Government Spending
Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, when you are home and the television is on, the phone starts to ring, your dog is at the back door barking, and the kids need help doing their homework, occasionally you can forget that dinner is on the stove, but if you forget about it too long, your house will catch on fire, and that is going to be a problem. You can get distracted by a lot of things and suddenly miss out on something that is very important.
Our Nation is dealing with a lot of issues right now, such as terrorism, immigration, banking issues, our economy, education, transportation, and I do have a concern that we have forgotten this year we still have $450 billion in deficit and a total debt of $19 trillion hanging over our heads.
If we were in any State in America and faced with that, the legislative branch would work, make hard decisions, and then balance their budget. Every single State, at the end of the legislative session, comes to a balanced budget, but we don't. We just overspend, and it has happened consecutively so many times now, our debt has built up to $19 trillion. I don't have an easy way to articulate $19 trillion of debt, but let me give you a picture of that. Earlier this year we passed a 10-year budget plan that would get rid of our $450 billion of deficit and would slowly work down, within 10 years, back to a balance. Good.
Let's do a hypothetical. Let's say we finish out that path, and we have to get back to a balance within 10 years, and then in year 11 we do very well and we have a $50 billion surplus. It is a good surplus. Here is my question: How many years in a row would we have to have that $50 billion surplus before we paid off our debt? If you are doing the math in your head, the correct answer is 460 years in a row. If we had a $50 billion surplus for 460 years in a row, we could pay off our debt. That is not going to happen, is it? We are in a bad spot, and my fear is that we are distracted and we are not focusing on something that will come back and bite us.
What do we do about that? I ask if we can do the first thing: Can we at least agree that this is a problem and that we should actually work to balance our budget? At least have that as the common ground that we can agree on in this body and say we need to get back to a balanced budget, and then we need to begin to pay this down and start that process--to approach this issue in a way that I think can develop real solutions. We need to find common-ground areas, but first we need to begin with that one simple principle.
Our office has come up with a list which we affectionally call the Federal Fumbles List--100 ways the Federal Government has dropped the ball. We are identifying areas of waste, duplication, and, quite frankly, regulations that are well outside the purview of the Federal Government, many of which slow down the economy and drive up the costs to consumers.
These Federal fumbles are not an exhaustive list. This is not everything; This is just our list. We took some from multiple agencies and entities. As we pulled this list together, we encouraged this. This is our to-do list. We encourage other offices to start their to-do list so at least we can have a common-ground sense of, let's get back to a balance and work together to identify something within our own office to find out ways we can deal with some simple things, such as, how are we wasting taxpayer dollars? What programs are ripe with fraud? What duplication and inefficiency is out there? Where are we overregulating, which in turn raises the costs of goods and services for consumers? And how does the government actually have processes in place that deceive taxpayers and add debt to their families?
When we walked through this, we had a common agreement on our team: We are not just going to identify problems; we are going to actually work together to find a solution. Our issues and conversations have been simple. If I am back home in Oklahoma, I can sit in the coffeehouse with other folks eating breakfast and talk about all the problems, but when I get back in this room, we can't just complain about the issues, we have to fix those issues. That is our job. We spend a tremendous amount of time just complaining about the issues as if fixing it comes from somewhere else.
So we take all 100 of these issues and say: Here is the problem, and here is the solution we have proposed. If people have different ideas and different solutions, bring them, but let's at least agree that these things should be resolved. Some of them are small, some of them are large, but we simply asked the question: How do we fix this?
I have several things to say on that issue. One is that we have to fix our budgeting process and the way we make decisions about it.
We have these cute little terms in our budgeting process, such as CHIMPS, changes in mandatory programs. It is a cute term, but the problem is that adds $11 billion to the debt every year and everyone just pretends that it is not there, that it is not real.
There is a fund called the Crime Victims Fund. This fund is supposed to go directly to what it says--to crime victims--but it is actually not used for crime victims.
Eleven billion dollars each year--in fact, this is the same $11 billion that is used each year as an offset for additional spending, but the money never actually moves out of that account, it just stays there. We pretend we are going to spend it and then actually spend it somewhere else and then the next year do the same thing again. It is deceptive. We have to stop that. That adds deficit and debt onto families by a deceptive tactic.
We have a thing called the corporate payment shift. This one is fun as well. The corporate payment shift assumes that money is going to come in or be spent, and we have a 10-year budgeting window and move it in the very last month to year 10 plus 1 month. We move it just slightly out of the budget window, but we say we are going to spend it and actually go ahead and spend it anyway. If we had a budget that was 10 years and 1 month, it would be out of balance, but if we put that little corporate payment shift in there, it looks fine on paper, but in reality it doesn't work. So we identify that as one of the fumbles that we have as a government. It is something that we obviously have to fix. Basic oversight will help that, but it is also this body making a decision on how we are going to budget it.
