Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. The Senator may speak either way.

Mr. DOMENICI. I propose that unanimous consent request I just articulated.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, Senator Thompson and his staff have been very objective. Obviously, his committee has a lot of jurisdiction to conduct hearings with reference to restructuring of anything in Government. We are very pleased he chose to join us and he chose to lend us the excellence and expertise of his staff as we put this package together. It is a very good approach. After 20 years of actually floundering around within a bureaucracy at the Department of Energy that was very top heavy, as reported by various commissions, I am very thrilled to be in this Chamber and able to say we are going to try to do better by the most serious research and the activities which are most apt to harm us in the future if others get them. It is the national security of America and perhaps peace in the world that hangs on whether this Department can do its job right, this autonomous agency with reference to nuclear activities, and whether we can find a better way to maintain freedom for those scientists, the greatest in the world, so they will come and do their work and at the same time do a far better job of securing the secrets that are within the minds and the products that our great scientists are producing at the nuclear laboratories. In the meantime, there are some who want to punish the laboratories. I note with some interest the appropriations bill in the House from the subcommittee that is supposed to fund our nuclear activities. Obviously, it has been reduced so dramatically I am not at all sure they can function. I do not know if that is a function of not having enough money or a function of saying: Let's do something about the fact that we are worried about security. That is not the way to do it. The way to do it is to adopt this amendment in both Houses, send it to the President, and get started with the task, for the first time in 22 years, of trying to set up an appropriate semiautonomous agency to do our nuclear work, to conduct the activities of our nuclear laboratories. I have been asked by the leader, unless my colleagues have an objection, to ask unanimous consent that all the time be considered used on both sides of the aisle and the cloture vote occur at 10:40 this morning. This means we will go into a quorum call, and anybody who wants to can call off the quorum and speak. Is that fair enough to the Senator from Idaho?

Mr. DOMENICI. The Senator from Nebraska has 30 minutes and has used none of it.

Mr. DOMENICI. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute off their side.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. If we wanted him independent, we would put him out here like NASA and call him an Administrator or Director. So as long as we are thinking the same way, we are willing to work with you.

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator, I will not take very long.

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank you for recognizing me. I say to Senator Levin, I have read that part of the Rudman report which talks about the Secretary having adequate input and having staff to make input. Let me tell you what I would be very worried about; and I remain worried about it as we talk with the members of the staff of the Secretary. I think the worst thing we could do is to create this semiautonomous agency on paper but make it still like it is subject in every detail to the Secretary of Energy and his staff. So I am not going to sit by and tell you I agree because I do not agree that we should say on the one hand an Under Secretary is going to run it, and it is created with autonomous authority for him, and then say the Secretary's office can, with various staffers, run it day by day. Because then all we have done is created autonomy and then taken it away. There are two ways to take it away. One is very direct. For example, just take out the environment and say they do not have control of the environment. That is one way. The other is to put it all back into the Secretary in detail so his staff can be running it. I think you and I would be serving our country terribly if we created it, in a poor manner, semiautonomous and then found in 5 years, when it was set up, that three strong men in the Secretary's office were running it. I think that would be the worst ending we could have because we would be back to seeing how good they were at things; and without that, it would be an unsuccessful operation. There would be more masters rather than just the one we are looking for. Having said that, I want to speak for a moment--because I forgot to during my opening remarks--about the kind of science that exists at these laboratories, especially our three deterrent laboratories and two that help them that are partially in this mode, and a little bit about the origin of all this work. I want to start by ticking off a few names. This is by far not the entire list. This whole scientific entourage that we have here which we call the nuclear weapons laboratories, the great crown treasures of our science- based research, was started in an era when America did not have enough scientists of its own who were nationalists, American born and raised, educated in America. So guess what the list of the early Manhattan Project scientists who helped us get a bomb sounded like. They sounded like Italians. Enrico Fermi; he was an Italian. He was at one of the other laboratories in the country. Both he and his wife were taken to Los Alamos and they became some of the principal players. It sounded like Hans Bethe; it sounded liked Edward Teller, Carl Fuchs--and the list goes on. Frankly, we were taking a real gamble because they knew what they were doing, each and every one of them. Collectively, they knew they were preparing an atomic bomb for the United States of America to either win the Second World War or to use it to stop it. They were working at a ferocious pace to get it done before the Germans got it done. We all remember that as we read about it. Those scientists had contacts all over the world, whatever kind of world it was at that point in time. The same thing is happening today. We should not be surprised that we have marvelous Chinese scientists at our laboratories. They are American born, American educated, and I assume some are naturalized citizens, and they are among our best. It just so happens that the Chinese seem to have breached our security in some intricate ways, not the way the Russians did it. They did not come along with a big bribe and pay somebody off. They did it in an intricate way by little bits and pieces. Since the Chinese scientists who make their nuclear program work are intimate about Americans in science, would you believe that it is our understanding that the chief scientist in charge of their nuclear weapons development has a Ph.D. from one of our universities? You do not think he knows American scientists of his era? He was apparently a very good nuclear physicist or scientist--Ph.D.