Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the very real effects sequestration is having. I want to speak about the people of Virginia, but I am sure it is equally true of folks in New Mexico and for that matter folks all across the country. I remind folks, sequestration was set up so it would be so stupid, so draconian, so outside the realm of possibility that no rational people would ever let it happen. We are actually seeing now that we did not pass that bar. Sequestration is happening. It is actually stupidity on steroids.

Earlier this week a group of us heard from Dr. Francis Collins, the head of NIH. NIH, as we all know, is America's premier health research institution. Dr. Collins told us of the real world impacts of sequester cuts. He gave heartbreaking examples of lifesaving medical research that is being disrupted, perhaps irrevocably, due to budget cuts and employee furloughs.

Two days ago I had the opportunity to chair a Budget Committee hearing about the impact of sequestration on our Nation's security. We heard policymakers talk about what sequestration was doing to military readiness. But what drove home the point to me was Virginia business owner Mark Klett who had actually been named as the Small Businessman of the Year back in 2011, who said this start-and-stop environment, where you did not have any predictability of whether your funding was coming through, was completely wrecking his business model and it already had caused him to bench over a third of his 60 employees.

In the last 2 weeks alone, since sequestration has started, I have received over 500 letters, e-mails, phone calls from Virginians who are bearing the very real brunt of our failure to do our job, with real consequences on real people with potentially devastating impacts on a dedicated, experienced Federal workforce. This is no way to run a business. It is no way to run an enterprise as large as the Federal Government.

One letter is from Virginia Beach. Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach are our most concentrated area of naval installations and Air Force and Army installations. This woman is from Virginia beach. Her husband is a retired Navy officer who is now furloughed once a week for the next 11 weeks. She writes that her husband came home with a letter about the furlough, that he felt his moral character and the oath he had taken to protect his Nation would not allow him to write, so she said she was going to write. She says:

It pains me to see what he has worked so hard to defend, you're working so hard to tear down. This country is deserving of good leadership and right now Congress is not providing it.

Another Navy employee from the Fredericksburg area writes:

Three years of pay freezes followed by a furlough seriously makes me question if this is where I want to spend the rest of my career.

Think about the hours and dollars that we as a public have invested in getting these individuals trained to provide these services. They are now saying they are not sure this is where they want to work.

A woman down at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital writes:

Both my husband and I are DOD employees and will be taking a 20 percent pay cut for 11 weeks.

She points out they may be able to get by but a lot of her coworkers do not know how they are going to make ends meet.

A Federal employee from Woodbridge, VA, down the road in Prince William County, says:

I want all my elected officials to know how disappointed I am that we have been abandoned and let down by our representatives in Congress.

I have three children in college, and I am paying for college loans of two children who have graduated. Eleven furlough days don't sound like much, but over the year a loss of over $4,000 in income is crucial. If I ran my own budget like this, I would have to fire myself.

This employee I do not think is going to get a sequestration discount on repaying those student loans.

A West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran says:

The failure of Congress is having a tangible and real negative impact on people's lives and livelihood. I do not see leadership, I do not see accountability, and I do not see selfless service that rises above partisan politics.

Finally, a former Army officer who lives in Springfield, VA, says:

The morale in our agency is so poor that most workers who used to work 10 or 11 hours a day are planning to work their exact 8 hours [only].

So the 20 percent cut 1 day a week is actually cutting productivity in a much greater percentage.

I could stand here the rest of the afternoon and go through letter after letter that has the same theme. What strikes me about these letters--I am sure, again, the Presiding Officer is hearing from New Mexicans what we are hearing from Virginians--is that none of these letters talk about the red team or the blue team. None of these letters say this is all the Democrats' fault or Republicans' fault. None of these letters say this is a House problem; the Senate has the solution.

They are saying, regardless of party, regardless of whether you are in the House or the Senate, your job is to get this fixed. It is appropriately targeted at the entire Congress and, while our dismal performance recently may be great fodder for late night comedians, I think having a 90-percent-plus disapproval rating candidly undermines Americans' basic faith in our democratic institutions.

