Our National Debt, Our Spending, and Our Deficit

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for holding this Special Order and talking about this very important subject.

The reality is, as we are on that tank from ``Indiana Jones'' that is going off the cliff, we are busy fighting on top of it, but the tank is still going over the edge.

One of the problem areas that we have is this payment of a half a trillion dollars a year--think about that--that we are giving to unauthorized programs. You can go to the Congressional Research Services and they will give you a full print out. You can get the full display of all of them and when those programs expired.

One of the oldest ones--and I will just pull it up here. I have to scroll through all of these programs, these hundreds and thousands of programs. This is one where the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction, Mr. Buck, and I mention that because Representative Buck and I both sit on judiciary.

It is the payment to the Legal Services Corporation. You know what that is. That is the public defender's office. The expiration of their authorization was in 1980, 42 years ago.

What is the amount of money that they were last authorized to spend? Undefinite, an undefinite amount. There was no cap on it.

That is what we have. We have everything from EPA, State Department, ATF. These are agencies and departments that haven't been authorized. Then we have a whole list of additional programs that have not been authorized, but we continue to fund them. Our own rule proscribes that.

The remedy for us immediately is, when those come up, at least under previous terms of Congress, we have been able to actually raise a point of order and get that pulled out, if we can.

Representative Buck, that gives you kind of a background and an idea of what we are facing, which is part of our huge budgetary problem.

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Mr. BIGGS. You would authorize a program--like the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. That is an authorizing program. It authorizes us to spend money, and then we go ahead and appropriate to that authorization.

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Mr. BIGGS. Yes. I am not sure that I knew that detail because I don't think I have seen that happen since I have been in Congress.

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Mr. BIGGS. I am in my seventh year. That is the point. If you want to authorize something, like the Judiciary Committee, they should be holding these types of hearings because it is just what you say.

The year that I got elected from Arizona, a famous national journal did a study and estimated that the Department of Defense was wasting $125 billion annually. Well, that is one of those things where you probably would want to bring it in. Actually, in this instance, the NDAA, those hearings on authorization, you would be talking about if there is really that much waste there and what we do to recover that waste and prevent it.

We just don't do enough of that in Congress. We are just so busy, again, like I said, trimming around the edges. We are not getting at the core of the problem.

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Mr. BIGGS. That is why I support what I call the Buck plan. The Buck plan calls upon Congress, the majority in this case, in every committee to have a subcommittee that is looking at the authorization jurisdiction of that committee and then makes the recommendations, has the hearings. Let's do this right.

Transparency is important, but beyond that, the process is broken. If we are going to try to get a handle on our out-of-control spending, you would think we would want to fix the process as much as anything.

I commend Representative Buck.

For those watching at home, both of you, Representative Buck has put together this plan, has been championing this plan, and I am behind that plan all the way. I think it is something we must do. It should be part of any appropriations process going forward.

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Mr. BIGGS. We are too fearful because every program that gets created creates a constituency, and you have to look somebody in the eye and say that program is no longer necessary.

The ESA is a perfect example of that. It has basically run amuck. It is why California doesn't build storage facilities for water, which impacts the entire western half of the United States. It is why we had someone who wanted to stop any building in Arizona. They tried to get the Sonoran Desert tortoise to be declared an endangered species, but they had to stop counting when they got over 3 million of them. They said, well, that is not really an endangered species. That would have impacted the entire State because they are found everywhere in Arizona. It is an example of one of those eternal programs that you and President Reagan talked about.

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