The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H93-H98 on Jan. 28, 1998.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by bringing America's attention to the name of a young lady. No, it is not a young lady who was an intern in the White House. It is a young lady who is now dead as a result of negligence on the part of our system. Her name is Yanahan Zhao. She is a 16-year-old girl who was killed after bricks fell from a scaffolding at PS-131 in Brooklyn.
I think it is very important that we note that Yanahan Zhao may not be the only student that has been killed in this kind of accident, but certainly this one we know about, it was reported. It has high visibility. Any time a child is killed in New York City, it gets high visibility. A city that often ignores the conditions under which students and children are laboring from day to day will focus a lot of attention on a child that is killed.
So death was cruel, and our concerns and prayers we offer to the family of Yanahan Zhao. But I think we ought to understand that we should use her as an example of what we do not want to happen again. We do not want anywhere in America a student killed by bricks falling from the scaffolding of a school, or we do not want any one American student killed as a result of a building decaying or fixtures falling or any other matter. We do not want students killed and hurt.
Yanahan Zhao becomes a motto for a school construction initiative that ought to spread all across America. We have to declare a state of emergency and assume that we have a state of emergency with respect to infrastructure, construction and everything related to infrastructure with schools. We have to listen to the General Accounting Office when they say that more than $100 billion is needed to deal with updating the infrastructure of public schools across the country. We have to listen.
I have a few other examples of some outrageous things that have happened with respect to school construction or the lack of it. At East New York's Transit Technical High School, a wide swath of brick facade broke free from the building and came crashing down to the sidewalk. The only reason no one was injured is that it was Martin Luther King's birthday holiday, and the children were not in school. That is the only reason we did not have massive injuries. This wall, according to the report of the New York Times of January 23rd, this wall weighed 10 tons. The bricks in that wall weighed 10 tons, measuring about 500 square feet. That is the wall that fell from the school. Fortunately school was out and no one was hurt.
According to the same article in the New York Times of January 23rd, the city construction officials had inspected that school and found it safe just 5 days before a wide swath of the brick facade fell. They said that the school, East New York Transit Technical School, had been inspected at least three times in the last 5 months, most recently last Friday. The last inspection was one of nearly 200 that had been conducted by the city's building department at schools throughout the city after debris, variously described as brick or cinder block, tumbled from a construction site atop of a Brooklyn elementary school, cracking the skull of 16-year-old Yanahan Zhao, who later died from that injury.
I think it is important also to note that New York City has, of course, 1,100 schools, 1 million students. You expect things like that to happen, some people say, cynically dismissing the significance of this.
But across the country, having these same accidents, that get less publicity.
At Phoenix, Arizona, at a Phoenix preparatory academy, a large piece of fireproofing material tore away from the metal decking of a second floor computer room, hitting the teacher.
At Blake Elementary School in Lakeland, Florida, a student was struck on the head when loose mortar fell from over a doorway.
A second grade teacher at Washington Elementary School in Spokane, Washington, was hit on the head and is still suffering nightmares after fluorescent lights peeled from the ceiling and crashed in her classroom. The thousand-pound metal fixture smashed onto her desk and across a small rug where students were gathered. Fortunately the students were not injured.
At Grande Hills High School in Los Angeles, California, six students and two teachers were struck by boards that fell from the roof of their building.
And I am sure it goes on and on, and I would like to invite other Members on both sides of the aisle to gather up these statistics, do a survey on what is happening with the buildings in their districts. This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposition that we should spend far more money than has been proposed on school construction.
I want to sing my praises for the State of the Union address. It was a great address. It offered platforms and programs that I certainly agree with. The education initiatives, I think, that were proposed by the President are magnificent. Most of the initiatives are really needed. But I want to argue here today, and the reason I am here so early in the year, I want to make the case that we keep our eye on the core of the problem, that school construction and the infrastructure of schools is central to any effort to improve America's schools.
There are a lot of other things that are proposed in the President's set of initiatives that can happen if you do not have first attention and most attention directed at school construction. You cannot have a reduction of teachers, a reduction of classroom size so that you have fewer students in the classroom, if you do not have the classrooms.
