Judd Gregg

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to yield myself 10 minutes on the time of Mr. Thomas.

Mr. GREGG

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, we are about to begin the heavy lifting on the Patient Bill of Rights Conference Committee, and I wanted to come to the Floor of the Senate and lay out some of the key concerns and principles that should guide us in the coming month. First, I want to take a minute and compliment my colleague, Senator Nickles, for his fine work over, really, the last 3 years. He has been a dedicated leader on this issue. I am confident that as chair of the conference, he will conduct a fair and orderly process for this conference. We are ready. Many of us have worked on most of these provisions for several years. I and my Republican Senate conferees, for one, have worked over the last several months to educate ourselves on the House bill. Let me be clear. We want a substantive conference. As I have said, we have already rolled up our sleeves, and I think we can work through this complex bill and meet the deadline of completing this bill by the end of March. That is our goal and with the cooperation of every Senator and House Member on this committee, I believe we can meet this goal. The stakes are high. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that the very future of medical care in this country hinges on what we do in this next month. From the very basic and practical question of who a patient calls for help when there is a concern about coverage or some aspect of their health plan--to the delivery of that care by doctors or other health professionals--to who regulates these fundamental health insurance issues--all of these issues will be greatly affected by this bill. First, do no harm. This is the doctor's oath. I believe we serve Americans badly if at the end of the day we do not adhere to that same rule. That is why we cannot enact a bill that unreasonably increase the cost of insurance. We cannot leave American families with no choice but to drop their insurance altogether. Even in our strong economy--the strongest economy that this country has seen since WWII--the number of uninsured Americans has increased by about another 1 million. The latest census numbers available show that 44.3 million Americans were without coverage in 1998. That is one American in six. And employers are facing increases in health care costs this year of as much as 7.3 percent. Small businesses are struggling with even much higher cost increases. Costs are rising for American employers who want to continue providing coverage to their employees. For better or worse, managed care has been the main instrument in this country for making health care more affordable for a vast number of Americans. If we price these products out of the market, with regulations, mandates and lawsuits, the effect will be crippling. We recently heard from some fairly large employers who said that if the House-passed bill were enacted, they would stop offering employees health insurance altogether--resulting in more uninsured. These aren't just some unrecognizable companies with a few employees. Companies like Wal Mart, which employs 800,000 employees, have indicated they would drop health coverage. The Chamber of Commerce announced they would have no choice but to recommend to their member companies to drop health insurance if the House-passed bill were enacted into law in its current form. Overall, I believe about 36 percent of the employers in this country have said they'd stop offering coverage. This Congress must not allow that to happen. Will these bills hike the costs for families and their employers? Both bills will, even though Senate Republicans believe we have come up with a better bill that addresses the complexities of the health care system and gives patients the care they need without unreasonably raising their costs. The CBO has said, in February, that the House-passed bill would cancel coverage for over a million Americans, increasing costs of private health insurance premiums by an average of 4.1 percent above inflation. This driving up of the costs of medicine does little to improve the quality of care. Equally important as costs, is the issue of expanding lawsuits, or the liability debate. I fought to prevent the Senate bill from including an expanded right to sue last summer, and 52 of my colleague agreed with me. They recognized that consumers don't get much from these lawsuits. They don't get greater care. They don't get much money for their troubles either, because the lawyers take most of any settlement or award. If the truth be known, lawsuits have never been a friend of the patient. Nothing confirms this fact better than a recent IOM report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, that finds unreported medical reports are killing alarming numbers of patients every year. This report, based on the hard work of experts at the National Institute of Medicine, concluded that the threat of lawsuits actually prevents hospitals, doctors, and other health care professional from reporting mistakes and errors that they have made. We are not just talking about a few cases, but the report concluded that as many as 98,000 people are killed each year because of such things as: Poor handwriting by doctors, which often causes pharmacists to misread drug prescriptions and issue the wrong drug and/or dosage. Unfamiliarity of doctors, and health professionals with the rapidly changing and emerging technologies that are being introduced in health care today. These technologies pose new hazards for patients, and professionals simply do not have competency and are not continually retrained. The recommendations suggest that these errors are hidden for fear of malpractice lawsuits. More importantly, the report suggests that doctors, hospitals and other health care providers will never report errors without protection from the threat of litigation. So what is the answer to the horrible fact that thousands of Americans are dying each year because of unreported medical mistakes? The IOM report calls for a national effort, and I agree that we have to work with every aspect of health care in this country to turn those numbers of deaths around. We need our public agencies responsible for the public health, like HHS, HRSA and the Agency for Health Care Policy Research and Quality involved. We need state agencies and public health institutions involved. All of these folks need to engage the entire health care industry in a broad range of quality and safety issues. This is absolutely the direction we must go to prevent medical mistakes. The report suggests that all these folks should work together to develop standards for safety and define minimum levels of performance for every health care organizations. All these efforts should focus public attention on patient safety. We know how to prevent many of these medical mistakes, and real reductions in errors are achievable if we focus on patient safety. President Clinton also wants to require every state to create mandatory reporting systems to collect information on medical errors. However, I haven't really heard very many folks say they support a mandatory system; most don't believe it will solve the problem. Even the Administration official who presented the plan to the Health and Education Committee several weeks ago, acknowledged that a mandatory system of reporting may not be the best approach. Dr. John Eisenburg, director of the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, admitted that some of the criticism of the proposal was ``on target.'' He said, ``Do we know if these programs [mandatory reporting programs] work? No, we don't. We don't know how well they work, and when they work best.'' The Health and Education Committee has had four hearing on this issue, and we have heard one thing time and time again: as long as there is the fear that reported data--whether it is supposed to be confidential or not--will be ferreted out and used by an aggressive trial bar, we will never be able to reduce medical error rates. Unless we do something about liability, there will never be a real and substantial effort made to report medical mistakes. The American Hospital Association had this to day, ``Our concern is around the protection of the information that's contained in those reports. Any enterprising malpractice attorney is going to be able to track back to the caregivers.'' So, the fear of blame and lawsuits is too great. When the American Medical Association testified at this hearing, they opposed mandatory reporting, saying that, ``The president has the cart before the horse. He'd put in place mandatory reporting, then study it and do something different if it doesn't improve patient safety'' My colleague, Senator Hagel, also specifically asked Dr. Dickey what she thought of the IMM's conclusion that there be some liability protections vis-a-vis this important issue--patient bill of rights. You know what she said? She basically said that they wanted the flawed liability legal remedies and failed legal system that has harmed the doctor's practice of medicine for so many years applied to HMOs, and then and only then should we fix the mess for everyone. Where is the logic in that? That does not sound like the answer to me. Shouldn't we acknowledge that, yes, this system that has caused defensive medicine and cost society in terms of quality health care for decades, and killed people according to the IOM, should be fixed before we expand its breadth to anyone else? So, Mr. President, I say that liability has never been a friend to patients and the unfortunate findings about annual deaths in the IOM report are the best evidence of that fact. This IOM report is very important in our deliberations, and none of us should lose sight of this fact. I also believe that my constituents back in New Hampshire should not have to deal with a greatly complicated regulatory bureaucracy. You know, a patient that has a question about his coverage or some other aspect of his health plan wants a straight answer to a question. I want to highlight this fact: The consumer wants a straight answer. Ultimately, he should be able to call his health plan and receive reliable information. If the answer he gets is not the answer he wants, the patient should have a means of redress. Under the Senate passed bill, we have set a system that lets doctors take a look at what doctors are deciding for patients. Under the Senate passed bill, concerns are addressed by a doctor specializing in the patient's type of problem. The doctor is independent, and makes that decision. There are several levels of independent medical review where a patient can go outside the insurance plan and have another doctor who specializes in the same type of problem look again at the patient's needs and decide if the patient should or should not have the requested service or treatment. This is an approach designed to get the patient care, and get the patient good care. The House-passed bill also has an appeals process, but I am very concerned its design is more about creating more lawsuits, and putting more money in attorneys' pockets. What will patient's get out of this? They won't get the care they need. So we think we have come up with a better idea. In conclusion, let me say that patients really want and need to be put back into the health care equation, and I think that has been acknowledged on both sides. That is why many of the provisions in both bills are very similar. I think the provisions on plan information in both bills are similar and there is common ground from which we can work. We both give Americans expanded new rights to go to an emergency room and get the care they need without worrying about having to fight with their insurer over who will pay for this care. We both greatly expand access to specialists. Both bills allow direct access to a pediatrician for children, and for women seeking primary and preventative ob/gyn care. So, we are close on very many of the issues that are important to most Americans. These are major issues that I believe we can come to an agreement on. Other issues will be difficult to resolve, but I am committed to sitting down with colleagues on the other side of the aisle to discuss these issues, and will promise to negotiate in good faith. We may not agree yet, but I am hopeful. I think Democrats and Republicans share a goal of wanting to ensure individuals have access to safe and appropriate health coverage. So I am positive about this conference.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia. I appreciate his hard work on this bill. He has certainly outlined most eloquently the importance of these savings accounts to education and how the dollars that will be going into the savings accounts will have a multilayer effect and grow radically, thus increasing the opportunity for more and more kids and more and more families to experience the American dream of going to college. They are using these dollars for other educational activities. I wish to speak specifically to the amendment of the Senator from Washington State. This amendment is misdirected. It has come to the floor on a number of other occasions and it has been misdirected every time it came to the floor. It has been put forward by the administration as basically a polling amendment. I mean they went out and polled the term and then they concluded that term polled well so they came forward with a program based on that term. It does not have anything to do with quality education. Study after study has shown the issue of quality education is not tied directly to class size. It is tied to the quality of the teacher in the classroom. In fact, there was a recent study done which studied all the other studies; 300 studies were looked at by Eric Hanushek of the University of Rochester. His conclusion was this, looking at 300 different studies on this specific issue: Class size reduction has not worked; the quality of the teacher is much more important than class size. Equally important to that issue is the fact this is a straw dog amendment; 43 of the States in this country already are below what the President wants in class size ratio, 18-1. So the amendment really is not for the purpose of reducing class size; it is for the purpose of putting out a political statement. Let's do something about education. That is what the Republican side of this aisle wants to do. So we have come forward with something called the Teacher Empowerment Act. Rather than having Washington put a straitjacket on the communities where they have to use this money for one thing and one thing only, which is to hire new teachers--many school systems not needing new teachers; what they really need is keep the good teachers they already have and they are having trouble doing that--rather than having this straitjacket from Washington delivered by the Clinton administration and the Members on the other side of the aisle, we said: Let's give the local communities the opportunity to give them what they need, the Teacher Empowerment Act. It says we will take the funds suggested by the Senator from Washington and put them in the proper vehicle, which happens to be the Elementary and Secondary School Act, which is being marked up today, and we will allow those funds to be used by local communities to assist in addressing their teacher needs. They can use it for teacher education; they can use it for paying good teachers more money to keep them there in the school system; they can use it to send teachers out to get better qualifications and more certification or, if they want, they can use it to hire teachers to reduce class size. We give the local school system a series of options, which is exactly what should happen. We in Washington should not be saying to every school system in America that in order to get these funds it has to add another teacher because that may not be what the local school system needs. There are numerous school systems in this country that have great teachers that they are losing because the tremendous demand of the marketplace is taking those teachers out of the school system and putting them in the private sector, especially in the math and science areas. So what that school system needs is the ability to pay them a differential, pay them a little more money. This gives them that option. The Republican proposal is a logical proposal. It is a proposal that addresses the needs of the school systems, the needs of the principals in the school systems, the needs of the superintendents in the school systems and, most important, the needs of the teachers in the school systems and the needs of the parents whose children those teachers teach, rather than addressing some polling data that happens to make a nice political statement but ends up straitjacketing the local communities and the parents and teachers in those local communities. That is the difference. To begin with, the Coverdell bill is the wrong place for this amendment. The amendment is bad to begin with, as I just noted, and I noted why it is bad, but it has no place in this bill. We are in the process of marking this specific issue up in committee. In fact, today we heard from the Senator from Washington; we heard from the Senator from Massachusetts as to how class size was going to be one of the two essential issues they intended to raise in the committee as we marked up the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That is very appropriate. That is where the debate should occur. In that bill already is the TEA bill, the Teacher Empowerment Act. They don't like it because it gives freedom to local school districts and they want to keep control in Washington. I can understand that is their political philosophy, but that debate should occur in the committee of jurisdiction on the bill appropriate to the issue. It should not occur on this bill, which is a bill to expand and empower parents and kids so they can go to college, so they can pursue other types of educational excellence activities. The Coverdell idea is a superb idea and it certainly should not be mucked up, the water should not be discolored as a result of putting out what is basically a proposal that has no relevance to this bill.

