Darrell Issa

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I want to comment just briefly, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. First of all, Lance Corporal Phillip Vinnedge is among the very first postal namings of the year. No other postal namings have occurred this entire Congress except these we are considering today for our fallen heroes. It has become clear that the public understands the importance of honoring those who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and so we do so today on behalf of the several fallen heroes. This particular lance corporal, in addition to being from Missouri, deployed from Camp Pendleton in my district with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, a unit that has seen as a percentage the greatest amount of losses of any unit in the theater of Afghanistan or Iraq. The sacrifice of our marines in this conflict in Afghanistan with not a single body of water anywhere around it says a great deal about the new marines. When Lance Corporal Vinnedge enlisted, he knew he was joining a force that wasn't waiting for a war in amphibious landing craft, but that in fact had already been and had fought with great distinction in Afghanistan, in addition to Iraq. He went there to serve his country, and he paid the highest cost. That is far too often what is happening around the world. On behalf of the marines of Camp Pendleton, we have great pride in his service, his commitment, and I am pleased to urge all Members to vote for the passage of the naming of this post office after one of our heroes of this decade. With that, I urge support of this bill. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on the bill under consideration.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Chairman, let me start off on a positive note. The positive note is the regular order in which we bring this important legislation. We have held 11 full committee hearings, 30 subcommittee hearings, produced three full staff reports. Between the work of Chairman Jordan, Chairman Lankford and Congresswoman Foxx on this legislation, there have been countless thousands of hours of hard work to figure the right way to say it to make sure it is narrow and consistent with multiple Presidents' policies of both parties. This legislation is filled with bipartisan support on each of the bills. This is, in fact, not a Republican or a Democratic idea. Mr. Chairman, that ends the positive part. I just listened to my ranking member in opposition, and I was shocked--shocked--that he would talk in terms of rulemaking shouldn't have the interference of the private sector. Customers should not look at their supplier being involved in the production of the regulation. Locking out people who have to manufacture the goods, produce the labels, comply with the law in the process is exactly what is wrong in government today. Mr. Chairman, the American people know full well that a regulation is a law; a rule is a law. The idea that laws are produced in private with often special interest groups on one side only at the table and then put out as a take it or leave it, fight it if you can, is the absurdity of the regulatory state. Mr. Chairman, this commonsense reform is perhaps too little, rather than too much, because, Mr. Chairman, the lawmaking that is going on in the executive branch, including those so-called independent agencies, is independent of our responsibility, as Members of Congress. We are supposed to make the laws, and we are supposed to make them in the clear light of day, with all sides having an opportunity to be heard. Rulemaking for too long has been, in fact, done in secret, shown up without any input, and then those very manufacturers and producers and growers--the regulated--have the option of trying to come here and asking us to strike down or slow down the speed of some ill-conceived regulation. So this important legislation--something that President Obama supported, something President Clinton supported, something that people in the executive branch understand needs to happen--needs to pass here today. I strongly urge the passage of this bill, this bipartisan legislation. I thank Chairman Lankford, and I thank Congresswoman Foxx.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Mr. ISSA. I thank the chairman. Mr. Speaker, when I was alerted as to this change, like Mr. Polis, I asked, What will be the impact? And, at first glance, I was concerned that it could be a poison pill, that it could limit the ability, for example, for somebody to take trade-ins of thousands of phones and unlock them, but I found no such case because they are buying from an individual. At that moment, they choose to unlock it as part of the arrangement, and you now have an unlocked phone. There is no prohibition on buying 500 unlocked phones and selling 500 unlocked phones. As a matter of fact, when I went through the language of bulk sales, I could find essentially no possible business plan that would require