John Spratt

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Davis].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Dakota [Mr. Pomeroy].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Minge].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Dingell], ranking member of the Committee on Commerce. (Mr. DINGELL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Doggett].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Bentsen]. (Mr. BENTSEN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Woolsey]. (Ms. WOOLSEY asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to yield 45 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut [Ms. DeLauro], and that she be allowed to control and yield that time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I cannot pass up the opportunity to observe, as I have before, why it is we are here at this moment. Five years ago, the date I always pick as January 13, 1993, just before George Bush left office, his Economic Report of the President came to the Congress and it indicated, projected, that the deficit for that year, fiscal year 1993, would be $332 billion. Within a few months, we passed in the House and in the Senate and sent to the President a deficit reduction plan, only with Democratic votes, passed by the skin of its teeth, which sought to cut that deficit in half over the next 5 fiscal years. The results are a matter of record. The deficit fell in fiscal year 1993 to $255 billion, in fiscal 1994 to $203 billion, in fiscal year 1995 to $164 billion, and last year, September 30, 1996, the deficit was $107.8 billion. Both OMB and CBO projected that the deficit will be well below $75 billion on September 30, 1997, when we close the books on this fiscal year. So we can credibly say that we are within reach of a balanced budget because of what we did at some political expense in 1993. This could be for many of us, a sweet occasion, a very satisfying moment. Instead, it is a little bittersweet. Mr. Speaker, less than a month ago, we passed a budget agreement here in the House, sent it to the other body and they passed it as well, that deserved the name bipartisan. Mr. Speaker, 132 Democrats voted for that agreement, and today, 132 or more would come back to the well of the House and vote for it again if the budget agreement we made a few weeks ago were simply carried out, straightforwardly implemented in the bill that is before us. Unfortunately, it is not. This bill does not fully realize the goals that we set out in the balanced budget agreement. It is still a work in process, very much something that is yet to be realized. That is why the administration requested us in a letter they sent today to pass a bill to move the process, not that they are endorsing this bill, but they endorse the process, because their expectation is that it can be perfected in conference, which remains to be seen. Here are just a few of the ways that we have fallen short. The philosophy of our negotiation was that each side, Democrats and Republicans, would come out of the negotiation with something that each of us could claim we had won, some distinct victory. For our part we chose as a victory education, the President's request for education, and an initiative in the area of children's health care, another step toward providing health care for the millions of Americans who do not have it. The goal we set for ourselves was to get at least 5 million children of the 10.5 million children in working poor families who do not have coverage covered with health insurance. We set aside an earmark $16 billion of new spending resources in this bill in order to accomplish that. Unfortunately, the committee of jurisdiction in its mark of this bill gave us a block grant that provides us no assurance that this $16 billion will reach the children for whom it was intended. CBO has cast grave doubt as to whether we will even get a fraction of those children. So we have fallen short of a goal that we all ostensibly shared and should share, and that is, get at least half of that 10 million children covered. That is why I say this bill needs improvement. Next, provisions were added to the bill that were never contemplated, never discussed in the course of the budget negotiations. In dealing with welfare to work and with workfare participants, provisions were added that would deny workfare participants the protections of the Federal Labor Standards Act, deny them the right to be called employees and all the rights, benefits and privileges pertinent thereto under Federal law. In dealing with the food stamp provision which now requires able- bodied food stamp beneficiaries between the ages of 18 and 50 to work in order to get their food stamps, we have provided $1 billion in order to see to it that 350,000 workfare slots would be available so that these food stamp participants, if they could not find a job, could at least get workfare and continue to get their food stamps. We have not realized that goal in the bill before us. Then in this bill, which is a must-pass piece of legislation, everybody knows it is a moving vehicle and it is going on a fast track, some bitter pills were added by people who are ardent proponents of various projects that have nothing to do with reconciliation. This bill contains a new medical malpractice code, a far-reaching innovation for the Federal Government. I voted for that before. I have actually written the title, the Rowland-Bilirakis bill that dealt with it, but there are many Members on my side for whom this is a bitter pill to swallow. The same goes for the Hyde amendment, which I voted for before, but many Members on my side simply think it has made the kids' care bill something that they cannot support until it is removed. Go down the list; 500,000 MSA's, medical savings accounts, never discussed in our agreement, never contemplated, and scored by the Congressional Budget Office not to save money in a bill where we are trying to shore up and restore solvency to Medicare or shore up and eradicate the deficit; this will cost the Medicare Program $2 billion over the next 5 years, an expensive experiment. So all of this is hard to swallow for Democrats. Some Democrats today, as a consequence, who could be counted on to come to the floor as they did in 1993, as they did just a few weeks ago, and vote to eradicate the deficit and balance the budget will be forced to vote no today. It is not because they do not want to balance the budget, it is because they think the deal that they supported just a few weeks ago has not been upheld and has been actually breached. Some, like me, will vote for the budget reconciliation bill before us. I vote for it for two strong and substantial reasons. First of all, as the bill began to emerge from the pipeline of the different authorizing committees, and we began to note its problems that had to be corrected and cleaned up, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] worked in earnest and in good faith with me to work off a list of things that I thought we could correct here in the House between the reporting of the budget resolution and the rule that was considered today. Much of that was accomplished in the self-implementing, self- executing rule that we passed just a few minutes ago. In that same spirit of good faith, I am betting that that same cooperation will continue into conference so that we can, through one means or another, negotiations with the Senate, the President's veto threat, whatever the device may be, we can take this work in progress and bring it back to what it was just a few weeks ago, a bill that we could call a balanced bill to balance the budget, a bill that is truly bipartisan, one that we can all vote for. It is in the hope that we can obtain that objective that I will support this bill, but I say to all Members of the House, Democrats and Republicans alike, it is still very much a work in progress and it needs and requires a lot of work before final passage. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California [Ms. Roybal-Allard].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Cardin].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan [Ms. Rivers].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota [Mr. Sabo], former chairman of the Committee on the Budget. (Mr. SABO asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Engel]. (Mr. ENGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mrs. Clayton].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I believe the provision the gentleman referred to was dropped in the manager's amendment. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Evans].

