Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I would like to engage the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire, the Chairman of the Subcommittee, in a colloquy. I want to begin by commending you, Senator Gregg, and your Ranking Member, Senator Hollings, for the hard work you have done in crafting this Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary appropriations bill. You have done a great job in funding the priorities identified by the Committee in this bill. You have been particularly helpful to me in my efforts to curb the trafficking of Mexican black tar heroin in my home state of New Mexico. A separate issue of particular importance in my home state is the Women's Business Center program at the Small Business Administration. In this bill, you have funded the Administration's request of $9 million for this program, and I applaud you for meeting the President's request. Unfortunately, the President's request fails to address an important issue for the future of the Women's Business Center program. Particularly, the President's request does not take into account the need to allow existing WBCs to re-compete for federal funds once their initial five-year funding stream expires. So, many existing centers with outstanding track records of facilitating the growth of women- owned businesses and providing technical assistance to fledgling companies will go unfunded, while the SBA allows new, untested centers to open in other areas. Sacrificing the successful, existing centers to replace them with new, untested ones seems like bad policy. I think we need to open more new Women's Business Centers, but we also need to help the existing ones continue their work. Senator Bond, the distinguished Chairman of the Small Business Committee, Senator Kerry and I, along with a group of 25 bi-partisan co-sponsors, have introduced S. 791, the Women's Business Center Sustainability Act. This bill would increase the authorization for the Women's Business Center program to $12 million and allow existing centers to re-compete for up to 40 percent of the federal funds available under the program. Is the Chairman of the Subcommittee aware of this bill?

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. In responding, let me first confirm for my friend from Idaho that it is not the intent of this amendment to shift or reassign responsibility for Idaho's Advanced Test Reactor to the new Agency for Nuclear Stewardship. Let me further acknowledge the larger issue that my colleague has raised, by stating that under the new Departmental structure created by the Kyl, Domenici, Murkowski amendment the Secretary of Energy should continue to ensure that the capabilities, skills and unique expertise of all of the Department's laboratories are made available to the national security programs of DOE. In this way, the beneficial collaboration between defense and non-defense sectors of the Department--a collaboration that has been taking place over the entire history of DOE--will continue under the new structure.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, be allowed to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday July 21, 1999. The purpose of this meeting will be to consider the committee budget resolution and to possibily consider the nomination of William Rainer for Commissioner and Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be permitted to meet Wednesday July 21, 1999 beginning at 10:00 a.m. in room SD-106, to conduct a markup.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. I will use the remaining 10, 15, 20 seconds to say we have been looking through the amendments to see if we can see daylight in dealing with the agency for nuclear weapons development. I believe Senator Carl Levin has another amendment. We are going to submit to him some language on reporting, the deputy to the Secretary being available for the Secretary to accomplish some of the responsibilities that the Secretary has. We will get with him on that. Hopefully, we can work that out.

Mr. DOMENICI. Senator Bingaman has an environment and safety amendment. I will have one I will offer ahead of that. Perhaps it can be accepted and Senator Bingaman can offer his after it. We will work on that. It seems to me, other than the alleged, talked-about substitute, which I know nothing about, which I assume will be ready-- is that correct, I ask Senator Levin? It will not cause us a long delay to have that available?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, if we have not reached conclusion of this amendment, that we vote on or in reference to this amendment at 1 o'clock.

Mr. DOMENICI. I modify my request and make it 1:15.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, Senator Bingaman is in the Chamber. I assume the Bingaman-Domenici amendment with reference to work for others is available and ready; is that correct, I ask the Senator?

Mr. DOMENICI. I would like to get it done before this vote.

Mr. DOMENICI. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOMENICI. We have 30 minutes on our side?

