Frank Lautenberg

Mr. LAUTENBERG

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. I am prepared to yield as much time as the Senator from Minnesota needs.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Yes. They are going to have to pay additional funds for services that, otherwise, they might not. And it's true that, in the past, we have not permitted the so-called balanced billing, which simply says the service was advertised or talked about at this level and now it is at a higher level, so you are going to get a bill for it.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Not for the Medicare Program.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. The Senator is correct.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Yes, that is true. That was designed originally to pay, through Medicaid, for those who were up to 150 percent of poverty, any increase in premium that might occur.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. The Senator is correct.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. The Senator is correct. The one thing that I found most disturbing about the proposals that have come in the reconciliation is the fact that suddenly we are in to a whole new area having very little to do with the mission that we have set out for us, to get a balanced budget, to try at the same time to invest in education, to try at the same time to make sure impoverished senior citizens do not have to pay more as a result of the transfer of home health services to part B--all of those things. Suddenly, now we are seeing that something might be called bait and switch, where senior citizens are being told now, well, you may have to pay a higher premium for your part B, your deductible may be going up, that the most modest-income person would have to pay $5, perhaps to get an insulin shot or something like that. Five bucks, when you ain't got it, to put it crudely, is an awful lot of money. These people do not have it. They do not have contact with the outside world. They are frail, they are elderly. For God's sake, where is our conscience on these things?

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I want to commend my colleague from Massachusetts for being on the alert here. I worked very hard with my distinguished chairman from the Budget Committee to try and assemble a consensus agreement that we could all support, and suddenly now we are offered a change and that change says, ``Well, senior citizens who have home health care pay $5.'' It sounds trivial almost, but Mr. President, when we have someone who needs sometimes two, sometimes three visits a day to keep them going, $100 a week, when the average for many of these people, whose income is $15,000 a year or less--you get up to $3,000, $4,000, or $5,000 a year, that is torment. That takes away their very life sustenance because they cannot afford the rent, they cannot afford the heat, they cannot afford the nutrition. On top of that, to impose this new burden, I say, Mr. President, the Senator from Massachusetts is always on the lookout for a balance in our society to try and provide equal service to those who need help-- the promise for the future, an education for their children--Senator Kennedy is always there. In this case I must tell you, I heartily agree with him. The target group are people, usually women, 75 on balance in years, with incomes of under $15,000. They are old, very often frail, sick people who do not take home health care if they can get out of their homes, if they have any mobility, if they have any opportunity to go visit the doctor. These are often critical, life-sustaining services that they need. Some argue, Mr. President, that most people subject to this copayment will not really pay because they have Medigap policies that cover copayments and deductibles. That is misleading because a new copayment would lead to increased Medigap premiums. So seniors would either have to pay the new copayment or their insurance bills would go up. Either way, the bottom line would be higher out-of-pocket costs. Already, seniors typically pay more than 20 percent of their income on these costs. As the Senator from Massachusetts said, unfunded mandates, States will have to come up with $700 million, I think is the figure the Senator used. This is not a particularly good way to get this bill back on track, especially when we know immediately hereafter in the next part of the reconciliation we will be looking at tax relief for lots of folks who do not need it, who can get by very comfortably without it, and here we are talking about $5 out of the pockets of the poverty stricken, typically those who need help, and whose only contact often with the outside world is with these groups, and they want to charge them $5 to have somebody come by. I commend the Senator from Massachusetts and I support him. I yield the floor.

Mr. LAUTENBERG

Mr. LAUTENBERG. I thank the Chair.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I understand that the time is going to be yielded by that side of the aisle and should be appropriately recorded.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. I apologize to the Senator from Arkansas for messing things up.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. About 15 minutes. Apparently the Senator from Iowa would be all right if the Senator from Arkansas--it had been apparently agreed to before he came.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. In this case I think there is a question about whether the Senator from Arkansas had a commitment to speak at this time. I would ask the Senator from Arkansas how much time he needed.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Will the Senator yield for just a moment?

