Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Senator from Arizona for the time to speak on his budget, and I yield.

Mr. COBURN

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, as somebody who is still practicing medicine, I wish to tell you, we see comparative effectiveness every day. We cannot even get recertified unless we know comparative effectiveness. The NIH last year spent $267 million on comparative effectiveness research, not associated with cost but based on quality outcomes. What is in this bill is a short-term look to say who is going to cookie- cutter cut a way to practice medicine that a bureaucrat will say is the best way, rather than what the science says. There is no question we have tons of waste. The biggest inhibition for anybody getting into the health care system today is cost. The chairman of the Finance Committee is right, there is tons of waste. The reason there is tons of waste is 61 percent of the health care in this country is controlled by the Government today. I can document it fully, each component of it, 61 percent. It is designed to create the mess we are in. If you want to change this system to where we get better value for the dollars we put into health care, let's create a clear, transparent, competitive market where you know quality and you know cost before you ever enter it. That is a goal we can all agree on. We should know what it costs, and we know what the quality parameters should be. What comparative effectiveness as outlined by the acting head of the NIH is, what is the cheapest treatment we can do to get it there? Not what is best for the patient in consideration of that patient's particular needs and what is the best thing the doctor could recommend. There are conflicts of interest. I do not deny that. Here is the No. 1 thing that comparative effectiveness fails to remember: Everybody thinks we can take the science over here and we can fix everybody. Well, I have news for you. Medicine is 40 percent art. Since we will not pay for physicians and providers to take the time to listen to their patients, to actually know what is going on with them, we have created a system where we spend a ton of money that does not have anything to do with a better outcome for the patients. Two examples. Two patients in the last 4 years in my own practice, denied, under comparative effectiveness, MRIs; did not have a hard sign at all, had soft signs. Both of them had cancer of the brain. Both insurance companies and Medicare denied that they needed an MRI because it did not match with the guidelines. That goes to show you that when you just use guidelines, you are not going to really care for the patients. The art of medicine has to be included. Comparative effectiveness never considers the art of medicine. That is 40 percent of taking care of people and giving them great health care and great outcomes. This amendment is a good amendment. The reason it should be there is we seek comparative effectiveness. You cannot get reboard certified unless you know comparative effectiveness, at every chance, at every corner, for every disease. Do we need more? Yes. But we are spending billions every year on comparative effectiveness research. We finished a 7-year study on the heart. You know what it told us after we spent $100 million on that study? We do not have the answer on which is the best. A double-blind, progressive, controlled study, and we do not have the answer. What makes us think some bureaucrats can take less research and come to a better conclusion than the best scientists in this country? What we are looking for is an answer in the wrong place. The way we fix health care in this country is to truly allow doctor and patient relationships that will take advantage of the scientific advances that are out there and do so in a transparent way, where you know quality and you know price. It is called performance for pay, rather than pay for performance. If you perform, you get paid more. If you do not perform, you do not. We apply market forces to everything we are doing, much less so since the new administration came in, but if we would apply that, we would have a tremendous advantage in terms of quality outcomes in this country. I support the amendment and yield back the remainder of time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I would be happy to. I would like to have 1 minute to wind up the one point.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I will be happy to yield.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent to speak on the budget until the time should come up for the UC and not to exceed 15 minutes.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, if we have a unanimous consent agreement, I will cease the discussion.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, first off, I thank the chairman for his graciousness. If you are sitting at home right now and you have a job and you see the tough times that are out there, or you are sitting at home and looking for a job, one of the things you are doing is you are starting to say: Here is what is coming in and here are the mandatory things that have to go out, and you are starting to prioritize. We have a budget before us that prioritizes two things. It prioritizes growing the Federal Government by a huge amount over the next 10 years. If you were running a business and you were at these times, the last thing you would do is go borrow money to expand a business into a market that is not growing. Yet we have before us the biggest budget in the history of the country--a budget that will, in fact, double the debt that is going to our kids over the next 5 years and triple it over the next 10 years. It does not fit what any of us would do with our own families' budgets or our own businesses' budgets. Why is it we are afraid to say that what we really need to do is live within our means? Instead, we are going to have a $1.7 trillion, maybe a $1.8 trillion, maybe even a $2 trillion deficit this year and something very close to that next year. Instead of cutting some of the $380 billion of documented waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the Federal Government, we are not looking at it at all. When President Obama ran for the office, he said one of the things he was going to do was a line-by-line item analysis of every Department, at every area, to make sure it was effective and efficient at accomplishing the task it was set out to do. We have not seen any of that, and there is none of that in this budget. If, in fact, we were to do that, here is what we would find. We would find $50 billion worth of wasted money at the Pentagon. There is no effort to do that in this budget.

Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. COBURN. I ask if we could bring up some amendments. They would be voted in the vote-arama, and I have no problem with that, not wanting a specific vote before that, but we could get them up and get them pending.

Mr. COBURN. Every one of them has been filed.

Mr. COBURN. Thank you. We have $80 billion worth of fraud in Medicare. Yet we are going to talk about health care, but we are not going to fix the problem with Government-run health care and the fraud that is associated with it. We have $40 billion in Medicaid. There is no attachment to do that. So what we are doing is we are not trimming spending anywhere, we are going to raise taxes significantly, and we are going to grow the Federal Government in a time when we can least afford to grow it. The idea that we can have prosperity out of the Government instead of out of our own individual efforts is counterintuitive to everything this country stands for. With that, I will carry on my debate at a later time, and I thank the Chair.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to spend some time tonight talking about the budget that is before us as well as some good Government things we can do. If you are a typical American family, husband and wife working and you are bringing home $3,500 a month, and all of a sudden one of you gets a cut in pay, where now you are bringing $3,000 a month home, what is the first thing you do? The first thing you do, knowing the kind of economic times we are in, is you start saying: What is necessary and what is not? Where can we make up this difference? What can we not spend money on so that, in fact, we are not using our credit cards to finance a living standard that is less than what we have today? Almost every family in America would do that. They would go through and they would say: Well, utilities are important, food is important, clothing for the kids is important, automobile repair, gasoline is important, but building a new addition onto our house isn't important right now. It needs to wait. Going to the movies may not be important. Going out to eat may not be important, in terms of a list of priorities. Every family would look at what their expenditures are and say: Where do we cut spending? This budget does exactly the opposite of that. We have markedly declining revenues, and we are going to increase spending $1.3 trillion. The net effect of that is not so much that we might want to do good things for people, but it is that we are going to be doing those good things by taking the money--not from us and not even from our kids--but from our grandkids. So within this budget--the real budget, the Obama budget--are the plans for us to grow Government spending over the next 10 years to a level we have never seen before and at a rate of growth we have never seen before. Why would we do that? We wouldn't do it with our own home and our own family; we certainly wouldn't do that with our own business. Why is it Congress thinks, and this budget purports, that we can borrow our way and spend our way out of financial difficulty? The fact is, we can't. We cannot do that. It is impossible for us to do that. The dread secondary effect of that is to cripple potential growth in the future. Let me explain how that works. As we go from $11 trillion in debt to $30 trillion in debt, what is going to happen to us? How much inflation ultimately will come about because we do that kind of borrowing? Well, what will happen is everything you have and everything you try to buy will cost more and everything you own will be worth less. So what we are doing is we are generationally thieving, stealing money for us today so we don't have as much problem recognizing the pain. What is called for in our country today is not growing the Government, it is shrinking the Government. Here is what we do know, according to GAO and IG reports that are published and that any American can find: that out of the money we do spend every year, at least $380 billion of it is lost to fraud, duplication or waste. Nowhere in this budget is there any attention to any of that; not one place is there attention to it. My friend, President Obama, campaigned on the fact that the first thing he was going to do was a line-by-line analysis of every department of every program and get rid of the things that don't work and the things that work marginally, make them better. Well, that comes up to $380 billion. That is what it comes up to. Tonight I am going to introduce a series of amendments--I know they can't be called up by the unanimous consent agreement we are operating under, but they will be voted on during our votes tomorrow--that are plain common sense and that we would all do with our own business or with our own family; that we would actually put into place. The first thing we would do is we wouldn't give somebody a bonus who is repairing our house who didn't repair our house. Yet every year in this country, this Government pays out about $7 billion to bonuses to people who didn't perform. We create a reserve fund so we don't do that anymore. Let me give some examples. We have paid $8 billion to contractors for nonperformance bonuses--they didn't perform but got paid bonuses anyhow--in the Defense Department. Why would we continue to do that? I will put into the Record throughout the evening the line-by-line areas associated with that. The first amendment says we are going to quit paying for performance that we didn't get, so we will save $8 billion a year, or $80 billion over the next 10 years. It will get voted on, and everybody will vote for it, but then in conference it will get stripped out. That is the game we are playing in the Senate this week. Anything that passes, and we put it in, we will take it out in conference. Why would we continue to pay extra money for something that didn't perform the way it was supposed to? I am not talking about not paying the bills--that is a totally different question--and about absolutely not meeting the contract. I