Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to call up my amendment out of order, to briefly explain that amendment and enter into a colloquy with the chairman of the subcommittee.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I am from the State of Michigan. I have a tremendous interest in this issue. Recently, some of my colleagues and I, one of them from Wisconsin, completed a document called the Myth of the Magical Bureaucracy, the belief that Washington can solve every problem. This issue that we are discussing today fits right into that document, because this document talks about the Washington myth that the future of America rests with bureaucrats in Washington, that the future of the people on welfare in Wisconsin is dependent on bureaucrats in Washington and not on the State legislature in the State of Wisconsin. What is going on is we are replacing Washington ideals with traditional American ideals. We are replacing a faith in God with a faith in Washington. We are replacing the American ideal of parents and family with bureaucrats. This picture of Washington shows that what we have called Independence Avenue really needs to be renamed into Dependence Avenue, because every time we build a new bureaucracy, we are moving decisionmaking away from the people. We are moving it away from the States, and we are putting it into bureaucrats here in Washington. We need to move power back to the States, back to the people closest to the problem. We have had a lot of talk about the welfare process, the waiver chase in Washington. Let us talk about what the State of Wisconsin has to do to address the problems in their State. Congress passes or issues mandates. We develop thousands of pages of laws of public health and welfare. It goes into bureaucracy. They develop rules and regulations, thousands of pages of regulations. It goes to the State of Wisconsin. We have a bureaucrat who interprets these thousands of pages of regulations. Finally we get to the people of Wisconsin. They say, that is interesting what they did in Washington but that does not work for our State. Those people do not quite understand what goes on here. So they pass overwhelmingly a program that will work for their State. You think they would be able to move forward, but, no; they have got to submit 300 pages of waiver requests. It comes to Washington here. Somebody who maybe has never been in Wisconsin is going to evaluate whether they can get these waivers. The bureaucrat makes a recommendation and maybe the President will sign it. That is not compassion for the people in Wisconsin that need help. The results are that we have waivers that take 292 days to approve, 448, 153, 322. That is not performance. That is not compassion. That is not dealing with the problem. Let us recognize that the future of many of our problems, the future of America is in the hands and should be in the hands of individuals, parents, families, and States and not Washington bureaucrats.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to acknowledge a bright, young group of students from Fremont, MI, who met with me yesterday. A special wish for a happy birthday is extended to Mr. T.J. Meister. A list of those representing the school follows: Fremont High School Students, Fremont, MI: David Ammirati, Brooke Bacon, Sara Breuker, Christine Cooper, Jennifer Dueling, Jennifer Eitniear, Connie Erickson, John Hughes, Heather Kraley, T.J. Meister, Jessalynn Nieboer, Billie Jo Novak, Julie Rottman, Kari Schipper, Jenna Scott, April Smith, Kristine Stariha, Andrea Stroven, Mike Vanostenberg, and Amy Vanzant. Baars Bultman, teacher.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I would like to thank the gentleman from Kansas. You have got us off to a good start in talking about exposing this myth. I now want to turn our attention to another myth. We have talked about the one that Washington creates communities, Washington creates homes, and we have found out that after $5.5 trillion that is not the reality. I would now like to address another myth, that Washington bureaucrats create jobs, that they are better than entrepreneurs, they are better than small business at creating jobs. To do that, I would like to go back to my colleague from Wisconsin [Mr. Neumann] who has created real jobs working in the private sector as a small businessman in Wisconsin.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for his discussion on that point, because really the giant sucking sound here in Washington is the Federal Government sucking capital out of the capital markets, away from entrepreneurs, away for young people, away from people who want to start businesses or build homes or start their futures. The magical bureaucrats in Washington here define their success by how much money they spend on, quote-unquote, job creation programs, not by how many jobs they actually create. If I had to make a choice about where I wanted to invest my dollars or who I wanted to have spending dollars to create jobs, I would go with entrepreneurs and not sending them to Washington and having Washington try to pick winners and losers. Washington would never have picked Steve Jobs at Apple Computer as saying that looks like a good investment. Here is a guy working out of his garage. Let us go pump some money into that because I think that is going to create a new industry. I doubt if they would have picked Bill Gates. Those are not the type of people bureaucrats look at and say that is the wave of the future, because they are out of the mold. Entrepreneurs break the rules. Bureaucrats live by the rules. They cannot accept these kind of challenges. I would like to yield to my colleague from Minnesota, who has joined us from the exalted Speaker's platform.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to now yield to the gentleman from Kansas [Mr. Brownback] to talk about, I am not sure we will have time to get all the way through with it, but to at least talk about one other myth that is being perpetuated here in Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kansas [Mr. Brownback].

