Budget and Accounting Transparency Act of 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Here we are on the floor of the House, another day when we haven't taken up the President's jobs bill that he presented right here before a joint session of Congress last September. We have had some good news in the economy, some numbers that show that we have a fragile recovery going on. It would be a huge mistake not to do everything we can to nurture that recovery. So I hope we will finally take up the President's proposal, and I hope that the ongoing conference committee on the payroll tax cut will complete its work in an expeditious manner.

Now, with respect to this particular bill that is before us, it raises some very serious and very complicated issues regarding budget accounting for credit programs, and I want to commend Mr. Garrett from New Jersey. I want to commend him for raising some legitimate issues as part of this conversation, issues that deserve our attention. But it is totally premature to bring this bill to the floor without having more hearings and more review.

In the Budget Committee, we've not had a single hearing on the comprehensive question of how we deal with all the credit programs and how to account for them. We had one hearing with respect to whether we apply this to the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration; but this bill goes way beyond that and would direct CBO to change its method of accounting for credit programs like student loan programs and for other programs throughout the U.S. Government.

It has very far-reaching consequences. This is a matter on which people who've spent their lives looking at the budget disagree, and so the Budget Committee at the very least could spend a few hours on a hearing to understand fully the consequences of doing this.

I just want to read from a letter that was sent to us from the former head of the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office, Robert Reischauer. He says, I strongly oppose this change. He goes on to say: ``The accounting convention used since the enactment of the Credit Reform Act of 1990 already reflects the risk that borrowers will default on their loan or loan guarantees.'' He goes on to say: ``H.R. 3581 proposes to place an additional budgetary cost on top of the actual cash flows.'' And he goes on to explain what is a very complicated issue, a very complicated matter.

I would say to my colleagues, not that this isn't an appropriate question for the Budget Committee to take up, but it's totally inappropriate for the Congress to direct the Congressional Budget Office to take up a different accounting measure which is not ready for prime time and for which we have not had the time to fully review all of its consequences.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

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