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, let me, first of all, congratulate and thank Senator Kyl. There have been many Senators involved, including the occupant of the Chair, who have serious concerns about the issue. But I believe we have a great threesome who worked together fundamentally from the beginning. Senator Kyl was more than willing right up front when the idea evolved. When we said let's work on it, he was most willing to take the lead, and, frankly, knows a lot about nuclear weapons, the safety, and the well-being of them. He knows a lot about the so-called science-based stockpile stewardship. He has not been an advocate of doing anything with reference to nuclear weapons that would diminish in any way America's great strength in that regard. I commend him and thank him for it. I want to comment for just about 3 minutes on the issue that he raised. There have been contentions that the Department of Energy is moving in the right direction. In fact, I think the Secretary misspoke once when he said to the Congress and to the people we have taken care of the security problems. That is not a quote. It is just a general notion of what he said. I noted over the weekend that the new four-star general, retired, has been put in charge of security and counterintelligence. They called him the czar. I note that he has indicated he is a year away from getting what he thinks is necessary under this dysfunctional department to be able to say we are taking care of the security issues in the best possible way. Why wouldn't we hurry up and reorganize? Instead of that czar spending all of his time trying to get a structure set up under the old system--which everybody says isn't going to work, and which says, Good luck, general, but when you are finished with all of that, it isn't going to work--we ought to get this reorganization in the hands of that Department, in the hands of the President of the United States, and say, Let's get on with trying to implement. I submit that it is going to be hard to implement. There are many ties that are going to have to be broken. There are many parts of the Energy Department that are going to go down swinging in terms of them having little or nothing to say anymore about the nuclear weapons aspect of this. They all have parts in it. It has made it such a bureaucratic mess that even as I look at amendments that want to ease up a little on the semiautonomous nature, my mind immediately goes back to, well, if we open the door a little bit, we are just going to end up in 10 or 5 years right back where we are. I want to make sure everybody understands that we want to keep it semiautonomous where the Secretary is ultimately engaged, but within that is something similar to the FAA that is doing its own work on nuclear weapons. I think we are close. However, I suggest to those Senators who want to discuss amendments or who contemplate offering amendments, including the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, that we hear from him soon as to what he wants to do. We have a proposal we are discussing about going somewhat in his direction but not totally. I am trying to see if we can minimize amendments and get this done quickly. If not, I think we will just start voting. Some don't want to do that. I think we will have to do that within the next hour or so if we can't put things together. Then I will have a couple amendments, if that is the case. I think they are more acceptable than what I understand others are going to offer. We will get those debated.