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Hawaii [Mrs. Mink]. (Mrs. MINK of Hawaii asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm]. The SPEAKER pro tempore [Mr. Dreier]. The gentleman from Texas [Mr. Stenholm] is recognized for 1\3/4\ minutes.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. This is not foreign aid. This is an investment in our own national security. Here is what is left on the agenda. These are Nunn-Lugar projects on the agenda. Dismantle 130 SS-19 heavy throw-weight ICBM's, dismantle 54 SS-24 mobile ICBM's, fill in 148 SS-18 silos in Kazakhstan, eliminate 492 SLBM silos, destroy 10 more heavy bombers, complete the construction of a facility in Siberia to safely store over 12,000 nuclear warheads, dispose of 100,000 metric tons of liquid propellants, scrap 916 ballistic rocket motors. That is a concrete list, that is the work order.

Mr. SPRATT. These are the accumulated work orders for the Nunn-Lugar program ready to be executed if the gentleman does not stop the funds with this ill-considered amendment. For somewhere between $300 and $400 million a year we can destroy nuclear missiles that were targeted to us and could have destroyed us throughout 50 years of the cold war. That in my book is money well spent. This amendment would have us cut off an investment in our own security if the Russians were to sell to the Chinese, listen to this, a cruise missile with a range of 60 nautical miles. This type of missile is already deployed by the Indian Navy. It cannot be ignored or dismissed. It is not state-of-the-art, however, by any means, and though it can be tipped with a small nuclear warhead, it more often carries a conventional warhead, and it does not constitute by any stretch of the imagination a strategic threat to the United States. Russian ICBM's, however, and Russian SLBM's and the fissile materials that must be secured from nations hostile to the United States are a strategic threat. This is not a good amendment, it is not a good idea. I urge all Members to vote against the Solomon amendment. It is not in our national security interests.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the gentleman's amendment. This amendment would stop, stop any funds for the so-called Nunn-Lugar program from being spent if the Russians dare to sell the SS-N-22 antiship cruise missile to China. The Nunn-Lugar program, sometimes known as cooperative threat reduction, helps the Russians to smile at ballistic weapons and store their deadly components. Nunn-Lugar is not foreign aid, it is not a gratuity. Nunn- Lugar helps U.S. national security in very direct and substantial ways. Listen to this list. So far Nunn-Lugar has helped deactivate 4,500 nuclear warheads, put over 200 ICBM silos out of operation, destroyed 20 heavy bombers, eliminated 64 submarine-launched ballistic missiles and sealed 58 nuclear testing tunnels. Nunn-Lugar has helped the three former nations of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan totally denuclearize. This is really one of the crowning successes of the post-cold-war world. It has not gotten nearly the attention and acclaim that it deserves, and there is much more that Nunn-Lugar has to do.