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. LAUTENBERG

Mr. LAUTENBERG. I thank the Chair. I want to say, Mr. President, this is my first year as ranking member on the Budget Committee to process the budget resolution, and it has been an interesting experience. It is a fairly complicated process. I had a lot of learning to do. I still feel that I am playing catchup in some areas, but it was largely through the good work of Senator Domenici that the process moved fairly expeditiously. We work well together. The relationship, on a personal basis, is excellent. We disagreed without being disagreeable, and we completed this arduous task. It has gone on for several months and I think probably will be a milestone mark in the way a budget is developed because of the target that it has, a balanced budget in the year 2002, 5 years hence. There will be enormous change as we go along. Mr. President, I have to point out that this comes at a time when things are pretty good. Since President Clinton has been in office, we have seen dramatic changes in our fiscal condition. For instance, the annual deficit came down from $290 billion, in round terms, in 1992, to an expected $70 billion level for the year 1997. So we have had dramatic declines in the deficits. Our unemployment is at a low point in decades. America is very competitive. We are sending out the kind of high-valued products that we like to see being shipped to other countries, in terms of international commerce. We have the lowest deficit to GDP among all countries of the world, running around 1.5 percent, the envy of almost every nation on this globe. Our ratio of taxes to GDP is the lowest of any nation on the globe. We are talking about large societies, advanced societies. We just saw completion of the gathering of the heads of government in Denver, eight countries, including ours, in which I guess America boasted a little bit because we have been leading the way. Countries that were so envied for so many years, like Germany and Japan, are trying to figure out how we did it and with a tax base that enables people certainly to succeed, acquire, in some cases, incredible fortunes, fortunes far larger than we ever dreamed possible. There used to be a time in America when if someone was a billionaire, that was a stand-out person. It is not all inflation, but today they are counting billionaires and multibillionaires. There is success after success of people going into the corporate world, from whence I came, and work a few years with a company and walk out with $20 million, $50 million, some people being paid $25 million a year on a regular routine. It is quite incredible and quite different, by the way, than the guy who works hard every day and tries to support his family and thinks about where he is, whether his kids are going to be able to get an education so they can move up the economic ladder. He worries about his old age, ``Will my pension be there when I am ready to retire?'' ``Will I be able to give a hand to my mother if she falls sick beyond the capacity of the system as it is presently designed to take care of her?'' ``Will I be able to continue to live on a little plot of land and maintain my home, our home?'' Or, ``Will my wife and I have to work shifts so that she can be home when I am not, and vice versa, to take care of our kids?" That is the picture we see in America today, with all the good results. People at the top are doing very, very well, and people at the bottom are doing slightly better but still very worried. The price of a college education, the opportunity for the kind of jobs that can sustain a family--it is quite different in the levels of income. So, Mr. President, when we look at a bill like this which we will be considering very soon, the tax consequences of our deliberation--and we will be running into some difficult discussions here, because I know a lot of my colleagues are worried about tax breaks for those who don't need them and tax opportunities for those who do. Today, we are talking about the first of the two reconciliation bills, this one called the spending reconciliation bill. Senator Domenici went through some explanatory statements to let people understand what it is about this arcane system of ours--frankly, it is a mystery to most and to many even inside this place--about the budget resolution, the reconciliation, enforcement, and all of the terminology that becomes routine when you are working with it every day, and talking about germaneness and relevance. Around here, relevance, to steal a phrase, when they talk about beauty in the eyes of the beholder, relevance here is in the eyes of the bellower. That is where often debate comes about--relevance. But we have a process by which we determine whether or not something is relevant. So that will be considered as we go along. So, Mr. President, I want to just say once again that I commend the chairman of the Budget Committee for his hard work and cooperative attitude over the past many months. We have spent long days in tight quarters working on this--by the way, no longer smoke-filled; that's out, as we see now with the tobacco legislation in front of us. Senator Domenici is one of the most competent, serious, hard-working Senators in this body. I enjoyed, as I said earlier, working with him over these past few months. The reconciliation bill before us includes provisions that have been, as the chairman noted, reviewed and developed by eight different authorizing committees. Our colleagues on those committees deserve real credit for moving fairly quickly to put these pieces together. I commend them for their hard work. When I look at the final product, there is much in this legislation to be pleased with. It makes some improvements in Medicare solvency and extending the trust fund. It restores some important benefits to legal immigrants. It includes $3 billion to move people from welfare to work. We want that to happen. And it softens the law that denies food stamps to those who try but are unable to find work. Despite these positive elements, Mr. President, I have serious concerns about this legislation in its current form. It is blatantly inconsistent in parts with the bipartisan budget agreement. Once again, I have to say that we labored long and hard and honestly, I believe, in trying to establish agreements. They did not always go down easy. Some of these were bitter pills to swallow. But we inched our way at first to get there, and finally it evolved into a consensus that we felt we could live with. The bipartisan budget agreement had some problematic provisions that now we are seeing--frankly, I would have to use the word ``attacked''-- in some ways. I want to touch on a few examples. First, I think this bill does challenge