the unlocking of bulk phones, except as to buying from a wholesaler who did not intend them to be unlocked, intended them to be sold individually, unlocking them, and then selling them off to another party. Any transaction in which the product gets to an individual or in which unlocking occurs at the time of the individual is fully covered by this bill. So although I did share the concern of the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis) that there was a scenario in which somebody would not be able to unlock a phone, I discovered that there was nothing that the consumer would be affected by that could possibly affect this. For example, let me say that, hypothetically, I am that individual, that company, and Mr. Polis and I have something in common, which is we both ran companies. If I am an individual and I want to buy 1,000 locked phones, there is going to be an easy unlock capability. Third parties are going to be able to provide the unlock capability. I can buy 1,000 locked phones or 100,000 locked phones. I can sell them to somebody else, who sells them to somebody else. Anytime that company or individual is down to the end user who wants to unlock a phone, that capability is there. Mr. Polis is one of the most intelligent and knowledgeable and trained people in this area of anyone in Congress, but if we go through each of the workarounds that we, in business, would do, I can find no scenario whatsoever in which this would stop the consumer from receiving an unlocked phone, if they chose to, even if, in the interim basis, there were many transactions of 10 or 100,000 phones of bulk sale. It does not prevent the sale of unlocked bulk phones being sold and resold. It does not prevent the bulk sale of locked phones. So you only have to ensure, as I understand the law--and I have checked it against the language--that the unlocking occurs in support of the consumer. So though I share the opposition's concern, I believe--I have looked through, vetted it, and like Mr. Polis, as a businessman, I have found that it stops no business plan and hurts no consumer. I thank the chairman for bringing this legislation. I urge its support.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. In closing, first, I urge all Members to vote on this important legislation to send a strong message that this is a do-something Congress when it comes to problems that have been around for a very long time. Secondly, I would like to take a moment, in a bit of personal privilege, to say to the American workforce that work for the Federal Government that, in every investigation by our committee, we have found in every failed project there were legions of good Federal employees who recognized the problem, sent letters, and who tried to have a program that was not going right to go right or go better. It is not for lack of many, many in the Federal workforce who are doing their job as best they can. It is for lack of a consolidated and predictable chain of command. It is for lack of the ability to have somebody know they are in charge, bear the full weight, and be qualified. I have no doubt that, upon enactment of this law, the Federal workforce will begin to breathe a breath of fresh air to know that they are being empowered to do the work they so desperately want to do, and that the tools are going to be added for them and the titles will become a title earned and then used wisely. Seldom do we spend a lot of time on the House floor talking about how great the Federal workforce is. We are talking about monumental failures. Let's understand that it is not for lack of good programmers, it is not for lack of good contractors, and it is not for lack of well- meaning and dedicated Federal workers that we come today. It is for the need to organize them in a way in which we believe they can be successful. And that is the other part of our committee. We are the Committee on Government and Oversight Reform, and today is a structural reform in how we purchase information technology. For that, I want to thank my partners on the other side of the aisle because we have been right next to each other on this all the way. I particularly thank Mr. Connolly, who has put his staff and his own personal time into every aspect of this, and who also added his earlier legislation that allows us to bring about the necessary consolidation of duplicative centers spread around the country. They are simply a waste of energy and a waste of software power. So I see this as a win-win, one in which Republicans and Democrats have come together in a Congress that does not have a great reputation but, on occasion, does great things. I urge support for this, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I now yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Chaffetz), a man who has worked diligently on the subcommittee to ensure that national security includes Internet security.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, can I inquire as to how much time remains?