Let me try to respond. Here is what I have done and will continue to do. I will keep fighting for the significant Federal workforce that lives in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In the 4 1/2 years I have been in the Senate, I have come down to the floor on a regular basis to celebrate the great work of individual Federal employees. I will continue to come down to the floor and appeal to my colleagues and provide real examples of the real impacts that this funny name--sequestration--is actually having on people's livelihoods.

On a personal basis I am giving up 20 percent of my salary through the end of this budget year. I am donating it to the Federal Employee Education & Assistance Fund, which provides emergency loans as well as childcare assistance, scholarships, and other financial help for the families of Federal and postal workers.

I will continue to work with any colleague, Democrat, Republican, Independent, libertarian, vegetarian--it doesn't matter--who is willing to try to, yes, replace sequestration in a more rational way and get our debt and deficit under control.

I am proud of the fact that the 3 1/2 years--I guess 4 1/2 years I have been here, there is no issue on which I have tried to work harder. I am proud of the fact I was one of the founders of the so-called Gang of 6 that built on the very good work of the Simpson-Bowles plan. And I remind my colleagues, anyone who thinks there is any solution that is not going to involve raising additional revenues and starting to reform our entitlement programs either can't read a balance sheet or has not grasped the magnitude of this issue.

I will continue to advocate for a balanced bipartisan blueprint that will work on these issues: Raise the revenues, not to grow the size of government but to pay our bills, make sure the promise of Medicare and a Medicaid and Social Security are here, not just for today's generation but for future generations, in a way that is responsible.

We are soon coming up on another series of important fiscal and budgetary deadlines. I know many of my colleagues and the American public probably got to budget fatigue after the end of the fiscal cliffs and supercommittees and debt ceilings and thought maybe we were past a little bit of that.

Well, the economy is recovering and the size of the deficit is decreasing but our challenge is still in front of us. We are soon set to come to the end of this fiscal year which will present these issues again at the end of September. The debt ceiling will be not far after that. I have heard there are only slightly more than 20 legislative days left before the new fiscal year starts. It is incumbent upon us to recognize, to reflect the voices of these Virginians who, again, don't call out red team, blue team or House or Senate, but say to us in Congress, implore us to do our jobs.

We have been joined by my colleague, the Senator from Maryland. I think we could debate whether Maryland or Virginia is more ground zero for the negative impacts of sequestration. But whether it is NIH workers in Bethesda or civilian Navy employees in Woodbridge, the stories are the same. This is not fair. It is not right. None of these folks are getting a 20-percent discount on daycare, rent or, as the one person said, repayment on their student loans.

It is incumbent upon us to get this problem fixed and that is going to require the kind of hard work on revenues and entitlement reform so many of us have tried to avoid; otherwise we will not see an America that will stay as competitive as it needs to be and we will disrespect the literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of workers who work directly or indirectly to protect our Nation and are trying to provide the services that are so essential to our people.

Let's not do any more harm. Let's not waste any more time.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. WARNER. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. CARDIN. I will be glad to yield.

Mr. WARNER. I thank the Senator from Maryland for his comments. Let me say no Senator has served with more distinction, both here in the Senate and prior to that in the House, in being a constant advocate for Federal employees and being willing to step up to protect them and rebut what we too often hear from some of our colleagues who, across the board, without distinction, demean and denigrate the extraordinary good work that so many countless unnamed Federal employees do.

I thank the Senator from Maryland for that work. I thank him for his continued willingness in conversations with me and others to talk about: Hey, we all have to stretch a little way to get things done. I know he is hearing the same thing in Maryland. People are not distinguishing red shirt, blue shirt. They want us to get this done. I thank the Senator for his good work and I look forward to working with him and folks on both sides of the aisle on this issue.

Mr. CARDIN. I thank my colleague for his comments. I understand he already mentioned what has happened at the National Institutes of Health and the fact that, because of the sequestration cuts, the number of grants being given out this year, contracts with young scientists to do research, is going to be cut by the hundreds.

