Telework Improvements Act of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise with serious concerns with H.R. 1722, the Telework Improvement Act. This began as a bipartisan bill, and if our one opportunity, a motion to recommit, is passed, it will have an opportunity to end as a bipartisan bill. There is no question in my mind that telework is the future. It, in fact, is the present. Virtually every Member of Congress has remote access. Virtually every Member of Congress and many of their staff carry BlackBerrys and use other tools so that we can work here and around the world. It would be just about impossible for a Member of Congress and their key staff to bounce back and forth between their far-away districts, here on the Hill, and various meetings if we didn't have the ability to be portable in our information access. So we are not here to talk about telework as though it is a bad thing, because it can be an extremely effective tool.

We do have concerns. One of our specific concerns in the underlying legislation is, at a time in which we're borrowing nearly 40 percent of the operating cash of our government--put in another way, once you get past entitlements, everything we spend is borrowed--it would seem ridiculous that something that can save money, that is argued to save money, in fact, is not required to be at least neutral in its expenditure. This bill is expected to cost millions of dollars per year and, like most government estimates, is likely to cost far more than that if it's expanded to its logical conclusion.

So, Madam Speaker, it is my hope that as we begin offering what we were not allowed to offer under the rule, which would be any amendments that would curtail the millions of dollars in costs over 5 years or to deal with the reality that if you're going to claim that you can save the construction of office buildings, you should be required to show that you are saving it. If you claim that you are going to be more efficient by not having a commute time, you should at least be required to show it. Additionally, we are very concerned that recent discoveries have shown that there are vulnerabilities which have not been properly cared for in this bill. The bill authorizes it but does not require it.

I am, however, pleased that in a number of areas, the majority has made improvements and has taken many suggestions. The committee did work, as you would expect us to, in favor of the efficiency and effectiveness of the Federal workforce in getting this bill as far as we could go. It is my sincere hope that one and only one opportunity to further amend would be accepted and that this will be a broadly bipartisan bill at the end.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The chairman and the majority leader both make good points, and I would like to address them for just a moment. The chairman, who I have had a good working relationship with, made the point that this passed out of committee without anything left unresolved. And to a certain extent I would agree with him. Except of course we didn't have a score on this. We never do. We didn't know what this bill was going to cost. And when we discovered that this was going to cost millions of dollars every year, we made it clear before the last round of a request for a vote that we would have to find an offset or we would have to modify the bill to ensure that it would not cause the taxpayers to look at this as simply a perk for government.

Because ultimately we can talk about morale, but the Federal workforce makes on the average $60,000 more than their private-sector counterparts. So morale should already be good in an organization the size of the government that has added a quarter of a million new workers since we went into a recession.

There is no question that telework can justify this if it's done properly. Our amendment is going to seek, our one motion to recommit--we weren't allowed any amendments--to try to at least trim around the edges to have our Members be able to go home and say of course we supported telework, but we made sure there were some safeguards of the American people's money.

The amendments that we tried to offer to what was known in advance to be a closed rule, a please do not suggest, create a process problem that I hope, Mr. Speaker, that you will be sensitive, along with the American people, to. Our committee has 40 or so members. That's roughly one-tenth of the Congress. So 9 out of 10 Members of the House never get an opportunity to be there. As a matter of fact, including the Delegates, it works out just exactly as 10 percent. So 400 people didn't have input when we were working this through committee.

Some may have noticed the bill, but as the majority leader said, he has been working on this for 20 years. Who would have thought it would come to the floor now? So can we as a body deny the process of 400 people, 400 voters, if you will, or representatives of voters, including yourself, Mr. Speaker? How can we deny you the ability to look at something when it's going to become a bill on the floor and offer constructive amendments?

The process of the Rules Committee is supposed to deal with germaneness. It's supposed to deal with whether or not your amendment is properly written, whether it seeks to amend a portion of the bill allowed to be amended. That's not the way it is here in the House right now. We had amendments perfectly allowable, and they simply were ruled out because you could. So we will use our one opportunity, our motion to recommit. We trust that we have written it properly, and that it will be found to be in order. And we trust that both sides will see that it is modest, it's moderate, it's intended simply to deal with cost and other concerns in the bill.