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This bill, the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, is a slightly modified version of the one that left committee. It was changed only with my cosponsor's concurrence in order to make it more likely to easily pass both bodies. This is, in fact, substantially the same bill, as amended, as the full House voted last year to incorporate in the House version of the defense authorization bill. H.R. 1232 reforms governmentwide the process by which the government annually acquires and employs, roughly, $81 billion of Federal information technology. To quote President Obama on November 14, 2013: ``One of the things the Federal Government does not do well is information technology procurement.'' Now, that was profound because, in the fifth year of his Presidency, it is very clear that the President has realized that this is a monumental task, one inherited by him, not one created by him. There are systematic problems in the way that we procure IT, including the nature of the history of individuals at all levels thinking they can buy something, and often they can, but too often our committee sees and reviews billion-dollar writeoffs of IT programs in which you cannot find out who was in charge, in which you cannot find out how they went on so long, and the hardest thing to find out is why they don't work at the end of $1 billion worth of ``in and out'' of House production. Indeed, industry experts estimate that as much as 25 percent of the over $80 billion annual expenditure is mismanaged or is attributable to duplicative investments or simply doesn't come to be used. We need to enhance the best value to the taxpayer. More importantly, good software saves billions of dollars and countless lives and countless hours if it works. Bad or poorly done software can frustrate the American public and can often deprive them of the very product or service that they expect to receive. When this bill was originally envisioned, written, and passed out of our committee, no one had heard of the healthcare.gov Web site. Our committee, in fact, had looked at countless other failures within the IT procurement community, including ones at the Department of Defense and others, including ones that occurred under previous Presidents. We had determined, along with Mr. Connolly, that there were a number of areas in which we needed to make fundamental change. So, although the American people can certainly see the launch of healthcare.gov as a poster child for not done on time, not, perhaps, done on a budget that we would be proud of and certainly something for which you could not find the responsible parties, even when you called them before your committee, let us make this clear: this bill is not about one failure. It is about a governmentwide, longstanding failure that predates this administration. Among the things that FITARA will do is to create a clear line of responsibility, authority, and accountability over IT investment and management decisions by empowering agency CIOs; creating an operational framework to dramatically enhance the government's ability to procure commonly used IT faster, cheaper, and smarter; and strengthening the IT acquisition workforce. I want to reiterate this, that this is the Federal IT acquisition force. There can be no better investment than to make sure the people whom you trust the most for procuring IT, both from a standpoint of functionality and security, be a well-trained workforce, which is part of what we want to make sure we have. FITARA accelerates and consolidates and optimizes the organization of government's proliferating data centers, something that my colleague from Virginia has worked on tirelessly. It increases the transparency of IT investment scorecards by requiring 80 percent of governmentwide IT spending to be covered by public Web sites called ``IT dashboards,'' and it ensures procurement decisions give due consideration to all technologies, including open source. I might note that for the $677 million that initially was spent on healthcare.gov, some of the areas in which the code worked was proven open source technology that was made available. The discussion draft of this bill was first posted by our committee on its Web site 18 months ago. We held two full committee hearings on the bill, and the language that has evolved through the course of several rewrites and extensive feedback by the contracting and technology communities and experts inside and outside of the government has given us the legislation you see before you today. This is a significant and timely reform that enhances both defense and nondefense procurement, and I urge all Members to support the bill. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1232) to amend titles 40, 41, and 44, United States Code, to eliminate duplication and waste in information technology acquisition and management, as amended.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. My partners in this are sitting on the other side of the aisle. But this committee has come together to look at a problem as simple as chief information officer doesn't mean ``chief.'' It is simply a hollow title. This bill, more than anything else to the American people, means that for every piece of major IT procurement, there will be a chief information officer; and that CIO will have budget authority and be held accountable, but also be given the ability to make those decisions, including pulling the ``stop'' button on a bad piece of legislation. So the title of CIO and CTO and some of the other titles need to mean something. Our committee unanimously believes that if you are to be a chief, you have to be able to tell the Indians what to do. You can't be a chief in name only, and when something doesn't work, find yourself without the ability to call ``halt,'' to go directly to the agency head or do the other things we would expect the title ``chief'' to mean. So, for that reason, I believe it has united a committee behind something that must pass today, go to the Senate and be taken up and become law, if we are going to begin regaining the American people's confidence in our ability to procure large information systems. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I will be brief. When our committee works together in the way they have, particularly under the leadership of Chairman Lankford, we can do some amazing reforms. This is, in fact, more amazing than people might at first gather. For example, this requires something as simple as to have the Office of Management and Budget report what is called the all-in cost of Federal programs. For too long, the American people have heard about what a program costs, only to find out that if you go through all the various budgets that a particular action is spread about, it might cost five or six times as much. That kind of single point accountability is just one of the many reasons that this well-thought-out, bipartisan legislation, led by Mr. Lankford, really needs to be passed today as part of this package of reforms to get a government accountability to the American people. I thank the chairman. I thank the ranking member.