Mr. GREGG. How much time remains?

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I begin by congratulating the Senator from Delaware for bringing this bill forward again, and the Senator from Georgia, who is presently in the Chair, for having been the original author of this bill. This is a very strong piece of legislation which, as the Senator from Delaware has so effectively pointed out, is absolutely critical to the parents of this country as they try to assure the one thing that is most important in most parents' lifestyles in dealing with their kids, beyond giving their kids love and a sense of how to deal with reality and a sense of values, and that is the ability to get a good education. The ability to get a good education, once you get out of the public school system in our country today, is tied, to a great extent, to your ability to pay for that education. Postsecondary school education, even under public school systems, can be extraordinarily expensive. These college savings IRA accounts give parents more flexibility. In fact, there was an ad I saw on TV last night which brought home the reality of this so effectively. It showed a baby being born. The theme of the ad was: The first image that comes across the parents' minds is the wonder of the baby. The second image that comes across the parents' minds is, $210,000 is flashed up on the screen because that is what it is going to cost to educate that child, to have that child, who was just born, go to college. The theme of the ad is: What am I going to do to pay that? One way to address it is to pass this bill which was passed and, regrettably, rejected by the Democratic side of the aisle and the President. It is before us again so we can give parents some relief. Nobody is claiming this is the entire rug or the entire makeup of the issue of how we address education. No one is claiming that this is the whole quilt. This is one block within the quilt, one item of the quilt in how we improve education in this country today. It is an important item, and it is an important statement to make that we, as a Congress, are going to, once again, put forward this initiative which we put forward last year as part of our efforts. A couple of Members from the other side of the aisle have come to the floor today and said they would rather debate something else. I guess they do not think college education is that important. They think something else is more important. One Member came to the floor today, the Senator from Connecticut, and said we need to debate special ed; we need to put more money into special ed. We should not be putting more money into this program; we should be putting more money into special ed. That is an unusual argument to hear from the other side of the aisle because there is a certain inconsistency and hollowness to that argument. Let's go through the numbers as to special ed and this Congress since the Republicans have taken over and since we have had a Democratic President. In 1997, the President sent up a budget. How much of an increase did he have for special ed? He had a 12-percent increase. The Republican Senate made a commitment. It said: That's not enough; we have to address special ed. We are going to put more dollars into special ed. As a result, the Republican Congress put forward a 34-percent increase in special ed. Why was that? Because we see special ed as being the single largest unfunded mandate, outside the environmental area, this country has. Originally, the agreement was, the Federal Government was going to pay 40 percent of the cost of special ed. When the Congress became Republican, the cost that was being paid by the Federal Government was 6 percent, and it had not been improved at all by the Democratic Congress or by a Democratic Presidency. We made a commitment as a Republican Congress that we were going to get that spending up so more special ed dollars would flow back to the States, so we could fulfill our obligations under special ed of paying a larger percentage of that 40 percent, so local dollars could be freed up for the purposes of spending them on local priorities rather than having local dollars spent paying the Federal share of special ed. As I said, in 1997 the Democratic leadership in this Congress, and through its President, proposed a 12-percent increase in special ed. We raised special ed spending by $783 million that year, or 34 percent. I am pointing this out because the Senator from Connecticut said we have to spend more money on special ed; we should not be talking about this program on the floor; more money should go to special ed. I think that rings hollow in light of these numbers. In 1998, the President put forward a budget with a 4-percent increase in special ed funding. That is essentially enough to pay for all the salaries of all the administrators they want to put on the books. The Senate increased special ed spending that year under a Republican initiative by 22 percent, $698 million. In 1999, it was the same story. The President sent us a budget supported by the Democratic leadership. How much of an increase did they ask for in special ed spending? This time they asked for a .03- percent increase in special ed funding. The Republican majority said: No, that is not acceptable; we are going to increase special ed funding again. We increased it over the baseline by 13 percent in 1999, $510 million. Again, in the year 2000, this year, the President increased special ed funding by what? Seven percent. We said: No, that is not acceptable; more special ed dollars are needed to meet the obligation of the 40- percent commitment we made. So the Republican Senate, with a Republican initiative of this Congress, increased special ed funding by $678 million last year for a 15.7-percent increase. The total increase under the Republican leadership in this Congress in special ed funding has been over 100 percent since the year 1997. We have gone from $2.6 billion up to over $5 billion we are projecting in this coming year in special ed funding. The proposals coming from the other side of the aisle--and we just heard this presentation that said we should be spending more on special ed--were to increase special ed funding over that period by essentially nothing. The Republican majority has taken the issue of special ed funding. We have fulfilled an obligation. We are moving toward full funding of that obligation made by this Congress in 1976 when the special ed bill was first passed, and as a result we are doing what should be done, which is to fund special ed at an aggressive level, something which we have not seen coming from the other side of the aisle or from the administration. When I hear folks come to this floor and say we should not be taking up this bill, we should be funding special ed, there is, I think, a certain hollowness to that argument. The Senator from Massachusetts argued we ought to be taking up this item of education, that item of education, another item of education, and why haven't we taken up all these items of education; we have not done anything in this Congress, including minimum wage. I note, the bankruptcy bill did have minimum wage in it, which we passed, which the Senator, I guess, does not like, and that is why he considers we have not taken it up. The fact is, all the educational items he has listed are presently moving through committee and will be discussed in committee and then will be brought to the floor, as the Senator knows. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act is on the verge of being marked up in committee. In fact, I think the Senator probably, as of today or maybe tomorrow, will be putting together his amendments and will be getting ready for a major markup of that bill the first week in March, which will take up almost all the issues he outlined as not being addressed by this Congress. Would he want us to skip the committee and just bring that bill to the floor without any committee action? As a senior member on the Democratic side of that committee, I seriously doubt that. That bill is not being vetted in committee. I cannot imagine the Senator would want those issues, which are very complex, very important, and involve substantive discussions of education policy, to be thrown out on the floor without committee action. But that seems to be what he is suggesting, that we should have just thrown the bill before the Senate rather than putting it through the proper committee procedure and taking action on it, which is what he has proposed. He knows it is going to be taken up in committee and then brought before the Senate and worked on I suspect for a week or a week and a half, maybe 2 weeks. Why is this bill being considered? Because this bill has gone through the committee process. The chairman of the committee which has jurisdiction over this piece of legislation is presenting the bill. That is why it is here. If the ESEA bill was ready, it could be brought to the floor, but the ESEA bill isn't ready. It will be ready fairly soon. It is going to be one heck of a good bill on which to debate education policy. I will not deny that. The differences between our side of the aisle and the other side of the aisle on the issue of elementary and secondary education in this country are fairly significant. We happen to think after you have spent $100 billion on a program, and kids can be shown to have obtained absolutely nothing from that money, that you have children essentially who are still locked into failure, where low-income kids are still getting the same terrible education children got 20 years ago. Even though we have spent $100 billion on education, unfortunately, the children with whom we started out 20 years ago in this program have ended up coming through a system which has failed them. We are still sticking kids into that system. We are still running them through that system, the same way it has always been--counting bureaucrats instead of counting results; not focusing on the child but, rather, focusing on systems. That is a failure; no question about it. We are going to get to discuss that failure at some length on this floor, as we will in committee. That is going to be a big issue. But to simply bring the ESEA out here and throw it on the floor, as the Senator from Massachusetts, the ranking member, seems to be implying we should do before we take up this bill, abandons the legislative process. The legislative process relative to this bill has worked. It has gone through committee. It has actually gone through committee and through the Senate and it has been vetoed. Now it is back on the floor. Having gone through the committee, it has come back to the floor to be heard again. It makes sense that we should be taking up this bill. I think the arguments by the Senator from Massachusetts, as much as I respect his understanding of the legislative process--he is one of the people in the Senate who knows the most about the legislative process and has been here the longest of anyone, I guess, other than Senator Thurmond and Senator Byrd. He understands the legislative process, and I am a little surprised, I guess, that he would make the representations he did relative to why this bill is on the floor versus the other issues he outlined as being his preference for being considered on the floor. We will get to those other issues. We will get to them aggressively. We will have a full debate. It is going to be a very energized debate. There will be a lot of differences of opinion. It will be good for this country because the education debate needs to be aired on this floor with intensity and with a full hearing because it is such a critical issue for our Nation. But as of right now, the bill on which we are ready to proceed is this bill. In my opinion, we should not have a lot of ``straw dogs'' put up in the face of it. Let's pass this bill. It is good for parents, it is good for kids who want to go to college, and as a result it will be good for the country. I yield the floor. Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000. On January 20, 2000, the FCC approved a new non-commercial low-power FM (LPFM) radio service. In order for LPFM stations to fit in the FM band, the FCC will have to significantly weaken the existing interference protections it developed and has subscribed to for decades. The public commentary and technical analysis shows that LPFM will cause interference with current FM stations, and thus result in a loss of service to listeners. It is imperative that the integrity of the spectrum is protected and that all individuals have access to local news, weather and emergency information free from interference. Both public and commercial radio stations are opposed to the FCC's proposal in its current form. These new FCC rules are inconsistent with sound spectrum management. I believe that this issue requires further study, as well as Congressional hearings, to fully examine the impact that LPFM would have on existing FM radio service. Therefore, I am introducing the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act. This legislation would repeal any prescribed rules authorizing LPFM and revoke LPFM licenses that may be issued prior to the date of enactment of this bill. While the desire to provide a forum for community groups to have a greater voice is laudable, a multitude of alternatives already exist. Currently, groups may obtain commercial or noncommercial radio licenses, use public access cable, publish newsletters, and utilize Internet web sites and e-mail. It is important that our efforts to create more opportunities for those who support LPFM do not lead to the denial of access for others who depend on FM radio for safety, news, and entertainment. For instance, inexpensive and older radios, particularly vulnerable to interference and most commonly used by low- income and elderly listeners, will sustain the greatest negative impact caused by LPFM. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the relaxation of first, second, or third adjacent channel protection standards will have an adverse effect on the transition to digital radio. Unlike television broadcasters, who are being given additional free spectrum to broadcast in digital format, radio broadcasters must use the current spectrum allocations to transmit both digital and analog signals, making adjacent channel safeguards all the more important. At a minimum, adding a large number of LPFMs to the already congested FM band will make the transition to digital radio increasingly difficult and problematic. Finally, the new low-power proposal makes formerly unlicensed, pirate radio operators eligible for LPFM licenses. This ruling re-enforces their unlawful behavior and encourages future illegal activity by opening the door to new unauthorized broadcasters. The introduction of thousands of LPFM stations not only rewards illegal activity, but is certain to undermine the integrity of the radio spectrum, interfering with current FM service and penalizing the listening public. The radio programming supplied to listeners by existing radio stations provides crucial news, weather, and emergency information, as well as cultural entertainment, which must be preserved. I ask that the text of the bill be printed in the Record. The bill follows:

