TAXPAYER FIRST ACT OF 2019--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, the Federal Government currently owns about 640 million acres of land in the United States, which means 640 million acres is owned by the American people, and that is about 28 percent of all the land mass of the United States. If you round the number up, let's say, a quarter of all the property in the United States is owned by the Federal taxpayers. When you can break that down, people immediately think it is all the National Park Service. Actually, the National Park Service is a small amount of that.

The Bureau of Land Management holds about 244 million acres, followed by the U.S. Forest Service with 192 million acres, Fish and Wildlife Service with 89 million acres, and then the National Park Service right at 80 million acres. The Department of Defense and some other agencies hold another 34 million acres. All together, there are 640 million acres and growing.

This doesn't even account for all of the land that is controlled by the Federal Government. That is the amount just owned by the Federal Government. That 28 percent of all the property in the United States that is owned by the Federal Government doesn't take into account the 27 million-plus acres that are also controlled by the Federal Government. Those are areas where they do conservation mitigation. Those are areas where they have land in trust for other aspects.

All told, around 30 percent of the United States is owned or controlled by the Federal taxpayer, by the Federal Government. That would all be fine and good if we were managing it well, but we are not. On those properties right now, we have almost $20 billion in deferred maintenance backlog. That is almost $20 billion just in things that haven't been done and where the Federal Government has proved to be a bad land manager.

There is a bill that is coming this week. It is on the floor now being debated. The conversation is about this: How do we get better at maintaining the land that we have and how can we actually purchase additional property?

There is something that has been around a long time called the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Land and Water Conservation Fund has dollars set aside from offshore oil revenue to be able to purchase areas of property. That has happened for decades now. The problem is we haven't maintained that. Even with the property that we buy that has maintenance issues, we don't fix the maintenance issues when we purchase the property.

The proposal on the table this week is to double the amount of land acquisitions that we have and to be able to solve the maintenance issue that we have had for a long time. This conversation about the backlog and maintenance has been an ongoing issue. There is finally a resolution to it.

Here is the resolution. After years and years of debating a resolution about how to reduce spending in one area so we can make sure we can do the maintenance we need to do, the final decision was made to be able to put a bill together that just says: Forget it; let's just all add it to debt. Let's just completely do debt purchasing of all of our maintenance stuff. We will figure out some decades in the future how to be able to pay for that, rather than discerning how to pay for it now because there is not an offset on how to be able to pay for the maintenance.

The maintenance needs to be done. It is not a shock to anyone. I brought proposals to this years ago, saying: Why don't we split the dollars we have in the land and Water Conservation Fund, use half of those dollars to purchase new properties and half of it just to be able to work on maintenance?

That was denied. They said: No, that is an irrational approach. We want to buy more land and figure out later how to maintain it.

We are at that point where we have to figure out how to maintain it because an almost $20 billion backlog in maintenance is rising up and screaming at us all over the country. Instead of actually deciding how we are going to do it, this is a punt saying we will figure it out later.

Here is the fiscally responsible portion of it. We are not going to do this forever just to work on maintenance backlog. This is just for the next 5 years that we will have additional debt. Every single year we will spend about $2 billion, all in debt money, to be able to do this, and then we will figure out in the sixth year how to be able to take care of the rest. The fiscally responsible portion of this is to say we are not doing infinite amounts of debt. It will just be the next 5 years.

The problem is that in the sixth year we will still have a maintenance backlog. We will still have issues, and there is still not a plan to pay for the first $20 billion for what is still coming.

My challenge is figuring out what we can do with a bill that we need to fix. We need to be better managers of our land, but we are managing our land by not managing our debt and not making the hard decisions that people have to make. At your home, you can't just say: Everything needs to be fixed, but I can't afford it; so I will take out more debt, and I will fix everything.

We have to make decisions on what is going to have to wait so we can do this because it is more important. That is the kind of thing I would like to be able to see with this.

