Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Is the Senator from Massachusetts finished?

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to Senator Kennedy, I commend him for what he is doing. I remind the Senate that the last time I looked, this bill had 33 Republicans on it and was led on the Senate side by the chairman of the Finance Committee. He is one of the leaders, not just Senator Jeffords from the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Frankly, what has happened is, though we pass laws with reference to helping people who are disabled, either because of physical disabilities or mental disabilities, a lot of our terribly mentally handicapped do participate in disability programs. What they do not participate in very well is the training programs for them. We are just getting that started. But essentially we pass laws saying let's help them. Then we forget about them for about 15 or 20 years, which is what happened here. We find that in many respects the law has arbitrary finalization of benefit dates that hurt instead of help. Instead of encouraging that a person who is disabled go to work, if anybody is experienced with the old law, before we change it, what the people will be telling them is: Be careful, because if you try to go to work and get off, they take you off so quick and for such a tiny amount of earnings that sometimes that job finishes because the disabled do not have the propensity to have 6- year-long jobs; sometimes it is 6 months, 5 months. In the case of the mentally ill, sometimes a schizophrenic works 1 month. This program, unless we change it, does not work for them, because they get taken off the benefit list too quickly. Then it is hard to get back on. So a parent may say: Let's just not ask Jimmy to go to the Green Door and get trained over here to get a job. They say: Let's just leave that alone and talk to him about volunteering, not earning money. But I tell you, to the extent we are encouraging that, we are doing a very bad thing for disabled people. You will find across the board, for the disabled people, young or old, the most important thing going is for them to get a job. You cannot imagine how important it is for them to get a paycheck. It is among the most intriguing psychological things that happens to a disabled person--when they earn their own money--that you have ever seen. Why should we have laws that help them but at the same time discourage them from getting a job because they may get kicked off the rolls too quickly, or they cannot get on quickly enough after they get unemployed? Let's change that and make it common sense. I understand these laws are good laws, the ones we are changing. They put America in the vanguard when we passed them. They are good. But in the meantime, we are finding that nothing is as good as a job. These jobs do not pay a lot but pay just enough to qualify people under the old law to get off the rolls. So it is not as if it is rich people who are getting on and off the rolls, people earning $100,000; it is people earning minimum wage. In some instances, they even have youth jobs that are at less than minimum wage, and all of a sudden they qualify--no more aid--and they are worse off than they were before. That is what this is; the essence of it is to try to fix those things. We ought to fix them. It does not belong on this bill that Senator Reid and I are managing. Senator Kennedy has not said it does. But, look, if you cannot resolve it, we are going to do what has to happen here. I hope the Republican leadership would get together--actually, they are in the forefront. I am assuming that the chairman of the Finance Committee is not here today. He would probably be here. He wants to make sure it is done right. He has to find offsets, does he not? There are offsets. This bill is going to be neutral budgetwise. We are going to pay for it. It is not that we are going to add to the debt, or use up the surplus or use the Social Security trust fund--none of those. Frankly, I am very hopeful that our bill has served a purpose. There has been a nice debate. There is nobody here who needs the Senate any more than we do right now. Nobody is offering amendments. We are waiting. It is all right with me if they do not. It is a fine discussion. I thank the Senator. It is good to get an opportunity to comment. Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, before Senator Kennedy leaves the floor, I will just make a comment. He mentioned those disabled because of severe mental illnesses: manic depression, schizophrenia, severe chronic depression. I say to the Senator, I introduced the parity bill with Senator Wellstone to try to get more insurance coverage resources applied to these serious illnesses. I want to share with the Senator, since we are talking about disabilities, a notion that came to me with reference to severely mentally ill people. I said, what would happen if the United States, by definition, had decided we would not cover, under health insurance, illnesses of the heart because we did not want to cover illnesses of the brain? The complicated vessels are the heart and the brain. What if 30 years ago, as we produced the list of coverable illnesses, we said no coverage for heart conditions. Guess what would have happened. None of the breakthroughs in treating the heart would have ever occurred because there would not have been enough resources going into it for the researchers and the doctors to make the breakthroughs. As a matter of fact, we would not have invented angioplasty and all those other significant techniques. What would have happened in the meantime is that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be dying earlier than they should. That would be along with what I just said. When we say insurance companies should not cover schizophrenics, who have a brain disease, diagnosable and treatable, that we should not cover them, then are we not saying the same thing about a very serious physical frailty that hits between 5 and 15 million Americans during any given year, from the very young to the very old, with the highest propensity between 17 and 25 years of age for schizophrenia, manic depression, and the like? It seems to me that sooner or later, if we are going to call something ``health insurance,'' it ought to cover those who are sick, wouldn't you think?