We don't know which one of these researchers would have come up with an advancement, a major breakthrough, but there would have been some. And they are going to be denied. They may get discouraged, the people who would have received these grants, and they may go into other fields. We may lose them forever. They may go to other professions. They may go to other countries. But we know they are not doing the work they are trained to do and we know they had a proposal that went through the most difficult vetting process and was selected for funding and should have been funded but is not being funded because of these sequestration cuts. That we know. That much we know for sure.

We also know it is not just that researcher who has been hurt by the sequestration cuts. It is the businesses that depend upon the basic research--many of which are small companies--in order to build upon that research to create the products that go into the marketplace and create the jobs that are necessary for our economy.

There is a direct loss to the economy of our country as a result of these sequestration cuts. It is time we move forward and resolve the problems of our country.

I agree with my friend from Virginia that we have to find a way on both sides of the aisle to come together, but I must point out it has been extremely difficult, particularly with the climate in the other body. In the current issue of New York magazine, Jonathan Chait writes:

The chaos and dysfunction have set in so deeply that Washington now lurches from crisis to crisis, and once-dull, keep-the-lights-on rituals of government procedures are transformed into white-knuckle dramas that threaten national or even global catastrophe.

The Republican party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all.

This brinkmanship is preventing the economic recovery from gaining steam, it is preventing us from addressing urgent problems, and it is punishing all Americans, not just Federal workers.

If we come together on behalf of the American people, we can replace sequestration with a measured and balanced approach to deficit reduction. We can agree on a path forward to fiscal solvency that spreads the burden equitably. We can begin to solve our problems instead of compounding them, but I will tell you what we can cannot do. We cannot balance the budget on the backs of Federal workers. It isn't feasible, and it isn't fair.

Increasingly, Federal workers are asked to do more with less. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the size of the civilian workforce relative to the country's population has declined dramatically over the last several decades, notwithstanding occasional upticks due to military conflicts or the taking of the census.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were, on average, 92 Americans for every Federal worker. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were 106 Americans for every Federal worker. By 2011, the ratio had increased to 145 Americans for every Federal worker. Since the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. population has increased by 76 percent, and the private sector workforce has risen by 133 percent, but the size of the Federal workforce has risen by just 11 percent.

Relative to the private sector, the Federal workforce is less than half the size it was back in the 1950s and 1960s. The picture that emerges is one of a Federal civilian workforce whose size has significantly shrunk compared to the size of the U.S. population it serves, the private sector workforce, and the magnitude of Federal expenditures.

I previously talked about the adverse effect of sequestration on many of our domestic agencies. I have talked a little bit today about the circumstances at NIH. I have talked about the Food and Drug Administration, the Social Security Administration, and other domestic Federal agencies.

I will focus, if I might, for the next few minutes on the impacts of sequestration on a particular group of Federal workers: the Department of Defense civilian employees who are part of a Total Force team providing invaluable support to our men and women in uniform serving in harm's way. These proud individuals have in the past few weeks suffered unnecessary hardships due to sequestration.

The primary priority of our government is the defense of our Nation and sequestration adversely affects the civilian men and women who help provide that defense. DOD civilians serve our Nation by advancing scientific research, providing logistical support to our servicemembers while forward deployed, and ensuring institutional stability within DOD offices as servicemembers rotate to different duty stations.

Recently, some in the media have promoted the idea that the $85 billion sequestration cut triggered on March 1 isn't causing drastic effects. CNN called the cuts ``not as bad as advertised,'' and the Washington Post reported that the cuts are less ``scary'' than predicted. Tell that to the 46,000 DOD employees in Maryland and another 103,000 in the Capital region who are being furloughed, losing up to 20 percent of their weekly pay through the rest of this fiscal year.

Earlier this month, the Defense Department began furloughing 652,000 civilian employees nationwide, forcing them to take up to 11 unpaid days off through September. This is in addition to the furloughs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service. These furloughs disrupt our national and economic security and put hundreds of thousands of Federal workers and their families in financial hardship. Our government cannot continue to provide for the defense of our Nation by maintaining such a harmful policy toward our civilian workers.