It is wonderful that the President proposes that the Federal Government take the initiative and provide some of the funding to reduce class size, highly desirable objective, and we must all work toward that objective, but it will not be possible in situations where schools are overcrowded and there are no classrooms.
In 1990, in the fall of 1996, in New York City on opening day they did not have room or places for 91,000 students, that with more than a million students. But even in a system with more than a million students, to not be able to give a desk to 91,000 students is still an outrageous situation.
When schools opened in 1997, we were in the midst of an election year, and nobody would let us see the statistics. We do not know whether the situation improved dramatically between 1996 and 1997, but we do know from observation and from surveys that have been done by my education advisory committee that in my district there are large numbers of overcrowded schools.
There are some schools where the principals insist that they are not overcrowded, but you can begin to knock that assertion down when you ask the second question. The second question is, how many lunch periods do you have? How many shifts for lunch do you have in your school? And when you find out that they start feeding children lunch at 10:00 in the morning, you know they have got a radical overcrowding problem. It is out of hand. You force a child to eat his lunch at 10:00, and you stop having lunch as late as 2:30, you force a child to wait that long, you have a situation where you have overcrowding and you are punishing the children. It is really a form of child abuse to make a child eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning.
So we have a problem, and the problem is not limited to inner-city schools. It may be more acute and more obvious in inner-city schools across the country, but urban schools, suburban schools all need help in dealing with their infrastructure problems.
We need money to build more schools. The President's proposal, the $5 billion over a 5-year period, is a good one because it at least is better than nothing. It begins the process. But so much more is needed in order for us to generate the more than $100 billion that the General Accounting Office says we need to deal with school infrastructure.
Now, the President should not be forced to bear the burden of providing all of the funds for school construction. The Federal Government should not be forced to bear the burden of providing all the funds for school construction. Traditionally, this has been left to the States and localities, and some of my friends on the other side of the aisle in particular argue that only the States and localities should be involved in school construction funding.
I think we ought to share the burden, that the Federal Government should provide a stimulus and should get very much involved to more than just $5 billion over a 5-year period, but the States and localities should do their job, too.
We have across the country many States that are reporting surpluses in their last year's budget, anticipating surpluses at the end of the fiscal year. New York State's fiscal year ends on March, the last day of March. The new fiscal year begins April 1st. They are predicting more than $2 billion in surplus, money that they have gained through revenue that they did not have to spend. New York City's budget, which begins on July 1st, ends on June 30th, they are projecting more than a billion dollars, too. $1.2 billion is presently being projected as the surplus in New York City budget.
So I will agree with my friends on the other side of the aisle, Republicans who say that local government ought to be responsible but not totally responsible. I think the President should use the bully pulpit and challenge all of the States and all of the local governments who have surpluses to deal with the infrastructure problem, the crumbling schools and the overcrowded schools. Particularly in New York City, I think that the first use of the surplus should be addressed to the crumbling infrastructure. No more children should die in New York City. If you have a surplus of $1.2 billion, then certainly part of that ought to be addressed to school construction. The State has $2 billion. Part of that ought to be addressed to school construction.
I think that we do not want to be guilty of having a civilization which cannot protect its children in school. School is a very important function of every society, and if we cannot protect our children there, what kind of statement are we making about our concern with children?
We know that dramatic situation that we encounter here in Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. schools opened 3 weeks late last fall because of the fact that they had problems with roof repairs. People criticized the judge for ordering the schools to stay closed while the repairs were being conducted. It appears that that judge might have saved somebody's life because Yanahan Zhao was killed at a school where repairs were under way on the roof. And the bricks fell from the roof and struck her and a number of other students, and she was seriously injured and died. So we might have saved some lives by taking the bold step of refusing to let the Washington schools open while the roof repairs were being conducted.
Of course, we had a situation also where once the Washington schools were opened and the roofs were repaired, the children had a problem because the boilers began to break down in the same schools or some other Washington schools. So you have teachers being forced to tell children to wear extra heavy clothes to come to school, and of course I think it is child abuse to make a child sit in a cold room at a school and depend on his extra clothes to keep him or her warm.