Mr. DOMENICI. Why do we call health insurance ``health insurance'' and leave out a big chunk of the American population? Because the definition chooses to will away an illness. You define it so it does not exist, right? No. It exists. Families go broke. Their kids are in jails instead of hospitals. Because once they get one of these diseases, there is no way to help them, because there are no systems, because there are not enough resources. The resources come from the mass coverage by insurance. That is what puts resources into illnesses and cures. So I just want to assure you, we are going to proceed this year. We are going to proceed with this parity bill. We are going to have a vote here. I do not know which bill yet, but we are going to have a good debate. We are asking the business community to get the price tag. We do not want to hear any of this business that it is going to break us. We want to know, based on history, what is it going to cost? Then we are going to let the Senators and the public decide: Is that too much? What if it isn't too much in the minds of most Americans and Senators? Then it seems to me the marketplace will have to adjust to it. Obviously, if I have a chance, I would like to talk about this. I would like to do it on the floor of the Senate so a lot of other Americans hear about it. I would like to do it when somebody is here to talk about the significance of this. This is important business, the disabled in this country, whether they are disabled physically or disabled mentally. If we are going to have a real society that is proud of being free--and we have put so much emphasis on that--then we cannot leave out big chunks of the public with arbitrary laws or a failure to have insurance companies take care of the responsibilities of health coverage for disabled Americans. I yield the floor. Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. Teenagers, 31,000; they are not in the senior citizen numbers. There is a small percentage, but the big percentage are in the absolute throes of starting a great life. If we could do a better job with diagnosing depression, we would have medication and therapy preventing many of those 31,000.

Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator withhold?

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to my good friend, the ranking member on this subcommittee, we have a good, bipartisan bill. I hope we can make the point that we worked together to make it bipartisan, because I think that is the way we get a bill that we can get through here and can sustain. Commenting on your last statement and your efforts with reference to suicide, that is not unrelated to what I was discussing at all.

Mr. DOMENICI. I don't know the numbers, but I am going to guess that 60 to 70 percent of the suicides are probably found to be caused by a mental illness, most of them by severe depression. Frankly, one of the reasons we have so many suicides is because we have not created a culture among our medical people and among those who help our medical people of properly diagnosing such things as depression. One of the reasons we don't have a culture that does the diagnosis right is because it is not covered by insurance. As a consequence, there are not enough resources put in at the grassroots where doctors are getting paid for this and universities can do research on it, because it is worthwhile to the doctors to become experts in this. We are doing a little more than we did in the past but not enough from the standpoint of real mass involvement. Young people in particular are the majority victims of the suicide numbers, which is such a shame. Many of those 21,000 are kids; right?

Mr. DOMENICI. You have it.

Mr. DOMENICI. Right.

Mr. DOMENICI. That is true.

Mr. DOMENICI. Yes, indeed.

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

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we now proceed to morning business with statements allowed by each Senator for up to 5 minutes.

