Tsunami Warning, Education, and Research Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Iowa for letting me speak to a very important issue. I also thank him for his leadership. Long before I came to the Senate, I know the Senator from Iowa was working tirelessly to make sure government was more efficient, more effective, and more accountable. He has done an awful lot of work to ensure that. Certainly he has relied on inspectors general to bolster his efforts.
So I am completely in support of S. 579, the Inspector General Empowerment Act of 2015. When I took over the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senator from Iowa had been working long and hard on this act. I was happy--I was pleased to utilize our committee to move this bill through our committee unanimously.
The bill has 18 bipartisan cosponsors. It is just incredibly important. The Senator from Iowa will certainly fill us in on the details of what has happened and what has made this bill so important.
I just want to spend a little bit of time on how important inspector generals are.
We, working together with the Senator from Iowa, asked the inspectors general, for example, to report back to us how many of their recommendations--off of their tireless work--have gone unimplemented.
We just received that report. Over 15,000 recommendations from inspectors general have not been implemented. The total aggregate savings could be as high as $87 billion. Even in this massive Federal Government, $87 billion is real money. Of course, inspectors general need access to the records from their agencies, from their departments, so they can determine what is happening so they can make these kind of recommendations.
We also have had and witnessed a real tragedy, for example, at the Tomah VA Medical Center. We had an inspector general who had inspected and investigated over 140 different instances, then issued reports on those inspections, investigations, and then buried those reports--did not make those reports public.
One of those had to do with the Tomah VA Center in terms of the overprescription of opioids. Because that report was not made public, we were unaware of the problems there, and the problems persisted. For over a decade, opioids were being overprescribed. The result was that veterans--the finest among us--some of them died because of overprescription.
It is not an overstatement to say that the work of the inspector general is crucial and that work--those reports, those inspections, those investigations--literally is the difference between life and death. Again, I am here supporting the Senator from Iowa in his tireless efforts to get this bill passed, the Inspector General Empowerment Act of 2015. I urge all of my colleagues to allow this to pass by unanimous consent so we can get this put on the President's desk and it can be signed into law as quickly as possible.
With that, I yield the floor.
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