty training. So they have 12 years at a minimum of higher education. They come out all excited about actually doing good, real good, making a difference in individual people's lives--whether it is holding a hand when somebody is going through a rough time or diagnosing a very serious disease. The payment for being a physician is the relationship with a patient. It does not have anything to do with money. It has to do with helping your fellow man. I want to tell you, that is totally upside down right now. If you do not think that makes a difference when you have a doctor walk into a clinic setting, and you are sitting there on an exam table, and that doctor is focused on: How am I going to pay the overhead? How am I going to buy the next piece of equipment that I need to care for you the way I need to care? How am I going to buy insurance for my own employees? How am I going to pay for the necessary bills? Oh, by the way, I have got the Independent Payment Advisory Board coming that is going to tell me what I can and cannot do as a physician, regardless of how I am trained, regardless of what I know, regardless of how much gray hair, regardless of how much experience I have in terms of really caring for folks, I am going to have a group of unelected, appointed bureaucrats decide what I can and cannot do for you. Then on top of that, we have ICD-10. Most people do not know that. That is a diagnostic code manual that has just been expanded from some 10,000 diagnoses to over 66,000 with Federal penalties if you do not explicitly get it down to the detail. It is not enough that you broke a metacarpal in your hand, you now have to label which hand, which finger, and describe in subsets the fracture. Your nurse cannot do that for you. You have got to do it. So now we are taking more time, and the penalties are going to be severe if you do not do it right. As a matter of fact, they will not pay you for Medicare or Medicaid if you have not done that. There is no significant benefit to the health care community, but certainly a mandated bureaucratic cost on every physician practicing in this country that will offer no long-term benefit to the individual patient. So now you have a doctor walking in. He may have been up all night the night before delivering a baby, carrying this added burden of all of this bureaucratic mess that the affordable/unaffordable care act placed on physicians in this country. Think that has any impact on diagnostic skills, on compassion, on empathy? Think it will impact care? It certainly will. It is going to have a devastating impact. I want my physician focused on me. I do not want him worried about the Federal Government. I do not want him worried about IPAB. I do not want him worried about ICD-10. I do not want him worried about whether or not they have met the requirements of electronic medical records. I want him worried about me. I want him concentrating on me. So we have put this big distraction out there because we know better than the market, than the trained professionals, and the arrogant assumption that we know better than the average American about what they need because we have already told them what they must buy. We have told them, if you do not buy what you must buy, here is the penalty. Thank goodness the young people of this country have figured that out. Which brings us back to the integrity of the statements of the President. What did he say? We have seen all sorts of rationalization evidence: If you like your insurance now you have got, you can keep it. Is that right? Right now, for 5.8 million, and soon to be 15 million Americans that is not true. They knew it was not true when they said it. But it sounded good. Second deceitful thing: If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period. Oh, really? Can I if I did not have individual separate means to keep Chris Logothetis? No, no. You cannot keep your doctor. You can have a new doctor, based on what your insurance company--based on what the pricing mechanism has. You can have one of those doctors. But if your doctor is not on that list, you cannot keep him. So somebody may have delivered all of your babies, taken care of your parents, delivered your babys' babies, cared for your husband's heart attack, knows everything about your family, knows your psychosocial profile, knows your emotional needs, someone who has really been your ally in life--that is gone for millions and millions and millions of Americans. But oh, no: You like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Every one of my colleagues voted against Mike Enzi's bill to allow you to keep your insurance under the grandfather clause. Every one. Mike Enzi knew what was going to happen. He put a bill on the floor. All of my colleagues said: No, we do not want you to be able to keep your insurance. It does not work that way. What about the deceit of this? Is it significant? Sure it is. It is a matter of trust. Third thing. The promise of President Obama, who said, on average, that your health insurance costs will go down $2,500 a year. I do not know who told him that, whether it was Dr. Emanuel or who. I do not know what whiz-bang accountant or financial forecaster told him that. But it is just the opposite of that. Probably the average American is going to spend about $2,500 more trying to get equivalent care to what they had, not keeping their same insurance and not keeping their doctor. Then, finally, the deceit that is assumed but not spoken, is that your doctor is going to make decisions for you and with you about your health care. When the independent