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000. On January 20, 2000, the FCC approved a new non-commercial low-power FM (LPFM) radio service. In order for LPFM stations to fit in the FM band, the FCC will have to significantly weaken the existing interference protections it developed and has subscribed to for decades. The public commentary and technical analysis shows that LPFM will cause interference with current FM stations, and thus result in a loss of service to listeners. It is imperative that the integrity of the spectrum is protected and that all individuals have access to local news, weather and emergency information free from interference. Both public and commercial radio stations are opposed to the FCC's proposal in its current form. These new FCC rules are inconsistent with sound spectrum management. I believe that this issue requires further study, as well as Congressional hearings, to fully examine the impact that LPFM would have on existing FM radio service. Therefore, I am introducing the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act. This legislation would repeal any prescribed rules authorizing LPFM and revoke LPFM licenses that may be issued prior to the date of enactment of this bill. While the desire to provide a forum for community groups to have a greater voice is laudable, a multitude of alternatives already exist. Currently, groups may obtain commercial or noncommercial radio licenses, use public access cable, publish newsletters, and utilize Internet web sites and e-mail. It is important that our efforts to create more opportunities for those who support LPFM do not lead to the denial of access for others who depend on FM radio for safety, news, and entertainment. For instance, inexpensive and older radios, particularly vulnerable to interference and most commonly used by low- income and elderly listeners, will sustain the greatest negative impact caused by LPFM. Furthermore, it is not clear whether the relaxation of first, second, or third adjacent channel protection standards will have an adverse effect on the transition to digital radio. Unlike television broadcasters, who are being given additional free spectrum to broadcast in digital format, radio broadcasters must use the current spectrum allocations to transmit both digital and analog signals, making adjacent channel safeguards all the more important. At a minimum, adding a large number of LPFMs to the already congested FM band will make the transition to digital radio increasingly difficult and problematic. Finally, the new low-power proposal makes formerly unlicensed, pirate radio operators eligible for LPFM licenses. This ruling re-enforces their unlawful behavior and encourages future illegal activity by opening the door to new unauthorized broadcasters. The introduction of thousands of LPFM stations not only rewards illegal activity, but is certain to undermine the integrity of the radio spectrum, interfering with current FM service and penalizing the listening public. The radio programming supplied to listeners by existing radio stations provides crucial news, weather, and emergency information, as well as cultural entertainment, which must be preserved. I ask that the text of the bill be printed in the Record. The bill follows:

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Reserving the right to object, I simply ask the Senator from Wyoming if I may be reserved 10 minutes within that timeframe.

Mr. GREGG. That will be fine.

Mr. GREGG. I understand the Senator from Wyoming controls the time. I wonder if, after the Senator from Idaho speaks for 5 or 10 minutes, the Senator will be willing to give me 5 or 10 minutes on a separate subject.

Mr. GREGG. Will the Senator from Wyoming yield?

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I want to mention the efforts of Special Agent Eric Harnischfeger, who has been on detail from the U.S. Secret Service to the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary for the consideration of the fiscal year 2000 bill. Eric has been a considerable asset to the subcommittee, astutely handling some of our more difficult law enforcement accounts. His management of counterterrorism programs, office of justice programs, and state and local law enforcement accounts is greatly appreciated. Eric's ability to provide keen insight and a friendly manner toward any task he is asked to deal with assured a competent resolution. Eric's professionalism, wit, and jovial manner will be missed. Agent Harnischfeger exemplifies the high standards that the Secret Service is known for and has done an excellent job for us. I just want to thank him publicly for all his efforts over the past year. Based on his performance here, I am sure he has a bright future at the Service. We wish him the very best.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, today marks the 1-year anniversary of the Internet tax moratorium and the setting up of a commission to look into the manner in which we tax the Internet. This moratorium was to last for 3 years, and the commission was to meet and begin the process of trying to determine how best to deal with the variety of proposals to place taxes on the use of the Internet, products which are sold over the Internet, and services which are supplied over the Internet. Obviously, the Internet represents a watershed mark possibly in history as to economic activity. It is a period in which we have seen the Internet become an economic engine of immense proportions for our Nation and for the world. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 18 that electronic commerce not only positively affects economic activity but has had a very positive impact on reducing the rate of inflation. Products sold over the Internet are actually forcing down prices as competition occurs and products, such as prescription drugs, have been found on the Internet to be 28-percent cheaper and apparel 38-percent cheaper. The overall index found that products generally were about 13- percent cheaper on the Internet. The Internet has not only been a wonderful economic engine; it also has been a force for maintaining and controlling inflation during this period of dramatic prosperity. Of course, the Internet is growing at an incredible rate. Over the last 12 months, Internet economic growth has been about 68 percent, which is a huge rate of growth compared to a national economic rate of growth which is somewhere in the 3- to 4-percent range, if we are lucky. The role of the Internet in our society is immense today and is getting even more significant. The question is, How do we deal with it in the context of taxes? There is a large number of communities and a number of States in this country that wish to assess on Internet transactions their local sales tax activity, much the same as they attempt to assess catalog sales. There are something like 30,000 jurisdictions which could assess taxes on the Internet. The effect, of course, of having this diffuse and extraordinarily large group of taxing authorities--50 States and 30,000 subjurisdictions of those States--with a potential of taxing the Internet at various rates could, quite simply, grind to a halt this wonderful engine of economic activity and prosperity into which our Nation has gone. Literally, if we allow the Internet to be subject to this variety of taxes and this variety of tax authorities, and the imagination and creativity we always see from various Government entities when it comes to taxing, literally we could end up stopping the Internet as an effective force for economic expansion and prosperity. Furthermore, the concept of taxing the Internet, which is clearly a national and really a global instrument of commerce, appears, to me at least, to fly in the face of our Constitution. The commerce clause of our Constitution is pretty specific. Section 8, clause 3, of the Constitution reads: The Congress shall have Power . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes. There can be nothing that is a form of commerce more among the several States than the Internet as it presently is expanding, growing, and becoming a force for economic activity. Thus, the taxing of the Internet by all these different entities would clearly, in my opinion, raise serious constitutional problems. In fact, the Supreme Court addressed this issue when it came to catalog sales in the Quill case, where the Supreme Court essentially ruled that States, unless they have a nexus relationship with the seller of the assets, do not have traditionally the ability to tax that transaction. Secondly, Congress needs to look at the issue of taxation because of the extraordinary, as I have mentioned, chilling effect it would have on commerce generally. We, as a nation, as the creators and inventors of the Internet and, therefore, controllers not only of the initial and expanding technology, but also of the language which dominates the Internet, have put ourselves essentially as a nation on a rocket sled of economic activity. We have expanded and accelerated at an extraordinary speed past the rest of the world towards economic prosperity. I recall, rather vividly, in the late 1980s when the ``woe is me'' crowd was saying that Japan was going to overtake the United States in all functions of economic activity, and that our economic model for prosperity simply could not compete with the Japanese economic model of prosperity, which was intimidating and which remains significant. But the fact is that it did not work out that way. It did not work out that way because America's strength is our entrepreneurship and our inventiveness. We took that entrepreneurship and inventiveness and we created this massive new vehicle for economic activity called the Internet. Thus, instead of being overwhelmed by our friends and neighbors and allies in the industrial world, we have, instead, exploded past them in the ability to produce prosperity and economic activity, in large part because of the Internet and the offspring of technology which it has created. So we do not want to do anything which jeopardizes the unique and special international lead that we have in this area. Yet allowing thousands of different jurisdictions to tax the Internet would do exactly that. It would jeopardize that lead and undermine and, as I said, possibly bring to a complete halt the use of the Internet as an element of commerce. The third thing we must be sensitive to in this area of the Internet is the international implications beyond the questions of trade. It has been suggested by people at the U.N. that the U.N. should start to fund itself by putting in place a tax on e-commerce and e-mail. At first it was an outrageous suggestion, but it is the type of suggestion you get at the U.N. from people who represent nations which maybe do not have as much of a financial interest in it as we do and know that we would end up paying the tax, our Nation would end up paying the burden. But the fact that has been suggested is just a sort of crack of the door behind which, if it were fully opened, you would see an international initiative of significant proportions to place taxes on the Internet. As a result, if we have essentially come to the table, having already soiled our hands with taxing the Internet, it will be very extraordinarily difficult for us to resist, whether it is the U.N. or whether it is some other nation that also