--from one of our universities. We understand in the hierarchy there may be six or seven who were educated as MIT or Caltech or someplace, and they are running their program. The point of it is, we cannot, in some fit or frenzy, put a wall up around these laboratories and say these scientists cannot exchange views around the world; they cannot travel to conferences. Let me ask you, do you think they would stay at the laboratories, if they are among the greatest minds around, if you told them they can be only half a scientist, that they cannot go to a conference where Chinese scientists are coming who may exchange views on something extraordinarily new in the field of physics which has nothing necessarily to do with nuclear bombs? The truth of the matter is, if you try it, do you know who the losers will be? The losers will be the American people, because we won't have the greatest scientists in those laboratories. What has made us the most secure nuclear power in the world? Our scientists. We talk about everything else, but it is the scientists over the last 40 years, successors to this list I gave -- incidentally, I did not mean to imply that there weren't many early scientists who were American; obviously there were. Some of the leaders were Americans, no question about it. We should not leave the impression that we don't want scientists, whatever their national origin is or whatever their basic culture is, working in our laboratories and we want to muzzle them; for if we put a wall around the laboratories, it will be a matter of a decade and nobody will want in the laboratories, much less out of the laboratories. Instead of worrying about getting secrets out, we will have to worry about getting enough good things to happen where there are some secrets. I want to make that point so everyone will know that my approach and the approach I am working on with other Senators to create this semiautonomous agency is not directed at closing these laboratories, closing the lips and the brains of scientists and putting them behind a bar up there. When I was a young boy, believe it or not, we had a family that could all fit in one big car. On a number of occasions we drove from Albuquerque to Los Alamos because we were inquisitive. We had heard that if you went up there, they wouldn't let you in. So we would drive up, and they wouldn't let us in. We would drive up to these big gates, and that was the Los Alamos scientific laboratory. No trespassing. So I was there. That was the early version of this. Now they have grown into much larger institutions, much more sophisticated kinds of science. In addition, because my friend Senator Levin has been talking about things that concern him, I will mention two or three things that I want everyone to know. First, what is a semiautonomous agency and what is an independent agency? The best I can tell Senators is, a model of independence would probably be NASA. I don't know the best model for a semiautonomous agency within a department, but I will tell my colleagues that what it means is described very clearly in the Rudman report, that the functions of this agency must be autonomous and not subject to the everyday rule of the larger department. If we are not prepared to do that, then let's not kid ourselves and say we have done it halfway. It must be done in a way that is consistent with the agency director reporting only to the Secretary of Energy and in a manner that would assure that its functions are autonomous, even if it means we must have a duplication of functions. Because if there is one set of functions, we are back where we are. If it is not subject to the Secretary's power, then it is not semiautonomous; it is autonomous. I think we are on the same side, trying to make it semiautonomous, which means the Secretary is still all powerful. Having said that, let me say that as we proceed, I am willing to look at the document line by line as it gets introduced--it has been circulated--and cite where I believe we have covered most of the aspects that are of concern and that have been expressed as of concern on the floor, save two. One of them has to do with the laboratories being able to take work for other agencies, for the Defense Department and from the Energy Department, and thus remain laboratories that are diversified, that are, thus, very attractive to scientists. I will insert in the Record, and not read much from it, testimony given in the Committee on Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power and the Committee on Science Subcommittee on Energy in the House, by William Happer. Dr. Happer is one of the distinguished scientists in the United States and used to be in the department. He concludes in the statement, in reference to the new agency: I do not think that the ANS need hinder the support by other parts of DOE, or by outside agencies, of science at the Weapons Laboratories. As a former director of the Office of Energy Research, I saw, at very close quarters, how work was funded by my office at the Weapons Laboratories, and how other Federal agencies--for example, the National Institutes of Health, or DARPA--arrange to have work done. The creation of an ANS within DOE might actually help the interactions between the Science Laboratories and the Weapons Laboratories if it leads to better management [at the semiautonomous agency]. I ask unanimous consent that the Happer statement of July 13 in its entirety be printed in the Record.

Mr. DOMENICI. I note the presence of the cochairman of the committee that actually has jurisdiction and is in control of the bill, H.R. 1555, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska. I say to the Senator what I said to one of his staff members who was on the floor. Whenever the Senator is ready, I will relinquish the floor and yield. I am prepared to speak today and tomorrow and however long is necessary until we all get together and get the bill up and get the amendment to it called up. I am not here today to keep others from speaking. My responsibility with reference to the amendment which we propose is to start talking about the significance of it and of the Rudman report to the future security prospects for our nuclear resource development by the Department of Energy. I started on that report of your good friend and mine, Senator Rudman. This is not a bad breaking point for me if the Senator desires to speak.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, what I want to do, in the presence of my friend, is recap. I heretofore, I say to the Senator from Nebraska, made the point of why we need some dramatic, drastic, and significant reform of the Department of Energy as it applies to nuclear weaponry in all its context. I have indicated there are a number of reports that point in the direction of doing something very different, not just some new boxes in the Department. I said I would start with a review of the Rudman report as to what they recommend, because the amendment I will be proposing and of which Senator Kerrey is a cosponsor is our best effort to incorporate into the bill language the Rudman recommendations. We are not inventing something new, although some of us were on that trail before the Rudman report. It is essentially an effort to convert these recommendations, of which my colleagues are fully aware, to a bill, and that legislation will be presented when we are on the bill. We do not know when that time will come. We are now on a motion to proceed to that bill. Let me now, in my own way, talk a bit about the Rudman report. The Senate is now fully aware of who the commissioners are, what their origins are, and the fact that this is the first such report that has been made public. In the past, Presidents have used them, but they have not made them public. The President asked from the outset that this report be made public. That was prudent because we were in such a state of confusion and chaos regarding how much of our future security was actually stolen. This was a good way to say some people are recommending ways to fix it. It is public. Let me state to the Senate, and those interested, some of the significant findings of this report. Remember, the reason the report is significant is not because it is the only report of its type, but it is the last one recommending drastic change. These findings I am going to be talking about are in support of the bill we want to introduce, because they are in support of the Rudman commission's recommendations. Findings found at pages 1 through 6--I am going to pick out the ones I think most adequately present the issue and the reasons for doing something. No. 1, from my standpoint: More than 25 years worth of reports, studies and formal inquiries--by executive branch agencies, Congress, independent panels and even the DOE itself--have identified a multitude of chronic security and counterintelligence problems at all the weapons labs. I give this fact at the outset because I am very concerned there still will be some in the public, at the laboratories and in the Senate, who will say we need more time. Remember, the finding I just stated was that for 25 years there have been reports, studies, and inquiries that addressed the issues in this amendment we want to call up on the bill. No. 2: Organizational disarray, managerial neglect, and a culture of arrogance--both at DOE headquarters and at the labs themselves--conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen. Those are not my words. I might have phrased it differently. Essentially, in the amendment we want to call up, we are also