Tax Extenders Act of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise to talk about an amendment I hope ultimately will be given a chance for consideration on this very important legislation we are working on right now. I commend the chair of the Finance Committee for his good work on trying to focus this next round of job-creation activities that will be created, I believe, as we move forward on extending some of the tax provisions that expired last year. Some of these tax provisions were part of our stimulus bill that, about a year ago, we passed to help jump-start job activities; a stimulus bill I sometimes think the American public--perhaps we never explained. In fact, close to one-third of that bill was tax cuts, another third was direct assistance to States and localities, and the final third was a series of new initiatives, many of which are just now starting to come to pass.

I can recall, about a year ago, I came to the Senate floor as we were debating the stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to talk about fiscal accountability; to talk about our long-term outlook; and to make some recommendations on how we might better track the performance and outcome of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, what most folks commonly refer to as the stimulus.

Here we are 1 year later and unfortunately it appears critical Recovery Act reports and plans have gone missing or have been long ignored or were never fully developed in the first place. As we debate this important piece of legislation that extends a number of the tax provisions, I think we ought to take this moment as well to correct some of the deficiencies in reporting on the fiscal responsibility I think all of us on both sides of the aisle would like to see in the overall Recovery Act activities. We have this chance, at this point, to correct course and to ensure we can account for every dollar. Now it is time to correct management and transparency gaps that still exist.

Today, I would like simply to very briefly go through a couple things my amendment would do. Hopefully, the chair of the Finance Committee and folks on the other side will agree to have these amendments incorporated. My amendment will, in three very important ways, correct the management and transparency gaps that still exist in the Recovery Act. First, it will require agencies to update the implementation plans they have developed last year for high-risk programs.

High risk has this connotation that somehow it is a bad area or bad idea. No, the high-risk areas I am defining are those programs that are over $2 billion that saw a funding increase of over 150 percent more than their fiscal year 2008 funding or are brandnew programs. These programs will be required to update their plan by July 1, 2010.

Let me take a moment and describe what kind of programs I am talking about. As I mentioned a few moments ago, the stimulus broke into tax cuts, assistance to the States, and then, finally, an agreement that we ought to take up a series of areas that have for years been talked about in this country but, candidly, we have never done much about--broadband technology, high-speed rail, smart grid, health care information technology. These are all areas that, again, had broad support on both sides of the aisle, that we talked about, and only in the case of the stimulus were there actually funds put behind these initiatives. The challenge was, a year ago many of these areas had very little funding or had no programmatic prior experience so the administration appropriately took some time to gear up these programs. We are just starting to see some of the disbursement on high-speed rail and disbursement on the President's Race to the Top education grants. But for these new programmatic areas, we need to make sure there is a plan in place, that there are metrics in place, and that we know how these dollars are being spent out. So the first part of my amendment will require these programs in high-risk areas to update their plans by July 1 of this year.

Second, my amendment will require these high-risk programs to report back to Congress and the public quarterly, beginning September 30, 2010.

These reports must include performance and financial data to let us know whether these programs are working and meeting the goals they defined in their initial business plan that they would lay out to us in July of this year.

I think this is terribly important. These are areas that, because they are new--I think they have enormous popular support, but because they are new, we need to make sure that at the front end of these program implementations, we have that business plan in place, we have the metrics, and we have a reporting mechanism.

The second part of my amendment is an area that we have been working with the inspector general around the Recovery Act, Mr. Devaney, and others. I think many of us in this Chamber would be disturbed to find out that the recent quarterly report showed that over 1,000 recipients of stimulus funding--1,000 agencies, departments, grantees--had failed to report back the legally required data on how these dollars have been distributed, what kind of tracking is in place. Consequently, when we hear critiques, particularly from the other side, about the stimulus, about the job creation and efficiency, well, an appropriate rebuttal requires facts being in place. Over 1,000 of the recipients that have received stimulus funds have basically ignored the law and failed to report back. So my amendment proposes financial penalties of up to $250,000 for recipients of the stimulus funds who knowingly fail to comply with the existing quarterly reporting requirements. We have to ensure that our agencies, Congress, and the public are getting the information they need to know if these important investments are working.

The amendment requires agencies to notify recipients if they miss a deadline. They will provide an opportunity for the recipient to report and offer technical assistance if they need that assistance to get back on track. But if recipients knowingly do not file the required reports or if they ignore these agency requests for this information, agencies may impose a penalty to hold these recipients accountable. The amendment provides sufficient discretion for agencies to set penalties, such as consideration of whether the recipient is a nonprofit, government, or small business entity. We don't want to add on a new burden, but we simply want those who are receiving financial assistance from the stimulus fund to actually fulfill their obligation and make sure they report back to us and the public on how those dollars are being spent.

I repeat, it is not too late to correct the gaps in program management and transparency in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. So much of the Recovery Act funding is still in the pipeline. As a matter of fact, at the end of last fiscal year, last October, only 18 percent of our recovery dollars had been spent out. Even at the end of this fiscal year, at the end of September 2010, only about 54 percent of the dollars will be spent out. We still have literally hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent out from this program.

We have to make sure--we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the public--that we have in place both the appropriate metrics on these high-risk programs and that those other organizations that are receiving dollars do what is their legal requirement to report back on this terribly important data.

I hope we can get this amendment adopted. I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to bring this added transparency and this added management oversight to this very important activity.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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