There is no killer in this bill. There's nothing the American people would not be happy with in this bill the way it is. And there is nothing they will be unhappy with if the motion to recommit passes. We structured it that way. We would like to have something that started off as bipartisan end as bipartisan.

Mr. Speaker, I truly believe we are going to have that opportunity. I would hope that everyone in this body will view it that way, look at it carefully, come to the same conclusion, and we will leave here today on a bipartisan basis.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. At $175,000, one Congressman to another, yes. The typical American making $35,000 or $40,000 understands we make a lot more.

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I note the gentlelady acts as though already everybody teleworks. It's very clear that the people who were able to telework, that, quote, saved us $30 million during that snowstorm, were the people who have redundant activities, for the most part, people who had a duplicate computer, duplicate capacity. That costs money. That is an item that we simply want to make sure is cost justified.

You know, many people on the other side of the aisle, including the next speaker, have talked about the private sector. Well, I, for one, came from the private sector, and I very much understand that we do a cost benefit.

The previous speaker talked about insurance salesmen. You don't care where they are. That's right. An insurance salesman is usually a commission person. It's somebody who's very accountable for their pay because it's earned and justified against revenue. More importantly, even their package of perks is figured into that.

So, in the private sector, if somebody costs, if you will, $190,000 dollars--or as the average Federal worker costs, nonuniformed, $119,000 per worker versus $59,000 in the private sector--in the private sector they know what their sales or revenues or profits are relative to that cost. In the public sector, we don't.

All we're seeking to do, all we're talking about here today is we want telework to be used and rolled out extensively where it can be at least revenue or cost-neutral relative to alternatives of bringing people in. That's all we're asking for. We believe it's reasonable.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself just 1 minute.

Mr. Speaker, my good friend from Virginia was accurate in almost everything he said, but the one part that I'd like to correct is we don't need more time. We had sufficient time, once the scoring was in, to figure out what needed to be changed among the various hundred or so Republicans who were not on the committee, and we offered them. And the gentleman from Virginia is not on the Rules Committee so he's not part of that hidden hand that simply doesn't allow any dissent or any amendments or any corrections once a decision has been made by the majority. So, you know, I appreciate the fact he has been good to work with and that he is not somebody who would have limited that, and we would be happy to share all of our amendments if we had a chance of having them ruled in.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

As I begin, my staff is bringing over to the chairman a copy of something I am going to include in the Record from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce. The chairman may recognize the Department of Commerce is part of the administration and part of government.

Their assessment in 2008--and it has only become greater--is that we have as Federal workers against average--this is not against average of job per job but just against the working stiff, whatever they do in the outside world versus the working stiff in government, $29,169.63 of additional wages. What makes the huge difference the American people don't always see is that in the private sector, a typical benefit package is about $9,881. Well, a civilian Federal Government employee has a benefit package on the average worth about $40,784 or $30,900 more.

So, Mr. Speaker, we do have the Department of Commerce currently, during the Obama administration, telling us very clearly--not that engineer versus engineer. I appreciate the way you can match up various jobs, but the Federal workforce is a highly skilled and highly paid workforce, and we should understand that if we are going to have telework go greater and greater--and I approve of it doing it--we have two reasons to do it.

One is continuity of government, and sometimes continuity of government can cost more. It can be for redundant computers, redundant centers and so on, no question at all. But often it is, and as it is justified in this bill by many of the people speaking on it on both sides of the aisle, it is also about avoiding traffic, avoiding building new buildings, avoiding heating and air conditioning, avoiding costs. All the minority would like to make sure is that this expansion meets one of those requirements or the other. If it is necessity and it costs more, fine. Of course you can have redundant facilities; but if it is intended to be cost savings, let's make sure it's cost savings.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, although we have 12 minutes left on our side in debate, I don't intend to use it. I also don't intend to continue to have the American people hear haggling on the House floor about how much one side gets paid or another. For that reason, I will today post at republicans.oversight.house.gov the Department of Commerce report in sufficient detail for people to realize that $60,072.97 is roughly the additional amount in pay and benefits that Federal employees receive than the average private sector.