Let me run through basic ideas. They are all amendments that were already brought up that say: Here are logical ways to be able to fix this, beginning with the most basic of them. Take part of the money that already exists for the Land and Water Conservation Fund to purchase new land, and then split it, saying we are going to dedicate dollars to maintenance and also have dollars to buy new properties. We will not be able to buy as many as fast as we want. We will not be able to fix as many things as we want, but we are not adding additional debt spending to do it. These are the same decisions that families make all the time. I would love to have the nicer car. I can have the nicer car if I just save up for several years to get it.

That is one recommendation.

There is a second recommendation to this. There is a portion of this that gets into the budget scheming of everything that goes on. Part of what is happening to the Land and Water Conservation Fund is moving it--brace yourself from budget gimmicks here--to what is called appropriated dollars that we vote on every year to mandatory dollars you only vote on once and every year it keeps going. Think of it like Social Security. Social Security was voted on a long time ago and keeps going year after year. We don't vote on it each year. It happens because it is mandatory.

The idea in this bill was to move the spending from being appropriated each year like we do with the Department of Defense or Department of Education or Health and Human Services, to take it out of that area and move it toward mandatory. Then they still left the funds over in the appropriated side and said: We are also going to spend those dollars as well.

The gimmick that this sets up is it allows those funds that were spent last year to be spent on the mandatory side this year and leaves a big hole on the normal side that will just plus-up to spend for other things.

My second idea is this: If we will not split the dollars we normally use for half of the purchase and half to maintain, at least dedicate the dollars that were left and aren't spent on something else and spend those on maintenance, because then we will only have half a billion dollars of new deficit rather than what this does at $2.5 billion of new deficit spending.

The first challenge is to split it.

The second challenge is take the dollars that were ``left over'' in appropriated dollars and just dedicate that to only doing the maintenance funds that need to be done.

The third idea is pretty simple, as well. This has a 5-year tail on it on the maintenance, at about $2 billion a year of additional debt spending. I would just say that if we are only going to do maintenance for 5 years, we should only do the purchasing, which is the big chunk of this, for 5 years, as well, so that we sunset both of them. We are not going to have this big plus-up and more and more purchasing at the same time we have no plan to maintain it long term. As long as we are going to maintain it, we will also do purchasing. Just sunset it. That seems common sense as well.

Here is a fourth idea. When you purchase new properties, make sure that with the dollars that are used to purchase it, there are also dollars set aside to fix what is broken on it.

We often find that when people want to sell property to the Federal Government, it is because there are major problems on the land already, and they can't get another private seller. So they want to sell it to the Federal taxpayer, knowing there are problems in infrastructure on that property.

We buy property with major maintenance needs already on it, and it just backs up our backlog of maintenance even more. Put a requirement in that says when we buy property, part of the purchase of it is also setting aside dollars for maintenance, so we have to fix it right then, rather than add it to the backlog of maintenance issues. That makes common sense.

That also is not getting a hearing right now. I think that is a problem. There are commonsense things that don't drive us further into debt, that aren't going to cause years and years of problems in our budget, that maintain the properties that we have--maybe not as fast as we want to, but its starts getting after our backlog of maintenance-- that continue to allow us to purchase new properties, but to make sure that we are actually managing the properties that we purchase.

It is a frustration for me that we are not having amendments in this process, that we are not having the opportunity to be able to fix some of the things that are wrong with this bill--because we do need to have Federal lands, we do need to maintain the lands that we have, but we do need to honor our budgets for the future, as well.

Why would we say we really need to maintain all of this and purchase this, but we don't have a plan for how to do it now and so we will just wait 6 years? We will have 5 years of debt spending, and then we will somehow figure it out 6 years from now.

Five years ago we were talking about this very same issue. We haven't come up with an answer in the past 5 years because no one has been willing to say we have to do less so we can take responsibility for what we have. We just want to do more and not have the accountability. So from 5 years ago to 5 years later now, to 5 years from now, when this bill ``expires,'' we will still have maintenance issues.

We need to start making hard decisions. Some of those hard decisions deal with the budget and making choices and saying that there aren't any options to instead saying: There are options that I may not like as well as the ``just do everything all at once'' option.

But there are options on how to do this, and we should have this debate to be able to figure out how to manage these dollars better. Maybe we will 5 years from now.

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