or violate the provision in the budget agreement that protects senior citizens with modest incomes from increases in Medicare premiums. The bipartisan negotiators set aside $1.5 billion specifically for this purpose. But the Finance Committee has refused to allocate this money. Now, this must be fixed. I understand they are considering it even as we speak. Second, the bill violates the provision in the budget agreement that protects those who have come into our country legally, paid taxes, played by the rules, who suffer at a future time from a disability, accident, sickness, or otherwise. The budget agreement clearly requires that these innocent victims be protected. However, the Finance Committee has refused to include that in their agreement and included only a temporary restoration of benefits. This, too, must be fixed. Third, the bill fails to provide Medicaid coverage for the 30,000 children who are losing SSI benefits under last year's welfare bill. This runs counter to the goal of ensuring that America's children have health care coverage. It is another blatant violation of the bipartisan budget agreement. Mr. President, it is up to the congressional leadership, not the leadership of the committees, to correct these problems and to bring the reconciliation bill back into compliance with the budget agreement. Senators Lott and Daschle have agreed in writing to do this through bipartisan leadership amendments. I am confident that this commitment is going to be fulfilled. But as I mentioned earlier, Mr. President, I am concerned about other provisions as well in this reconciliation bill that go beyond the bipartisan budget agreement. I want to outline some of these. First, the bill changes the age for eligibility in Medicare from 65 to 67. Mr. President, that may be a worthwhile subject, but not here, not in this bill. There is no legislation to protect the seniors who will be aged 65 and 66 as they wait for eligibility going from one place to another. For many companies, for many situations, the retirement period is age 65. It is common. I do not think it is right to be in here. The issue was never discussed during the negotiations on the budget agreement. So while there may be an argument for considering related proposals as part of a broad review of health care and entitlements, this is not something that we ought to be doing now on a fast-track reconciliation bill. Our senior citizens deserve more than that, or one day to be senior citizens. Nor, Mr. President, should we be considering a fundamental change in the universal nature of the Medicare Program as part of a fast-track bill? This legislation would introduce means testing to Medicare. Again, I realize that there are Senators here who support this proposal. But the long-term implications for this move are enormous. They deserve much more thorough debate than is possible in this legislation. Mr. President, the bill before us also includes several other provisions that go beyond the bipartisan budget agreement that are of concern. The bill would increase the financial burdens on some of our most vulnerable senior citizens, poor people, people impoverished by establishing a new copayment for home health visits. It would authorize medical savings accounts, a new approach to Medicare that could, in my view, harm its long-term viability, harm the viability of the whole Medicare Program, because it would give people choices outside the system and perhaps would pull out those who are in good health and leave the rest to those who are not quite up to snuff. It would make excessive burdens for them. It cuts the Medicaid payments. The hospitals also would be curtailed, and they serve a disproportionate share of poor and uninsured patients. So, Mr. President, these and other problematic provisions should not be in a reconciliation bill--again, I remind you, fast track; this will be done sometime tomorrow--that is designed to implement a bipartisan budget agreement. I hope that many of these things can be eliminated before the Senate has to vote on final passage of the legislation. I want, Mr. President, to caution my colleagues that they are to get here with their amendments because the time continues to pass. As Senator Domenici has said, at some point the 20 hours that is allocated for the debate will be consumed by just wasting time. If that is the case, those who have amendments that they care about will be here in the final moments of the time that we have allocated to this debate and they will not be able to bring them up. They may be able to introduce them and get a vote on them, but they are not going to be able to discuss them, they are not going to be able to argue the merits. I think that is something that people ought to pay a lot of attention to if they are serious about the amendments that they are proposing. So, I plead with our colleagues, get over here, get your amendments in. The fact that there will be no votes today does not have anything to do with the time schedule. If these issues are going to be voted upon, these amendments, that can be done tomorrow, but the debate will have to be held before we run out of time. So I conclude, Mr. President, by saying this to my friend and colleague, the chairman of the Budget Committee, that despite the various controversies that have pitted our two parties against each other, we have managed to maintain a spirit of bipartisanship in our efforts to balance the budget in the proper way. I believe that we will maintain that cooperative approach. But if we are going to do it, many of these problems will have to be addressed before this legislation is sent to President Clinton. I look forward to working with Senator Domenici and with the leadership on both sides of the aisle to make it happen. Let us get a bill that we can live with, a consensus bill, much in the manner that we shook hands on; maybe with a grimace or two across the table, but we did it. We arrived at a consensus. I need not go to such elementary teachings to say a consensus really reflects a give-up by all parties to a discussion. A consensus is not I win, you lose; it is we both win a little and we both lose a little. That is what we did to get to where we are. Therefore, I express some disappointment in the changes that have been made in the process of reconciliation and hope that we will be able to change the changes and get on with this bipartisan budget agreement that we concluded here on the floor not too long ago. I yield the floor. Mr. DOMENICI addressed the Chair.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. That could be very well the case.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. We have heard that Senator Moynihan will be here, as will, I assume, Senator Roth, at about 1:30.