will give you an example. The Census Department had a contract--a no-bid contract with Harris Corporation--for hand-held recorder devices for the census. Oversight hearings were done in the Senate, and we said: What is your plan B if it doesn't work? They said it is going to work, no problem. Now we have spent $700 billion and paid $26 million in bonuses for something that doesn't work and will not be used by the census. Why would we do that and allow that to continue to happen? The Government is rife with that. So why would we not put a prohibition into the budget that has teeth, which says we are not going to pay bonuses for work that didn't meet performance standards? Yet we will vote on it, and it will get jerked right out when it goes to conference because of the connectedness of the elite in this country. The second thing I have an amendment for creates a reserve fund so we will do exactly what President Obama said we would do and that is a line-by-line analysis of every Government program: Does it work? Is it accomplishing what it is supposed to? If it is not, we should be eliminating it or fixing it. That may or may not pass. But it will get pulled out, even though that was a campaign promise--not only in the campaign, but in his inaugural statement, as well as in his statement to the Nation. He has embraced the very idea that we need to do that. Everybody knows we need to do that. If you are running a business and have hard times, you go through what is not working and get rid of it. But we don't do that in the Federal Government. One of the other amendments we will have says we will apply metrics to every program we have. In other words, we will say here is the goal, and we will put in measurements as to whether we are achieving the goal. Then we can, for sure, tell what we are doing. The fact is that 50 percent of the programs aren't living up; 12 programs, specifically, have been on the warning list by the GAO for 10 years, and Congress has done nothing about that. The reason is because they don't want to put a metric system in because they don't know what it is. It might cause them to lose a vote with somebody if, in fact, it is not an effective program. The third amendment is to offer a reserve fund to set up metrics, so that when we do that and see that things aren't working, we can get rid of them. The fourth amendment we will offer is another one President Obama advocated. He said this time after time and he believes it and I believe it. The question is whether we will do it. There ought not to be any no-bid contracts for anything above $25 million. We mandate that there has to be competitive bidding. It is interesting that when we passed the stimulus, we all voted for it, but when it came out of conference, there was no competitive bidding requirement in the over $870 billion worth of spending. What does that mean to the average taxpayer? That means you are not going to get good value for the money we are spending. So there is no mandate, even though that is a commitment that was made, and we should live up to it. So we will have an amendment that says no bonuses if you don't earn it; No. 2, line-by-line going through the budget; No. 3, metrics performance measurements; No. 4, competitive bidding. Then, finally, an amendment I will offer is something that will make a real difference in people's lives today. The Senator from Texas and I worked on that during the stimulus. What it says is that if you have an IRA or 401(k) and you are underwater on your mortgage and you have money in that 401(k) or IRA and you want to take that money and apply it to your primary residence mortgage, where you are underwater, you can do that without a 10-percent penalty. In other words, we are not going to penalize you for taking out money you have saved to get yourself out of trouble today. That will be a controversial amendment, I am sure. The fact is, that is something that would make a big difference for families because they have money locked up, but we have such a harsh penalty for them to take it out; they have to give the Government 10 percent so they can use it to get themselves out of trouble on their mortgage. There will be two other amendments I will offer. One will be with Senator McCain on an alternative budget, which describes what we should do, and it will save over $3.5 trillion, compared to this budget, which shrinks the size of the Federal Government and doesn't allow it to grow in terms of nondiscretionary spending, except for defense and veterans. It puts a cap on how fast it can grow. It doesn't raise taxes like this budget does. The last thing we should be doing--we know the history of what we did wrong in the 1930s and at other times--is raising taxes on individuals and corporations at a time when we are in a deep recession. That is exactly the wrong tax policy to create jobs. So we will be offering all those amendments come tomorrow. The draft budget increases the veterans spending by $25 billion over 5 years to take care of the commitments we have made to our veterans. It increases the defense spending, which we need to do rather than decrease it, in terms of real dollars, $190 billion. It decreases some of our real problems, which is our mandatory spending in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, by $3.2 trillion less than what the President's budget and this budget will portend. It doesn't play any games with AMT, as far as paying for it. It doesn't raise taxes. It will reduce the cumulative deficit, over the next 10 years, by $3.5 trillion. It also will give us $3.5 trillion less debt. It is a budget that reflects a family's budget, that reflects the real times we are in, and it is a budget that says we recognize that if we are going to do something for our kids and grandkids, some sacrifice has to come now. Will people peel at it and shoot at it? You bet. The fact is, we have a way too big Federal Government. It is highly inefficient. It wastes at least 10 percent of everything it does every year--at least. That