trying to change the organizational disarray. We are trying to change it so that managerial neglect will be harder to be vested in this part of the DOE. We are addressing the culture, but we are not destroying the actual necessary component within these laboratories of freedom for scientists. But freedom is not absolute for scientists who work on nuclear weapons. We want to give them as much freedom as is consistent with minimizing security risks, and that means there has to be pushed through management a change in the culture without changing the scientific excellence. . . . DOE headquarters and at the labs themselves-- conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen. The way it is phrased one would think they were doing something intentional in that regard. I would not have used ``conspired.'' It happened that way because of the way it is managed and the way the culture has developed. Let me move down to another couple I think are very important: DOE has a dysfunctional management structure and culture that only occasionally gave proper credence to the need for rigorous security and counterintelligence programs at the weapons laboratories. For starters, there has been a persistent lack of real leadership and effective management of the DOE. They also factually concluded that the Department--and this is very important--is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has proven it is incapable of reforming itself. Why do I pull that one out? Because we are hearing that we do not need to do everything this report recommends because the Secretary is going to do it. As a matter of fact, the Secretary is a friend of mine. He is from my State. He served in the House and I in the Senate, and I have great respect for what he did. He has done more in the Department in the past few months than anybody we have had around in terms of seeing that it is really risky and things are dangerous there; we have to get on with fixing them. The point is, the Rudman commission said the Department's bureaucracy is so dysfunctional that it cannot reform itself. For those who will come to the Chamber either in opposition to the amendment or indicating we should go slowly because the Secretary is doing some things, I will keep reading them this statement. This is not our statement. This is the statement of five of the best people around appointed by the President of the United States to tell us how to fix this. In fact, I will tell you one of them, Dr. Drell, would be picked by anyone on any five-member commission that was going to survey and recommend how we should handle nuclear weapons within our bureaucracy better. He is on this, and he agrees. They are saying the Secretary cannot fix it because the bureaucracy is so rambunctious, so overlapping, so inconsistent that it cannot fix itself. Last: Reorganization is clearly warranted to resolve the many specific problems with security and counterintelligence in the . . . laboratories, but also to address the lack of accountability that has become endemic throughout the entire Department. I am going to move to a couple more facts. We all know--no, we do not all know; some of us know because we have been around here long enough--that we can look at who have been the Secretaries of Energy over time, and the Rudman report has something to say about that. This is a complicated Department, but if you know anything about it, it runs all the nuclear weapons activities in the country. For starters, one would think: Boy, we ought to put somebody in who knows a little bit about that. The report says: The criteria for the selection of Energy Secretaries have been inconsistent in the past. Regardless of the outcome of ongoing or contemplated reforms, the minimum qualifications for Energy Secretary should include experience in not only energy and scientific issues, but national security and intelligence issues. . . . I am not going to list the Secretaries in the last 30 years since the DOE was formed, and prior to it ERDA, but I am going to merely say there have not been very many Presidents who gave serious consideration to who should be the Secretary in the same context that the five-member commission looked at what should be the qualifications. There will still be some who will say: Well, look, we have a Secretary who is trying. This has just come upon us. Let's go a little slower. The Rudman commission made another finding, and it is the following: However, the Board is extremely skeptical that any reform effort, no matter how well-intentioned, well-designed, and effectively applied, will gain more than a toehold at DOE, given its labyrinthine management structure, fractious and arrogant culture, and the fast-approaching reality of another transition in DOE leadership. Thus we believe that he has overstated the case when he asserts, as he did several weeks ago, that ``Americans can be reassured; our nation's nuclear secrets are, today, safe and secure.'' That is an allusion to a statement by our Secretary of Energy. I take it Secretaries have tried to tell us they are doing everything they can within the structure they have and that we are moving in the direction of making things safe. This board--I frequently call it a commission--the Rudman board, has taken a look at that statement versus what they think you can do in that Department, and they have concluded that things are still kind of at risk. I note today, in the presence of the press the new securities czar, the distinguished four-star general who was appointed, is saying: We're working on it, but it is at least a year away in terms of having something in place. I note that is in the news today. What did this distinguished board--sometimes referred to in my remarks as commission--actually recommend by way of reorganizations? I want everyone to know I am going to repeat that there are other reports, prior to this, that recommended dramatic changes within the Department, and I have not yet alluded to them. I am only talking about the Rudman recommendations. They suggest that: The panel is convinced that real and lasting security and counterintelligence reform at the weapons labs is simply unworkable within DOE's current structure and culture. To achieve the kind of protection that these sensitive labs must have, they and their functions must have their own autonomous operational structure free of all the other obligations imposed by [the department]. In order to do that, they say it can be done in one of two ways. It could remain an element of DOE but become semi- autonomous--by that we mean strictly segregated from the rest of the Department. This would be accomplished by having an agency director report only to the Secretary of Energy. The agency directorship also could be ``dual-hatted'' as an Under Secretary, thereby investing [him] with extra bureaucratic clout both inside and outside the department. They go on to say: Regardless of the mold in which this agency is cast, it must have staffing and support functions that are autonomous from the remaining operations at DOE. Essentially, when you read the recommendations, the most significant words are their functions must have their own autonomous operational structure free of all other obligations imposed by DOE management. You get that one of two ways. You get it semiautonomously--which I have just read--or you can take it out of the Department of Energy in toto, stand it free, i.e., NASA. They have suggested those are the two ways. Those of us who have been involved for years think that we ought to start by trying to convince the Senate and House that we should make it semiautonomous, leaving it within the DOE, for a number of reasons, and only if all fails should we go the other route. This Senator is very concerned about the laboratories that make us so strong and contribute so much to our science effectiveness in the world, that they remain the very best. I would not, for a minute, be talking about restructuring if I did not think those laboratories could continue to do work for others, work for other agencies, and work for the Department of Defense and nuclear weapons. I believe they can and they will. I believe they will, under the amendment about which we are talking. So while there is much more to talk about, in summary, H.R. 1555, which is the annual intelligence authorization bill, the