Mr. LAUTENBERG

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, first let me say to the distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the ranking member that I commend them for a job well done. I am very much aware of the complications that one has in the defense authorization bill. It is a large sum of money, a very complicated piece of legislation. It has research funds and it has operational money. It is quite a job, and I commend the both of them for moving this rapidly and getting this bill to the floor. Mr. President, I have an amendment that would strike a section, section 3138 of this bill because this section prevents the Department of Energy from recovering any cleanup costs at sites under DOE's Formerly Utilized Site Remedial Action Project program other than the costs already covered in a written, legally binding agreement with the party involved in the site. To put it more simply, this section would strike the Department of Energy's ability to recover costs already covered in a previous agreement with a party involved in the site. As a practical matter, Mr. President, it would absolve W.R. Grace Company of millions of dollars of responsibility for toxic pollution costs by their actions. The effect of this provision from the analysis that we have conducted so far is to grant a special exemption from Superfund law to one company. The Superfund law, a law which I am proud to have helped author, embodies the principle that polluters should pay for the damage they do, and in this case W.R. Grace should pay for the cleanup of the mess that it created. The deal was an unacceptable slap in the face to American taxpayers and the residents of Wayne, NJ, my home State. As a matter of fact, I lived in this community for some time. The residents of Wayne Township have been living with this problem for such a long period of time, and why this amendment is so outrageous is something that I want to explain. A pile of approximately 15,000 cubic yards of potentially radioactive material has already been removed by the Department of Energy, and the Department of Energy says that there are still about 70,000 cubic yards more still buried at the Wayne site, and it is still deciding how to clean up the part that is on the surface and below. The Department of Energy estimates the entire cleanup may cost $120 million. The major contaminant in this soil is a contaminant called thorium, highly radioactive material. It is known to cause cancer and has a half life, Mr. President, that is far longer than perhaps this Earth can endure. It is 14 billion years. In other words, this stuff stays hot for that long a period of time. This deadly waste was the result of industrial activity going on since 1948, almost 50 years ago. The contamination may affect the drinking water of 51,000 New Jersey residents resulting in untold harmful health consequences. The W.R. Grace company owned the property and contributed to this huge pile of waste. The Grace company signed an agreement with the Federal Government in which it promised to contribute to the cleanup, and then they went on to pay a tiny fraction of the ultimate cleanup cost for this site when they deeded over the property to the Government. They paid $800,000 as a down payment on $120 million. That does not sound like a very serious downpayment to me. But the agreement also said that the Federal Government maintained the right to come after W.R. Grace under other laws to remedy the threats caused by their pollution despite again the agreement they had signed. But nothing happened for many years. In 1995, I urged in a letter to the Department of Energy to expedite the cleanup by negotiating with W.R. Grace, the responsible party, the polluter, to pay its share. Those negotiations began shortly thereafter. Over the last year, I have been assured a number of times by the Energy and Justice Departments that progress was being made. And for over 1 year now W.R. Grace has been engaged in a discussion with the Department of Justice, which I believe was in good faith, to determine what share Grace would pay for contributing so much to this mess. Now I read the language in this bill and find that it effectively wipes out all of the progress that has been made, wipes out all of the obligation that W.R. Grace would have. This language takes away the Department of Energy's legal rights under the Superfund polluter pays liability system. It abrogates a legal