is a very conservative estimate. What we are going to put forward is a budget that doesn't do any of those things. When we waste $80 billion a year through fraud in Medicare, think what that means. That means 20 percent of the money spent in Medicare is defrauded. Our biggest problem is we are not going to be able to keep up with Medicare. Yet we have 20 percent of it that we are not doing a thing about in getting rid of fraud and improper payments. We have at least $40 billion in terms of Medicaid. We have a Medicaid Program here and a health care program that will save the States $880 billion over the next 10 years, and the Federal Government $400 billion over the next 10 years. That is $1.3 trillion. It will cover everybody at a level, where every doctor--no matter who they are--will take their insurance and will take the stamp of being a Medicaid patient right off their forehead, and nobody will ever know they are a Medicaid patient because they will have an insurance card just like everybody else. We can buy for them something better than they have and also save $1.3 trillion. Why wouldn't we want to do that? That is in our budget. Why wouldn't we want to do that? Why wouldn't we want to create the opportunity so people will have an option? Instead of going to a nursing home, they can have a program that gives them in-home care, and we can still save money. Going back to what we were talking about on bonuses, do you realize that CMS paid out $322 million last year to nursing homes that were also on their list as substandard nursing homes? Think about that. We paid out in excess of $300 million in bonuses to nursing homes that had significant problems in terms of giving the care and meeting Medicare standards in the first place, but we still paid it. Why? Why wouldn't we fix that? We don't want to. It is hard to fix--except our budget would fix that. This budget will cause us to not waste as much money. This budget recognizes that we have real problems in our country, and the way to get out of it is not to borrow more money and spend more money. It is to be frugal and learn what we were taught by our grandmothers: If you have a penny, spend it wisely. If you have a dollar, don't spend it all. If you get fortunate enough to get more than a dollar, make sure you are saving something for the future. We all know that is right, but we don't apply it to the Federal Government. Consequently, what will happen is the standard of living of our grandchildren will erode. We are in a seminal moment in this country, where we are going to become on an equal basis with Europe. What does that mean? That means the standard of living in this country is getting ready to drop 30 percent, both by what we spend and the printed money that will come after that in terms of the inflation that will devalue everybody else's assets in this country. There are a lot of ways to run this Government, but the way we are running it now wouldn't pass muster anywhere in anybody's household. Nobody would throw 10 percent of their money away every year. Nobody would give bonuses to people who didn't deserve it. Nobody would not make measurements about what they are doing to see if it was working. We need a change. The seminal moment is coming. We may not win the budget battle but, in fact, if we don't win the budget battle, the problems are just going to be that much more severe. The debt load we will carry with this President's budget will shackle the next two generations in this country for their entire lifetime. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I have just a few observations before we start the vote. This has been a long process on this bill. I appreciate the pain and patience of the chairman of the committee. He has been a gentleman to work with all the time in our discussions. I also note for the Senate that over 70 of these bills could have gone by unanimous consent, but because we chose to have a procedure where up until now, over the last 2 years, no amendments were ever allowed to be offered on any of these bills--none; it was never an option--we have taken approximately 7 weeks on something we could have done in 2 weeks if we had an open amendment process like the Senate is supposed to. We find ourselves ping-ponging between the House and the Senate because we want to avoid the very purpose for which we are here, which is open debate and amendment. It should be a lesson to us. The American people win when there is a debate. They lose when we use unanimous consent to pass something that is controversial. To say it is not, the average we got on our amendments was 31 votes. That is almost a third of the Senate. So to say we should pass legislation by unanimous consent when a third of the Senate does not agree, I would say there is a great lesson for us and that is, let's open up, let's have a debate, let's put a short period of time on it, and let's not have to use procedures to try to, in fact, get a debate for the American people. I will also say, in looking at this bill, what have we done? There are a lot of good provisions in this bill. I am not opposed to half of this bill. Half of this bill I am adamantly opposed to. I was thinking, as we recognize the Republican and Democratic staff, who is representing truly the American people rather than parochial interests and what staff worked on that? We went through this. We rejected transparency for the American people. We rejected the ability to know what we have and how to deal with it and how to manage it. We have said no by a vote of this body that we are not going to do that; we like the darkness, the lack of accountability, the lack of transparency that goes to the American people. We rejected eliminating earmarks. Every appropriator voted against that amendment, even though the President says and the American people say that is not the way they want to do business. But we rejected it. We have rejected significant amounts of potential renewable energy. Ninety percent of all geothermal, potential renewable clean