Unmanageable Cabinet Agencies

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address the people's House this evening. Last night, I talked about my initial reflections on having been a freshman Congressman spending my first term in the United States House of Representatives. Last evening, I talked at length about the growth of the administrative state, the expansion of executive power, to the detriment of the first branch, the legislative branch. I traced those changes from my previous service on Capitol Hill as a young man in the Senate staff of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, and then, most recently, working for President Bush 41 during his 4 years in the Presidency.

Tonight I want to turn and continue that discussion with our American people, Mr. Speaker, and talk about how the cabinet agencies, since I worked for President Bush, worked in cabinet affairs, coordinated economic policy during the last 2 years of his Presidency from the White House staff. I want to talk tonight about those cabinet agencies and how, in my view, they have become essentially unmanageable.

You can see the critical need for spending and personnel reform in many of our departments. In fact, one may assume that change is desired by both the legislative and executive branches, yet reform flounders, whether it was at the Pentagon under Secretary Rumsfeld during Bush 43 or the Veterans Affairs Department today under the current administration.

I have watched the VA for the past 2 years. Secretary McDonald's plans changed, laws are changed, yet malfeasance, incompetence, and worse persist. On just this Monday, Mr. Speaker, The Washington Post published a shocking report that Pentagon officials buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste during 2015. For that horrific activity, they were the recipient of this month's Golden Fleece Award by my office.
To make it worse, they even made the effort, according to The Washington Post, of hiding this effort, knowing that it would be impetus for the Congress to come together and cut their budget. Clearly, that is a problem with an unmanageable cabinet agency.

I have seen this firsthand right in Little Rock, my hometown, where the center of the Air Force's C-130 program is, for America's airlift, where the Department of the Air Force officials planned for years to transfer aircraft from Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi to Little Rock Air Force Base, basing it as a critical, cost-saving initiative, along with other force structure changes of some $922 million across future years of their 5-year plan.
Yet, Congress' meddling prevented this commonsense Air Force plan cost- saving initiative. So these bureaucratic efforts in the cabinet agencies that make them, in my view, unmanageable come both from the executive and from the legislative.

Looking at the Veterans Affairs Department, some 360,000 employees, up 140,000 in the past decade alone. About two-thirds of the members are civilian employees, are part of the American Federation of Government Employees and Service Employees International Union. These VA employees are subject to, of course, the protections by the Merit Systems Protection Board.

While there are many hardworking and dedicated VA employees, both in the healthcare area, across our VA hospitals, and in benefits, and many union members fight for high standards and fight for high quality across our veterans system, the facts are stubborn things, and they remain that the VA has had serious quality, ethics, and management issues that are hurting veterans and hurting the reputation of the Federal Government.
Just in this Congress alone, under the leadership of Congressman Jeff Miller, the chairman of our Veterans Affairs Committee during this Congress, we have seen reforms to rein in construction spending by the VA, clawback bonuses, fire bad actors, stop paying official time to do union work. We have seen, though, people not fired, even though people have died in VA health care.

We have seen a $300 million hospital complex, Mr. Speaker, be $1 billion over budget; not possible, in my view, in the private sector. So there is no doubt that our cabinet agencies need reform. We talked about regulatory reform, executive overreach reform, but we must have work rule reform in our agencies.
The other thing I want to touch on tonight before I talk about solutions is just spending overall to fund the obligations of our Federal Government.

Every month, I receive numerous letters about the $1.1 trillion in annual spending that Congress typically approves each year. When done properly, this annual spending is approved by way of 12 appropriations bills in this body, the people's House, and six appropriations bills in the Senate. They are conferenced together, and they are presented to the President for his veto or approval.

The problem is that this very typical, very constitutional program that has been applied for 240 years about how to authorize and appropriate funds to operate our government just no longer typically happens, yet this is Congress' most fundamental obligation under Article I. The appropriations clause is but 16 words long. ``No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law.''

This is our job, yet the last time that all the appropriations bills were passed individually and enacted into law before October 1 of a new fiscal year was 1994. My, that is a terrible track record. So this is not a President Obama issue or a President Bush issue. This is an issue of the Congress itself. Now you know why, after 20 years, I have seen so many things change, and not for the better, coming back to Washington to represent the people of central Arkansas.

What happens without such a process of appropriations bills is what we will be voting on this week: a continuing resolution which simply freezes spending at current levels and extends forward to a date certain, or, as an alternative to that kind of continuing resolution, an omnibus spending bill where everything is rolled into one.

These massive bills reflect the work, hopefully, of our House and Senate committees. They frequently contain items, Mr. Speaker, that are parachuted into the bill at the end of the negotiations between the House and the Senate, and those produce fireworks on both sides of the political spectrum.

The irony about that debate of that $1.1 trillion in typical annual spending, approved by this body, is that it composes about $600 billion--50 percent--that goes to our national defense that funds the essential expenditures for our men and women in uniform. About $80 billion goes to our veterans and military construction projects around the United States and the world, and the balance is for everything else that we consider government: highway finance, local education initiatives that go to our States, our national parks, and help for our Corps of Engineers on our ports and along our rivers.