Mr. DOMENICI. I ask unanimous consent I be permitted to speak as in morning business for 5 minutes.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I wholeheartedly agree we ought to adopt the amendment. I will speak for one moment on it. I will not address the first portion of it, wherein the amendment discusses the responsibility that rests with reference to making sure that appropriate communications occur rather than be stymied by the new Agency. I think that is good language. I do not know that we would have had anything different than that in the underlying bill, but this clarifies it. I am pleased to be part of that. With reference to the second part of the amendment, the Department of Energy has been operating with field offices--some of them very successful, some of them not so successful. There has even been a clamor over the past 5 or 6 years to create more of them rather than fewer of them. In fact, there have been proposals to create more field offices that this Senator personally has had to confront in the appropriations bill. What this says is that rather than being silent in the bill with reference to the Rudman recommendation regarding field offices, this says the Deputy Secretary may use an appropriate field structure for programs and activities of the agency. I think that is good. It gives them the options and it gives them all they need for good management. What we are talking about is good management--field offices versus the national office. So I urge the Senate to adopt this amendment. We have no objection on our side. I urge the chairman and cochairman of the Intel Committee to concur in our recommendations. Mr. SHELBY addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. It has been a pleasure working with Senator Bingaman on this and on some other amendments. I say to the two floor managers, it is my hope we can take the four or five remaining issues and see if we can't get one amendment put together to see if we can resolve them. We should have an answer to that for the floor managers within the next half hour, 45 minutes. Having said that, let me talk about the field offices for a moment. I have also been a proponent of the belief that if you can do some of the business of government down close to where the problems are, you are better off. I believe that such is the case with field offices. If properly run, under the appropriate accountability rules, wherein everybody knows who is accountable for what, I believe they can be very helpful. Because I believe that, I think this amendment gives the option to retain them in a manner that will be helpful to the new Under Secretary as he puts together the semiautonomous entity. I think much of the activity in field offices has been good. The fact the entire Department has made it very difficult to run the nuclear weapons part may be some of the reason the Rudman board was not thinking of field offices in a very good light. I believe it is imperative we look at it that way--in a good light. We have not told them how to use them. We have not told them what kind of role they play. We have said they may be used for programs and activities of the agency. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, on the floor of the Senate today, yesterday in a press conference at the White House, today in a press conference, and this afternoon, the President of the United States will end about 48 hours of White House attack on tax cut proposals that Republicans have put forth. We are very grateful, however, that some Democrats are now espousing the same --in particular, in the Senate. The whole idea of the attack is, we don't have enough surplus to give the American people a tax break. I hope the American people understand the contentions made by the President, by the Secretary of the Treasury, by those on the floor today from the other side who debated it. I hope they understand that this is an attack that should be called ``anything but taxes.'' That is the philosophy of those who are attacking what we are trying to do-- anything but taxes. For those who think we don't have enough resources, I will take some time today, both on the floor and in other places here at the Capitol, to explain that, indeed, it is a prudent plan. Indeed, there are sufficient resources, and there are sufficient resources in the broadest sense, to take care of our commitment to Social Security. We have done that. We want a lockbox, and we can't get it passed in this Senate. There is ample money for reform of the Medicare system to include prescription drugs. We will also today let the American people know that the Congressional Budget Office believes the President's prescription drugs are not going to cost only $48 billion in new money; their estimate is they could cost $118 billion--a very important difference, more than double the amount. The point of all this is the contention that we can't take care of the rest of government if we have a tax cut. I will just use a round number here. My recollection is that the surplus is $3.9 trillion--people can't even fathom $3.9 trillion--over the next decade. To put it in perspective, the entire budget of the United States on an annual basis, including Social Security payments, Medicare payments, all of the appropriated accounts, is about $1.8 to $1.9 trillion. Almost twice the total expenditures of the Federal Government in a given year is the surplus accumulating, according to the best estimators and best economists we can put on this issue-- experts at both the Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office. I quickly penned some figures. If we have $3.9 trillion in surplus and we want a tax cut over a 10-year period of $782 billion, that is 20 percent of the surplus that would be given back to the American people by way of tax cuts and tax changes. That will make for better economic sense in the future. That is a rough number. That is a gross number. However, it puts it in perspective. We ask the question, Where is the rest of it going? We will share in detail what we say it is going for and what the Congressional Budget Office says the President's budget is going to be used for. It will be an interesting comparison. For those on the other side and those in the White House--including the Secretary of the Treasury--who think they will have free rein making their case, which in my opinion is extremely partisan, it is Democrats in the White House, including the Secretary of the Treasury, who are saying, ``We are not for tax cuts,'' and making every kind of excuse in the world to avoid it. We will make sure that our side of this is understood. We believe if we don't have a significant tax cut adopted now for the next decade, all that surplus will be spent. We can already see it in plans coming from the White House. We can already see it in the current budget of the President extended over a decade as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. I thank the Senate for giving me a little bit of time this morning. I clearly did not today present our case in its totality. I want everybody to know there is another side to the partisan antitax fever that will be coming out of the White House the next couple of weeks. That is what it is. It is a ferocious attack on anyone who wants to give back taxes to the American people, using all kinds of arguments, even if they are totally partisan, one-sided exaggerations. We won't get as much news because the President's press conference will be heralded everywhere. Before we are finished, we will have a few spokesmen tell the American people what this is about. I wish we had an opportunity to present what we are going to present today to the House. I wish we could do it in a joint meeting to the public. The concern that there is not enough money for discretionary appropriations in defense is wrong. The notion that there is not enough money for Medicare--be it the President's $48 billion or the $118 billion that the CBO says a plan such as the President's would cost--is not so. In these 5 minutes, that is the best I can do. I don't have charts. They prepared their charts for use today and hereafter. We will use them. Frankly, attacks on the budget resolution by the White House should get thrown in the wastebasket. If Members want to attack a budget, attack the President's budget and see what he did with all this surplus. See what the Congressional Budget Office says he will do with all this surplus. We know what we will do. We will lock up $1.9 trillion for Social Security. That leaves a very large amount for defense, education, and other areas--indeed, a very significant amount for Medicare, if we choose to reform it, and a tax cut about the size proposed in the budget resolution approved here. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the junior Senator from Missouri, Mr. Ashcroft, be made an original cosponsor of the Kyl amendment.

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Chair. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. DOMENICI

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