Trade Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, people in my home State are trying to figure out what they missed on this budget deal. It was announced by the White House today that this is a great job-creating achievement, but all they see is more spending and no change in the status quo.
Everyone throws around numbers, but here is the one number people in my State want to hear. How much does it save the American taxpayer? Put another way, does it help us to balance our budget or to address the debt problem?
We need two things to be able to balance our Federal budget: spending restraint and a growing economy. Right now we have neither. We have $18.5 trillion in debt and over $430 billion in deficit in this year. To start paying down our debt, we have to first balance our budget.
The Presiding Officer knows very well that we passed a budget earlier this year that took the next 10 years to be able to balance our budget. Let's play pretend for a moment in this body. Let's say we put that budget into place, and over the 10 years we work down a little bit each year and get to a balanced budget 10 years from now. Let's take a guess in this body, and let's say the year after that we had a $50 billion surplus. It took us 10 years to get back to balance, and in year 11 we had a $50 billion surplus. How many years would we have to maintain a $50 billion surplus until we paid off our debt? The correct answer would be: 360 years in a row we would have to have a $50 billion surplus to pay off our debt. We need to start doing budgets that actually deal seriously with our debt and deficit.
Today, our GDP growth was announced again. It is a whopping 1.5-percent growth in the American economy. With new regulations on every business, the assault on American energy, new loan restrictions on banks, and ObamaCare cost increases--including in my State of Oklahoma, where premium increases are hitting 35 percent for next year on individuals--people know inherently that if you keep overspending, it limits our economic growth in America. We have fewer jobs because of it. It is harder to start a business because of it.
The President keeps saying if we will just spend a little more, we will have more jobs. But people don't believe it anymore because they have seen it is not true. After 6 years of ``if we just spend a little more, spend a little more, this will get caught up'' we still have a 1.5-percent growth rate in the American economy. That is pathetic.
While we have a great number of terrific people in the Federal workforce, people inherently know if you just keep adding jobs in the Federal workforce, it hurts our economy because it continues to take money out of private hands and puts it into government control. What people want is not unreasonable. They just want a plan. People want to know that if we are going to spend money, we use it efficiently and that there is a plan to be able to get us out of debt.
What we heard through the negotiations was that any increase in spending would be offset with pay-fors that were real. The spending negotiations that were done were supposed to develop that plan. What we have as a final document is not a plan to get us out of debt. In fact, it increases our debt again. What we have is not a plan to handle the long-term consequences of deficit. In fact, it obfuscates that again. We need a plan to deal with entitlements, and what we have done is just scratched the surface dealing with entitlements.
What I have heard over and over is that at least the pay-fors are real, that for any increased spending that was done, at least there were offsets for that. Let me give a couple of examples of these real pay-fors, as I read the bill.
Here are a couple of real pay-fors. One is called pension payment acceleration. This is listed as one of the real pay-fors in the document. Pension payment acceleration in section 502 changed the due date for pension premiums from October 15, 2025, to September 15, 2025, in order to get another $2.3 billion into the 10-year budget window.
You see, this is all laid out to say that in the next 10 years we will pay this off. So they took a payment that was due 10 years and 2 weeks from now and moved it forward a month. So literally, yes, it adds $2.3 billion into the 10-year window, but if we had a 10-year-plus-2-week time period, it would be exactly the same. It is actually zero savings. It is not real. They moved the payment a month and said that is a pay-for. It is not a pay-for. That is the pension payment acceleration.
How about this one? We have this one in the Federal Government called the Crime
Victims Fund. The Crime Victims Fund is money seized from criminals and designated not for general use but to compensate the victims of crime--hence the name Crime Victims Fund. Apparently, this budget agreement qualifies as a victim of crime because $1.5 billion is taken from the Crime Victims Fund and dedicated not to victims of crime but to spending in other areas.
We literally take $1.5 billion out of the Crime Victims Fund and spend it on the EPA, the IRS, and silent Shakespeare festivals out there in Federal funding--so much for helping crime victims.
We have 12 appropriations bills we have done in the Senate. It is the first time in a very long time that the Committee on Appropriations has done all 12 appropriations bills through committee. In this agreement, all 12 of those appropriations bills will have to be redone. Here is how they will be redone. The defense bill will be cut, and the other 11 will all go up in spending. The top of that debt ceiling is without reform.
The final straw for me in looking at this deal is Social Security disability. The Presiding Officer knows full well I have worked for 3 years on Social Security disability reform, knowing that the day was coming when we would have to fix Social Security.
The CBO has warned us for 4 years that Social Security disability would reach insolvency in 2016, so my office has spent the last 3 years preparing for how we could actually reform this program to make sure we stabilize the Social Security disability program. I have interviewed individuals within the disability program--attorneys that work with it, Federal judges, administrative law judges, representatives, Social Security staff in all of those cubicles across the Social Security Administration offices, advocacy groups, parents of the disabled, and we held bipartisan hearings to look for common-ground solutions and worked with the inspector general and the GAO to hear other practical solutions they had discovered. We have a long list of real solutions to solving Social Security disability for the disabled and for the taxpayer. We have submitted those solutions as an amendment to this bill because there are real answers to solving Social Security disability, if you do the work. We have actually done the work to prepare for this.