sooner we can get it up on the Senate floor, the sooner we can bring up this amendment, the Kyl-Domenici-Murkowski, et al. amendment, which has every chairman of every committee who is involved in this as cosponsors, along with a number of other Senators, and the distinguished Senator from Nebraska, who is here on the floor with us, Senator Kerrey, and Senator Feinstein of California. As soon as we can start debating it--obviously, we are willing to listen; we do not claim that every ``t'' is crossed right and every ``I'' is in the proper place, but we believe the format to accomplish what the Rudman five- member board recommended is within the four corners of that amendment, and that is what we ought to be looking at now in the next few days to get it done. I yield the floor. Mr. KERREY addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I do not know how much longer the Senator wants to speak, but I can only be here about 15 or 20 minutes and I still have a few comments. I want to listen attentively to what he is saying. I believe I heard the Senator mention four or five things. I ticked them off as he mentioned them, and we find there may be two that are not in the bill which were thought to be management techniques. Three out of five or three out of six are in the bill. I am willing to work on anything my colleagues want to work on, except I want to make sure of what I consider to be the most important recommendation of all, when the Rudman report says: To achieve the kind of protection that all these laboratories have, they and their functions must have their own autonomous operational structure free of all the other obligations of DOE management. If we start with that, then I think we can work on that in terms of how you get there and make sure it means what you want it to mean. Frankly, I am very pleased this afternoon because I heard both the Senator from Michigan and the cochairman of the Committee on Intelligence say they want to get on with the bill and they want to try to work on the amendment to get it as bipartisan as we can. Frankly, if that is the way we are moving, I am ready to say, let's work on it. I have given my colleagues my draft. It is the final draft. As soon as my colleagues have amendments, we want to look at them. I have three or four Senators to check with, and I am sure my colleagues have, too, but I do think you clearly understand, in the way the Senator has expressed it, that it will have its autonomous functions within that agency. The Senator has a great concern, and if I was not positive that we had satisfied it, I would not be here. On the second page, paragraph (C), we say: The Secretary shall be responsible for all policies of the agency. The Under Secretary for Nuclear Stewardship shall report solely and directly to the Secretary and shall be subject to the supervision and direction of the Secretary. That was put in because everybody said we ought to do that. It was a little earlier than some of you think. My colleagues missed it for a while. It is there. At the end of the page we also say: That the Secretary may direct other officials of the Department who are not within the agency for nuclear stewardship to review the agency's programs and to make recommendations to the Secretary regarding the administration of these programs, including consistency with similar programs and activities of the Department. The Senator from Michigan has expressed a concern about that one. This may not be exactly the wording he would like, but I believe it moves in the direction of one of his previous concerns.

Mr. DOMENICI. Can I comment?

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOMENICI. That is a fair statement that the Senator made about what I would like to see. I also stated on Friday past, the first time I ever said this as a Senator who has been involved with these nuclear activities since I arrived--and I have been chairman of the subcommittee that appropriates it for almost 6 years--if the semiautonomous agency is weakened, to the extent it is really just another of blocks on a chart, I will wholeheartedly support taking it all out of the Energy Department and making it a freestanding department. In fact, I am almost looking at this that if it were a freestanding agency like NASA, and moved within the Department, how would the Secretary control it? I am beginning to think of it that way. He still would have to control it so long as it is in his Department. But I think we have said that in the amendment. We are willing to work with you on whether there are better ways to make sure he still is the boss; that is what you are talking about, that he is in control. The Under Secretary in charge of this new semiautonomous agency is not totally independent or we would not call him ``semiautonomous.''

Mr. DOMENICI. On page 5 of the amendment, which I think my colleagues have, we adopted the language that is in the Armed Services bill: The Chief of Nuclear Stewardship Counterintelligence shall have direct access to the Secretary. Secretary of Energy.

Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to talk a little bit about what Mr. Light discusses in this column on the 30th day of June, 1999, and set it a bit in perspective. As Senators and those listening today might recall, starting about 3 months before this article written by Paul C. Light appeared in the Wall Street Journal, word broke through the media in the United States of the possibility that the People's Republic of China had, in fact, breached security at Los Alamos National Laboratory and, indeed, they may have some of the most significant and profound secrets with reference to our nuclear weaponry in their possession. That broke in the New York Times in a series of articles, and thereafter it was in the headlines and on the front pages of our papers for 3 or 4 weeks. Now it seems to have dwindled a bit because Congress and the executive branch are working on what we ought to do about it. Frankly, one of the purposes for my being on the floor today and tomorrow and for as many days as it takes until we can take up the intelligence bill, H.R. 1555, which I have little to do with because I am not on that committee, is an amendment that would permit us to organize within the Department of Energy that aspect of the Department of Energy's work that has to do with nuclear weapons. The reason that is important is because the American people should not be misled, nor should we let this issue go to sleep. The issue is a serious one. The issue of who develops and protects our nuclear weapons, and are they doing it in the best possible way, should be front and center with the American people because if, in fact, the security was breached to the extent that the Cox committee report had-- that is a House Member's name; he was chairman of a joint committee in the House that prepared a report commonly known as the Cox report. If it is as bad as he and other House Members say in that report, and as bad as some others who have reported on it say, then clearly we are at risk that the Communist Chinese has sufficient information to develop, over time, a very significant arsenal of nuclear weapons. Coupled with the fact that they are moving rapidly with respect to delivery systems, then clearly in the next millennium we will have a new adversary in the world. It will no longer necessarily be Russia as a successor to the weapons systems and delivery systems--the U.S.S.R.