So it is a challenge as to how urgent do we feel the situation is. It is a challenge as to how we really feel about children. Every public official makes speeches about our dedication to children. If you have a surplus, Mr. Mayor, if you have a surplus, Mr. Governor, then show us how dedicated you are to children by putting forth an initiative right away to let the Federal Government know that we may need help. After all, we have in New York, I said, 1,100 schools.
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Three hundred of 1100 schools have coal burning furnaces. They are still burning coal. Many of them are more than 100 years old.
So we need a massive program, but certainly the Federal Government has a right to expect our city government and our State government to show some initiative and use their surplus in a constructive way for children.
On July 28th, which is of course today, The New York Times article reports that Mayor Giuliani is expected to announce that the city will finish the 1998 fiscal year with a surplus of $1.2 billion, thanks in large part to a surging Wall Street. It will be the second year in a row of good fortune for the city, which was pummeled by the recession in the early 1990s. The city ended its last fiscal year with $1.4 billion more than expected.
So we are 2 years in a row where we had a surplus. The second paragraph I want to read from this article says the following: But in contrast to the election year budget that he presented at this time last year, which called for sharply increased spending on education, children's services and other programs, the Mayor is returning to the conservative fiscal stance he took early in his first term when he pushed through some of the largest spending cuts since the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
If children are not important, if schools are not important, if the surplus cannot be utilized for that purpose, than what is more important? Tell me, Mr. Mayor.
We have, again, as I said before, and I have a list right here, 300 schools out of 1100 schools in New York City that are still burning coal in their furnaces. Now, we might have somewhere in America, maybe many places, some efficient coal burning furnaces that do not spew pollutants in the air, but the likelihood that these old boilers are efficient and are not spilling large amounts of pollutants in the air is nil. They are polluting the air.
Is it any wonder that we have a high asthma rate in the same neighborhoods where the coal burning schools are. Where we have the greatest number of coal burning schools we have the highest asthma rates among the youngsters. There is an obvious correlation there, and we are officially guilty of doing things that we would never sanction or allow the private sector to do. We are endangering the health of children in a very concrete dramatic way.
So we had on the agenda on our ballot 3 years ago a State bond issue related to the environment, and in order to pass that bond issue it was clearly stated that part of the money for the environment bond issue would be used to convert the coal burning boilers in New York. It was clearly stated that part of the money would be used to convert some of the coal burning boilers in New York. That was 3 years ago. That was 3 years ago almost. As of right now not a single school with a coal burning furnace has been converted using the money from the bond issue that we passed almost 3 years ago.
The sense of urgency, emergency, is not there. The concern for children is not there. The concern for students and, in the final analysis, the concern for education is not there. We must think in terms of a state of emergency and we must understand that incremental steps will not solve the problem. Incremental steps will not, in time, save this generation of children. Incremental steps are not good enough.
And the President, in proposing the initiative at the Federal level, has taken the first step. I hope we can increase that, but the call on every unit, every level of government must be made with the Federal Government's leadership stimulating that response.
I yield to the gentlewoman from Oregon.
Ms. FURSE. Thank you so much. I come to the floor today because the most dreadful tragedy has occurred in the City of Portland.
Yesterday a policewoman, Officer Colleen Waibel, was shot and killed by a man with an assault weapon. Another police officer was gravely injured by the same man with an assault weapon. These officers were wearing bulletproof vests but the bullets used by that man struck through those bulletproof vests and killed Officer Colleen Waibel.
I am here to say that I am sick and I am tired of the tyranny of violence. I am sick and I am tired of the tyranny of guns. And I am here to say that I am really sick of the NRA.
There are too many guns in the hands of violent, uncaring people, people who hide behind a constitutional amendment that they misinterpret. Why should our great police officers be in jeopardy every time they go out on the street to protect us because there are people out there with guns such as this man had?