advisory board gets going, it will be not only about Medicare, it will be about everybody. If a group of unelected bureaucrats thinks I shouldn't run a non-stress test on a pregnant woman whom I am watching closely and they say I can't do that, I won't be able to do that. We are going to be having a group of people practicing medicine in this country who don't know the patient, don't know the situation, don't have their hands on the patient, haven't ever touched the patient, making decisions about what kind of care that patient will get. When we try to unwind the unaffordable care act, we have a routine chorus of noes. So the consequence is, who is going to be held accountable? A total disruption of the indemnification market in this country is now occurring in terms of health care insurance. When the insurance companies look at what their ratios are in terms of young to old, in terms of higher risk patients who cost more versus younger patients who cost less, they will make a calculation this spring about what their fees will be for next year. The ObamaCare administration did something else deceitful-- intentionally deceitful. Before the election next fall, they don't want you to know how much the health care costs are going to rise, and so they changed the date on which you will make a selection for next year and on which those prices will go through until after the November elections next year because they know that if you know the significant increase in costs that are going to come next year--not just this year but next year--based on the adverse selection and the mix of all of the insurance companies in this country--they know that the rise in your insurance health cost is going to be significant. So what did they do? They passed a little rule, and they changed the day to make the knowledge available to you, the purchaser, come after the election. So you won't be a fully informed voter knowing that your insurance costs are going to rise 20 or 25 percent again next year under the unaffordable care act--the unaffordable care act. We are in a mess in a lot of ways. We are going to continue to see significant disruptions in the health care in this country. We are going to see a continuous decline in the quality of health care in this country--just the opposite of what they promised--because we are disrupting the doctor-patient relationship. I know this, having practiced for 25 years. I know what it takes to really care for someone. I know what it means to be in a room and spend the time that it takes to listen, to find out what is really going on, to find out why the patient is really there. We are going to drive down all of that. We have this payment system in Medicare which pays on the basis of procedure--which is a dumb system--instead of paying on the basis of time that is spent with a patient. What most people don't recognize is that all reimbursements in this country for physicians--unless a doctor is in concierge medicine, which is another thing I will talk about in a minute--force doctors to spend less time with their patients because as we crank down reimbursements, either through Medicaid or through the insurance or through Medicare, and a doctor has fixed overhead which has been markedly expanded under the mandates associated with the Affordable Care Act, less time means less quality care. Less time means less quality care. There was an interesting study done recently about how long--after your doctor comes into the room and asks ``why are you here today?'' how long before you are interrupted because the doctor is in a hurry to get to the next patient. It is 6\1/2\ seconds. So our reimbursement mechanism, mandated by the Federal Government-- another positive aspect of us meddling in the markets--is decreasing the time, the quality, and the quantity of health care that patients rightly deserve when they are sitting in your office. What is the market doing about this? There is this growing expanse of what are called concierge doctors where, for a certain fee, that doctor is yours no matter how many times per year you want to go to him or them. No matter what your needs are, they are available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. How does it work? Well, most people can't afford concierge medicine. It is about $1,000 a year that you pay. Insurance doesn't reimburse you for it. You pay $1,000, and they are available. You get a comprehensive, thorough health care screening exam once a year. All of your tests are included in that as far as blood tests and laboratory tests at a physician's office. Then if you have a need at any time during that year, you have access to that physician. What do we find? The first studies that have come out on that, where we take the time pressure off the doctors and let them actually practice medicine the way they were trained, show that they order 40 percent fewer tests. Isn't that interesting? The axiom in medicine that every doctor is trained with is if you will listen to your patients, they will tell you what is wrong with them, whether it is cancer or diabetes or heart disease or anxiety or depression or hypertension. But it takes time, it takes interaction, and it takes a great differential diagnosis. The unaffordable care act is destroying that. This is why you are seeing this little blurb out in the market where you see concierge medicine because now the reason they are ordering fewer tests is they spend about five times as long with a patient because they are not in a hurry to get to the next patient because they are not making their money by filling