-- but, essentially, we may have both Russia and China with substantial nuclear weapons. We may feel secure with our Air Force and our Navy and with our Army, as we have had these skirmishes in the past 3 to 5 years, but we will still be looking at a very dangerous world. As a matter of fact, it may be the only single source of real power and military might that Russia might have for the first 50 or 100 years in the next millennium. And that is enough for a country that is not doing very well to be a bit dangerous. It is certainly enough for the world to be dangerous and America to be in danger and fearful if the Chinese Communist regime has a determined and dedicated and significant nuclear arsenal. With that as a background, and with many hearings in both bodies-- some joint, some singular by different committees--over the weeks since this was first broken, we have heard all kinds of evidence about how this happened--some of it in secret, some of it public. As a Senator from New Mexico, I have had to learn about nuclear weapons because two of the laboratories are in my State, and I happen to be chairman of the committee that funds all of the Department of Energy. I have said that there is so much that went wrong that there is plenty of blame for everyone. This is not exclusively a problem that occurred within that laboratory at Los Alamos. It is not exclusively a problem that something happened within the Department of Energy. It is not totally dispositive of this issue to stand on the floor of the Senate and say the FBI didn't do their job right--which they didn't. The problem is, it was a comedy of errors. Everybody seems to have messed up on this one. Frankly, it seems that enough time has passed for us to be on the verge of fixing it, and so let's talk a minute about how we are going to fix it, and then I will read excerpts from the article that I asked be printed. First of all, there is no question that we received a formidable report from the PFIAB Commission, which is made up of five members. It is a presidentially appointed group. The President did something different about this one than in the past in that he asked them to do the report and to plan to release it to the public. They did. It was released to the public, and its principal spokesman and chairman was the very distinguished former Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Rudman. We will talk at length about what they recommended. But suffice it to say they found that the management structure within the Department of Energy was in such a state of chaos that it could not control, in the form and manner that it existed over these past years, the security of valuable secrets and information within the laboratories; that it was incapable of doing it because it was disorganized, or organized in a manner where there was no accountability. So that if you wanted to blame the FBI for something that happened out of their Santa Fe, NM, office, they could clearly, if they chose, say: Yes, but somebody else fell down on the job. If you asked the Director of the laboratories, he would say: Nobody ever told me about it. Nobody brought me on board. I thought since they were doing an investigation of an individual that they were in charge of the investigation, and I didn't have anything to do with it. There are many examples, real and anecdotal, that say the Department of Energy is incapable of maintaining within its current framework of management such a significant system as the nuclear weapons system of the United States of America. Frankly, it pains me to come to the floor and say that I have arrived at that conclusion unequivocally. And it pains me to say that I arrived at it some time ago. As a matter of fact, there will be a big argument made that we should move slowly. I would like in due course, if not today, tomorrow, to outline why the time has come to fix it in the manner recommended by the Rudman commission, which is a Presidential commission. How much more time do we need? I will tell the Senate that 2 to 3 weeks before the Rudman report was issued, this Senator from New Mexico was busy working with Senators developing the exact same model that the Rudman commission ultimately recommended to the Congress and the President of the United States for restructure, in a formidable way with significant changes, of the entire apparatus that functions within DOE and produces for us safe, sound, and reliable nuclear weapons and that has all of the ancillary functions which are related to that. Having said that, it was not just yesterday that there were recommendations that the Department of Energy was straining under its own bureaucracy and that the nuclear weapons laboratories were victims of it. In fact, we will allude to at least two prior reports and recommendations to that of the Rudman commission by which clearly we are sending a loud and clear signal: Fix it. It is not working. It is the risky way you have it done. I would add, it is not only risky as to security, but let me suggest there is a substantial lack of efficiency and the ability to manage the nuclear weapons system adequately and frugally to get the very best we should have. It is almost an impossibility within the structure of the Department of Energy, a hybrid department made up of many different agencies and groups thrown together in a haphazard way. And then we expect the nuclear weapons part of it to function under the overload of management, rules, and regulations that apply across the board to any kind of function within the Department, some so removed from nuclear weaponry that you wouldn't even think of them being in the same personnel department, in the same environmental department, or in the same safety and health departments. With that, let me move to the Wall Street Journal article and paint a little history along with this writer, Mr. Light. He starts by saying: How can Washington prevent future security breaches like the one at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory? Last week former Sen. Warren Rudman, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a head of a special investigating panel, recommended a ``new semiautonomous agency'' within the Department of Energy that would have ``a clear mission, streamlined bureaucracy and drastically simplified lines of authority and accountability.'' Mr. Rudman is right to focus on the structure of the department, not the failures of one or two key bureaucrats. For the Energy Department has never had more layers of management than it does now--and its leadership has never been more disconnected from what is happening at its bottom. Secretary Bill Richardson, last week appointed a security ``czar,'' Gen. Eugene Habiger, to serve as the fulcrum for a newly rationalized chain of command. But the czar may merely add one more layer to a meandering, mostly unlinked collection of overseers who can easily evade responsibility when things go wrong. I could not say it any better. Continuing on: At the department's founding in 1979, its secretary, deputy secretary, undersecretary and assistant secretary ``compartments'' contained 10 layers and 56 senior executives. By 1998 those four compartments had thickened to 18 layers and 143 senior executives, including an assortment of chiefs of staff and other alter-ego deputies who fill in whenever their bosses are out. The problem in such overlayered, top-heavy organizations is not a lack of information on possible wrongdoing. Lots of people knew about the vulnerabilities at Los Alamos. The problem is finding someone who is ultimately responsible for taking action. Which department executive does Congress hold accountable for the security breach? The secretary? His chief of staff? One of the two deputy chiefs of staff? The deputy secretary? Undersecretary? Assistant secretary for defense programs? For environmental management? For science? How about the principal deputy assistant secretary for military applications? Deputy assistant secretary for research and development? Defense laboratories office director? Perhaps the assistant secretary for strategic computing and simulation? Or the inspector general, deputy inspector general, or assistant inspector general? The answer is everyone and no one. And the diffusion of accountability continues down into the University of California, the contractor that supervises the Los Alamos laboratory and three other DOE facilities. Whom does the federal government hold accountable at the university? The president? The senior vice president for business and finance? Vice president for financial management? And on it goes. I will jump down in the article to another full quote: No wonder it takes a crisis to focus attention. With 15 to 25 layers just to get from the top of the department to the top of Los Alamos, information is bound to get lost along the way, and no one is accountable when it does. I am going to skip a little bit of the article and move down to the end of it with another quote. I will insert it with the underline parts being that which I read. Spies will be spies, and the Los Alamos espionage probably would have occurred regardless of the width or height of the government hierarchy. But the breach would have been noticed earlier and closed