Mr. DOMENICI

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

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator, may I suggest the absence of a quorum for a moment and make an inquiry of my staff, and then I will return and answer all these questions. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be set aside, and that we move on to other business, leaving it pending.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I send a technical amendment to the desk. It is clearly technical, and I ask it be adopted.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I commend Senator Reid for his comprehensive statement. I tell him and the Senate how pleased I am that I have a ranking member who understands the importance of the work of the Department of Energy in our nuclear weapons development, maintenance, and safekeeping, because sometimes it is rather lonely. Many people fail to understand the relationship between not having any more underground testing and the decision to have a new science- based stockpile stewardship of nuclear weapons. Without underground testing, with various scientific approaches and new kinds of scientific instrumentation, we are going to produce the atmosphere and environment surrounding what would have taken place in a real underground test, and we will be able to say what is happening to our nuclear weapons--their safety, well-being, maintenance, and reliability. That is a big undertaking. For those who come to the floor regularly and eloquently urge we put plenty of money in our defenses, it is high time they understand we have to put plenty of money into this area because, although the regular military of our primary military adversary in the world is getting depleted and its strength is being greatly diminished, the country remains a huge owner and developer of nuclear weapons. They do not build their weapons as we build our weapons. They are far less sophisticated. That is their choice. We chose another approach. Our approach requires we regularly understand what is going on in the wear and tear and longevity of our nuclear weapons as they stand ready, continuing to be the great deterrent they are. That has a fancy name. My good friend from Nevada explained it very well. It is tied inextricably to our decision not to do any underground testing. Frankly, there are some in this body, including the occupant of the Chair, who are not quite sure we should have abandoned underground testing, and there are some who maintain we ought to do science-based stockpile stewardship and nuclear testing. I heard Dr. Schlesinger testify about that at a committee hearing. Perhaps Senator Kyl has heard them say that. The policy of our country is not to do that. It is to substitute for nuclear testing, scientific knowledge, and scientific technology, first simulating and then acquiring information regarding the reliability of nuclear weapons--a huge undertaking. Our scientists approached it with great trepidation. There are still some great nuclear scientists who are not sure it is sufficient and who are not sure at some point we will not have to go back and think it all through again. But for now, three basic laboratories are doing this. One of the lead laboratories is Lawrence Livermore, with reference to a great big project called the National Ignition Facility. Los Alamos has a piece of it, both in computer technology and in a new building and new instrumentation called the DARP program. And Sandia, the engineering part of our laboratory structure, is heavily engaged in developing the kind of computer capacity to do the simulating and make sure we are getting the right answers in these new, sophisticated tests of the validity and consistence and well-being of nuclear weapons. That is all in this bill. So Senators who are worried about defense should know a big portion of this bill is defense, unless they perceive we now live in a world when we can have defense all in the defense appropriation bill, all those subjects, and not have a nuclear deterrent and a nuclear maintenance function within our Nation's priorities. If some feel that, then this is not defense. But who would dare say that to the American people? Who would even suggest we ought to be underfunding this kind of activity? Frankly, the Senator from New Mexico was greatly concerned upon hearing, in the last 3, 4, 5 months, so much about the lack of security because clearly I do not want, nor should the Senate, that fear and that concern to have an impact on the maintenance of the scientific effort that we all know we have to do so long as we will not and do not intend to test any of our weapons, either old or new. This is a good bipartisan bill. This is a bill that has had a lot of input from Senator Harry Reid. Of that I am proud. He has listened to our concerns; we have listened to his. There are many Senators' States that have projects in this bill that are very important to them on that side of the aisle and on this side of the aisle. I believe we are going to have less money to spend, and I say this to all the Senators. We are going to have less money for this bill. Even if we wait around until the end of the year and think we can make some kind of deal with the President, we are going to have less money in this bill than we had last year. That is just the way it has to be under the Balanced Budget Act. I think we have done a good job in allocating that money, which is short, to the various functions of Government within this bill. We have not shortchanged our defense preparedness, as it pertains to nuclear weapons, in the process. I understand that my friend, Senator Reid, concurs with this unanimous consent request I will propound. Unanimous Consent Agreement Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate receives from the House the companion bill to S. 1186, the Senate immediately proceed to consideration thereof; that all after the enacting clause be stricken and the text of S. 1186, as passed, be inserted in lieu thereof; that the House bill, as amended, be read for a third time and passed; that the Senate insist on its amendment, request a conference with the House on the disagreeing votes of the two Houses, and the Chair be authorized to appoint conferees on the part of the Senate; and that the foregoing occur without any intervening action or debate. I further ask unanimous consent that the bill, S. 1186, not be engrossed and it remain at the desk pending receipt of the House companion bill; and that upon passage of the House bill, as amended, the passage of S. 1186 be vitiated and the bill be indefinitely postponed.