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We don't often find in this body the kind of consensus behind something that, as the ranking member said, has gone both ways under different Presidents. I am a proud Republican, but I believe that the order given by President Obama was the right order. The order given by President Bush, perhaps in light of 9/11, perhaps in light of other considerations, might have seemed right at the time. But let me make something clear today: on our committee, there is unanimity. The American people must have access to all the information, unless there is a specific reason to withhold it. This requirement under FOIA today will drive the DATA Act and other reforms that will cause information to be likely stored in formats that are easier for agencies to determine that which they must withhold. We think it is important. Today, legions of people often spend countless hours redacting nothing more than one name or one Social Security number that cannot be found, except by a set of eyes scanning over it. So, in addition to the American people getting what they are entitled to under this act, we believe that it will drive the kind of innovation automation that actually will save the American people money and cause more information to be available. Just as census data is critical to our economy, so is access to what your government is doing, planning to do, or thought about, talked about, or did in the process of making laws, regulations, and rules. So I join with my colleague in believing that this is a time in which we say this President acted properly in how he ordered something, we believe codifying it, so that no follow-on President could modify it or fail to deliver what this legislation envisions. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1211) to amend section 552 of title 5, United States Code (commonly known as the Freedom of Information Act), to provide for greater public access to information, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on the bill under consideration.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. H.R. 1211, the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act, or FOIA Act, is a bipartisan bill approved unanimously by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last March. I cosponsored the legislation, which Ranking Member Elijah Cummings authored. The bill is a product of the joint effort by our staffs. The legislation has been endorsed by 29 nonpartisan transparency groups, including the Project On Government Oversight, known as POGO, Government in the Sunshine, the Sunlight Foundation, and the American Society of News Editors. Mr. Speaker, it is critical at this time that the American people believe and actually receive the information that lets them understand what their government is doing. A key provision of this bill is to codify requirements in a FOIA memorandum issued by President Obama and Attorney General Holder. This includes making the presumption of openness standard the law of the land. That means that an agency can only withhold information if the disclosure of such records would cause foreseeable harm. This shifts the burden of proof from the public requester seeking information about a government agency, with which he must now demonstrate that he has the need to the government being open and transparent, unless it has a good reason to withhold. The FOIA Act of 2014 also requires an unprecedented level of proactive disclosure. That means that more information will be made available to the public without each individual interested in the information needing to file separate FOIA requests to get it. Mr. Speaker, in plain English, if one person and then another person or one entity and another entity seem to want to have the same information, rather than the agencies possibly posting it publicly, they will be required to post it publicly, so that which a few agencies want to know or a few private organizations want to know, the entire public would have easy access. Another way of putting it is, if you are going to tell one person that it is reasonable to have public access, then all the public should have easy access to that information. These proactive disclosure requirements are intended to make the information-sharing a routine part of government. Like the DATA Act passed earlier this year, which the House approved, the FOIA Act requires all information be posted in an electronic, publicly accessible format. Raw data will be available as the original format so that it can be machine-searched and give the widest ability for the public to have not just access to the letters, but access to the meaning and the cross- meaning of this information. Under this bill, more agencies will be using technology to increase transparency by processing FOIA requests through a centralized Web portal. Users will submit requests in one location, where agencies can automatically post their response. This kind of one-point access is something the public has long waited for from the Federal Government. The legislation before the House today modestly amends the committee- reported bill by establishing an Open Government Advisory Committee, housed within the National Archives' Office of Government Information Services. The Open Government Advisory Committee will ensure that reform efforts continue after this bill is enacted. Mr. Speaker, this amendment to the FOIA law is one of the most important additional accesses to the American people; and I might note with thanks that this is an initiative begun by this administration, by President Obama, that we believe should be there for all times. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, as I close, I want to thank my partner in this legislation, Mr. Cummings. In order to get this kind of legislation, you do need to make sure that you have dotted the i's, and I believe we have done so. The minor modification that was made between the time it left the committee and the floor is one that was done on a bipartisan basis. Were this to go back to our committee, of course it would pass unanimously. Therefore, I urge all Members to vote ``yes'' on H.R. 1211--to support the bill, to support freedom, to support the opportunity for the American people to know. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, famously, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, We have nothing to fear but fear itself. That is not true here and, sadly, the last speaker is entitled to his opinion, but the facts do not bear out his conclusions. The truth is that actual interviews and depositions taken of the highest-ranking people that helped develop this Web site, both public and private, show there was no end-to-end testing. It did not meet the spirit of any definition of a secure Web site. In fact, the highest-ranking person, Teresa Fryer, on September 20, was unwilling to recommend this site go active, and said under oath that if it had been within her authority to stop it, she would have. It is very clear, even from the White House's statements in the last few days, that they claim to have mitigated or have a plan to mitigate significant security risks. The American people need to understand a plan to mitigate means they have not mitigated security risks. This is the situation we are in, in which no private sector company, including Target, would go live with a system that has known failures and unknown failures because of a failure to do end-to-end. All we are asking for is, since Secretary Sebelius, under oath, has been wrong on multiple occasions, I have called for her to make clear that she made false statements. The fact is what we need is a law that makes it clear that they should do the right thing, not say they have always done the right thing and they will do the right thing, because in the case of healthcare.gov, they launched a site that was neither functionally ready, nor had it been security tested, and it had known failures that were not mitigated prior to the launch. Those are the facts, Mr. Speaker, and I ask for support of this bill.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Madam Chairman, my colleague from California a few moments ago spoke eloquently on behalf of the small inventor, but he didn't speak for me, and I am a small inventor. When I patented my first product, all I had were a couple of employees and an idea. I presented a product that I really wanted to make to a company that I thought would buy it, and then I raced down to protect my rights and succeeded. Ultimately, I was paid. I know very well what you do if you assert patent infringement if you want to prevail. You look at the competitor's product; you take some due diligence. All this legislation is trying to do, and do well, is to put some teeth into what my colleague from California disparaged: the trolls who will simply surf the Internet and send out litigation alleging patent infringement with products they have never looked at, understood, nor do they know if they fall under their patent. I have received damages under the rule 11 sanction. I know what it takes to share a completely frivolous case. I have prosecuted my own patents against infringers. I know what you should do before you assert to somebody ``patent infringement.'' This bill does one thing very well. It puts a little bit of teeth finally back into what the trolls use as a tool: file a lawsuit and collect an amount of money because people don't want to spend it on litigation. Just for once I would like us to understand this is not sponsored by the big guys. In fact, the little guy starting a company, who gets a letter or a suit from a troll, is the person that this will protect. I know this firsthand from more than three decades of being an inventor. Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your leadership on this issue.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3343) to amend the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to clarify the rules regarding the determination of the compensation of the Chief Financial Officer of the District of Columbia.

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, a capable chief financial officer is paramount to the physical health and integrity and defensiveness of any organization that he or she oversees. The District of Columbia is no exception. Just the opposite. The Federal city is perhaps the most important place for people to look at a microcosm of whether or not the Federal Government can be fiscally responsible. In the 1990s, when the District of Columbia was bankrupt, Congress, at its discretion and the direction of this committee, stepped in with sweeping legislation to help the city's sinking financial ship. Included in these reforms was the establishment of an independent chief financial officer to oversee the city's finances. Since the creation of this position, Congress has come to rely upon the D.C. CFO to give an objective, unvarnished picture of the city's finances. The D.C. CFO is our best window into the financial status of the Federal city. The bill before us today spends no Federal dollars. It simply allows the District to use its own locally generated funds to pay its CFO as much as a member of the Federal Government's Senior Executive Service can receive in total compensation. Now, I know that the men and women here on the floor understand the Senior Executive Service. But for those who may not, we have, throughout the government, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of positions that are very senior that make, in fact, at times more than Members of Congress. These are specialists. These are highly trained career professionals that, in fact, make up to but not more than the Vice President. Back in the 1990s when we created this position, we established an amount that seemed reasonable at the time. Today, establishing a more flexible amount, one that can change over time as the Senior Executive Service changes, makes more sense. Ultimately, there are CFOs throughout government--some of them controlling less responsibility and smaller amounts of funds and certainly, in many cases, less significant and complex relationships than that of a city of over 500,000 with countless different departments, including, obviously, the education of children, the security of the Federal city, and the like. For that reason, it seems only fitting that we link it to a salary that can be at least as great as a senior Federal service. Now, ultimately, we are not mandating a salary. We are only allowing the city to recruit someone who is created by an act of Congress to serve this body as a window into our oversight of the Federal city. This legislation was supported unanimously by the Oversight and Government Reform Committee last month, and I urge all Members to support this important technical change to the charter for the city of the District of Columbia. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. ISSA

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.