What shocks the Arkansans that I respond to about their letters is that, while I appreciate their correspondence, their emails about that $1.1 trillion in spending, the so-called domestic discretionary spending, I remain frustrated that Congress' lack of action on the other $3.5 trillion that this government spends is in the mandatory spending portion of the budget. It is not subject to annual appropriations.
So I thank you for your mail and your suggestions about how we can reform spending at the Pentagon or reform spending in our national forests or our national parks, but $3.5 trillion is in mandatory spending which funds Social Security, Social Security Disability, Medicaid health care for the poor, Medicare health care for the elderly, and interest on our national debt--and these programs are essentially based on eligibility.

Yet, many of us remain concerned about the size of our annual deficits--the total size of our national debt--particularly when you consider the size of the national debt to our total economy. We currently have about $19 trillion in outstanding debt of the United States with about $6 trillion of that owed to foreign investors outside the U.S., principally in Japan and China. This debt is a percentage of our GDP, that is $19 trillion, which is about 100 percent of GDP.

Back in my twenties, when I worked for Senator Tower from Texas on the Senate Banking Committee, debt to GDP was about 30 percent. When I worked for President Bush 41 as a member of his White House staff for economic policy, our debt was about 50 or 60 percent of GDP. Now you know why after 20 years I remain so concerned, because it has now doubled.

There is a lot of economic research that tells us about the dampening impact on our national growth rates if we have national debt at these kinds of levels. It saps capital alternatives to the private sector that can bring faster growth. Clearly, since the Great Recession of 2008, we have had low growth--well below what I believe should be the growth rate of this great economy.

Likewise, we are at a time of low interest rates. Interest rates are likely on the rise. And while we are paying a modest amount of interest on that soon-to-be $19 trillion dollars today, the Congressional Budget Office believes that, as interest rates gradually increase over the next few months and years, interest will move from about $220 billion to $830 billion, Mr. Speaker, over the next 10 years, surpassing what we spend as a nation on our national defense. So there is no doubt the Federal Government has grown too big and too complex and interferes too greatly. We must get our fiscal house in order.

Mr. Speaker, eliminating waste and fraud will not do it. Raising taxes won't do it. I am always reminded by members of the opposition that insist that we can only balance our budget by raising taxes.
Winston Churchill's favorite quote about taxes: ``We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift it himself by the handle.'' It is not going to do it, Mr. Speaker.
This problem is too large and requires reform, and it requires this Congress to reform in the out-years and put us on the right track.

Former Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen said in 2010, 6 years ago, Mr. Speaker, that the biggest national security problem facing the United States was the size of our national debt.

So let me talk now, Mr. Speaker, about potential solutions that this Congress has to adopt working with our President-elect in the coming days, in the coming years, and in the early months of the Trump administration. First, Congress, heal thyself. We must reassert our Article I powers: the power of the purse; the power of the proper appropriations process. We don't need someone to impose that. We need to impose it on ourselves.
We need to remind the American people to contact us, to help us return to regular order and return to the appropriations process. We need all 12 of those bills passed and we need to stop depending on continuing resolutions like we will this week. This is something I think that is fundamental.
Let's talk about some of the reforms to that budget process tonight.

In this Congress, I was proud to support the Biennial Budgeting and Enhanced Oversight Act, which was introduced by Reid Ribble of Wisconsin. If this bill passes, it would help the government fix our broken budget system by establishing a biennial budget cycle. I think this would provide Federal agencies with the kind of planning capability that would make them much more effective. We could identify cost savings, no doubt, in the important infrastructure area and long- term systems issues that we have, particularly in the Pentagon. This would be a large advantage.

After reflecting on this, I support abolishing our Budget Committee process. Put in place in 1974, the intent was to have a way to rein in the executive. The Budget Act of 1974 was to help punish Richard Nixon.
I believe that if we abolish the Budget Committee, we can allow our authorizing committees to serve both an authorizing and an appropriating function. We can eliminate redundancies in our Federal Government, and we can look inward in how we can eliminate also unnecessary procedures in Congress that waste time. In turn, our Appropriations Committee would oversee the budget resolutions, making sure that Congress spends no more than what we have approved in a budget resolution and that we can review individual ceilings for appropriating money for those government functions that don't require an authorization.

I also support the idea of properly directing the Congressional Budget Office to account for, or score, in their terminology, for long- term investments as budget impacts versus just current-year spending.
These ideas are not revolutionary; they are well known. We are stuck in the past, Mr. Speaker, and we must reform ourselves starting with this budget and appropriations process. In fact, these ideas are as old as my boss' suggestions. John Tower was a 24-year veteran of the Senate. He served on the Budget Committee and was chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate. These were his ideas upon his retirement in 1984 as to how to make the Congress more effective.

The Congressional Budget Office relies on a set of government statistics including GDP growth, inflation, and tax receipts. It takes into accounts dynamic scoring. In my view, these things need to be done in a more proper way to better calculate the cost of legislation and the benefits for the economy. For example, CBO does not currently include interest payments on the debt when scoring new legislation. As previously mentioned, this interest will grow exponentially in the coming years, and now spending programs and reforms, in my view, ought to be calculated and take into account the agency costs and the carrying costs on our national debt.