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, on June 2 the Committee on Appropriations reported Senate bill 1186, the Energy and Water Development Act for the year 2000. As reported by the Appropriations Committee, the recommendation would provide $21.2 billion in new budget authority, $12.6 billion within defense, and $8.6 billion within nondefense. In the defense accounts, that amounts to a $220 million increase over the request; in the nondefense accounts--that is including the water project--it amounts to a $608 million reduction from the request. For the first time in memory, the recommendation before us provides less money for water projects than was requested. We have reduced some energy research, nondefense environment management, science, and the Department of Energy's administration accounts. In fact, in order to accommodate some serious shortfalls in the President's request and some very legitimate requests from Members, we have cut a significant amount more than $608 million that we are short from that request. For example, the recommendation before us restores the $81 million for the Power Marketing Administration to provide power to their customers. That was left out of the President's request, and we had to cut other programs, above the $608 million, to provide these funds. As we have made these reductions, we have tried to follow certain criteria. In the water accounts, for example: Where the President fully funded or provided advance appropriations for special projects, such as the Everglades, Columbia River Fish Migration, and the CALFED project, we have brought those programs back down in line with other accounts, but we have funded them. Second, projects included in the budget at the capability level, in this year when we will not be able to fund projects at their full capability, have been reduced to no more than 85 percent of capability. Third, items where the budget request was significantly increased over the current year's level of funding have been reduced to bring them back in line with the fiscal year 1999 levels. We have not included unauthorized projects or projects contained in the water resources development bill, called WRDA 99, which is still in conference. Finally, a significant amount of previously appropriated and unused funding has been used to finance the fiscal year 2000 program or recommended for rescission in order to save outlays. Having said that, the recommendation for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still at $3.723 billion. That is $182.6 million below the budget request and $374.1 million below the fiscal year 1999 enacted level. Moving on to the Bureau of Reclamation, the recommendation before the committee totals $756.2 million. This is $100 million below the budget request and $24 million below the current year level. Within this account, the largest single reduction is from the request for the bay delta restoration Program, and we can go into more details on other projects. From the Department of Energy's nondefense accounts, we have proposed--because we don't have sufficient money--some substantial reductions from the President's request. For example, the recommendation for solar and renewable energy is $348.9 million. That is $3.4 million over the level the committee recommended a year ago, but it is less than the President asked for. We have also gone through all of the DOE accounts and found $41 million in unobligated balances from old projects and programs, and we have gone so far as to rescind $1,000 from an old program that hasn't been around in years, to make those funds available for this act. Within the defense allocation, we have been able to add some funds, because we were given a slight increase by the Appropriations Committee from that account. To the extent possible, we have tried to recognize the needs of Members with environmental management sites. We have provided increases at Savannah River and the Hanford site as well as Rocky Flats where DOE is on track to complete this cleanup by 2006. Let's hope we can stay on track and celebrate that event soon. I am well aware that more funds could be justified to increase the pace of cleanup at those sites, but we simply don't have the necessary resources. Within weapons activities, we have begun a major realignment among the defense laboratories. As we have taken some nuclear weapons designs out of the stockpile, an imbalance has been created between Livermore and Los Alamos in my State. To ensure that balance is retained between them, we have transferred responsibility for one warhead design from Los Alamos to Lawrence Livermore. We have also expanded certain operations at the Nevada Test Site and initiated a microelectronics capability, a new technology which will make our weapons safer in the future, and at the same time may make some breakthroughs for American industry and for future uses that may bring microengineering and microelectronics into our everyday lives in a very big way. The Defense Authorization Act was recently passed by the Senate, and the Intelligence Authorization Act will come to the floor next week, perhaps. It is my hope that is where issues related to the Cox Commission report and allegations of espionage at our laboratories will be addressed. The recommendation before you does not include any broad effort in that regard. It is an appropriations bill, not an authorizing bill. Now, obviously, I am hopeful that nobody will offer broad changes to the structure of DOE and moving toward better security within DOE. As I say, it is not an authorizing bill; it is an appropriations bill. The extent to which we can predict the action taken on the authorizing bill so far will necessitate funding in this regard. We have made some adjustments. We have increased funding for security investigations from $30 million to $45 million. We have increased funding for counter- intelligence from the requested level of $31 million to $39 million--we are proposing to more than double the funding of $15.6 million the Committee provided last year. Finally, because some have raised concerns about materials security, the recommendation provides an increase of $10 million for physical security. In summary, the recommendation before you is for $21.2 billion, a reduction of $380.8 million from the request. It is our intention to work, if we have to, late tonight, but with the unanimous consent agreement that was entered into, obviously we will know by 5 o'clock the extent to which we will be working on the floor handling various amendments. We will be here all afternoon. I personally urge colleagues on my side--I hope that Senator Reid will urge his on his side--to bring any amendments they may have to the floor so we can consider them today. It is my intention to shortly--after all amendments have been filed-- act on a package of managers' amendments. We will not do that immediately. We will wait a while. I yield the floor and turn the podium over to my distinguished ranking member, Senator Reid. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Chair. Let me thank Senator Reid very much for doing that. We have all been working to try to make sure that as this week fills up with other kinds of votes, on everything from Y2K to the lockbox and other things, we be given ample opportunity to get this bill passed. We worked very hard under the leadership and direction of our chairman, Senator Ted Stevens, chairman of the full committee, to get this bill ready and to get it out here as soon as possible. This will be the second full Appropriations Committee bill that will be before the Senate. If it passes in the next few days, we will be on some kind of a record in terms of our ability to get a large number of the appropriation bills done in a very timely manner. For that, I am grateful to the chairman and ranking member of the full committee for the amount of resources that were given to this committee. I will begin with an explanation of how we tried to respond to the allocation of resources. First of all, this is an interesting bill, interesting in the sense that it is not very rational in that you have two things mixed that are about as far apart in the spectrum of prioritizing and need as you could get. All of the nuclear weapons research and development for all of our bombs and all of our safeguards and all of our great research is in this bill. That has been and is still defense work. It is work for the defense of our country. We get money for this because it is a defense function. When we had the walls up wherein you could not spend defense money for anything else, the money that came into this bill for that purpose came right out of the defense total. There is another piece of this bill that has to do with water and water resources, not as they relate to anything nuclear, just water and water resources, various inland waterways, various dams, various dikes, Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, those kinds of activities, and a myriad of flood protection projects, because the Federal Government, over time, has been a major player with the States in a matching program with reference to flood protection. Then sitting kind of in the middle but aligned with those water projects are things that the Department of Energy does that are not defense oriented. We call those the nondefense energy projects, research of various types that is not necessarily or even required to be related to the defense activities I have just described. So in a very real sense, it is kind of comprehensive and a mix of various funding requirements of our country that do not mesh. We started from the beginning saying there are certain resources that come to this committee from the full Appropriations Committee that are clearly for the purposes of the defense of our Nation. We have taken those resources and said that all of the resources we are getting from the Appropriations Committee which have historically been for defense will be used for defense only. To the best of our ability, we have not used any defense money; that is, defense nuclear money, and defense having safe weapons, the nuclear stockpile, the stewardship stockpile-- we have used defense money for that--we have not in any case taken some of that money or any of that money and used it for water projects or used it for nondefense Department of Energy work. I would like to keep it that way. I have no power of the Budget Committee or points of order to keep it that way, because we, in compromising, when we put the 5-year Balanced Budget Act together, bipartisan, and executive branch with the President, had walls between defense and nondefense for 3 years, and then it was discretionary for the last 2. We are in the last 2 now. I have, nonetheless, with the assistance of my ranking member, kept defense money for defense programs and not put it into nondefense domestic energy programs or in water projects. On nondefense energy projects--I will just mention one--there is an amendment pending to do more with solar and renewable energy. That is not a defense activity. We have done the best we could, but we have not used any defense money for that. I hope when we see the amendment, since one is going to be forthcoming, that they followed that pattern and have not taken it out of the defense activities, because with what we know about the world, with what we know about Russia and the hard feelings that exist, what we know about the Chinese and their moving as quickly as they can toward a nuclear empire of their own with reference to weapons--and we have agreed that we are not going to do any underground testing whether or not we pass the treaty on nuclear testing or not; we have agreed not to do any--it is absolutely important and imperative we prove we can maintain our nuclear stockpile with adequate safeguards and that it is standing the test of time. What we need to do that with is the new program called science-based stockpile stewardship. The occupant of the Chair is an expert in some of these areas and has worked long and hard in the House. I thank him for a lot of the help he gave in trying to reorganize the Department of Energy, which will continue to come up even after the Rudman report today. I am sure it will be before us again. I believe the occupant of the Chair, the distinguished Senator from Arizona, has constantly raised the question, Will stockpile stewardship work? Will science- based stockpile stewardship work? Will substituting computers and new kinds of systems that can take x ray-type pictures of what is going on inside one of our nuclear weapons, even far more sophisticated than that, that knows what is going on--that is the substitute for testing in an underground mode that we have done for many decades in getting our weapons to be the best and most safe in the world--if that isn't working, then obviously everybody has to rethink where we are with reference to underground testing. So I don't want to shortchange science-based stockpile stewardship. There are three or four aspects of it that are very expensive--the development of certain buildings and certain technology. We are not finished with them yet. We are maybe halfway finished. We have about half more to go, including the gigantic, new process we are building at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which has the initials NIF, National Ignition Facility. The Senate is now considering Calendar No. 128, the Energy and Water Act for Fiscal Year 2000. As we begin, there is a technical error in the bill as reported by the committee. I will send to the desk, with the full understanding of my ranking member, a correction to that error. It has been cleared by both sides. I ask unanimous consent that, after I send it to the desk for reading, it be agreed to.

Mr. DOMENICI. That is the energy and water appropriations bill. Mr. President, I understand--is this correct--Senator Reid has procured a unanimous consent agreement that all amendments will be filed to this bill by 5 this afternoon?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I have a parliamentary inquiry: What is the subject matter before the Senate?