It is enough. We have had enough. We are not civilized if we cannot contain civil strife on our streets. I am here to pledge to the people of my district, whose lives are every day threatened by these same guns, that I will do everything in my power to see that assault weapons no longer threaten us all.
We have allowed those who support this unlimited use of guns to threaten, to badger and to coerce us for too long. And I want to say today that, in my belief, every time a person is killed by an assault weapon, every time a police officer is threatened by a gun, an assault weapon, gun or by cop killing bullets, I want to say that I think the NRA has some guilt in that killing.
Once there was a reason for people to arm themselves in order to protect themselves, and generally, then in those days gun ownership was responsible. But times have changed. Now everyone has guns. Kids have guns and criminals have guns and crazies have guns. And every time we try to pass sensible legislation regarding guns, the NRA brings out all its negative power to stop us. Enough.
Our brave men and women in law enforcement are a well ordered militia. They must be the ones to preserve law and order to keep our streets safe. The Constitution guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those constitutional guarantees were taken away from Officer Waibel. Those were taken away from her.
Enough. No more killing. It is time to get those weapons off the streets. It is time to end the killing for the sake of Officer Waibel and all the other brave law enforcement officers who every day, every day, face these unlimited guns.
Mr. OWENS. I salute the gentlewoman's sense of urgency. I think the message is quite urgent and my appeal is that we stop the business as usual approach in life and death matters. Gun control certainly is a life and death matter far more immediate than school construction.
In the long run we are talking about life and death of children, life and death of our society. I think the President started at the right place when he talked about Social Security and the concern of people and what happens to our Social Security. But I think we also understand that, and I am not one of those who thinks our Social Security is endangered, that we are facing the possible bankruptcy in 30 years, I think that is all propaganda, but the President certainly, by making Social Security the highest priority with the utilization of the surplus, has challenged those people and we can finally deal with it.
If we really need the money, then the surplus should be directed in that direction. But Social Security is threatened if we do not have a work force, a work force that can keep our economy going. And I am going to talk in a few minutes about the work force for the Information Age, the information technology workers and the great crisis that exists right now and is likely to grow even worse.
First, I want to talk about one of the President's initiatives. And again we must get behind the President and push these initiatives with a sense of urgency. There is a great need for the additional 100,000 teachers that he proposed. And whereas he talked mainly about those teachers being utilized to train students to read, I think we ought to seriously consider that we need teachers also who are able to deal with training children and what they need at every step of their educational career to get ready for the world of information technology where the jobs are going to be in the future.
I think we also should understand how this relates back to my concern with construction and infrastructure. If we pull in large numbers of idealistic students and they become teachers, do not subject those teachers to a problem of the boilers breaking down and they have to go into cold classrooms and instruct students who are shivering, or they have to participate in instructing students to wear heavy clothes to go to school in order to stay warm.
Do not subject teachers to a situation where they are teaching about the environment and they are teaching about health care and they are teaching about pollutants and we have coal burning furnaces right there at the school spewing pollutants into the air and children suffering from asthma at a greater rate. Do not subject teachers to that kind of situation.
Do not subject teachers to a request that they teach youngsters and use the latest technology, use the Internet, get them prepared for what is coming in the future of these children and then do not have adequate computers for them. And if they have computers, they are not hooked up to the Internet because the school cannot be wired properly.
They are old schools and the wiring does not lend itself, or they are afraid that asbestos, a problem I encountered in trying to wire 11 schools. And we did on Net Day. Net Day, by the way, is the national day on October 25th where all across the country volunteers were called upon to wire their schools. It was a Saturday. And volunteers came in to wire the schools so they could be hooked up to the Internet.
A school was considered appropriately wired and reaching the Net Day goals if 5 classrooms and the library was wired. So for 11 schools we got five classrooms and the libraries wired. It was not easy. And whereas I endorse the notion of using volunteers, and I know that there have been some very successful Net Days across the country using volunteers, we had to have some professional volunteers.
If you do not have some people who really know a little bit about what they are doing, it can really bog down. So I want to thank the Bell Atlantic crews that came in, because we did have a partnership with the private sector, and the private sector hooked us up with Bell Atlantic crews that came in to help. And there were some other private sector groups that provided us with personnel that went to the schools ahead of time to help mark off the wirings.