tries to pursue this course of action. It is essential, for the purposes of seeing an expansion of this technology and this form of economic activity, that we dampen down and restrict and as aggressively as we can resist having other nations pursue the path of taxation of Internet transactions. Obviously, the U.N. has no right to step into this ground. In fact, as chairman of the appropriating committee that has jurisdiction over the U.N., I put specific language into an appropriations bill, which hopefully will pass today, that says the United States will not spend any money at the U.N. should the U.N. pursue this course of action, which I am sure they will not. This was some idea put forward by somebody there, but I do not think it speaks to the majority at the United Nations. But those are three core reasons why we have to be extraordinarily sensitive to what the tax policy is relative to the Internet. The reason I raise this is because it took 8 months for the Internet commission to get started. That was not their fault. Really, it was the fault of those bodies which had the obligation of appointing membership to the commission. Actually, under Governor Gilmore, this commission has done an excellent job of meeting. Governor Gilmore's position relative to taxation over the Internet is exactly the position that should be pursued. However, I am not sure he has a majority position within the commission. I hope he does. But in order for us to assure this threat to our commerce does not occur, I believe we should extend this moratorium. Since we had at least 8 months of delay before we got this commission up and running, I think we should have an extension which recognizes that the commission should have the full 3-year period; therefore, we should extend the moratorium for another year, at a minimum, on the Internet. I happen to think it should be extended beyond that, well beyond that, because I believe certainty in the area of taxation is one of the key issues for maintaining economic activity. If people participating in an economic activity can predict what their tax obligations are and what the tax implications will be to an economic initiative, then they are much more likely to be willing to invest capital and take the risks necessary to pursue that initiative. But if they cannot predict their tax liability, then that limits and dampens down the desire to put capital and take risks in a certain economic activity. We have seen that historically. So I do believe very strongly that we should not only be extending this moratorium for a year but that we should be extending it for a series of years beyond the 3-year moratorium that presently exists. Let's face it. The economic benefit which this Nation has seen as a result of this truly revolutionary event--in the history of economics, I suspect this is going to go down with the industrial revolution as one of the most significant turning points in the history of prosperity and the way nations generate wealth. The benefits which we, as a nation, have obtained as a result of this, as a result of being the incubator, the developer, and now the provider in expertise in the area of the Internet, and the use of the Internet for commerce, the benefits which we have received, as a nation, are basically incalculable: the amount of new jobs which have been created; the number of people whose standard of living has been increased; the number of people who have been able to purchase goods at less of a price; and the number of people who have simply had a better chance to participate in prosperity. The Nation as a whole has seen economic activity and economic prosperity that has been a blessing to everyone, in large part because of this huge expansion in e-commerce and in the Internet as a force. Those benefits dramatically exceed any benefit which we would obtain by allowing a large number of different States or municipalities to start taxing the Internet for the purposes of expanding their local governments. It is the classic situation of the goose that lays the golden egg, to say the least. We have confronted a goose that is laying a lot of golden eggs for America, and for the prosperity of America, and for the opportunity of America to create jobs. For America to maintain its place as a world leader, we should not make the mistake of maybe not cutting off the goose's head but nicking that goose with thousands of different taxes which may cause it to, unfortunately, stumble or even be stopped as a result of allowing the creativity and the imagination of our various government units across this Nation to begin to tax the Internet. So I hope as we wrap up this session we will consider this. Obviously, we probably are not going to get it in this major omnibus bill, although I tried to do that and it was rejected in committee--an extension of the Internet moratorium. I do hope when we come back next year this will be a priority item-- to make it clear, to make an unalterable statement to the community which is developing and promoting this incredible engine of prosperity that we are not going to stop them by turning loose the forces of government and taxation on them. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, are we in morning business?

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his courtesy in yielding me some time. I especially thank him for his commitment to making the American people aware through floor statements of how much we have accomplished and how many positive things have occurred in this Congress. As he mentioned, the most positive is that we have a balanced budget for the first time in generations; that for the first time in years, 20 years or so, the Social Security trust fund money is going to be used for Social Security, which is one of the most important things we could do and thus preserve it for the benefit of senior citizens and the next generation of senior citizens. Something that is really an incredibly positive stride in the way we have dealt with ourselves in this Nation and has led in large part to the economic prosperity that we now experience is the fact that the Government has finally decided to live within its means. That is a result, in my opinion, of a Congress which has aggressively disciplined spending of the Federal Government. In fact, I recall when this Congress was first elected, a Republican Congress, the President had sent up his budget for the year, and it projected $200 billion deficits for as far as the eye could see. I think the year was 1996, and for the next 10 years it was $200 billion of deficits every year for as far as we could see. Well, we in the Republican Congress, the first Republican Congress in 40 years, said that was not acceptable; we were going to have to live within our means. Others said it was not doable. We proved it was doable. That is a positive event. We now have multiple billions of dollars of surplus, a big enough surplus so we will have no impact on Social Security in this budgeting cycle. What I wanted to speak about, however, beyond the good news, is the issue that has caused us to sort of grind through the process of wrapping up the appropriations bills, specifically the demand by the President in a number of areas of appropriations accounts. The first one I wish to talk about is the demand by the President that we expand his classroom teacher proposal. Now, the Congress has fully funded to the tune of $1.2 billion. The amount of money that the President initially requested for class size in his original request was for $1.2 billion, the purpose of which was to add teachers to the classroom. Teachers to the classroom may be a good idea in the $1.2 billion that has been put on the table to accomplish that, but the difference between the two sides is not in the dollars; it is in the way those dollars should be spent. The President's proposal and the proposal coming from the other side of the aisle is that $1.2 billion shall be spent as the people in Washington tell the local people to spend it; it will be spent under a command-and-control process where the administration, the people of the Department of Education, the people of the national labor unions, and the legislators on the other side of the aisle tell the local school districts, tell the States, tell the local principals, tell the local school boards: You must use this money for the purposes of hiring teachers. You must use it for the purposes of hiring teachers. It is a command-and-control, top-down directive from Washington telling local school districts how to operate their schools. We, on the other hand, on our side of the aisle, have proposed this $1.2 billion be used for schoolteachers, if that is what the local school district wants. But we have also said--and I will read the language to you--``If the local educational agency determines that it wishes to use the funds for purposes other than class size reduction as part of a local strategy for improving academic achievement, funds may be used for promotional development activities, teacher training, and any other local need that is designated to improve student performance.'' What we are saying on our side of the aisle is that we do not think that a one-shoe-fits-all approach; we don't think that a command-and- control, top-down approach is the right way to manage local education or to manage any education for that matter. What we believe very strongly is that we should put the dollars on the table. We should make those dollars available to the local schools. And we should say to the local schools: If you need more teachers, here are the dollars to hire those teachers. But if you have determined, under a procedure for obtaining higher academic achievement, you don't need more teachers but what you need are better teachers, and therefore you want to train your teachers, or what you need is to keep a teacher who is about to leave, and therefore you need to pay that teacher a little bit more money, or what you need is a class that has some sort of teacher's aide capability in it, such an individual, but also computer technologies, you should be able to do that. So we are saying in the context of improving the education, most importantly ``improving the students' performance,'' which is the exact words we use, you can use this money for other areas of teacher enhancement and of assisting teachers to be better teachers. Why are we saying that? Why aren't we saying what the White House and President Clinton say and what the Senators on the other side of the aisle say, which is you must do it our way; you must hire teachers, and that is what will make for better education? Why aren't we doing that? Because that doesn't work. That doesn't work. Study after study has concluded that it is not necessarily the class size ratio that is critical to education. It happens to be more than that. I think anybody who has ever been involved in any level of education knows this. It is intuitively obvious through inspection-- which was what one of my professors used to say in college, and we used to make fun of him for saying that--that there is a lot more to a classroom than the ratio of teacher to students. If you have a terrible teacher--I have said this on the floor before--who can't teach you a subject matter, if you put 10 kids with that teacher, or 20 kids with that teacher, they are still not going to learn. If you have an excellent teacher who knows how to handle the subject matter, the odds are that the size of the class, if it varies within five or so children, is not going to affect the quality of that education a whole lot. In fact, this is what studies have shown. In fact, Eric Hanushek at the University of Rochester, an economist, studied 300 other studies that have been done on this issue and concluded as follows: Looking at 300 different studies, class size reduction has not worked. Furthermore, the quality of the teacher is the most important factor in education, and it is much more important to the class than class size. A National Commission on Teaching and America's Future found the following: The thing that has the least impact on increasing student achievement, the least impact, is class size. The thing that has the greatest impact is teacher education and the capability of the teacher. In the State of Washington, which happens to be the home of the sponsor of this original proposal of the top-down control approach, Senator Murray's State, a Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee found: ``High quality teachers and family environment have a far greater effect on student performance than marginally reducing the class size.'' It is not our job in Washington to tell the local school districts that they must hire a teacher so that they can get their class size to some arbitrary number. The President has picked 18 to 1. I note that by picking that number he has managed to qualify 42 of the States already because 42 States already have a class size ratio that is 18 to 1 or better. There are only nine States and the District of Columbia that do not have the ratio higher than 18 to 1. Arbitrarily, people on that side of the aisle are all knowledgeable and are saying to every school board in America, 18 to 1, and that is it. If you don't have 18 to 1, we are not going to give you the money. You have to hire new teachers, and that is