energy, is put at risk by what we are doing. I know that is disputable, but our own Secretary of the Interior this week said we should not put the cart before the horse. We should have good planning on where we are going with transmission lines, the grids, and everything else, so we can take advantage of solar, wind, and geothermal. But yet we have rejected that. We have rejected prioritizing the needs of our national parks. That is what the Senate has done this week. We said: No, we are not going to do that, if we want to do something new, even though we have between $12 billion and $19 billion worth of backlogs, as the Government Accountability Office said we have significant health and safety risks for our employees and the American public who visit our parks--we rejected that. We said: No, we should not take care of what we have now before we start something new. We have done exactly the opposite of what the average American would be doing with their own assets. The other thing we have done is we have taken a large amount of oil and natural gas and said you can never touch it again. Let me emphasize why. Of the 80 wilderness bills my colleagues put in this legislation, 35 of them, under the Wilderness Study Area they said they never should be put into the wilderness, and my colleagues put them in the wilderness anyway. The whole project of having the Wilderness Study Area is to use the study to determine if an area should be wilderness. Not counting Colorado and Utah, my colleagues put 448,000 acres into wilderness that the study says should never go into wilderness area because they have significant oil and gas and other energy. We rejected the process by which we do it because parochial interests have trumped the national energy needs of this country, and that does not count Colorado and Utah. Utah has a significant area. So probably well over 35 percent of all the land my colleagues have taken away and said forever we are never going to touch, we are never going to utilize the natural resources that this country could utilize when we are sending $400 billion a year overseas for carbon-based energy which we are going to do for the next 20 years no matter what, you have taken it away. You said never. As I said earlier, you have taken clean renewables. We don't know what the percentage is but a significant percentage of geothermal for sure. A bill is going to be introduced that is going to take several hundred thousand acres out of the California desert by the Senator from California which is prime land for solar. It is getting ready to be introduced so that can never be touched. We have to have energy, and we are ignoring assets that we have. We are putting into wilderness area assets that have significant energy. We are ignoring the process under which we said we would make those determinations. When well over 35 of the 80 were recommended they not be put into wilderness area, what are the American people to think? Where is the common sense to say maybe we ought to plan for the future? Maybe we ought to look and say: If we are going to go to a renewable portfolio totally of energy in this country, how long is it going to take us to get there and what do we need in between now and then to do that? We are not making good long-term decisions with this bill. We are handicapping ourselves, and we are telling the Middle East: Go ahead and jack it up because we are going to limit our options with which we can balance energy needs in this country by what we are doing in this bill. Finally, we have said in this bill eminent domain is going to be utilized. We say we are not going to do it, but we certainly said: American landowner, if we are there and if we decide we want to do something, we are going to keep it. The fact is, one of the most painful things that occurs to an American citizen in this country is your land, without your permission, even though you are paid an equitable price for it, is taken from you. We said that is fine. We rejected that. Thirty-five Senators voted to not reject it but 60-some voted to reject it. Let me summarize. We like our earmarks. We don't want to think long term on energy. We reject policies that say we should not put land into the wilderness area, but we do it anyway. We have taken away our ability to handle the next energy crisis, which is coming. We have told the American people we are going to keep eminent domain and, by the way, it doesn't matter if you own property, we will take it if we need it. Besides all that, we have now more land area in wilderness in this country than we have developed land. There is 108 million acres now in wilderness in this country and only 106 million acres of developed land. When do we have enough? When do we stop tying our arm behind our back in terms of energy, whether it is renewable or carbon based? When do we do that? Is it wise and prudent to say we should not leave all options on the table for our energy needs for the future, whether it is green energy or traditional energy? Why would we send that signal to the rest of the world? And why would we do that to the American taxpayers? What is going to happen on energy prices in this country is natural gas is going to double in the next 2 years, and it is going to double for a couple of reasons. One is because they cannot afford to drill for it right now at $4. No. 2, we are taking a large swath, 13 million cubic feet, one area you have isolated, enough to run this country for 2\1/2\ years. It is proven, we know it is there, it is easy to get out, we don't have to do a whole lot more drilling, but you can't have it. We have taken 300 million barrels of oil in that same area and said: America, you can't have it. We know its there, its not hard to get out, but you can't have it. And that is just in one of the ranges we are setting off to the side and not making available to the American public to lower their energy costs, to balance the supply-and-demand imbalance we will see in the future. It is important that this bill was put together by