commitment signed by Grace. Mr. President, this puts the burden squarely on the American taxpayer instead of the polluters. Further, it will delay the cleanup and could poison the drinking water of the people of Wayne and the State of New Jersey. The Department of Energy, Mr. President, has limited cleanup dollars and numerous sites across the country under a program that is called FUSRAP, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. These are the sites of industrial activity that may have contributed at one point to our Nation's defense. That does not mean they have a license to pollute thereafter. They have a responsibility. Without an infusion of cleanup funds from the parties responsible for the mess in Wayne, there will be years of delay in this cleanup, years when the radioactive waste will continue to blight a community, years for that plume to migrate, to reach the drinking water source for that town. Mr. President, the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. Smith, and I worked together on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and together we are trying to rewrite the Superfund law which is soon to expire. We worked together in good faith, and I believe we have narrowed the differences on many issues affecting Superfund. I hope that we are going to be able to produce a bill later this year with both our names as cosponsors of that legislation. However, as far as the provision in this bill that deals with the Department of Energy cleanup at the site in Wayne, I oppose it strenuously. As the Senator from New Hampshire expressed to me, he had no scheme in mind to mitigate the obligation that W.R. Grace has to do the cleanup. That was an effect apparently unintended by the Senator from New Hampshire, but we have to deal in reality not the intent. W.R. Grace must stand up to their obligation. The reality is that the provision in this bill would not only slow down the Wayne cleanup program, but it would also transfer its costs from the responsible party to the taxpayer. We are not going to stand for that, Mr. President. So I urge the adoption of my amendment and urge my colleagues to support it. I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I just want to respond to my colleague. I do not object to the Senator's second degree amendment. If it is passed into law, DOE is going to have to report to Congress next year on the number of sites of this category, the FUSRAP program, on the cost of cleanup, the numbers of sites where private parties are involved, and on the progress DOE has made in pursuing them for a cleanup costs. We want to do these sort of things. This reporting requirement is certainly a step in the right direction. DOE at last will be required to step up its efforts to make the private sector pay for the pollution it caused. It's only fair. The private sector profited enormously from participating in DOE's efforts to build the Nation's nuclear arsenal. The company, however, should not escape liability for the mess they created as they did that. These former DOE sites, Department of Energy sites, contain some of the Nation's most dangerous and pernicious pollution problems. Their radioactive legacy--it is incredible--will endure for thousands if not millions of years. This stuff, unfortunately, creates the energy supply as well as the hazard for this period of time. DOE has been shamefully slow and their reluctance to bring W.R. Grace into the cleanup efforts is inexplicable. In fact, DOE did not begin to go after Grace as a responsible party until I started urging them to do so, now over 2 years ago. Sadly enough, Wayne is not the only New Jersey site being managed by the Department of Energy under the FUSRAP program. New Jersey has five of these sites, including another thorium site which threatens residents of Maywood, Rochelle Park and Lodi. Like the Wayne citizens, these residents, too, have been waiting patiently for lots of years to see that their particular site is cleaned up. This report should prove helpful in encouraging faster cleanup at these sites. I support the amendment and I note the presence of my colleague from New Jersey on the floor, who has worked closely with me on matters affecting the communities, these communities that have these radioactive sites. I am pleased to see him and to note that we worked together on these things. I assume the Senator from New Jersey wants to make some comments. I yield the floor.