It was a beautiful operation bringing together the private sector and the school officials and the local community volunteers, but it was very difficult just to wire 11 of 1100 schools. In other parts of New York City, I understand there were other schools wired on that day, but the number of schools that have been wired to hook up to the Internet is, indeed, a very tiny number for New York City.
In case my colleagues did not know it, effective this Friday the FCC has announced that the universal fund for libraries and schools application process will begin. If you want to apply for the more than
$2 billion available to pay for telecommunication services, if you are qualified, the process of qualification for the funds will begin this Friday, and that process will continue for 75 days.
And they are using the Internet. They are using the Internet as a way of getting the applications. So for the 75 days you can put your application in. It is a simplified application, with forms. You can do it right on the Internet and send it in.
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Anytime within that 75-day period that you put your proposal in, it will be considered like the first day, everybody is equal; and only at the end of the 75 days will the clock be cut off. So I think it is very important to link these things up and understand that here is an advantage that is being made as a result of an act of Congress, Telecommunications Act of 1996, where the Congress instructed the FCC to set up a universal fund for libraries and schools for telecommunications and give them a discount.
The poorest schools get up to a 90-percent discount. Any school in America can get a 20-percent discount. So that only operates if you have computers.
If they have a technology set up where they have computers and somebody who is in charge of their computers in their school and they meet the requirements, only that way will they be able to take advantage of a discount. They cannot have the setup and have their school wired if they do not have an infrastructure already that allows them to do that.
Asbestos is a major problem. When we start marking holes in the walls, boring the holes to put the wires through, we confront an asbestos problem. New York City must have a certified asbestos inspector come out, very expensive, each school have a certified asbestos inspector come out and say what we are doing will not cause a health hazard. Very expensive. So if there are only a tiny number of schools that are wired, my colleagues can understand how that hurdle alone will keep the number down.
When we get into the details, it makes it very sad for inner city schools. They are not wired now, and they are not likely to be wired anytime soon. They will not be able to take advantage of universal telecommunications for the universal funds for libraries and schools for telecommunication if they are not wired. It all goes back to the problem of infrastructure and construction.
So we must assume a state of emergency. Because there is a domino theory operating here. One inadequacy, one critical inadequacy with respect to construction and infrastructure sets off a chain reaction where it generates more disadvantages and more inadequacies.
The President gave a long list of initiatives and education, and I think he must understand and all of us must understand that those initiatives, most of them, will not go forward unless we deal with the basic problem of school infrastructure. Among those initiatives, he mentioned the fact that we want to have our children able to go into the 21st century with the knowledge that they need to hook up with the burgeoning and growing information industries.
There was a major conference held in California in Berkeley in the second week in January related to the critical shortage of information technology workers. Business is very upset by the fact that they are beginning to feel the pinch of this critical shortage of workers. And I think that it directly relates to the fact that at one point the President talked about an initiative that is needed which is similar to the GI education bill. We need something as massive as that in order to really get ready to confront the changing of our society into an information technology society.
The conference was held on January 12. I just want to read a few excerpts from an article that appeared in the New York Times.
The Clinton administration will announce today a broad and unique Federal effort to help train more computer programmers, responding to concerns from economists and business leaders that U.S. companies have a critical shortage of skilled technology workers.
The administration's initiatives, which include millions of dollars in grants to fund educational programs, the creation of a nationwide job bank on the Internet, and a campaign to glamorize computer-related professions, come as a new survey shows that 1 in every 10 information technology jobs in the United States is unfilled.
The study, conducted for an industry group by Virginia Tech and scheduled to be released today, estimated that 346,000 computer programmer and systems analyst jobs are vacant in U.S. companies with more than 100 employees.
Although rapidly growing computer firms increasingly have had difficulties finding enough workers with cutting-edge skills, the Virginia Tech report indicates that the shortage has spread to many non-technology firms, including banks, hospitals and retailers that depend on programmers to design and operate large systems for their businesses. The widening scope of the issue has prompted the administration to take the unusual step of intervening in a worker training issue.