out a code and filing it with an insurance company. There is a complete relationship between the physician and their patient. I would like to return to this gentleman named Brian who is from Oklahoma. He and his wife have two children under 5 years of age. They believed what the President said when he told them they would keep their health insurance plan and their doctors if they liked them. Brian recently called my office and said: That isn't true. That was a lie to me. It was deceitful. It was untrue. Brian works in Tulsa, and the company he works for, he felt the insurance cost was too much, so he didn't take insurance from his employer, and he went on the private market and bought, through Community Care in Tulsa, a plan he and his wife could afford. His wife decided to quit working, stay home, and raise their two kids. He was paying a $330 premium, but it didn't cover maternity care, and they didn't want any more children, so he underwent a vasectomy, which is an elective procedure, to make sure he wouldn't have more children. On November 1, Brian received a letter in the mail stating that as of November 1 of this next year he would be terminated from his current plan and he would have to find a plan that satisfied the new mandates that the wisdom of Washington said had to be in there--maternity care. He spent hours on the ACA Web site, and what he found were plans that ranged in costs from $800 to $1,100 per month--four times what he was paying. He can't afford that. He didn't qualify for a subsidy, but he can't afford that. So now what does he do? He had plan for $330 a month that met his needs and covered what he and his wife thought they needed covered. He is a young man. What is going to happen to Brian? Brian is going to get taxed, not because he doesn't want to buy health care, not because he can't afford the $330 or even $400 or $500 a month, but because he can't afford $800 or $1,100 a month. So now Brian is going to be without health care--I am going to say it again: without health care-- and then we are going to fine him, we are going to tax him because we designed a system that took him out of the market. It didn't put him in the market; it took him out of the market. What have we done? We had an opportunity to fix that with the Enzi amendment, to grandfather all of these plans in, and all of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle said no. So here is Brian with a wife at home and two small children under 5, and he is stuck in no man's land. Do you think he thinks President Obama is truthful? No. Does he think those who touted the Affordable Care Act are truthful? No. He has lost confidence in his government. That is really where we are in our country today. We are in a crisis of confidence with Washington. It was never meant to be. If you read the enumerated powers--as a matter of fact, we have an Enumerated Powers Act. It has 36 cosponsors. It says simply that if you bring a bill to the floor, you have to state what section of the Constitution gives you authority to legislate in that area based on what article I, section 8 of the Constitution has to say. Disappointingly, there is not one of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who is a cosponsor of that bill. It doesn't stop you from offering the bill, it just says please reference where in the Constitution you have the authority to legislate in this way. None of our colleagues believe the Constitution has any bearing on what we do by the fact they will not even cosponsor that bill. The very thing our Founders emphasized was our authority to make or change law. That is fundamental, structural to this country. As we have ignored--as does the affordable-unaffordable care act--the enumerated powers, the consequences to our country are monstrous. This book contains, through the middle of November, all the emails my office has gotten on the Affordable Care Act from a State of just 4 million people. We are just 4 million people. There is not much positive in here. As a matter of fact, there is not one positive story in here. They are all stories similar to Brian's and Tina's--identical. Had care; don't have care now. Had an affordable plan; don't have an affordable plan now. Had a doctor; don't have that doctor now. As a matter of fact, one of the stories in here is from somebody who had their doctor for 35 years and can't have that doctor anymore. It is not because the doctor doesn't want the patient, and it is not because the patient doesn't want the doctor. It is because the unaffordable care act has decided that will not work in our system anymore. We have heard through the press that we didn't have any ideas on health care. My colleagues know that isn't true. Senator Baucus stood right over there on December 8, when we tried to bring up the Patients' Choice Act. That did everything in terms of the goals which the Affordable Care Act did, without raising taxes, without disrupting the indemnification market in this country, creating a true safety net for those who could not afford health care, and created auto-enrollment for the irresponsible. We were never allowed to vote on that. It was very similar to what we are seeing now with the Defense authorization bill. We have to pass one, but you can't have your say. My 4 million people don't count when it comes to the Defense authorization bill because they do not like the amendments I might offer. Under the Constitution, it is illegal for the Pentagon not to give a report of how it is spending its money. It is a violation of the Constitution. We have an Audit the Pentagon