Instead, this budget bill renews a few demonstration programs, changes a few names, transfers some funds from retirement Social Security over to disability Social Security, and calls it reform. If you look at the way the actuarial tables work out, of the 100 percent that needs to be done to bring solvency, they do 1.5 percent of what needs to be done to bring the program to solvency. The estimate is 1.5 percent of the 100 percent that needs to be done, and it is called real significant disability reform. I wish it were, because it is desperately needed.
Everyone knows this Congress only seems to do anything when they have to. A deadline is coming to deal with Social Security disability. This is the time we have to do the reforms. This opportunity will not come around again for 7 years, because this extends out this program for 7 years with almost no reforms at all. We are missing our window.
These are the most vulnerable individuals in our society who are on disability. These are individuals who literally cannot work in the economy in any way, and they need our help and they need real reform in this program, and we have punted. There is 1.5 percent of reform of the 100 percent that is needed to actually stabilize the program.
What does real reform look like? It helps those stuck in the painful process of disability applications and gets them the help they need at the time they need it. Real reform helps with those who game the system to get out of the system. It gives clarity, accountability, and oversight to the system itself. That is what real reform would look like.
Let me give a couple of examples. The grid--it is called a vocational grid--which is used to determine if someone can work in the economy, has not been updated since 1978. It needs to be updated not just now but every 10 years in order to have a regular cycle of updating, and not every 40 years. But that is not required in this bill.
We need to have good record keeping--evidence for disability. That is not required in this bill. We need to have a standard to be able to rotate off disability and to bring some clarity to it. Right now it is medical improvement. The problem is there are no good records often for those individuals on disability. So there is no way to rotate off of it. An individual is permanently trapped in it because the records were so bad at the start. There is no change in that.
What does that look like in real life? Let me give a couple of real-life examples. In Puerto Rico, the Office of the U.S. Attorney accepted a case for prosecution about 4 years ago. The inspector general initiated a Federal grand jury investigation, working closely with the Office of the U.S. Attorney, the FBI, and the Puerto Rico Police Department. In August of 2013, 74 individuals, including 47 medical professionals and a nonattorney claimant representative, were indicted and arrested for their involvement in a large-scale disability fraud scheme.
On January 15, 2015, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Puerto Rico announced the indictments of an additional 40 individuals, including a psychiatrist, for their alleged involvement in this conspiracy when they undertook an early-morning arrest operation for those individuals. All of these individuals were apprehended, and at the end they estimate the cost to the taxpayer is $100 million of fraud in that one case alone.
In Huntington, WV, in May of this year, the Social Security Administration mailed letters to approximately 1,500 individuals informing them of their need to redetermine their eligibility for Social Security disability--many of those individuals have been on disability for years--because the Social Security Administration and the Inspector General's Office noted that many of these individuals were put on in a case that did not match facts with what actually happened in their lives. They were led to believe this by a representative, an attorney in this case, fraudulent work behind the scenes by physicians, and the inside work of individuals within Social Security who tracked them through the process. What happened? There were hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud.
These things still continue. Nothing changes on this. I wish this bill would correct some of these issues today, but it doesn't. Those individuals were told by someone that they fit into the disabled category, only to find out later that they had also been defrauded in the system.
There is nothing in this bill mandating the Social Security Administration to update its medical and vocational listings. There is nothing in this bill to prevent people who receive unemployment insurance, who by definition must be employable, from also receiving disability insurance--people who by definition cannot also work.
There is nothing in this bill to streamline the adjudication process or to eliminate the second level of appeal, which is called reconsideration. Many individuals within the process who are legitimately disabled and who just want to have their cases heard get stuck in this long process. There are actually more appeals in Social Security Administration, in the Social Security disability program, than there are on death row, which puts people in this cycle of endless appeals, year after year, and continues to rack up the cost to the taxpayer and the effect on those who are disabled.
There is nothing in this bill to ensure that a claimant's medical record is well developed so that when they come up for a continuing disability review, a disability determination service examiner can make an informed judgment and actually evaluate whether they are medically improved.
There is nothing in this bill to conduct oversight of the administrative law judges or claimants' representatives. The bill increases the number of administrative law judges but not the oversight. I am not sure if many in this body are aware that some of the administrative law judges in this country have an overturn rate of 95 percent or higher, and we are adding more but not increasing the oversight.
There is no opportunity given for greater accountability or even to improve the Code of Judicial Conduct--a basic element of reform that should be in this.
As for the claimant representatives, according to the Social Security Administration's Office of Inspector General, in tax year 2013, the top 10 highest earning claimant representatives made $23 million. Remember that the payment for the claimant representatives comes directly out of the money that should go to the disabled individual, not from another fund. It is from the individual who should have received that money as disability. So the more the reps make, the less tax money that actually gets to the disabled individual. There is no change in this model. It continues to provide funding for claimant representatives and attorneys and continues to leave the disabled exposed.
By the way, today in Social Security Administration offices all around the country, they are processing the money from the disabled and sending checks to the representatives because although the reps are hired by the disabled individual, they are paid and processed by the Federal workforce from the disabled person's money. We can do better than this. We should do better than this.
This is not a deal the American people are looking for. This is not a budget agreement the people of Oklahoma say fixes our debt and deficit issues and stabilizes disability. This is a deal that is done, apparently, but not a deal that is done well. Based on where we are in debt and deficit, we need to do better, and I pray we do in the days ahead. We have much to get fixed. It is time to actually fix some things, not just to stay operational.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for an additional 5 minutes.
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