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Floor Speech

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Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, during my 12 years in the Senate, I have exposed many outlandish examples of government waste.

For example, I uncovered that Washington sent nearly $500 million to China to pay for everything from poetry projects to dangerous research on bats.

Another $870 million of U.S. taxpayer money went to Russia. This includes more than $770,000 from the National Institutes of Health sent to a state-run lab in Russia to put cats on treadmills.

How did I uncover these crazy trails of money to our foreign adversary? It is quite simple. For 20 years now, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act has required unclassified government spending to be put online in a searchable public website, usspending.gov. This allows taxpayers to see for themselves how the money they are sending to Washington is spent.

Bureaucrats, however, have been hiding tens of billions of dollars distributed through secret spending arrangements known as other transaction agreements, or OTAs, by not publicly disclosing these expenditures on USAspending.gov. The Pentagon alone has obligated $77.7 billion for thousands of OTAs over just the past 5 years through over 30,000 hard-to-track contracts.

The lack of transparency with OTAs is having a real impact. According to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon ``cannot assess the extent to which OTAs are delivering capabilities to the warfighter.'' The Office of the Inspector General also found the Pentagon doesn't even have an accurate count of OTAs or their dollar values.

OTAs are also being used by the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation, Energy, as well as NASA.

We recently learned that NIH's new ARPA-H biomedical research contracts are being processed as OTAs through the Interior Department. This means if you want to know the details behind NIH's biomedical research contracts, you practically have to be a data wizard and know where to look deep in the Department of--where did I say?--Department of the Interior's databases. I know, it makes no sense. As we witnessed last week, we can't get answers from Dr. Fauci about what NIH has been funding because he is hiding behind the Fifth Amendment.

Taxpayers deserve to know how their dollars are being spent in Washington, and we have an obligation here to show them.

In June, the Senate unanimously passed my bipartisan Stop Secret Spending Act to require OTAs to be publicly disclosed on USAspending.gov just like all other government spending.

I very much appreciate Senators Peters and Hassan, whose support was critical for making this happen. I was also delighted last month when the House approved the bipartisan companion bill introduced by Representatives Moore and Panetta, which is now at the desk here in the Senate. We all know Congress can't agree on very much these days, so it makes a very powerful statement when folks on both sides of the aisle and from both Chambers come together by passing this transparency bill to hold Washington accountable for how Americans' tax dollars are being spent. With fraudsters stealing $1.4 billion every single day, we need this information now so we can account for who is taking tax dollars and why they are taking them.

Earlier today, I attended the meeting of the Vice President's Task Force to Eliminate Fraud at the White House, and the success of this effort depends on being able to track how dollars are being spent. Unfortunately, some Governors are impeding anti-fraud efforts by blocking access to spending information about how tax dollars from Washington are being spent in their own States.

We can't stop what we can't see, but we can do our part by passing the Stop Secret Spending Act today. This bill will end the secrecy about how tens of billions of dollars are being spent every single year. There are no excuses for delaying sending this bill to the President today to become law. In fact, the only reason to oppose the Stop Secret Spending Act is if you have something to hide.

As if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 2069, which was received from the House. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Ms. ERNST. I can appreciate the dilemma that many of us are in as we debate these very important bills, and they are very important bills. So what I have in front of me here at my desk is a list of 59 House bills that have been passed this Congress. They are H.R. bills. They are H.J. Res. 140; H.R. 7147--59 House bills that have already passed through the Senate in this Congress.

Now, I understand that we all have ways that we have to use leverage. I completely understand that. As a matter of fact, the bill that I had passed through this Chamber, you know, I would love to have it as an S. bill, a Senate bill, and I would love to see my name at the top of the bill rather than a House bill.

The companion bill was passed by the House. So, again, I would love to see my name at the top of the bill and it listed as a Senate bill.

I discussed it with my staff. I am in the last 6 months of my final term in the U.S. Senate. I would love to have more of my legacy items with my name on them, but I told my staff that it is more important that we get these bills done. I don't care if it is a House bill. I don't care if this has my name all over it. The important thing is that when we have good pieces of legislation put in front of us and that we worked hard in a bipartisan manner, in a bicameral manner, and it is good for the American people, that we move forward with those bills.

So I am disappointed today that my piece of legislation under the title of a House bill will not be moving, and I know that many of our constituencies will be greatly disappointed.

I do hope in the future that, between the Senate Republican leadership and the House Republican leadership, we can come together on these issues because it is not good for the American people when we have this infighting on good, solid pieces of legislation. We can do better.

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