it. That is what it is going to be. We are saying: Here is the money, American school system. You take that money and you choose whether you need it for a new teacher or whether you need it to make that teacher you already have a better teacher, and you tie it to standards. You tie it to professional development standards and you tie it to student performance standards. That is a much better way to do it than to try to manage every classroom in America from right here in Washington. As I said earlier, it is as if those on the other side of the aisle want to take the leader's desk and run a string out to every classroom in America, and that string tells that school what they are going to have to do. If they don't like what it is going to do, they are going to pull that string in running from that desk on the Democratic side of the aisle. I do not know how many classrooms there are in America. It would probably have to be what? I will take a guess. A million--a million strings running off that desk all over America, intertwined. It is going to get awfully messy and confusing--a big jumbled mess--and nothing is going to happen. We are not going to improve education at all. I think it is a much brighter idea, it is a much more appropriate idea, and it is a much fairer idea to say to the school systems that happen to know what they are doing because they are involved in it--at least every school district in America that I have ever dealt with is very concerned, first, about education: Here are the dollars. You use it to improve your teachers. You use it to improve your classrooms. You use it, most importantly, to improve student performance. This is what this debate on the budget has come down to. There really aren't too many other big issues out there today. This is what the whole budget debate has come down to--whether or not we are going to run the classrooms from Washington, whether or not we are going to demand that classrooms across America do exactly what we tell them to do by hiring a new teacher in order to get these funds, or whether we are going to allow the schools across America--the teachers, the principals, the parents, and the school boards--to decide how best to use that money in order to improve teaching in the classroom. The President has made his stand on this ground. To say the least, I think it is bad ground, a bad idea, and a bad stance. Ironically, at the same time the teacher and class size issue became a cause celebre for holding up the budget process, the other item holding up the budget process involves the President's demand for 30,000 to 50,000 additional police officers. This is a little bit different. This was before the committee that I chair, the Commerce, State, Justice Committee. The President put forward a program about 3 years ago. He said we want 100,000 new officers. The Congress agreed with him: Let's try to put 100,000 new officers on the street in America. The Congress funded 100,000 new officers. We put on the table and in the budget the money necessary to pay for 100,000 new officers. The program has run out. The authorization has ended. The President came forward and said, I want another 30,000 to 50,000 officers on top of the initial 100,000 officers. First off, there was no program. The Congress didn't agree to that. We agreed to 100,000. We didn't agree to another 30,000 to 50,000. It was a political statement. He held a poll and had some focus group rushing into his office in the morning saying, ``Mr. President, Mr. President, putting police officers on the street really pumps well. Let's do another 30,000 to 50,000.'' That is how they came to the conclusion. They did not have any hearings or even look at the program they have in place because if they had looked at the program they had in place, they would have realized that of the 100,000 officers we put the money on the table for--the Congress did our work to pay for them-- the administration has only been able to hire 60,000. They are still 40,000 short of the initial 100,000. But they want to go out and hire another 30,000. They can't do it physically because they haven't been able to hire these offerers. It takes 12 months to do the program. They are not going to get the 100,000 in next year. So they can't possibly do another 30,000 to 50,000. Equally ironic, where did they find the money in their budget to fund the additional 30,000 to 50,000 officers? Remember, these are local police officers in towns that you and I live in across America. These aren't Federal police officers; these aren't FBI agents or even police officers in this Capitol. These are local police officers. Where did they find the money? They took the money out of the funds we were going to use to fund 1,000 extra Border Patrol agents. What is the responsibility of the Federal Government? What is our responsibility? It is to protect our borders. Those are Federal agents. Those aren't local agents. Instead of funding the 3,000 new agents who were supposed to be funded and on whom we agreed, for whom we had authorized and appropriated, we were going to appropriate the last 1,000 this year. The administration said: No, we are not going to hire the extra 1,000 Border Patrol agents; we will take the money from that program and put it into hiring an additional 30,000 to 50,000 local police officers for a program that cannot even fulfill its first tranche of police officers, which was supposed to be 100,000. That is an interesting priority. Think about it. What this administration is saying is, we don't care about the borders as much as we care about putting out a political statement which happens to poll well, which we know has no substantive effect because we know we can't hire the officers. Maybe they didn't know it; they should have. All they had to do was ask the people at the Justice Department. Assume they knew it--putting out a political statement on which we know they cannot fulfill the specifics. They knew, going into this proposal, they could not hire an additional 30,000 to 50,000 officers because they had not even hired the first 100,000 officers. They were 40,000 short, and it takes 12 months to put the officers on the books and bring them on board. This instead of hiring the Border Patrol personnel to improve our southern borders from being the sieve they are where tens of thousands of illegal aliens come across on a weekly basis. I think it was in the Douglas area of Arizona they arrested nearly 40,000 people in a week. Unbelievable numbers of illegal aliens are coming across the border, placing huge demands on our society in the area of health care, in the area of law enforcement, in the area of schooling. These are huge cost demands on our society, policing those borders so legal immigrants can come across, legal workers can come across. Instead, illegal people are breaking the law to get into this country. Instead of doing that which happens to be a primary function of the Federal Government, they took the money and used it to set up this specious statement that they were going to add another 30,000 to 50,000 police officers. Now they insist on it. The irony is, they insist on it as part of the budget process wrap-up. They are insisting on adding the extra police officers when they cannot even hire them. Why? PR. It is that simple. It polls well. The class size statement polls well. On the polling statement, the substance is so fundamentally flawed. They are taking control of local school districts and saying local school districts don't know whether they need a new teacher; we will tell them they need a new schoolteacher. Although they may know they don't need a new teacher, they need to train the teachers better. That philosophy is fundamentally flawed. The statement to reduce class size is great polling. We will administer cops on the street. Great polling. They are holding up the entire budget of the Government of the United States, which happens to include a lot of other important things. For example, in my bill, which involves the police officers, we have the funding for the FBI, the funding for the DEA, funding for the INS, funding for the FTC, which is very involved in trying to keep seniors from being fraudulently attacked on the Internet with scams. We have the funding for the FEC, obviously very involved in the different issues of how we manage this e-commerce marketplace in which we are functioning today. We have the funding for the State Department; We have funding for the whole Justice Department, funding for the whole judicial system. All of that is being held up because this administration wants to put out a political statement--not a substantive statement, because they can't do it, as I just pointed out. They cannot accomplish what they claim they will do. They know it. They want a political statement. Then they want to put forward a horrendous policy on class size because it polls well. They are holding up the budget to do that. It is another example of the superficiality of the way this administration approaches issues. Time and time again for 7 years, we have seen issues put forward not for the purposes of resolving a plan but for the purposes of scoring a political point by this White House. Now they are willing to put at risk the functioning of the entire law enforcement structure of the Federal Government for all intents and purposes over what is basically a political issue, a political statement. It has no substance at all. It has no purpose and can accomplish nothing because it can't be accomplished in this next year. Maybe 2 years from now, when they catch up to doing the full 40,000 officers they still have to do, they can come forward and reasonably say we need another 30,000 officers. That may be true. Once again, we see the shallowness of this administration is only exceeded by their brazenness. Unfortunately, a number of Federal agencies and the American people will suffer as a result of that. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I want to respond to some of the comments made on the floor relative to where we are going with the budget. I specifically want to talk about the issue as it relates to a committee of which I am chairman. The committee I chair is the Commerce, Justice, State, and the Judiciary Subcommittee. The President of the United States opted to veto our bill. In his veto message, his representation was that we simply had not spent enough money. That was essentially what it came down to. His representation on the other bills he has vetoed is also that we have not spent enough money as a Congress. In fact, in listening to the President and the proposals he puts forward, we find he is talking about spending billions and billions more than what the Congress suggested we spend. The Senator from North Dakota has come to the floor and said that the Republicans have used gimmicks, that we have forward-funded, which we have, which is not a gimmick; it has been done in the Congress before on many occasions; that we have declared items emergencies, which we have. In fact, the Senator from North Dakota supported, I suspect rather strongly and with enthusiasm, the declaring of the agricultural situation as an emergency. It has been declared an emergency every year since I have been here, so I don't know why it is an emergency. But it has been declared an emergency. It is a way of funding agricultural issues, and there are severe strictures in the agricultural community today. The Senator from North Dakota didn't mention where we are going to get the extra money the President asked for. Where are we going to get it? The Republicans have allegedly used gimmicks so we could not take it from Social Security--which we have not, by the way; we have managed not to take any money from Social Security. Where is the President going to get it from? The President is going to get it from Social Security because the only other option is to raise taxes and we have already seen a vote in the House of Representatives--415-0 I think was the vote--saying they were not going to raise taxes. So that is not an option. It is not even on the table. The President makes these proposals: We are going to raise spending here; we want more money here; we want more money here. The Democratic Members, on the other side of the aisle, say: Hooray, hooray, more money for this, more money for that. When Republicans say, Isn't that coming out of Social Security? there is just this silence from the other side of the aisle. Of course, it is coming out of Social Security because we have no other resource from which to draw those funds than Social Security. So there is a lot of gamesmanship coming from the other side of the aisle on this issue. There always has been, on Social Security, of course. There are literally generations, now, of Members of the other side of the aisle who have demagogged the issue of Social Security. As many of us have tried to put forward substantive Social Security responses, we have found this President, who allegedly wants to address Social Security, has failed to do so in a substantive way. But we hear now he wants to raid Social Security to pay for his new spending and they will not even admit to that. The statements from the other side of the aisle are hollow on that issue, to say the least. But let me go back to the specifics of this proposal. The President has