Mr. LAUTENBERG

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, are we at the moment in morning business?

Mr. LAUTENBERG

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, it is a strange anomaly that the name of this company, W.R. Grace, is the name of--I am not sure whether it was the founder--but the name of someone who helped build this big company. It is also the name of someone who wrote a report that was officially called ``The Report of the Grace Commission'' in which they talked about how you reduce Government inefficiency, reduce costs, and cut down the size of Government and get those bureaucrats off our backs--all of those words. But now this company said there is one way to resolve problems, and that is to hide behind a good friend's efforts, whoever that friend may be, and get it off the hook for possibly--$120 million. We can't find enough money around here at times to take care of essential programs. We are cutting back Government as much as we can. We are trying to arrive at a balanced budget in the year 2002. And we struggled here not too long ago to try to get disaster relief money into the hands of people whose homes were torn apart, whose families' histories wiped out, with many left penniless and nowhere to turn. We had a heck of a time getting those funds to those people. Here we have $120 million that this Government is liable to have to spend to clean up this site. And what do we do? We let the company duck its responsibilities. Well, Mr. President, I don't intend to threaten at all. But I will say this: If this section stays in the bill and lets W.R. Grace off the hook, and maybe some other companies, we will have to study it a little more thoroughly. I will stand here, and I will talk. I will read, I will lecture, and I will do anything I can to keep this from becoming law because it is an outright misuse of taxpayers' funds. I am not going to let that happen, Mr. President--not this Senator. And I am sure other Senators will agree with me. With that, I yield the floor. I thank you. I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, I rise to express my objection to a provision in the defense authorization bill that is expected to shortly come before the full Senate. The reason that I take this time now to bring this to the Senate is that it is a matter of great urgency. This is the kind of thing that I think citizens throughout the country will automatically rebel against. This is kind of a shock treatment that every now and then happens here that ought to come to the attention of the American public because it is such a flagrant example of the abuse of power, and the power belonging to a corporation with a good friend inside this body. The provision I am objecting to is one of the most flagrant examples of special interest corporate subsidy that I have ever witnessed in my roughly 15 years in the U.S. Senate. This provision is section 3138 of the defense bill, will have the effect of exempting a company called W.R. Grace--a company that has contributed to a hazardous wastesite in my State of New Jersey--from any further liability at this site. Mr. President, this provision was written to get W.R. Grace off the hook--out of any responsibility for pollution that they created, out of the obligation to pay for it, thus passing the buck to the American public. This company contributed to this hazardous wastesite in the State of New Jersey, and now the bill includes this reference that excuses them from any further liability for pollution that they created at this site. The provision effectively grants a special exemption for this company from a law known as the Superfund law, the law which embodies the concepts that the polluter should pay for the pollution and contamination that they created. It is fundamental. The Superfund law, which I am proud to have helped write, provides the Government with the tools to go after the polluters who are found to be responsible for the waste. Mr. President, this provision was inserted in the dark of night without any consultation with this Senator who has worked for so many years to get this site cleaned up; and who has been chairman of the subcommittee on Superfund in the Environment and Public Works Committee and is now the ranking member. Though I am not involved directly with the Armed Services Committee, the fact of the matter is that everyone who is here knows that I have been very much involved in helping to create the Superfund law and making sure that we clean up contamination in our country. But here, even the professional staff, the Democratic staff of the committee, was unaware of this section's insertion and were not given any opportunity to review the provision. This provision is a sneak attack on the environment, on the taxpayers, and on the legal process. This provision says to the taxpayer, ``Too bad for you, taxpayer. We will let a corporate polluter off the hook because this polluter has some special friends in the U.S. Senate. Oh, and by the way, taxpayer, this dump has to be cleaned up. Somebody has to pay for it. So I guess it is going to be you. The most it can cost you, taxpayers, is $120 million. But it saves Grace that money. So that should make us all feel good, I guess. I want to explain a little bit about the Wayne Superfund site. From 1948 to 1971, thorium, a highly radioactive material, and other materials, were extracted at the site that was later owned by W.R. Grace & Co. in Wayne, NJ. The process of mining thorium resulted in contamination with radioactivity of numerous buildings. When the contamination was discovered these buildings were torn down. The resulting waste material was placed in an enormous dump site in Wayne Township, NJ. The Environmental Protection Agency placed this dump site on the Superfund National Priority List in 1984. They said it was one of the worst contaminated sites in the country because this site would potentially threaten the drinking water supply for 51,000 New Jersey residents. The Department of Energy, which oversees the cleanup of this fund under a program that they call FUSRAP, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, has spent over $50 million so far cleaning up this site. The Department of Energy says that the ultimate cleanup may cost as much as $120 million. In 1984, W.R. Grace turned over the property and $800,000 to the Federal Government. That year, W.R. Grace signed a legally binding agreement with the Federal Government which provided explicit assurances that the Government could still pursue the company under any law, including the Superfund law. So when the Federal Government put down the $800,000 deposit, that didn't permit them to escape any further liability. W.R. Grace signed the agreement to confirm that. As the Department of Energy began to clean up the site and to further study the extent of contamination, it soon realized that the cleanup costs were far beyond what they originally believed. In 1996, the Justice Department, acting on behalf of the Department of Energy, began serious discussions with W.R. Grace to determine the extent to which the company might be willing to contribute additional costs to pay for this massive cleanup. I was assured that these discussions were proceeding in good faith and that progress was being made. But then I found out about this outrageous breach of the legal process to which I believe the company would be seriously committed either by negotiations or tested in the courts of our country. Mr. President, the residents of Wayne Township are outraged. They feel betrayed by the democratic process, and I share their outrage and disappointment. I am going to be introducing an amendment to remove this provision from the bill and to defend the concept embodied in our law that says that you create the mess, you clean it up; you can't walk away, or, in this case, sneak away from your responsibilities. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record copies of letters from the Department of Energy written in 1995 which show DOE's efforts to get W.R. Grace to come to the table.