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I think just recently the fifth environmental vote was if a Member votes against allocating family planning, which is the code word for worldwide abortion, if we vote against family planning as part of the foreign aid package, is that an environmental vote? If a Member voted against promoting abortion on an international basis, that is an antienvironmental vote. I think the gentleman has a great quiz, and I want to thank my colleagues for joining me. I think we are going to keep raising this issue over the coming weeks. Washington has drawn its strength from this myth for way too long. Washington cannot solve everybody's problems, and when it pretends to, it really ends up too often hurting America and Americans. When we move decisionmaking to Washington, we substitute Washington wisdom, ``Washington wisdom,'' for the common sense of the American people. That is not the direction we want to be going. That is not the direction we need to go to address the problems that are facing this country. It is costing us trillions and trillions of dollars. I think working together we will one way restore Washington to its proper role in American society. That is what our colleague from Arizona talked about when we began this an hour ago. There is much work to do to make that happen, but we are committed to working on that and seeing what we get back to common sense America and away from Washington wisdom.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I would just ask the gentleman to go back to his first statements where in 1965 we started creating this myth of HUD. And what were the parameters and the directives that the President in 1965 laid out? What was the myth that was created or started to be created in 1965. That continued to be driven even into 1996 as we try to change some of these programs?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have a tremendous number of dollars that should be intended to educate kids that are never making it down to the local classroom.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think we should just also say that if we go into Washington, DC, we go to the public housing projects, to get to the public housing projects that are inhabited today we go by 3 and 4 empty buildings. We go into Chicago, we go by almost a mile of empty public housing. We did not do any of those things very well. I am sure my colleague from Wisconsin would like to say something about this. He is a builder in his real life; when he has a real job, he is in the construction industry. But my guess is, I just did some rough numbers at $55,000 for a down payment for a smaller home, I recognize over these 30 years we could have built 100 million homes. Given a nicer home, we could have built, at $110,000 a house, we could have still built 50 million homes over the last 30 years. It is amazing, $19,000 for each and every American is how much we have spent on this program for the last 30 years with these kind of results. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think if we take a look at Habitat for Humanity, it is active in Michigan. They take a caring attitude in reaching out and finding the people to move into these houses. These people are part of the process. They maintain their dignity. They put in sweat equity. They work hard. They put them on finance plans to enable them to buy these homes. They put them in the middle of the community so they are not segregated into little areas or pockets of the community.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, before we start with our prepared remarks this evening, I would like to assure the gentleman from Arizona that as we move forward and as we get to another week of active reform in this Congress probably around the middle of July, we expect that that piece of legislation will have worked its way through the committee process and will be one of the items that this full House will have the opportunity to talk about.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I do not know if my colleague from Wisconsin has any closing comments. I think we are about at the end of our time.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We have 4 minutes.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Only if the gentleman asks my colleague from Kansas all the questions.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. And the issue that we are going to be talking about tonight builds very much off of the problem that you describe. We are going to be talking about the myth of the magical bureaucrat, the myth of moving all of this power and responsibility from parents, from local levels of government to State governments, that the best place to make these types of decisions is in Washington. And we are going to be going through a number of examples this evening which we hope expose that myth for what it really is. It is for a bunch of people in Washington making decisions, spending money in areas where they really cannot have a significant, positive impact or most importantly, where they are not the most effective agent for bringing about the types of results that we want.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. As we move forward this evening, we are going to talk about this myth as it applies to education, as it talks about creating jobs, as we talk about Medicare, as we talk about environmental types of legislation, so that is one of the key areas. We could not have had a better introduction to our topic tonight than the legislation that the gentleman talked about, and I again would like to just reaffirm that I expect that this House will take positive action on legislation like that this summer so that this Congress can again begin focusing on the issues that Washington should be dealing with, that Washington is good at, in moving the other types of decisions, the other types of responsibility and the dollars back to State, local, and maybe even back to the taxpayers, parents and individuals who really are the driving force behind so much of what goes on in this country.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, it is the U.S. Federal Government.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The school board would ask for my resignation. They would say ``These are our kids. We need to get somebody in here that can get the job done.'' So they might, before that, they might ask me what the problem is? The problem is, I think, as we have talked about it, we have asked administrators and bureaucrats to look to Washington for their direction. When you take a look, I have oversight on the Education Department. The Education Department, they are not educational experts. You would think they would be educational exports. They are accountants, primarily, because they are moving money around the country rather than really providing expertise. I would be glad to yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, at this point in time we are trying to gather that information. Finding 760 programs is difficult. Having them scattered over 40 different agencies, we are calling up these agencies, trying to get that data. No, I do not know how many people there are in Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. There are bureaucrats at every level. There are over 5,000 in the Department of Education, which administers about 260 of these programs. There are bureaucrats at the local level who are trying to figure out what is coming from Washington.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. No; they would not have given me $1 billion. They would have asked me to come up with a new plan, to come up with a new process, to systemically take a look at what I was trying to do and figure out what the real problem was. It is very evident here in education. The problem is not money. Some of the best school districts in the country have some of the lowest per pupil spending. It is not an issue of dollars, it is an issue of where decisions are made. As we are trying to reform this and improve it, we do hear the extremists now calling us. Like you said, if I were making the kinds of decisions and changes we are trying to make here in Washington in the business world, I would be called too conservative, not willing enough to really face the issues. We are proposing change here in Washington and we are gutting programs that in reality do not work.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. At last count, I do not believe that there were any. Actually, it would be illegal for them to volunteer.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If I were still employed, most likely if these were the results of my area of responsibilities, I would be unemployed. The business would have never let such a key part of its future languish with these kinds of results for this long. They would have stepped in a long time ago and said ``You are selling us down the wrong track. You are out. We have got to take a new look at addressing it,'' because this is a very critical matter. We are talking about the education of our kids, the kids that are going to be running this country in 5, 10, 15 years, the kids that have to compete on an international basis if this country is going to continue to be the leading example for the world. Business would have never survived if they let this problem go on.