vetoed the Commerce-State-Justice bill, which has under it the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and the State Department. It also has a lot of agencies such as the Small Business Administration, FCC, FTC, SEC, elements of Government which are critical to the day-to-day operation of the Government and to our maintaining a sound economy and safe society. But the President has vetoed this bill. Why has he vetoed it? Basically, he has vetoed it because we did not spend enough money in some of the programs he wanted and because we did not include language he wanted in a couple of areas. He has vetoed it specifically on the allegations we do not spend enough money on the COPS Program. Let's look at that for a second. This Congress authorized 100,000 cops to be put on the street under the President's request, in a bipartisan way. We have paid for every one of those police officers in this appropriations bill. Not only have we paid for every one of those police officers, we paid for an additional 10,000 or 15,000 police officers in this bill. So we can go up to 110,000 or 115,000 police officers under this bill. What does the President say? He says that is not enough. He says he wants 130,000 to 150,000 police officers, even though there are only 100,000 authorized. That in itself is a bit of a reach, to ask for an extra 30,000 to 50,000 officers when they are not even authorized. But what is really inconsistent about this, and what really shows what a sham statement this is, the administration, although they have the money for 100,000 officers since we paid for 100,000 officers in our bill, has only been able to get out of the door enough money to fund 60,000 officers. In other words, down there in the White House they are now asking for another 30,000 to 50,000 officers when they cannot even undertake the day-to-day administrative event of paying for the full 100,000 we gave them in the first place. They are still 40,000 officers short from the original authorized number. It takes 18 months to get this through the system, to get an officer on the street after they have agreed to pay for that officer. So they are literally a year and a half away at the minimum from even reaching the 100,000 level. So we said, OK, we agree more officers on the street makes sense so we will go over the 100,000 number; we will give you another 10,000 officers. Then the President vetoes it, saying he hasn't enough, when his administration has not even put out on the street the first 100,000. How blatantly political can this administration be? How hypocritical can this administration be? They did not veto this bill over police officers who were not there. They vetoed this bill because they want to put out a press release that they are vetoing bills. It had nothing to do with the actual substance of how many police officers we have on the street or how many police officers we paid for because we paid for every police officer they put out there, and we are willing to pay for another 40,000, another 55,000 if they could put them out. But they cannot because they are not able to do it. It is pure hocum, this language that they want more police officers, and they vetoed it over the lack of funding in this account. It is just a pure political thing. Then they said they vetoed it because they did not get enough money-- no, not because they didn't get enough, because we did not give them the money for the U.N. We did not give them the money for the U.N. Every dollar they asked for, for the U.N., is in this bill, every dollar for U.N. fees is in this bill. Every dollar for arrearages is in this bill. Yes, there is not the full money they asked for for peacekeeping, but every other account in the U.N. is fully paid for in this bill. Why can't they get it out? Why can't they send it up to the U.N.? Why can't they pay England the arrearages we owe them? Why can't they pay France the arrearages we owe them? That is where this money goes. It doesn't stay in the U.N. Most of it flows to other countries that have picked up our obligations. Because they have a bunch of activists down at the White House who are focused on a very narrow issue of international Planned Parenthood and are unwilling to release the money to fund the world organization known as the U.N., which is a major international organization, because they are willing to hold up funding over an extraordinarily narrow issue dealing with Planned Parenthood lobbying internationally. It does not have anything to do with the United States. Not only that, but the language which they are holding up the funding over is language which was in existence, which this Government operated under during the Reagan administration and during the Bush administration. It is, to say the least, genuinely innocuous language. But they have activists down there at the White House, activists who are willing to take down the U.N. and our relationship with the U.N. over this narrow piece of language. It is unbelievable they would blame the Congress, which has fully funded the arrearage issue, when it is just a small group of extreme activists serving at the White House who are tying up the release of this money. The money is there. The money is physically there. Every dollar, every cent, is on the table and ready to be sent to the U.N. to pay the arrearages. The only thing that stops us is, I suspect, one or two internationalists, activists at the White House who have decided to make a cause celebre for themselves over this really obscure piece of language which, by the way, as I mentioned, was the law of the land in the United States for the Reagan and the Bush administrations. So the idea the Congress has in any way interfered with the ability to pay the arrearages is, again, pure hocum. This is a classic example of the situation where the individual shoots his parents and throws himself before the court and asks for mercy because he is an orphan. The White House has decided to shoot its parents--in this case the U.N.--and then claim it has no role in the event and is pure when, in fact, it is the reason we cannot pay the arrearages. That is just pure hocum. We now know the two major reasons they vetoed this bill; the COPS reason has no substance to it, and the U.N. language is their problem, not our problem. We put the money in. They are the ones who are holding this up. Then they listed a whole series of little different items, one of which I found most interesting. In the Senate we took up two different hate crime proposals to move this bill through so we could actually get it to conference. Then in conference it became absolutely clear there was no way an issue such as hate crimes, as massive as it is, could be handled in our conference. We had two competing ideas. So we put them aside and sent them back to the authorizing committee. Ironically, the amendments were offered by the chairman and ranking member of the authorizing committee, so one would hope the authorizing committee could straighten this issue out and we, as appropriators, would not have to straighten it out. What does the White House say? It says it wants the hate crimes legislation on this bill. This is an appropriations bill. This is a bill that funds the FBI, DEA, and the INS. Those are real law enforcement issues. They are going to undermine the ability of the FBI to do its job, the ability of the INS to do its job, the ability of the DEA to do its job, so they can get hate crimes legislation? They are going to undermine the ability of U.S. attorneys to do their jobs, the ability of U.S. marshals to do their jobs, the ability of the U.S. court system to do its job, so they can get hate crimes legislation? They are going to undermine the FEC, FTC, and the FCC so they can get their hate crimes legislation? How outrageous. What sort of priority is this from this White House? What sort of priority puts language on hate crimes ahead of the FBI, DEA, INS, ahead of the U.S. attorneys, ahead of the U.S. marshals, the FCC, FEC, FTC--what type of priority is it when they know in order to get that language they have to go through an authorizing committee anyway? It is beyond belief they would put at risk the law enforcement agencies of this country in order to get hate crimes language, which in the first place is a State issue. I note the State of Wyoming--the Senator from Wyoming is on the floor--is doing one heck of a job in pursuing that issue at the State level. It is first a State issue. The irony of it is, he is undermining the entire law enforcement community of the United States because he wants a new criminal act on the Federal books. Is there a total disconnect at the White House? There appears to be. The veto of this bill--and there are a lot of other miscellaneous points--but the veto of this bill has nothing to do with the substance of this bill. It was done purely for political reasons so the President could look as if he was in charge or he could look as if he was standing up to the Congress. The practical effect of vetoing this bill, however, is to undermine law enforcement across this country, to make it impossible for us to pay our U.N. arrearages, and to make it extremely hard for these agencies, which are so critical to the functioning of our country, to continue to function in an effective way. Mr. President, I yield the floor and thank the Senator from Wyoming for the time.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. I ask the Senator from Wyoming to yield me 10 minutes.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I understand under a previous order the Senator from Wyoming controls 30 minutes.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I join with my colleagues, many who are honoring John Chafee today. He was a proud New Englander and a person, in my opinion, who embodied the spirit of service which characterizes so many of his contemporaries and those who came before him, not only from his State but across the Nation, especially from New England. He came out of a culture which always put public service first. To him, public service was the purpose of being an elected official. He had no other cause or commitment other than doing well by the people he represented and by his Nation. There is a lot of identity I have shared with John Chafee, more in the sense of a father figure than as a comrade or a contemporary, during my years growing up. He went to Yale at about the same time my father went to Yale. Then he went to Harvard Law School about the same time my father went to Harvard Law School. He was elected Governor not too long after my father was elected Governor. So there was a parallel career path. In my household in New Hampshire, the name John Chafee, although it came from the distant State of Rhode Island, echoed with great respect. It was a name that had attached to it an understanding that there was a leader who was committed to his Nation and who understood that to be a good leader, you had to be concerned for others first. He was a person who set a standard for all of us. When I arrived at the Senate and I met Senator Chafee as a contemporary, so to speak, I had great anticipation because he was literally a very large figure for me as I grew up and a large figure within the New England community. I would not have been surprised had he been a person who just sort of smiled at a new Senator and said: Nice to have you here; we'll see you in a couple years when you get your feet on the ground. No, that wasn't John Chafee's style. He reached out to me, as he reached out to so many Senators who had served with him, both new and those who served with him for a considerable period of time. He said: Join me; I have some ideas. Sit down with me and listen to them. I would like to hear your ideas. He brought me into this council he had begun, the centrist group, and treated me as someone whose thoughts and concerns were equal to his and were of legitimate importance and significance. I greatly appreciated that, coming from someone with his senior status and great knowledge on issues such as health care. It was really an experience in how one builds consensus to deal with John Chafee at any time but especially during the first few years I served in this body. My respect for him only grew as I had the opportunity to serve with him over the years. There was no issue he undertook that he did not undertake as a person committed to identifying and obtaining a thoughtful and substantive response to that issue. I never experienced at any time his addressing an issue in a partisan way or in a political way in the negative sense but always in a constructive way and in a manner in which he was looking towards resolution. He would take the most complex issues that this body had to address, issues such as Medicare, the general health care system, environmental laws, issues which created great fervor and intensity on both sides of the aisle. He would sit down and, through the force of his personality, which was one of generosity and intelligence, of sincerity and of commitment, sift through the issue and work with the parties and, more often than not, be able to reach a consensus position--an extraordinarily impressive individual. His greatest strength, I think, was that he was just plain Yankee. He had a way about him that is personified by the Yankee mystique. It can be defined as being honest and committed, patriotic--of course, a lot of other people fall in that category, too--but there was also that willingness to be precise, curt, some may say, the willingness to cut through the large ferocity of this body to the essence of an issue quickly, and the understanding always that our purpose is to serve. His purpose above all was to serve the people of Rhode Island and the people of this Nation. As with everyone else in this body, my heart goes out to Ginny and his family. We wish them, during this time of difficulty, Godspeed, and we are thankful for the time which we had with John as he showed us how to be a good citizen, a good legislator and, most importantly, a good American. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise today to express my concern about the President's latest Social Security proposal as outlined in his recent radio address. I hope Congress will resolve to oppose this proposal unless it can be significantly modified, and it does not appear the President wants to modify it. I am greatly disappointed with the decision by the President to bring forward this proposal. I had hoped to work with the President in a bipartisan manner to resolve the Social Security issue. There are a number of us in the Senate who are willing to go forward in a bipartisan manner on this issue. For example, Senator Kerrey, Senator Breaux, Senator Grassley, and I have introduced a comprehensive Social Security reform bill. I have been pleased with this bipartisan effort, at least in the Senate, but I have been extremely disappointed by the White House's continued partisan approach toward the Social Security problem and especially their most recent proposal, which is, to say the least, a sham proposal. My goal today is to make absolutely clear for my colleagues just why this proposal does not work. This is not an easy task because it is a complicated and confusing issue, but it is something that must be done. Regrettably, I think the complicated and confusing nature of the proposal was intentionally created in that concept so the people would not understand it, so it would be confusing, and so that, therefore, by glossing over it with terms such as ``saving Social Security,'' they could attempt to hide the underlying documents and energy of it, which is to basically undermine Social Security. Thus, it is vitally important that we all understand exactly what is at stake. So I am going to go back to basics and try to simplify this as much as I can. In its simplest terms, the Social Security system has enough money to pay benefits today but does not have enough money to pay the projected benefits in the future, beginning in the year 2014. That is the entire problem. What will we do in the year 2014 under the current law? We will have to raise additional money through the income tax, through the general revenues of the Federal Government. The gap between benefits promised and the Social Security taxes will get bigger and bigger every year. It will be $200 billion annually by the year 2020 and $666 billion annually by the year 2030. Under the current law, we will simply keep raising revenues every year until the Federal Government has paid everything it owes to the Social Security system in the year 2034. When we reach that point, we declare insolvency, the Government of the United States, and the benefits would have to be cut, and Social Security would basically go into a tailspin. These funding gaps are so large, it would be unfair to a future generation to wait until that time and do the drastic cuts in benefits or radical increases in taxes which would occur in order to pay for the system. That is why so many of us have been calling for a comprehensive reform, a reform that will begin now, when we have time to work on the system and to make it work. What has the President proposed? The President has proposed that as part of any lockbox legislation we accompany the lockbox with a provision that will transfer interest payments to the Social Security system. It is vital that my colleagues understand two things: This proposal would do nothing, absolutely nothing, to fund the future Social Security benefit; in fact, it would undermine the Social Security system by giving the false assurance of improvement. Secondly, this proposal would formally commit tens of trillions of dollars in new income taxes, simply through some accounting sleight of hand. That means that future generations, our children, our grandchildren, would get a tax increase as a result of this President's proposal which would run into the trillions of dollars. To understand why, let me first show my colleagues this quote from the President's budget of last year. It was tucked away on page 337 in the analytical perspective section. Some budget analyst must have experienced an attack of truth in budgeting and included the language. It is definitive. Trust Fund balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures--but only in a bookkeeping sense . . . They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government's ability to pay benefits. That last sentence is the clearest explanation of what the problem is. No matter how large the trust fund stated number is, it does nothing to pay down the benefits, if there are not assets to back it up which can be drawn on without raising taxes. I hope every Member of Congress understands this. I hope the American people understand it. If we use our power to artificially inflate the balance of the trust, it does not do the beneficiaries one bit of good. If we decree that it is a $1 trillion or a $10 trillion or even a nothing number in the trust fund, it has exactly the same financial impact. It has no impact on the outyear benefit structure. So the President's proposal to credit the trust fund with the interest savings will have no impact at all on the structure of the system and the liability which the American taxpayer will have to pay to support the system in the outyears. What it would do, however, is give a false impression that we have taken some substantive action. And that, of course, is the goal of this President--politics over substance. We already have a problem of understanding. Already the Social Security system's problems are papered over by the declaration of actuarial solvency through the year 2034. This disguises the fact that the real problem for us and for the next generation begins in the year 2014. What the President is effectively saying is that we should now paper over the problem even further, that we should wait until the year 2050. Earlier this year, the Comptroller of the United States, David Walker, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. He was speaking about the President's proposal of earlier this year, but his comments are equally valid regarding the most recent proposal he has put forward. He said: . . . it is important to note that the President's proposal does not alter the projected cash-flow imbalances in the Social Security program. Benefit costs and revenues currently associated with the program will not be affected by even one cent. In other words, the proposal the President is putting forward has absolutely no impact on the ability to pay the benefits that are going to be required to be paid to maintain the Social Security system in the outyears. Moreover, he went on to say: One of the risks of the proposal is that the additional years of financing may very well diminish the urgency to achieve meaningful changes in the program. That would not be in the overall best interest of the Nation. It would be tragic, indeed, if this proposal masked the urgency of the Social Security solvency problem and served to delay the much-needed action. In other words, even though this proposal would not do anything for Social Security, it would make the representation to the public that we had. This would become a license for irresponsibility. It would break the faith of the Social Security beneficiaries by representing that the problem had been solved for another 50 years, even though we have taken absolutely no real action. Here is a chart that shows the workings of the Social Security system in a simplified form and represents the problems we confront. On the left of the chart, we can see the projections under the current law. On the right-hand side of the chart, we can see projections under the President's proposal. There is absolutely no difference. The President's proposal has no effect on the problems of the system. Current law problems which caused the system to go into insolvency are going to exist in the same form if we follow the President's proposal. The numbers are startling. We term it insolvent in the year 2040 because the cost is so high. Under the President's proposal, it is a $1.1 trillion increase in the year 2040 on the taxpayers of America, which, in my opinion, represents an insolvency event, if we follow the President's proposal. What is the President's argument? He is arguing that his program provides for additional reduction in public debt and that we can justify these additional income tax liabilities by the fact that the public debt has been reduced and debt service has also been reduced. But, once again, the reality is different from the claim. If you study the Social Security actuary's memo in the President's plan written last Saturday, October 23, you would find the following information. I hope the press will pick up on this. Transfers are not contingent on actual amounts of reductions of debt held by the public. Transfers are assumed to be as indicated, regardless of the effect on the budget balances. Now, it may well be the President will yet propose a way to require that only a reduction in public debt will trigger the transfers he has suggested, but that is not what his current proposal says. His current proposal only issues this new debt and these new liabilities and does not make them in any way contingent upon public debt being reduced. This is not a plan to reduce public debt. It is a plan to issue new debt. It creates new income tax obligations, regardless of what happens with the overall budget balance. It has nothing to do with straightening out the Social Security system by reducing public debt. It is simply an increase in income tax obligations as a result of an increase in debt obligations of the Federal Government. One other point: The President believes it is appropriate to reward Social Security by giving it the interest savings from the reduced public debt. Current law already credits Social Security with interest, as if we had saved the surplus, whether we do or do not. This is current law. What the President is proposing is that we give a second round of transfers to the Social Security system. We are already crediting Social Security with interest saved. That is what produced the finding that the system is sound until the year 2034. The President is simply proposing that we arbitrarily issue a second round of credit, not justified or contingent upon anything happening in public debt reduction, and increase the income tax obligations to the program. Remember, again, all the taxes the President is talking about pouring into this program as a result of this accounting process gimmickry are income taxes; they are not payroll taxes. So we are shifting the burden, under the President's proposal, of the Social Security system from being a payroll tax system to being an income tax system, from going to a system where the people who receive the benefit under the retirement process and pay for it during their working lives are now receiving a benefit from the general revenue fund and the income tax fund versus the payroll tax fund. That is a huge change in the basic philosophy of the way we have supported the Social Security system. The President does this with his proposal, which is to create a new accounting mechanism. So the practical effect of the President's proposal is to do absolutely nothing in the way of resolving the fundamental problems that confront Social Security. The practical effect of the President's proposal is to create an accounting gimmick that makes you feel as if you have done something. The practical effect of the President's proposal is to undermine the momentum for fundamental, fair, effective Social Security reform in exchange for a political statement that may get you through the next election but which is going to create major crises for the system in the outyears. The President's proposal fails any form of accounting test. The President's proposal fails any form of a reasonable review. The President's proposal, most importantly, fails the next generation and the generation behind it because what it does is transfer onto their backs, for the sake of a political statement today, a tax burden that will amount to trillions of dollars. It is an action that is absolutely inappropriate and which I hope this Congress and the American people will reject. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. There is an hour.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be given 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I understand the Senator from Montana wishes to speak. I know there are a number of other Senators who wish to speak on the Social Security issue. Mr. President, what is the regular order? Do we have an hour?