combining what individuals wanted for their States. I know some of these land and water rights issues are complicated. I know the exchanges are hard, and I know protecting things in the right way is important. I know it is to the Senator from Idaho, the Senator from Alaska, and the Senator from New Mexico. But when does the overall best benefit for the American people start trumping things around here instead of what we want parochially? I think we have two diseases. I think we have attention deficit disorder in the Senate to what the real problems are, so I think we need to be in a 12-step program to correct that. Then I think we have hyperparochialism in the sense that what is most important is what is important in my State; be danged what happens to the rest of the country. Our country is failing in a lot of areas now, and most of it is our fault. But what we will ultimately fail on is when we start thinking more about individual States than the best long-term benefit for the country. This bill is a classic example where we put parochial interests ahead of the long-term interests of the country. I worry about the grandchildren of this country. This is an $11 billion bill with $900 million in mandatory spending. When we have all these things we need to do that are a much higher priority, we are going to do this now. I am disappointed in us because we don't think long term, that we think short term. It is beneath the oath we take when we continue to do this. I want to be proud of what we do, and I want us to be above the influence of any short-term, any parochial, or any political decision. The people in this body know me, that I go after Republican projects as much as Democrats. I go on the basis of what I think is in the best long-term interest. That is not to say my colleagues don't too, but as a collective body we have not been doing that. And we are not going to fix the real problem in our country, which is the economy. It is amazing to me that we are spending time on this bill instead of fixing the economic problems of this country; that we are sitting here and we have spent a total of 7 weeks in the last 3 or 4 months on this bill rather than working on the real problems and the real needs of this country. The long-term future of our country is at great risk today, and I am not just talking economically. When we choose to protect home--i.e. State or city or earmark--at the expense of the long-term interest of our country, we won't last. What has made this country great throughout its years is we have had leaders who have said: The heck with my position. What is best for the country should come first. The irony of that--and it is really paradoxical--is, when people see that, we restore confidence. When they see the opposite of that, they lose confidence in us. And we ought to be about restoring the American people's confidence. They are rattled today. They are rattled over the economy. They are rattled over their confidence in us, and we ought to be about restoring that. I don't think this bill does that. I appreciate the patience of my colleagues. I have great respect for you. I know your sincere desires. But I truly think we need some coaxing to get our eye back on the ball. Madam President, I yield the floor--I understand we will not vote until 12:20--and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I won't spend the time to refute all of what the distinguished Senator from California said, other than to note that in 1924 the salmon were gone from that river; before any of the water canals or anything else was built. We are going to spend $30,000 a fish based on the 300,000 salmon. More importantly, this amendment talks about five total different earmarks in this bill. My office had a conversation with the mayor of St. Augustine, FL, this morning. Here are his words: I am really worried about the fiscal nature of this country. I am really worried that we are in real trouble, but I still want my money. Well, the way a republic dies is when the constituency learns they can vote themselves money from the public Treasury regardless of what the overall financial situation of the country is. These are the main earmarks in this bill. The President has said he doesn't want a bill full of earmarks. This strips them all out. We can either do what the American people want--we can act fiscally responsibly--or we can continue the age-old process of putting our positions ahead of those of the constituents we represent. With that, I yield the floor and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, the chairman is correct. I will gladly accept a voice vote.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, that argument rings hollow. The two of you sitting right there have the power to amend and change this and fix it with what your concerns are. It hasn't been offered once. You say you are for it. You have the power to change it to meet what you think are problems with the amendment. Yet there has been no offer to do that. That says one of two things: Either you don't want us to have this information or you are claiming a false claim that there is a defect with the amendment. You have every ability to change this, offer an amendment, modify it with my consent to meet your needs, but it has never been offered. The real fact is, we don't want the information. We can't manage 650-plus million acres; we can't manage millions of facilities without the information. We are going to sit here in the dark of night and continue to throw darts, missing the dart board all the time with what we do when we don't have this information. I yield back the balance of my time and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to rebut some of what the Senator from New Mexico said in terms of the real property reform. What you heard in his statements is a profound admission that we do not have the information right now. We do not have it. We have over 650 million acres of land, we have over 21,000 empty buildings now that we know of. That is just a guess. How, in