But the interesting thing about the Federal workforce versus the gentleman who was talking about commuting from Bridgeport and other parts in his State, is they are not laid off. They are not suffering. As a matter of fact, they have been net-hired. The growth that has occurred over the last 2 years has been in government. The pay increases have been in government. The benefit increases have been in government.

Now, we are not talking about telework as a benefit, although some speakers have talked about family time because you can telework and so on. We are talking about telework for one of two reasons that are justified, and Republicans will today, I hope, vote for the motion to recommit and then vote for final passage, because it either is part of the job of government, the sustainability, the continuity of government, and we want to make sure we use telework in order to advance that, or remote access, if you will, or it saves the taxpayers dollars.

If someone doesn't drive for an hour and they work an hour more remotely, that is a good thing. But if we are simply improving quality of life, having redundant computers at a cost of several thousand dollars plus several more thousand dollars in maintenance and overhead and renewal and software support, Mr. Speaker, we are not doing what the American people expect us to do.

The American people expect us to start being safeguarders of their precious money, which isn't even current but the money we are going to have to take from them in the future to pay back what we are borrowing today.

If we don't start counting the pennies, the nickles and the dollars and make sure they are well spent, then it is very clear we will never get to any kind of an affordable government, a balanced budget, and there will be an inevitably that the United States will look too much like Greece and not enough like the country that we were so proud of this past Fourth of July.

We have a great tradition, a tradition of small government and large private sector. Mr. Speaker, I want to make sure that our government works more efficiently so we can have a smaller government that meets the basic requirements, not that we simply expand government with one after another programs.

With that, I fully expect that we will make this bill better, that we will continue to work on telework being to the advantage of the American taxpayer and not simply an additional item to be spent.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, this is a straightforward motion. It is a motion that, if passed, will cause the Republicans to vote for this, if not unanimously, virtually unanimously. If we take out the $30 million in cost by insisting that there be reasonable offsets, then we will in fact have fixed one of the problems that was unnecessary in the bill. Additionally, as was so well read by our Clerk just a moment ago, it is very, very clear that there are some small areas but meaningful areas. We do not want the American people to believe that telecommuters are downloading pornography full time the way $200,000-plus executives at SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, were doing.

Now, I wanted to include in the motion to recommit that if you're found downloading while telecommuting, you'd be fired, but it turns out, Mr. Speaker, the rules of the House prevent me from offering that. I am not allowed under the rules to insist on behalf of the American people that somebody be terminated if they've downloaded endless pornography while telecommuting. So instead we have simply said in the motion to recommit that if they're found downloading pornography, they can no longer telecommute.

Likewise, on a number of other areas we feel that the American people should know that there is accountability. Accountability as to the Presidential Records Act. Mr. Speaker, as you know, the Presidential Records Act is extremely important. That if somebody is working offsite, we want to ensure that they do not use a Gmail account or in some other way go off system and have that lost for the rest of eternity. It is too important and it is too uniform a law to not make sure it is included in this Act. Additionally, the question of official business.

Now, often motions to recommit include poison pills. This is not one. We wanted to make sure that if there's a union contract in which there's union negotiation or other time allotted--official time--that it not be done clandestinely around telecommuting. The fact is that if a union leader who is also a Federal employee has a right to have so much time spent doing that, this would not stop them, but it would make it very clear that you can't simply be working out of your house and use that as collective bargaining time or other work that would not be manageable.

It's very clear that we were limited in this. This does not fix everything, Mr. Speaker. This does not fix everything I'd like to fix, but it simply makes the bill revenue neutral and in a couple of important areas assures the American people that their taxpayer dollars are not being misused while someone is telecommuting.

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