We also walked through a lot of areas where we just identified things that the Federal Government spends money on that we thought were rather unique to spend money on and we thought may need some oversight.
How about a $43 million natural gas filling station built in Afghanistan? It cost $43 million for one natural gas filling station. Now that that station is in place, it is not being used at all and it is a $43 million waste.
How about the Academy Awards. It is a pretty ritzy event. The Academy Awards are choosing to build a $250 million museum, and the Federal taxpayers are kicking in $25,000 to that museum. Why in the world are we kicking in $25,000? Did we believe at some point that they couldn't raise the last $25,000, and so we had to kick in a Federal connection to it? I would disagree.
One of my favorites is the fact that we just spent almost $50,000 to study the history of tobacco use in Russia. I am still looking for the national security implications of why we just spent $50,000 to study cigarette use in Russia.
The National Park Service spent $65,000 doing a study on what happens to bugs when you turn on a light in dark areas. I can tell anyone in this Chamber what bugs do if you turn on a light in a rural area. They fly at the light. But we spent $65,000 trying to investigate that.
The VA in Arkansas installed solar panels to show that they have green energy in this area. Many VA centers around the country are doing this project. The particular one in Arkansas put them on in the wrong spot, relocated them, and spent $8 million in total just for the installation for their solar panels. Any guess on how long those solar panels will have to run continuously to before they pay off the cost of installation? They will have to run continuously for 40 years just to pay for the cost of installation. That is not green energy, that is just waste.
How about a challenge like this. The Social Security Administration--the definition for Social Security disability is that you cannot work in any job in the economy. You are only eligible for Social Security disability if you cannot work in any job in the economy. But there are individuals who receive both Social Security disability, which by definition means you cannot work, and unemployment insurance, which by definition means you are looking for a job. You should not be able to get unemployment insurance and Social Security disability insurance at the same time. They violate the definitions between the two. Even the President of the United States agrees with that. Yet we have not been able to get that done. That is a fumble.
As American taxpayers, we spent $374,000 studying the dating habits of senior adults. Can someone help me understand what the national security implications are for that and why we spent $374,000 studying the dating habits of senior adults?
We also created what is called the Ambassador Slush Fund.
The Ambassador's Cultural Fund from the State Department, $5 million--almost $6 million--is designed to be able to help us give away money to do construction in other areas.
We have done projects like building a welcome grotto into a Buddhist temple in China, which I find the ultimate irony. If any church in America said we wanted to be able to add on a welcome center onto our church, we would forbid the use of taxpayer dollars for that, but in China we literally borrowed money from them, gave it to our State Department so they could build a welcome grotto into a Buddhist temple back in China. I am not sure that is a great idea.
The State Department also has a Twitter account called ThinkAgainTurnAway. It is to discourage people from joining the jihadi movement. Any guess on how much Americans spend for a Twitter account? For that one Twitter account with 23,000 followers, we spent $5 million--$5 million to maintain a Twitter account. I am very confident there are multiple teenagers at home who could help us run that for a lot less than the price.
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I have a real concern that our Social Security Administration is not sharing what is called the death master file. That may seem like a macabre comment, but what happens is, if we don't share the death master file, then we literally don't know in other agencies when to be able to pull a Social Security number off the record. The Social Security Administration recognizes that someone has passed away, but the IRS doesn't, so that is still a live Social Security number to them, meaning someone could get that Social Security number, file, get a work permit, even register and vote--all sorts of things can be done--under that number.
We have 6.5 million people, according to our government, who are over 112 years old--6.5 million people. That is quite a few. Actually, in the world, there are less than 100, but according to our government we have 6.5 million and those numbers are being abused.
I can't even get into multiple issues, but let me just mention one more on this list of waste. We identified what many Americans already know. Social Security numbers are being stolen and used to file fraudulent tax forms. Many Americans in the coming months will file their taxes only to get notification from the IRS that someone has already filed under this number. It is infuriating to them, and it is billions of dollars of loss to the Federal taxpayer. The IRS knows how to fix this. We list out the solutions. We have to actually implement the fixes. We have to be able to protect the taxpayer and to protect individuals from identify theft. That is a fumble, but it is fixable and we need to do it.
I haven't even gotten into some simple things such as school lunches--ask any teenager what they think of school lunches at this point with the new regulations--or waters of the United States and how even the Corps of Engineers doesn't want to implement the new EPA rule. The fiduciary standard is causing chaos among retirees and individuals wanting to get retirement advice or rural banks in how they want to be able to give out loans for mortgages but can't in many rural areas of America.
There are solutions to these problems, and it is our responsibility to be able to work through the process to solve them. With $450 billion in deficit spending and an economy that continues to slow down, this body needs to determine what our job is and do it. It would be my encouragement in the days ahead that we actually achieve that; that in the days ahead we speak of what we have solved for the American people rather than pretending, as we are eating breakfast back home with some friends who are complaining about the problems. It is time for us to fix the problems.
I yield the floor.
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