a time when we are going to run a $2.2 trillion deficit this year, can we say we do not want the tools to manage the real property in this country. The Executive order has not done it. It was basically about buildings, Federal buildings. I worked with the OMB on that 3 years ago to set that up. Much to the avail, we now know we have the 21,000 buildings, but the Senate continues to block any real property reform so we cannot get some of the $18 billion we are wasting every year on those 21,000 buildings. We cannot get any of them sold; we cannot dispose of any of them; we cannot even raze any of the ones that need to be razed. The very fact that we would oppose having the information we need to make real decisions, frugal financial decisions with America's taxpayer dollars, at a time when we are in an economic malaise, and have a deficit that is going to be $6,000 to $7,000 per every individual in this country is amazing to me. This requires 1 year of hard work and requires very little work anyway after that. So it is not an onerous task. But even if it were an onerous task, the thing we ought to be doing is getting the information with which to make good management decisions, which we continue to not want to have, so it can be an excuse so we can do what we want to do without knowing what the facts are. Nobody would run any organization without trying to know about their assets. Yet we are going to refuse to list out and know what we own, where it is, where we are behind, what needs to get fixed, and what does not need to get fixed. Common sense would dictate that if, in fact, you have a large number of assets and a limited budget, and it is going to get more limited as the years progress given the tremendous borrowing, the tremendous taxing that is getting ready to come about in this country, common sense would suggest we know what we are doing and that we have the information with which to make good decisions. To defeat this amendment says we want to continue to go on blindly; we do not want to have the information at our fingertips with which to make good, informed decisions about where to put taxpayer dollars. The very fact that the GAO now says we have between a $13 and $19 billion backlog just on structures in national parks and that the Department of the Interior is so far behind and is growing about $400 million every 6 months in terms of its backlog and for us to not know what is there and what should be prioritized to me is the height of foolishness. So we can defeat this amendment, and we can continue to go on blindly, making poor decisions because we are not making them within the perspective of the complete knowledge of what we own, what is important, and what should be prioritized. The Senate continues to refuse to prioritize its spending. The whole purpose behind this amendment is to give us the knowledge with which to make those decisions. But our political nature tells us we want an excuse so we do not have to make those good decisions. We do not want to have the information. Consequently, we put the credit card in, we spend money not wisely, not fiscally responsibly, and we charge it to our grandkids. At some point in time it has to stop. Now, it is probably not going to stop with this amendment. But you would not run your personal household this way. If you had your own business, you would never run it this way. You would never want your city government to not know what it owned and what its backlogs were, you would have an accounting. States do not do that. But we do that, and we do it at our own convenience, which I think is a shame. It belies our responsibility to future generations. It also belies the fact that we need the capability to make the tough choices. Not having this information means we will continue to make choices that are politically expedient but are policy poor and policy foolish. So I understand--actually I do not understand. Let me correct that. I do not understand why somebody would not want this information, and why--even though it is hard to get the first year, why we would not want it. Now, 100 percent of the Senators agreed we ought to have the Federal Financial and Transparency Act where we put online where we are spending the money, 100 percent of us. We thought that was a good deal. Here is another step toward transparency we can make that will give us information, give the American people the information to judge us. If we are going to put X money on a certain project, they ought to be able to see it in relationship to everything else we are doing. We are going to refuse to do that. I don't understand why. I don't have a clue to understand why we would not want factual information with which to make priority decisions in terms of the Department of Interior and in terms of national parks and forestland. It belies any sense of reality and any connection with common sense that we would refuse to do that. I retain the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Let me answer my colleague. There is an exception in this bill for anything of national intelligence or confidence, that it should not be related to the general public. It is already in there. So there is no problem where we would expose things we should not. It has been covered in the amendment. If Members truly believe we need to have the information, they need to be voting for the amendment. This is a wise approach to give us information we need to make cogent decisions. I retain the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, since I am controlling the remaining 10 minutes, I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Florida 2 minutes of that time.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I yield 3 minutes to the Senator from Florida. Amendment No. 683

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 683.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, H.R. 146 is the pending business; is that correct?

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that H.R. 146 be the pending business.