Another recommended reform to the CBO from our House Budget Committee would be to eliminate built-in discretionary inflation, removing the automatic extensions of expiring programs, and removing the current assumption that entitlement payments will continue at current levels even when their trust funds are predicted to be insolvent. These practices currently used by CBO result in automatic plus-ups for the baseline budget, and these reforms, in my view, will remove the current bias to ever higher spending levels.

We ought to consider what we do in the private sector, Mr. Speaker, zero-based budgeting to assess what is really needed and not needed in our Federal agencies. What a great idea for Mr. Trump's incoming new Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Interior Department, let's go to zero-based budgeting. Let's have you justify to the Chief Financial Officer in the Interior Department every program, and then come to Congress with your recommendation of what we really should be doing at Interior or any other bureau or cabinet agency of the government.

House and Senate bills have been introduced on this issue. Representative Duncan of Tennessee and Senator Thune of South Dakota would, I think, bring a lot of common sense. They would say that if private enterprises are performing activities duplicated by an arm of the Federal Government, then they would have the opportunity to compete for that work that Federal agencies unnecessarily handle in-house and, therefore, give better value to our taxpayers.

IT investments--information technology--is a critical function in all of our private sector life. Yet, GAO, the Government Accountability Office, found that 75 percent of the technology budget for the Federal Government goes to just painting up and fixing aging technology rather than modernizing and going in a different direction on IT.

They are actually still using floppy disks at the Pentagon and maintaining 1970s-era computer platforms. Look, that stuff ought to be in the Smithsonian, not at the Pentagon. The report notes that the Social Security systems that are used to determine our eligibility and our benefits are more than 30 years old and are based on COBOL computer language. Mr. Speaker, I used COBOL computer language when I was in college almost 40 years ago. We need that kind of reform in order to be competitive and provide services to our constituents and safe, cyber- ready protections. We have already witnessed the Office of Personnel Management losing people's identities and creating identify theft right in the middle of a Federal computer system that is supposed to be the best.

Our chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Jason Chaffetz, has expressed his support for modernizing our government's aging systems, calling it a vital part of infrastructure that we need in order to have a fully functional government. I couldn't agree more. We don't need to shortchange these agencies when it comes to delivering a safe, cyber-protected IT infrastructure.

Last night I talked about the administrative state, the growth of regulation, and the cost of regulation exceeding that of all the revenues from the tax system. Let's talk about what we can do to rein in regulatory costs. The House passed a Separation of Powers Restoration Act in 2016, which would amend the Administrative Procedure Act, to require the courts to decide all de novo relevant questions of law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions and rules. This bill would eliminate the Chevron deference, which, in my view, is blocking common sense being used and direction of this people's House and the Senate over our regulatory body.

This is not a new topic, Mr. Speaker. James Madison in Federalist 51 discussed the need of each branch of government to guard against overreach by another. He stated that when an overreach occurs, ambition must be to counteract ambition. That is what we want to do in this House, Mr. Speaker. We have passed
the REINS Act, Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act. The REINS Act, which passed this act overwhelmingly, said that any major rule like those that I described last night that cost the economy more than $100 million would require coming back to Congress for approval. That will put the people's Representatives here in charge of the administrative state and not the other way around. I referenced a few minutes ago The Washington Post story about uncovering $125 billion of hidden-away, misdirected spending at the Pentagon that I awarded this month's Golden Fleece Award.

I brought back the Golden Fleece from the seventies. It was created by Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin. It is that kind of thing that I think calls attention to egregious behavior by the Executive and allows us to have policy changes here. I commend former Senator Tom Coburn and his successor Senator Lankford for the same kind of work.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I want to turn to the subject of the Community Empowerment Initiative, something that I have spent a lot of time on in my district in Little Rock, finding ways to fight poverty and use the talents and time of the private sector to do that, and also to identify ways that we can find a better way to enhance the lives of American citizens, get them out of poverty, get them the education they need and the skills they need to succeed in our economy.

This is the big challenge before the incoming Trump administration and this Congress. It is important that people have a vested interest in their community and have a sense of community engagement about how we do what I talked about last night, the idea that we let people closest to the problems solve those problems and not be dependent on one-size-fits-all challenges here.

So, Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to have been reelected and continue to serve the citizens of Arkansas and our country. I am humbled to be asked to raise my hand on January 3 and again affirm my allegiance to our country and our beloved Constitution.

Every Thursday morning, we assemble for the House prayer breakfast, and every Thursday morning I feel the prayers around our country, for our country. We in that group pray for all of our families. We pray for our men and women in uniform around our world protecting our liberties and our freedoms. I pray for each of the families in my district, that they have the health and prosperity and the ability to pursue happiness under our great Constitution.

On behalf of my family, I wish all of the people of the Second Congressional District of Arkansas a blessed Christmas season. May God bless our troops overseas and our great Nation.

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