Act. It has real teeth in it. There is somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion worth of waste a year in the Pentagon. We will never manage the Pentagon if we can't measure what they are doing. Yet we don't get an opportunity to offer that. It is a smart good government amendment. But it is not in there, and it is not ever going to get offered. Why? Because the majority leader in this body has decided he will decide what amendments are offered and what amendments will not be. This is no longer the greatest deliberative body. This is a mimic of the House of Representatives--the exact opposite of what our Founders intended the Senate to be. Their genius was they created a House of Representatives to be responsive to the populace demands of our country. That is why elections are every 2 years for the House of Representatives. When the Senate was first formed, it was an appointed body by the State legislature and it was for a 6-year term. Jefferson wrote the rules--the first rules under which the Senate would operate--and the Senate was designed to make sure there could never be a tyranny of the majority, as we see today; that the minority rights of those in opposition would never be limited. For the first 130 years, it took absolute unanimous consent to do anything in this body. The rules were always changed--when the rules changes were made--with a two-thirds vote of those duly sworn and present, until November of this year. Are things raw in the Senate right now? You bet. And they are going to stay that way because the very genius behind our Founders was to force consensus and compromise in the Senate, something the majority leader doesn't believe in. We saw the raw, brute political power with the unaffordable care act. Not a single Republican voted for that bill. It was forced through with a 60-vote margin in December 2009 on Christmas Eve morning. Now we see more raw, brute political force, not because it had to be that way but because leadership is lacking, an understanding of the traditions and history of the Senate. Carl Levin explained why he didn't agree with that. We didn't listen to one of the senior Members who has been here a long time, who understands the history of the Senate, and so consequently we find ourselves in a situation where consensus is not derived, the mechanism to force consensus has been diminished, long-term thought goes out the window, and bipartisanship will as well. I wish to spend another minute or two talking about the Defense Authorization Act and the waste in the Pentagon. A little over 1 year ago I put out a report on the Pentagon. In the Pentagon's budget is $67 billion a year which the Pentagon spends on items that have nothing to do with defending this country. I put out that report in the hopes the Senate Armed Services Committee would look at that report and say: We ought to take all this out of the Defense Department. Do my colleagues realize the Defense Department has 112 science, technology, engineering, and math programs--110 separate programs. That doesn't have anything to do with defending the country. They have 138 green energy programs, spending billions of dollars every year on them. That should be at the Department of Energy, not in the Pentagon. It costs $50,000 a year to educate a child on a military base in this country--four and a half times what it costs to educate anybody anywhere else in this country. That doesn't have anything to do with defending the country either. Why? So we have $67 billion that not one aspect of was acted on in the Defense Authorization bill. That was not taken out. Let's have the military defend this country and not do all these other things that don't have anything to do with defending the country. Oh, by the way, if we moved that $67 billion out, it is estimated we could save about $15 billion in overhead absorption by moving medical research to the NIH, where it belongs, instead of the billions of dollars we send to the Pentagon for medical research that doesn't have anything to do with extraneous diseases that our combat forces might encounter in odd places around the world. So $67 billion, and we could have saved $15 billion. That $15 billion is three-quarters of what the new ``agreement'' between the House and the Senate on the budget for the next 2 years is. We could have saved that. That is $15 billion that would have paid for training; $15 billion that would have bought more ships; $15 billion that would have worked on missile defense, now that we are going to need it since Iran is going to eventually be armed with a missile-based nuclear weapon. But we didn't do it. We have the Government Accountability Office that in the last 3 years has identified duplication throughout the Federal Government coming close to the tune of $250 billion. One committee in the House has actually acted on their report. Of that $250 billion, perhaps $50 billion or $40 billion could be saved by eliminating some duplication. Yet not one committee in the Senate acted on the recommendations of the Government Accountability Office to eliminate duplication--not one. Not one bill came to the floor. We have tried to insert a lot of it, but we can't offer amendments anymore. We don't have the opportunity--the 4 million people in Oklahoma--to have a say on what happens. They see what is not happening, and they wonder why we don't fix these things. Let me create a scenario for a minute. What do my colleagues think would happen in the country if we actually did the things the Government Accountability Office recommends we do? What would the people