I have visited installations throughout Maryland. I have heard about and have seen the impact of furloughs of Defense Department employees and other Federal employees and the impact it will have on their ability to carry out their mission. These cuts and furloughs are affecting the ability of the agency to carry out its legal mission.

For instance, at Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center in Charles County, over 1,870 civilian employees--about 97 percent of the total government civilian workforce--are being forced to take leave without pay 1 day per week. It puts base police and fire protection, safety programs, air operations, air quality programs, and facilities at risk.

At Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, furloughs will hit 2,400 Defense Department civilians--94 percent of the civilian staff. Walter Reed is the country's top facility for wounded combat soldiers. Its Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation is the largest within the Department of Defense. Its seven specialty service clinics include one for traumatic brain injuries. Soldiers needing expert care might have to wait longer for appointments or be forced to nonmilitary facilities, both of which will drive up costs and compromise the quality of care.

I cannot say how many of us have taken the floor to talk about our commitment to make sure our service people--our wounded warriors--get the type of treatment they deserve. Many of us have visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and we are proud of the services that are being provided. Sequestration is hurting our ability to meet the mission we promised to the heroes who have served our Nation and have now come home and expect that health care to be available to them.

At Fort Detrick 4,900 Defense Department civilians will be furloughed. Those civilians support a multigovernment community that conducts biomedical research and development as well as medical material management that includes everything from advanced bandages to vaccines for soldiers on the battlefield and in military hospitals. That mission is at risk. There is no other place that can carry out the type of advanced lab work that is done at Fort Detrick.

Aberdeen Proving Ground, Harford County's largest employer, home to 11 major commands and more than 80 agencies, has approximately 11,500 DOD civilian employees subject to furlough, which is about half of APG's workforce. Before sequestration, APG reported contributing more than $400 million in payroll and $500 million in contracts annually. I can assure everyone that community will be affected and many businesses will be affected, as well as the mission at APG itself.

Just a few miles away at Fort Meade, Maryland's largest employer, sequestration is affecting the entire region. Most of its 27,000 DOD civilian employees face furloughs. These furloughs have all sorts of unintended consequences. A furloughed worker, for instance, may have trouble making his or her mortgage or car payments. Reduced credit worthiness may affect a worker's ability to maintain or obtain a security clearance. Is that how we want to treat people who have helped defend us from terrorists?

Budgets cuts compounded by sequestration will lead to brain drain in the Defense Department, with some of the best and the brightest defense professionals in the Federal Government deciding to seek opportunities elsewhere.

The Federal workforce is better educated, older, and more experienced, on average, than its private sector counterparts. A significant number of Federal workers provide their services to the American people at a discount. They could command higher salaries in the private sector, but they choose to work for the Federal Government because they are patriots and they believe in public service.

The world is still a dangerous place. In such uncertain times, we cannot afford to let political dysfunction get in the way of ensuring our national security. Sequestration is harming our national security readiness.

Sequestration is not just about compromising the ability of Federal workers to carry out their critical missions on behalf of all Americans, and it isn't just hurting Federal workers and their families economically. Private sector businesses and communities across the country are being hurt by the reduced purchasing power of furloughed Federal workers.

Federal workers are similar to everyone else; they support the local businesses in their communities: auto dealers, restaurants, dry cleaners, you name it. They all suffer when Federal employees suffer. The local economy suffers and the recovery becomes that much harder and slower.

We need to stop demonizing and scapegoating and punishing Federal workers. We need to replace sequestration with a rational budget. One of the greatest attributes of the American character is pragmatism. Unlike what some other Federal employees are actually doing, in Congress, balancing a budget is not rocket science. We know the various options.

Former President Lyndon Johnson was fond of quoting the prophet Isaiah: ``Come, let us reason together.'' That is what we need to do. We can acknowledge and respect our differences, but at the end of the day the American people have entrusted us with governing and with being pragmatic. Let us do our job so Federal workers can get back to doing their jobs.

I yield the floor.

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