sooner had the top been closer to the bottom. If Congress wants to increase the odds that nuclear secrets will be kept in the future, it could do no better than to order a wholesale flattening of the Energy Department hierarchy. Then it should do the same with the rest of the federal government. The reason I read excerpts from the article is that it is quite obvious to me this man has his finger right on the problem. Let me now proceed to a discussion of the latest thorough investigation of the Department of Energy and its mission as the primary functionary in nuclear weapons from research to security to safekeeping, et cetera. Let me move to the latest thorough report, and then we will go back to some others that existed prior thereto. I don't know that I want to make this report a part of the Record, but everybody should know if they want to read what has been said by the latest contingent of reputable, dedicated, knowledgeable Americans, I am reading from ``Science at its Best, Security at its Worst,'' a report on security problems of the U.S. Department of Energy by a special investigative panel, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, of June 1999. There are plenty of these reports around for anybody who wants to participate in this discussion. We will make them available. We will see that some are in the Cloakroom for people who might want to review them. I will talk a little bit about the significance of this report and why I think the time has come to adopt its principal recommendations. For those who wonder what we are trying to do, obviously, we had to draw from a lot of people to do what was recommended in this report. While Members may not find every word of the extensive amendment I will soon allude to in detail within this report, let me repeat, for anybody interested in the security of the weapons laboratories and the nuclear weapons activity of our Nation, the amendment we are trying to call up as part of H.R. 1555 is the recommendations from this report. Let's get in the Record what this report is. This report is the result of a March 18, 1999, President Clinton request that the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, commonly known as PFIAB, undertake an inquiry and issue a report on ``The security threat at the Department of Energy's weapons lab and the adequacy of measures that have been taken to address it.'' I will read the names of the board members and make sure the Senate and everybody knows who they are: The Honorable Warren B. Rudman, chairman; appointed members are Ms. Ann Z. Caracristi, Dr. Sydney Drell, Mr. Stephen Friedman, to form the special investigative panel. They are the members. They were given detailees from several Federal agencies, including CIA, FBI, DOD, to augment the work of the staff. They spent 3 months interviewing 100 witnesses, received more than 700 documents encompassing thousands of pages, and conducted on-site research and interviews at five of the Department's National Laboratories and plants: Sandia National Lab, Pantex in Texas, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Livermore in California, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. This report and an appendix that supports it, both of which are unclassified, are now before the Senate. A large volume of classified material which was also reviewed and distilled for this report has been relegated to a second appendix and is authorized for special kinds of authorized recipients. This report examines the 20-year history--which I just alluded to in reading the excellent article by Mr. Light--of security and counterintelligence issues at the laboratories, with an issue on five laboratories that focus on weapons and related weapons research. It looked at the inherent tensions between security concerns and scientific freedom at the laboratories. In effect, they looked at the institutional culture and efficacy of the Department. They looked at the growth and evolution of foreign intelligence and the threat thereafter to the National Laboratories, particularly in connection with foreign visitors programs, the implementation of effective Presidential Decision Directive No. 61, the reforms instituted by the Secretary, and other related initiatives. At some point in time within the last 5 or 6 months when it started to evolve that, in fact, there could have been a very serious, significant, prolonged, and persistent breach at Los Alamos, the President of the United States--and others might argue that the timeliness of the President's actions is an issue. I am not sure that I will argue that point. My point in what I will discuss today and tomorrow, and for however long it takes to get this bill up and get this amendment considered, is going to be discussing how we fix what is wrong with this Department of Energy as it relates to nuclear weapons and how we do it now--not 6 months from now, not a year from now, but now. Eventually, the President issued a Presidential decision directive which is called No. 61. Now, that suggested in no uncertain terms that some things be changed in the Department, and changed forthwith. However, those were things the Department could do without any legislation. They preceded the thorough recommendations that were made by the Rudman commission. Then it included additional measures to improve security and counterintelligence. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the page of the abstract of the Rudman report, with the panel of members and the staff.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, frankly, this is a very important debate that starts today on a very important bill, H.R. 1555, and there is a very important amendment that we will allude to and talk about this afternoon with reference to reorganizing the Department of Energy in ways that have been suggested by many in order to minimize security risks in the future and maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the department of the Department of Energy that works on the nuclear weapons installations, facilities, and research within that department. I note the presence of Senator Levin on the floor, and I want to be as accommodating as he would like in terms of his using time. I am prepared to speak a lot today about history and the like, but whenever he is ready, I will be glad to yield to him. I am going to start today's debate by inserting into the Record a June 30, 1999, column from the Wall Street Journal, written by Paul C. Light. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and the author of ``The True Size of Government,'' Brookings, 1999. I ask unanimous consent that that article be printed in the Record.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I hereby submit to the Senate the budget scorekeeping report prepared by the Congressional Budget Office under Section 308(b) and in aid of Section 311 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, as amended. The report meets the requirements for Senate scorekeeping of Section 5 of S. Con. Res. 32, the First Concurrent Resolution on the Budget of 1986. This report shows the effects of congressional action on the budget through July 14, 1999. The estimates of budget authority, outlays, and revenues are consistent with the technical and economic assumptions of S. Res. 209, a resolution to provide budget levels in the Senate for purposes of fiscal year 1999, as amended by S. Res. 312. The budget levels have also been revised to include adjustments made on May 19, 1999, to reflect the amounts provided and designated as emergency requirements. The estimates show that current level spending is above the budget resolution by $0.4 billion in budget authority and above the budget resolution $0.2 billion in outlays. Current level is $0.2 billion above the revenue floor in 1999. The current estimate of the deficit for purposes of calculating the maximum deficit amount is $56.1 billion, $0.1 billion above the maximum deficit amount of 1999 of $56.0 billion. Since my last report, dated June 21, 1999, the Congress has taken no action that changed the current level of budget authority, outlays, and revenues. I ask unanimous consent to have a letter accompanying the report and the budget scorekeeping report printed in the Record.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, what is the pending business?