think if we eliminated the duplication, if we eliminated the fraud, if we eliminated the waste? The confidence of the American people in this Congress would rise because we are actually addressing the problems. We are actually addressing the key components that put us in deficit every year. It is true--my colleagues all tell me--the biggest problem is our entitlements. That is true. But it doesn't mean we don't worry about the smaller problems. As a matter of fact, I am reminded--as I see the Presiding Officer in the Chair--that I owe Senator King some information on some programs I forgot to give him that he asked me for in November. But if in fact we did all those things, if our committees were charged, through the leadership of this body, to eliminate the duplication, consolidate the programs, and save the money because we need the money right now, we need to not be charging it to our children, what would happen to the confidence in this country? It would rise. We would actually be doing what the people expect us to do. Nobody in the real world gets to do what we do--ignore the real problems, don't act on the real problems and say: It is too hard. It is too difficult. I yearn for bipartisanship, for consensus. I yearn for a system that forces us into consensus--not all my way, not all somebody else's way but somewhere in the middle. That requires using the rules of the Senate and a long-term vision of where our country needs to be going and not caring about what a political career looks like but caring about what our country looks like. We have lost focus on what is important. It is not my career, it is not the career of the distinguished Senator from Iowa, it is what happens to our country. We have our eye on the wrong ball. I do too. I admit it. We degenerate to the easiest thing to be critical about. I am human. I admit to that as well. It doesn't have to be that way. Mr. President, I see that the majority leader and several others are on the floor. I yield the floor in anticipation of our vote.

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Senator from Texas. I have worked on these areas for a long time. I too am a defense hawk. I am not often accused of that because I am critical of wasteful spending in the Pentagon. Let me outline for my colleagues that the Pentagon's budget is near $600 billion, counting the extra money for overseas efforts today. Just by auditing the Pentagon, the GAO estimates the Pentagon itself would save $25 billion. The only branch of the Pentagon that has come close to an audit so far is the Marine Corps. For every dollar they are spending now on managing, they are saving $3 in the Marine Corps. So we have repeated attempts through the year to address the symptoms of the problems rather than the real problem. Let me outline that. The Pentagon has a broken procurement system. If we think about the programs which have been canceled and the penalties paid because of the programs which have been canceled--and Senator McCain can talk about those better than I ever could--we have never fixed the real problem, and the real problem is what Eisenhower warned against. It is the defense industrial complex. The only way we will ever solve the procurement problem of major weapons systems is to force the defense industry to have capital at risk on new weapons systems. In other words, they have to have money in the game. What routinely happens are two things: One is they don't have money in the game and we start out at cost-plus programming. Then the second problem--which Senator McCain identified with me today and I have long known--is there is never a grownup in the room when it comes to adding on the bells and whistles in terms of the costs. As a matter of fact, half of the major weapons systems the Pentagon is buying today are on the high-risk list by GAO. So what we have to do is fix the real problems, not continue to treat the symptoms. Let me run through a list in terms of savings in the Pentagon. These are not 1-year but 10-year numbers. So if we instituted this, we would save one-tenth of what I mention. Just consolidation of the defense IT structure could save $160 billion over the next 10 years. There are 80,000 employees working in IT for the Pentagon. That is twice the population of my hometown. They have more data centers in the Pentagon than we have in all the rest of the government combined. As a matter of fact, Senator Bennet and I have coauthored a bill to reduce those data centers. They are not highly utilized. They are very expensive to run. They also put us at risk for cyber security. The other thing not mentioned about IT is in weapons system procurement we have other ITs that aren't even counted in this, managing those procurement programs. If we took the V-22 Osprey we have on order and replaced it with MH- 60 helicopters--which can accomplish almost exactly the same thing--we can save $600 million a year, every year, over the next 10 years. Boeing doesn't like that--Boeing and their partner in contracting don't like that. But there hasn't been a weapons systems we have deployed that has had as many problems as the V-22 Osprey. Yet we are going to buy more, rather than a proven vehicle transport system which can accomplish almost everything the Osprey can. It is not the latest, it is not the newest, but it actually accomplishes the goal. If we reduce the spending for other procurement programs--and let me say why this is important. The Defense Logistics Agency has no idea what they have in inventory. There is a public law which says they will have an inventory. They have ignored it for years. So they have never taken an inventory. It is ``too big'' to take an inventory. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of equipment and parts and supplies at the DLAs, at the depots around the country, that are in excess and we continue to buy new parts for because we don't know we have them. Fix the real problem. That is $52 billion over the next 10 years. If, in fact, we took nonmilitary jobs at the Pentagon being filled by uniformed personnel today and replace them with civilian Federal employees, we would save $53 billion over the next 10 years. These do not require a trained soldier to do these jobs. That is $5 billion a year. That is 10 percent of the sequester on the Pentagon. All we have to do is to decide to do it. Do it. But we will not do it. If we reduced contractor support and did more stuff internally by the military--and I will give a great story. Offutt Air Force Base in southwest Oklahoma, C-17 training. The most recent commander down there saved $136 million the first year he tried in running that base. He got the heck kicked out of him for doing it by the higher-ups because they wanted him spending all the money. But what he did is demonstrate there was $136 million we could save on that one base. The question is, Where is the leadership to do that? So we could save that $53 billion--$37 billion in terms of decreasing contract support. If we just consolidated the three military health care services, we would save $380 million a year. At the same facilities, at the same locations we have duplicative military health care services. So we can consolidate that, give more consistent care, give better care, and yet save a significant amount of money. The Department of Defense has over 104 science, technology, engineering, and math programs. Governmentwide we have 207. Over half of them are at the Department of Defense. Why 104 from the Department of Defense? Why not one that incentivizes science, technology, engineering, and math? If we consolidated them, we could save $1.7 billion over the next 10 years. That is $170 million a year. What will that do for the operations and maintenance budget? What will that do for flying time for our pilots? What will it do for training that is not happening now for people deploying to Afghanistan? Those should all happen. Domestic schools. We have 16 bases that still have domestic schools on them, where we run schools by the Pentagon. The cost per student in the United States is $50,000 per student, five times what we spend everywhere else in this country on elementary and high school education. If we just ran those in the local school district and paid them $1,000 or $2,000 more than their average cost, we would save over the next 10 years $9.8 billion. We would save $1 billion a year. If we consolidated the DOD-administered grocery and retail stores-- and, by the way, Walmart has offered to do that, to offer the same prices--we lose money every year on those, and that doesn't include the cost of running them. When we have gone out to price things against the grocery store or Costco or Walmart or everywhere else, we can actually buy it as cheaply in the private sector as we can at a base PX. The point is here is a perceived benefit which is costing us a lot of money but isn't truly there.

Mr. COBURN. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. COBURN. There are a lot of ideas. No. 1, our biggest problem is when we buy, we don't know what we want. So don't even start a proposal until we truly know what we want. That is No. 1. No. 2 is there has to be capital at risk by the person building the ship or building the airplane. The only way to incentivize the private industry to control cost is to make sure half the cost is coming out of their hide. If we do that, what will happen is we will see real cost control because they don't do it on the commercial side. They only do it on the military side. The third thing is having a grownup in the room when we decide to make modifications. The fact is, when we think we have an unlimited budget, nobody is there to say: You don't have an unlimited budget. You can't add this. It may be nice. There is a great story on that. It was an Army backpack helicopter developed by Honeywell--on time, on price. Here is Honeywell delivering what the Army wanted on time and on price, and the military buyers added bells and whistles. It ended up weighing 12 pounds more, tripling the cost, and delaying the onset, to where they finally cancelled it-- not because the supplier didn't supply it on time and on price, but the military was out of control in terms of what they were asking for. So they didn't get it. So we didn't have the availability to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to look behind walls, which was available and on time. But it was our purchasing system. So we can't worry about the symptoms. We have to change the structure. We have to change the leadership. I will make one final point. Right now we have more admirals than we have ships. At the end of World War II, we had 10,500,000 people under arms, we had over 2,200 general staff officers. Today, we have half that many and 1,500,000 in arms. There is one of the big problems. One of the biggest problems is that we have way too many staff officers-- general staff officers who each have a cadre of people and then protect their turf. They don't protect the country, they protect their turf, and that is not to take anything away from their service. It is human nature. What we need is a marked reduction in general officers.