Wasteful Spending

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, there are a lot of things going on right now in DC and a lot of moving targets. A lot of Americans are looking closely at what is happening with the COVID-19 virus. We are tracking what is happening overseas in Afghanistan and multiple other issues on the stock market, as well as what is happening with oil and gas right now.

We are spending a little bit of time, in the middle of all those things, to also say that we can't lose track of structural issues in government, to see if we can work on those issues that are, right now, in front of us, but we also have to look at long-term issues, to look at basic government transparency and basic accountability for government.

So I want to highlight--several of my colleagues are here, as well, highlighting some of the things that are actually on the floor or have moved recently or we think we can move on those. One of those things is the GREAT Act. This is a bipartisan bill that deals with basic transparency for grants.

If you go back 20 years ago, the Federal Government gave away very few grants. Now, $600 billion a year is just for grants. My colleague, Joni Ernst from Iowa, just highlighted some of those wasteful grants that are out there that, as we go through them, we say we can try to get those one at a time or we can try to get a system in place where all grants have to go through a centralized data system where we can actually all look at the data and compare it across the government to basically look for areas of inefficiency. That is what the GREAT Act does. It creates standard data elements so that we can look at how the money is being spent--America's money--so we can actually evaluate it. That has overwhelmingly already passed. We are grateful to get that done this year.

Another one we were able to get done this year that has passed the Senate but has not yet passed the House is providing accountability through transparency. Now, this may seem super simple, but let me just begin with the most basic principle. No small business owner in America gets up every day and reads the Federal Register. It just doesn't happen anywhere.

If you are running a small business, you are running your small business. You are not getting up every day and reading the Federal Register to see the latest regulation. Even if you did, with the pages and pages and pages of regulations there, you can't make sense of it. This basic providing of accountability through transparency asks a simple question: Can we force the agencies, when they actually do a new regulation, to condense it down to 100 words or less in plain English so that you can actually figure out what this regulation is trying to do, so when you see a regulation come out, you can actually understand it without having to hire an attorney to go interpret it for you?

That has overwhelmingly already passed the Senate, and we are waiting for that to pass the House, as well--basic simplification of some of the government entities, in trying to be able to help out.

We passed by a majority--and it has already been signed into law--the one dealing with representative payee fraud. Now, again, this was a simple piece that was just needed in government. We discovered that if someone is a trustee for a Federal retiree for their retirement account and, as a trustee, they stole the money out of that person's account, we couldn't actually enforce the law on them. We could in several other areas, if it was Social Security or if it was disability, but we couldn't on Federal retirees.

So we were able to get a bipartisan agreement to pass this to take care of that. It was a very simple bill, but it is the way we need to react when we see a problem--to actually go to solve that problem rather than take forever to do it.

Speaking of ``forever'' to be able to solve it, what I think is the most basic government transparency piece we can put out there to force real dialogue on budget issues is a simple bill we have on shutdown prevention. If we can end government shutdowns, we can actually have more debate on budget issues here in this room, where it should occur, and take the pressure off of Federal workers and Federal families facing a shutdown and furloughs.

Maggie Hassan and I have a very simple bill. The bill simply says: If we get to the end of the fiscal year and if we don't have all the issues resolved on our budget, we continue debating those things here. We remain in session 7 days a week until it is actually resolved. But in the meantime, Federal workers and their families are unaffected because the budget automatically continues at last year's budget level until we get things resolved here. But in the meantime, we can't go home until we actually solve that problem.

It is a straightforward solution to say: We are not going to have government shutdowns. We are not going to have chaos across the whole country. We have had 21 government shutdowns in 40 years. We have to stop that chaos.

So it stops that chaos, and it puts the pressure where the pressure needs to be--on us. When we finish our work, then we can move to the next thing. But if the budget work is not done, the most basic elements of those appropriations bills, if they are not finished, we remain in session 7 days a week until they are finished.

We need to find ways to be more efficient as a government. Government shutdowns waste money by the billions. Rob Portman and his team did a remarkable study to look and see how much money was wasted in the last shutdown, and it was in the billions of dollars, and not even every agency turned in all their information to Rob Portman and his team.

We can't keep losing money that way. We can't keep that chaos going for all the Federal workers and their families. We should have arguments about the budget. We have big ones that need to be resolved, but we should keep it here.

So, this week, as we pause for just a moment on all the other big issues that are pressing on us right now, I am grateful that we are also pausing for a moment to say: What are the big issues that we should look long term on, and how do we solve some of those issues for the future, as well, to make government more efficient and try to make government more transparent?

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