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

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, it is my understanding that the Republicans have 10 minutes and the minority has 16 minutes.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I will take a little time to speak about the surplus that we have over and above Social Security, which we call the non-Social Security surplus. That is the amount by which the taxpayers of this country have paid more into the U.S. Treasury than we need to run Government. I choose now to speak to a proposal that I made with the introduction of a tax bill yesterday. I introduced it and had it printed and reported to the appropriate committee because I thought that even though I am not on the Finance Committee, that some of my ideas and thoughts might be relevant. I wanted the Senate to have the benefit of what I thought should be a good way to fix the Tax Code while we are reducing taxes. Let me address this matter in a text that I have prepared and worked very hard on, including the bill that was introduced. I thank my staff for the diligent work and the Joint Committee on Taxation for their willingness to help us with evaluations of how much these various proposals will cost. T.S. Eliot wrote, ``April is the Cruelest Month.'' Millions of Americans agree, especially around April 15. The Congress is going to pass a tax bill to make April a little kinder. I say it is time to share the surplus. Since without tax relief it takes the average worker until May 11 to earn enough money to pay his or her taxes, our tax bill also lets people start working for their families' benefit earlier in the year. American families are currently saddled with an unprecedented tax burden. Total Federal tax collections are at a post-World War II high of 20.7 percent of the gross domestic product. Individual income tax collections alone are 10 percent of the gross domestic product and are projected to stay there. We have never experienced a government based on that level of income taxation, speaking of the income tax component of our total American government tax table. The 1990s are truly a decade when government taxed the total population of America at a very excessive rate. The President will have a choice to spend on government programs or resist the urge to splurge and instead return the overpayment to its rightful owners in the form of a tax cut or tax relief. It is estimated the average American household will pay nearly $7,000 more in taxes than the government needs to operate the non-Social Security portion of the government over the next decade. The tax-writing committees of Congress are working right now to fashion a 10-year tax cut, phasing it in, that will total around $778 billion over the next 10 years. In the Senate it seems that they are working on that exact number because that is what the budget resolution we adopted said they should do. The House seems to be moving in a direction of a little larger tax cut over the decade, but we are talking now about $770 billion to $800 billion plus. The ideas that are encapsulated in the bill I introduced take into account that the economy is booming. Personal income tax, as measured against adjusted gross income, is up 8.25 percent from 1997 over 1996. That is a current year IRS statistic. That is, personal income, as measured as adjusted gross income, is up 8.25 percent. Income tax revenues are up 10.2 percent. This is good news and bad news, and these statistics encapsulate both. The good news is our salaries, capital gains, and interest income are growing. The bad news is that bracket creep is pushing more and more Americans into higher tax brackets, even though we do not have as many brackets as we had years ago when bracket creep was a major American problem because of high inflation. It is still pushing them into higher brackets, and at the same time, the code is working to make more and more American taxpayers pay what is commonly called now AMT taxes; that is, alternative minimum taxes, which really were never intended to cover the vast number of Americans that are currently being pushed into the alternative minimum tax portions of our code because they are being pushed into higher brackets. I share with the Senate the key components of the bill I introduced, and I want to recognize that this bill builds upon legislation introduced by Senators Coverdell, Torricelli, and Mack. The philosophy behind the various provisions is something important, as I view it. I have been a long-time advocate of fundamental tax reform. I believe it would be better for our economy and simpler and fairer if we could shift our tax base from income that is earned and instead tax income that is consumed. There are very few who disagree that that would be a very good approach to a philosophy of taxation in our country. I have often said our current code is hostile to savings and investing and that we, as a Nation, pay the price in the form of lower economic growth. The philosophical underpinnings of this package corrects some deficiencies. Let me go through it. First section. Broad-based tax relief for all taxpaying families. Purpose: To cut taxes for 120 million American taxpayers by lowering and widening the 15-percent Federal income tax bracket. Second, marriage penalty mitigation and burden reduction. The purpose is to return 7 million taxpaying families to the 15-percent bracket and to cut taxes for another 35 million taxpaying families who will benefit from a tax cut of up to $1,300 per family. It eliminates or mitigates the marriage penalty for many middle-class taxpaying families. That happens by merely adjusting the brackets downward and upward in the 15- percent area. I repeat, you do not change the marriage penalty for middle-class taxpaying families, but by making the 15-percent bracket broader, adding $10,000 to the adjusted gross income people can earn and still be in that bracket, and lowering the bottom bracket 1.5 percent, much of the marriage penalty is mitigated for people in those brackets. Third, dividend and interest tax relief. Adjusting the tax base to recognize that dividends and interest should not be taxed. Now, obviously, there is not room in a tax package to totally eliminate dividends and interest. But the purpose of our bill is to provide an incremental step toward taxing income that is consumed rather than income that is earned and saved. It simplifies the code by eliminating 67 million hours of spent time in tax preparation. It eliminates Federal income taxes on savings for more than 30 million Americans in the middle-class families and reduces Federal income taxes on savings for an additional 37 million Americans. It essentially allows about a $10,000 nest egg to grow, tax free, and will let Americans enjoy the miracle of compound interest. Specifically, it excludes the first $500 in interest and dividend taxation. That permits you to grow this nest egg and not have to pay taxes on the interest and dividends for the first $500 in that kind of income. It sounds small, but it affects a huge number of Americans and starts us in the direction of saying we ought to save, and we ought to start taxing not earned income, but consumed income. The next provision is a capital gains cut by recognizing that investment and investing should be encouraged, not penalized. A Tax Code for the new century should exclude modest capital gains from taxation. The purpose of the provision is to provide an incremental step toward shifting our Internal Revenue Code away from taxing savings and investment. A savings-friendly Tax Code would lower the cost of capital so that prosperity, better paying jobs, and