Mr. SPRATT. I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Mr. SPRATT

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and to my colleague from South Carolina and my good friend, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dellums], I commend the gentleman on the work product he brought to the floor. I want to address in the time allotted to me a common misperception now out in the public and a misstatement that is likely to be made a number of times before this debate is over, and that is that the reason this budget is stretched so tight that it is so difficult to come up with extra funds to do things we would like to do is that the Clinton administration has not asked for more money for national defense. In fact, the facts tell a different story. Last year's budget resolution in the last Congress was the last blueprint we received from the Republicans on what they would spend on national defense. That resolution spelled out, budget function by budget function, what every different function would be funded at. And for the function we call 050, which is national defense comprehensively, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy both, the requests over 5 years, the amount of money allotted to national defense over 5 years in that budget resolution was $1 trillion 371 billion. That was the Republican budget resolution which passed the House last year, 1 trillion 371 billion for the period 1998 through 2002. When the President sent his budget up this year for that same period of time, 1998 through 2002, the President requested and proposed spending $1 trillion 383 billion on national defense comprehensively over that same 5-year period of time. This is $12 billion more than the amount of money that was provided in the last budget resolution passed by the House, which was a Republican-sponsored plan. This year, this was $12 billion ahead of where we left off. We then entered into negotiations which the administration fully supported, and as a result of those budget negotiations, we added $4.4 billion to function 050, national defense comprehensively. So through this bipartisan budget resolution, which the Democrats and Republicans both have supported and the President has blessed and supported himself, we have added $17 billion more to defense spending than the Republican budget provided when we adjourned in the last Congress. That is a significant increment in spending. The committee, and this is a matter of concern to me also, the committee has gone beyond that budget agreement and has taken $2.6 billion which were specifically provided for function 053, the Department of Energy, specifically earmarked to certain programs there that are necessary for cleaning up the environmental mess that was left over from 40 to 50 years of building nuclear weapons, taken that $2.6 billion and put it in the Department of Defense instead of the Department of Energy. Now, I would be one of the last to say that the money is misspent. It is being spent on some good programs, on O&M, operations and maintenance, and on procuring some things that I think add to our national defense. But in fact, the requirement for these funds, this $2.6 billion in DOE, will not go away simply because we do not fund it this year. It is still there. It will come back next year. We have simply pushed it into the future. In the meantime, by adding $2.6 billion to the procurement budget and to an R&D budget, we have started up programs which will not be fully completed and will not be fully sustained by that $2.6 billion. So we have generated more demands for funds to complete what we started this year in the outyears, and that is going to create fiscal problems in the outyears, as $2.6 billion that we moved out of DOE into DOD. Frank Raines, the very distinguished and able Director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned the House in a letter on June 5 that this funding, taken from DOE and shifted to DOD, violates the bipartisan budget agreement. And it is bound to come up again in the conference that we will go to when this bill comes to the floor and in reconciliation, because we have not settled the problem of what to do in the future for the problems that are not addressed with this $2.6 billion. So I say to my colleagues who have participated in bringing this to the floor, I think on the whole it is a job well done. I commend the Chairman and I commend the ranking member for working together, but not every problem has been resolved and some of the rabbits we have pulled out of the hat to satisfy all of our demands this year will not be there next year when we try to do the same thing.

Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, let me raise, since no one else is, some concerns about this bill. There are some breathtaking changes here. This bill would cut management personnel in the Department of Defense by 25 percent; it would cut people classified as acquisition management personnel by 42 percent. Now I think that we need to impose external pressure on the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, in order to effect these cuts so that the overhead, the white-collar workers, are reduced commensurate with the reduction in force of the guys and women that fight the wars, but is 45 percent, 42 percent, a sustainable number? Exactly whom are we cutting? Engineers? Accountants? And when we cut these people, will we emasculate program management to the point where we cannot oversee defense contractors, costing us money, buying things imprudently, $600 toilet seats again? And when we find that we have cut too far, if we have, will we go back out and contract the very same people who are now in a different guise as civilians, and we will pay them more because they will earn more and they will have bigger overhead themselves? Are we saving money or are we not? I do not think we have weighed sufficiently, the pros and cons, delved sufficiently into the Department of Defense to know whether or not we can sustain without some lasting damage a 25 percent cut in management personnel or a 42 percent cut. We are taking 124,000 acquisition management workers off of 269,000. Then there is the enormous increase from $100,000 to $5 million where we will not have free and open competition. Is that a good idea? Have we adequately explored the risk inherent in that, or what is there? We have a letter, my colleagues can check everyone's office right now, a letter from the Chamber of Commerce expressing its concern that we are dispensing with free and open competition which is the best way to buy things. I may vote for it but I hope this is not the last word because I think there are some assumptions made here that have yet to be validated.