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I bring to the floor the conference agreement for the Commerce, Justice, State, and judiciary appropriations for fiscal year 2000. This conference agreement includes $39 billion for these and other related agencies. This is $2.8 billion above last year's level and $7.9 billion below the President's request. Also, it is $3.6 billion above the Senate level, which includes the additional funding requested for the census. To start out with, I want to address the department that comprises almost half of the funding in this bill, the Department of Justice. We provide it with $18.5 billion. Within Justice, we continue counterterrorism measures. A total of $152 million is directed to the counterterrorism program to bolster current counterterrorism initiatives. The conference agreement provides $14 million to the National Domestic Preparedness Consortium for their cooperative efforts. We put emphasis this year on equipment for first responders so that they have what is needed when they arrive first-on- the-scene of any terrorist attack. We also remain concerned about attacks on computer systems, these being a primary target to sabotage. The conferees agreed to $18.6 million for the National Infrastructure and Protection Center, through the FBI account, which serves as the central clearinghouse for threats and warnings or actual cyber-attacks on critical infrastructures. The FBI has field computer crime-intrusion squads and computer analysis and response teams to combat cyber crime and sabotage. However, I remain concerned by the release of the FALN members by the President, and its effect on our overall counterterrorism policy. In the past few years, the Appropriations Committee has worked closely with all aspects of the law enforcement community to hammer out a united, comprehensive counterterrorism strategy. There has been marked improvement in understanding where we need to go to prevent and to be ready for terrorist incidents. The President's clemency agreement takes that understanding and drives a stake in it. The President chose to release members of a known terrorist organization, against the recommendation of the pardon attorney and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The FBI is one of the lead agencies on terrorism policy, and the President disregarded their opposition to the clemency agreement. The President's actions went against his own administration and congressional efforts to craft and implement a strong counterterrorism policy. Ironically, his argument was that none of these individuals had been charged with murder. Terry Nicholas was not charged with murder, but 168 died in the Oklahoma City bombing. Unfortunately, the President's actions have created a schism in our terrorist policy that may take years to overcome. Moving to an area that is as horrifying as a terrorist attack, the conference agreement provides funding to address child abductions and missing children. We were able to retain the Senate's Missing Children program, which provides $19.9 million to help law enforcers find and care for missing children. We also fund the FBI's programs to prevent child sexual exploitation on the Internet. These efforts help solve investigations involving missing children by creating specialized cyber units whose purpose is to monitor and react to Internet pedophiles. The FBI works closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to find the victims of these attacks and return them to their families. To protect children in schools, the conference agreement recommends $225 million through the Safe Schools Initiative. The availability of these funds for schools, groups, and law enforcement should encourage communities to work together to address the escalation of violence in schools throughout the Nation. The conferees believe it is also important to encourage out-of-school prevention methods as well. One way to stop juvenile violence is to get young people involved in programs outside of school. The conference agreement includes the Senate number, $50 million, for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. It retains the Senate language regarding the use of the Internet in the clubs. Additionally, $13.5 is provided for Juvenile Mentoring Programs (JUMP), such as Big Brothers and Big Sisters and similar community programs that bring responsible adults together with children in a mentoring capacity. I believe prevention is preferable to punishment, and these programs can redirect the energies of high risk youth into positive activities. The conference agreement provides over $537 million for juvenile programs through the juvenile justice budget and accountability incentive grants. In an effort to combat another problem our society faces daily, the conference agreement supports counter drug efforts by the Justice Department. We provide DEA with $53.9 million for mobile enforcement teams and $17.4 million for regional drug enforcement teams. These teams have the flexibility to go to the hot spots in small cities and towns and provide an immediate, effective response to drug trafficking. They come in at the request of State and local law enforcement and work together to stop drug trafficking. The agreement also includes $27.1 million for the DEA and $35.6 million for State and local enforcement efforts to end methamphetamine production and distribution. Under my tenure as chairman, this committee has been supportive of the Violence Against Women Act Programs. The conference agreement includes the Senate level of $284 million. Within this level, $207 million is available for general formula grants to the States. Within those grants, $10 million will be available for programs on college campuses and $10 million for Safe Start programs. In addition, we retained the increase for court appointed special advocates and provide $10 million. The Senate will be glad to hear we were able to bolster some accounts in conference that had been reduced this year in the Senate bill. The local law enforcement block grant was raised to last year's level of $523 million. The conferees provide $30 million for police corps; $25 million for grants for bullet proof vests; and $40 million for the Indian country law enforcement initiative. The State prison grants were increased above the Senate proposed level to $686.5 million, and $420 million was designated for SCAAP. The last issue I want to address within the Justice Department is funding for law enforcement technology grants. As we approach the new millennium and provide funding for fiscal year 2000, it is important that we ensure that law enforcement is not behind in technology. The conference agreement includes funding of $250 million for law enforcement technology grants. These grants will be available for State and local law enforcement to acquire equipment and training to address criminal activities in our communities. Moving to Commerce, the conferees recommend a level of $25.6 million for the United States Trade Representative. The International Trade Commission is funded at $44.5 million, and the International Trade Administration is funded at a level of $313.5 million. The funding level for the Bureau of Export Administration is $54 million. The conferees provide full funding for the Bureau of the Census at a level of $4.8 billion. The decennial census is funded at the Administration's requested level. The Administration sent a budget amendment to Congress as the Senate's Commerce, Justice, State Appropriations measure was being reported to the Senate. Therefore, the committee was unable to incorporate this amendment in the original bill. A hearing was held on the administration's budget amendment in late July, and the conference report before us today contains all of the funds requested by the administration. The funding for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration includes $26.5 million for the public broadcasting grant program and $15.5 million for information infrastructure grants. The agreement funds the programs of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) at a total of $639 million for fiscal year 2000. Of this amount, $283.1 million is for NIST's scientific and technical research and services programs. NIST's external activities, the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) and Manufacturing Extension Program (MEP) are funded at the levels of $211 million, including carryover balances, and $104.8 million, respectively. The agreement fund the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs at a level of $2.3 billion. This funding level will continue vital funding for oceanic and atmospheric research programs which have such strong support in the Senate. The five major line offices of the agency are funded as follows: the National Ocean Service at a level of $267.3 million; the National Marine Fisheries Service at $403.7 million; the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research at $300 million; the National Weather Service at $603.8 million; and, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service at a level of $111.4 million. The agreement also provides funding for the first new fishery research vessel approved for the agency in several years. The conference agreement contains $10 million to capitalize two funds created under the Pacific Salmon Treaty, and $50 million for a Pacific Salmon Restoration Fund requested by the administration. A small part of our bill--$3.7 billion--is the judiciary. The conference agreement provides the judiciary with $122 million more than the Senate level. We fully fund defender services, and increase the hourly rate for court appointed public defenders. In addition, the Senate COLA provision was retained. Now, for the last department in this bill, we provide $5.8 billion to the State Department. The conferees recommend $254 million for worldwide security under Diplomatic and Consular Programs. We also provided $313.6 million in security-related construction under the Security and Maintenance of U.S. Missions account. These levels will address infrastructure concerns raised by the Dar Es Salaam and Nairobio bombings last year. Cultural and Educational Exchange Programs are funded at $205 million. These programs give U.S. and foreign citizens the chance to interact on an educational level where cultural diversity can be explored. The conference agreement includes adequate funding for the agencies related to the State Department, including the Asia Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy. Lastly in State, we provide $351 million to cover U.N. arrears, subject to authorization. This represents the final payment associated with the Helm-Biden agreement on UN reforms. This bill contains a handful of related agencies that act independently of the departments within this bill, and comprise $2 billion of the total of this conference agreement. For the Maritime Administration, the conference agreement recommends $178.1 million. Within the level, the Maritime Academy receives $34.1 million. The Maritime Security Program is funded at $98.7 million, including carryover balances. The conference agreement funds the Federal Communications Commission at a level of $210 million. This funding level permits the agency to pay rent in its new location, but does not provide funding for some of the new technology initiatives the agency had hoped to implement in FY 2000. As requested in the FCC budget, the Senate bill contained a provision permitting the FCC to protect our national spectrum assets. The provision in the Senate bill, Section 618, would have permitted the FCC to re-auction licenses currently entangled in bankruptcy court proceedings. This provision was dropped in conference at the insistence of the House. I regret that it was dropped. The FCC began auctioning licenses for spectrum in late 1994, and some of the companies who were successful bidders subsequently filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy courts have permitted some of these companies to avoid paying their debt to the Federal Government for obtaining these licenses. Billions of dollars are being lost to the treasury because of these rulings. These companies should not be permitted to use these licenses, for which they have not paid in full, as assets in a bankruptcy proceeding. Spectrum licenses are national assets, and the proceeds from the sale of these licenses are the taxpayers' assets. I hope we will be able to revisit this provision at a later date. The Small Businesses Administration (SBA) is one of the larger agencies in this bill. The conference agreement provides $803.5 million for their SBA. Within the amount, $84.5 million goes to the Small Business Development Centers. We also provide the Senate level of funding for the Women's Business Centers and National Women's Business Council. The SBA disaster loan assistance program is funded at a level of $255.4 million. And, as a last mention on this bill, the agreement before us recommends $125 million for the Federal Trade Commission. Of particular importance is the Senate language regarding the Internet. The conference agreement contains modified language regarding efforts to police the Internet and U.S. electronic financial markets within the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The conferees are aware that the explosion of Internet commerce also increases the opportunities for fraud and abuse. We want to ensure that those agencies that monitor the Internet are able to adapt to the increasing activity and match their consumer protection efforts in equal measure. I think this agreement addresses the issue, yet believe there is still much more to do in the areas of Internet policy. Overall, I believe this conference agreement of the House and Senate bills provides funding required to execute the needed services and programs under our purview. We have not reduced these accounts like we had to to meet the low Senate allocation. We were able to provide additional funding to these accounts that Senators and the administration thought were not given their due in the Senate bill. The ranking member and his staff participated fully in bringing this agreement to you. I want to extent my thanks for their collegian efforts. They worked with us side-by-side to construct what we believe is a respectable bill. I urge my colleagues to pass this conference agreement as being a sound compromise. I would like to take a moment to thank the staff for all their efforts on this conference agreement. Every year they do their best to get this particular bill completed quickly, and, every year we find ourselves jockeying for last position. I know they work hard to avoid this situation. The diverse jurisdiction of this bill tends to lead to controversy somewhere within its's realms even in the best of years. I appreciate the staff giving up weekends and countless nights to bring to Congress a passable CJS appropriations bill. Thanks to my staff, Jim Morhard, Paddy Link, Kevin Linskey, Eric Harnischfeger, Clayton Heil, Vas Alexopoulos, Dane Quam, Brian McLaughlin, and Jackie Cooney.