innovation can continue in the United States. The bill would eliminate capital gains for 10 million American families, 75 percent of whose income is $75,000 or less. This provision is also a 70 million man-hour timesaver. I can think of many activities to spend 70 million hours on rather than filling out tax forms. The specific of this provision is that it exempts the first $5,000 in long- term capital gains from taxation. It eliminates it totally from taxation. Another important section deals with retirement savings incentives. The purpose of this is to say that the savings rate for all Americans will increase by reforming the system to favorably treat income that is invested for retirement. It provides targeted incentives to middle- class families to increase their retirement savings in a traditional IRA by $1,000 per working member of the family per year. Specifically, it raises the contribution limit for traditional deductible IRAs from $2,000 to $3,000 and indexes the limit for inflation, when we can fit that into the dollars in the code. The bill includes a death tax phaseout. It recognizes that death should not be a taxable event in the 21st century. We do not have sufficient resources to do away with it in toto. Some will be proposing it. I think they will find that it is rather expensive, even with $782 billion to spend. So the purpose of ours is to begin phasing it out. Specifically, it reduces tax from the top rate of 55 percent to 40 percent. Then we have innovation and competitiveness. We all know those are characteristics that, at this point in our economic history, are rampant in our American economy. Innovation and competitiveness are the things that turned the American economy around and made Japan ask: What is America doing right? It made France and Germany ask: What are they doing right? Fifteen years ago, everybody was asking the reverse. Some were wondering if we should do things like they did things. I am grateful we did not, for most of the difference was planning by Government. They continued to do it and we came out of it with innovation and competitiveness. Now we ought to make sure we do what we can with this available surplus to make the research and investment credit turn out to be a permanent part of the Tax Code. This change recognizes that the single biggest factor in creating better jobs through productivity growth is innovation. Productivity growth is derived from research and development conducted in the private sector. Between 60 to 80 percent of the productivity growth since the Great Depression can be traced to innovation. Specifics of the proposal. The provisions here are the same as those contained in Senate bill 951, which I introduced. It makes this tax credit permanent, but also expands it to cover businesses that were not heretofore covered, including many small businesses that are filled with innovation but can't avail themselves of the research and development tax credit. Last, but not least, the bill includes a section on energy independence. All I will say is that America is, once again, looking at itself in the world and finding that we grow more and more dependent on oil from abroad. In fact, it has gotten so high that there is no question that America is now dependent for its very survival upon importing oil from foreign countries. We have probably reached the point where we cannot avoid that. We will always be dependent. But the question is, Should we let an American oil and gas industry-- principally made up of independent producers and risk takers--wither and die on the vine? Or should we change the Tax Code so more capital will be made available by the way we change the Tax Code for that kind of industry, the oil patch of America, for those who supply the services, take the risks, and those who pump the oil and gas. We have made some changes and many Senators are interested in some of these issues, such as oil and gas capitalization, through changing the Tax Code. I won't read them one by one. To be specific, with reference to my own State, this overall proposal cuts taxes for 574,000 New Mexican families who have to file an income tax return. First, the bill cuts taxes by 10 percent by lowering the 15-percent bracket to 13.5 with a 5-year phase-in. This lowers taxes for families with adjusted gross incomes up to $44,000 for joint filers and $28,000 for single filers. The tax change puts 424,000 New Mexicans who weren't up to that amount in a new lower bracket and cuts their taxes by 10 percent. This bill also raises the threshold on the 15-percent bracket--something that was included in the proposals made by the distinguished Senator from Georgia and Senator Torricelli from New Jersey. It raises that threshold by $10,000 so that middle-income Americans can earn up to $55,000 in a joint return and only pay 15 percent, instead of being dumped into the higher bracket once they are at $44,000. This is going to cut taxes for families with adjusted gross incomes between $44,000 and $55,000. You know the rest. According to our own revenue and taxation department in my home State, approximately 151,000 New Mexicans would be returned to the 15 percent tax bracket from which they have been pushed out; 83,000 of the families would see their taxes cut by $1,300 a year. Because of the progressive rate change structure, New Mexicans in the 28, 31, 36 and 39.9 brackets would all see their taxes cut by a similar amount because of the marginal rate concept in our law. This bill excludes $500 in interest and dividends from taxation. The exclusion essentially makes a $10,000 nest egg tax free; 504,000 New Mexicans will be helped by it and file more simple tax returns. The bill exempts $5,000 in capital gains from taxation, amounting to a $1.4 million tax cut for 118,000 New Mexicans. I close with a quote from Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman said, and I agree: The estate tax sends a bad message to savers, to wit: that it is O.K. to spend your money on wine, women and song, but don't try to save it for your kids. The moral absurdity of the tax is surpassed only by its economic irrationality. The death tax is also one of the most unpopular taxes. While most Americans will never pay it, 70 percent believe it is one of the most unfair taxes. Its damage to the economy is worse than its unpopular reputation. The Tax Foundation found that today's estate tax rates (ranging from 18 to 55 percent) have the same disincentive effect on entrepreneurs as doubling the current income tax rates and NFIB called it the ``greatest burden on our nation's most successful small businesses.'' The would make R&E credit permanent and phase-in some modifications during last five years. This is essentially the text of a bill I introduced earlier this year. The bill increases expensing to $250,000. This will simplify record keeping for 2.5 million small businesses and save them a whopping 107,000,000 hours in tax preparation. It also phases out the AMT for both indivduals and corporations. The tax plan also recognizes that there are certain areas of the country--oil patch in particular that are being devastated. At the same time, the oil and gas industry pays some of the highest taxes in the country. For this reason the bill also includes oil and gas tax relief. While the Joint Committee on Taxation has not completed its revenue estimate, it is my intention that these tax provisions can be accommodated within the Budget Resolution.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Chair, and I thank the minority for concurring.

Mr. DOMENICI. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order, following the remarks of Senators Dorgan and Kennedy.