The Federal Government programs will form the central part of a campaign among industry and educational institutions to chip away at the shortage. The efforts will be unveiled formally at a meeting of government and industry leaders in Berkeley, California, including Commerce Secretary Daley and Education Secretary Riley.
``The shortage is a fundamental threat to the economic growth of the United States,'' says Harris N. Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, an Arlington-based industry group that is organizing the meeting.
``It's not just hurting the ability of classic computer companies to grow. It's hurting the ability of the entire economy to grow through the productivity increases you get if you can install the latest technology products,'' Miller said.
The Virginia Tech study confirmed similar findings made last year and shows that the industry has made no progress in reducing the shortage of technology workers.
Though many statistical measures indicate the U.S. economy is at one of its strongest points in recent history, the economists say much of the recent growth has come through technology: both the growth of the Nation's tech industry and cost savings from the use of computers.
``Right now, technology represents 50 percent of the Nation's economic growth,'' says Kelly H. Carnes, deputy assistant secretary for technology policy at the Commerce Department. ``It is the most important enabling industry.''
I will not read any further, but my point is that this has a great deal to do with those constituents of mine in the low-income section of my district, the people who cannot find jobs, and some of them, you know, are community college graduates. But many have never been exposed at all to a computer. It is relevant in terms of not so much the astronomical figures that are mentioned today, and they say 346 vacancies now.
The Department of Labor has a more conservative estimate of an additional 1.2 million workers over the next 5 years. If we take the most conservative estimate of the Department of Labor or the estimate given as a result of the Virginia Tech report, we still have a large growing industry which probably nobody can fully estimate what the limits are.
There are jobs there for the future. There are jobs for the youngsters coming out of our schools if they have had some kind of orientation to computers early in their schooling, beginning in the elementary grades, progressing through junior high school and, of course, high school. They really need some significant exposure to the utilization of computers before they get to college. And many of them may never go to college. Many of them may never go to college.
There are some young men that I know who did take a few courses in college and maybe were exposed to college to some degree, but they did not take any computer science courses, and they have decided because they like to work with computers that they will go into this field. They are getting promotions and making very good salaries with a bright, rosy future. One who started at $35,000 says that by the end of this year, in less than 3 years, he expects to be making $100,000 a year, and he has never taken a computer science course in a college.
So, in addition to the programmers, in addition to the analysts, we need the troubleshooters, we need the mechanics, we need people all up and down the line. And it cannot happen. The opportunity will be there, and we will not be able to fill that opportunity if our schools do not have the courses and the exposure to computers that are necessary, the opportunity to utilize computers.
Most of the homes in my district do not have computers. Nationwide, computers are a middle-class phenomenon, upper middle-class phenomenon and a large percentage of middle-class people have computers in the home. Most of the children who go to public school in my district will not be exposed to computers except in school and library.
And I want to congratulate the Brooklyn Public Library. In several of the poor areas, they have installed computers. They have only a few. But it does give youngsters an opportunity to come in and practice a little and get some exposure. The Brooklyn Public Library has a very forward-looking approach to computerization and technology. There is a lot of vision that the director of that library has shown in this area.
Recently, the Brooklyn Public Library received some grants from Microsoft to continue their work and to expand it; and we are looking forward to the library, which is a free-standing institution. Not only can the student and school come there, but the parents can come, and the people who are not enrolled in school can also utilize the library's computers. That is an area we hope will continue to grow.
I did say that the universal fund that the FCC has created is for both schools and libraries. It is for private schools as well as public schools, and it is for libraries. So they will have an opportunity to be able to get the discount on the telecommunications services, telephone company, Internet, various telecommunications services. They will qualify also for the discount which ranges between 20 and 90 percent.
And I am not rambling at all, I assure my colleagues. There is a direct connection between the need to have an emergency school construction initiative across the country. There is a need to deal with this as a central problem related to education.
The additional qualified teachers, the efforts of the Federal Government to recruit more teachers, all of those are important and must go forward. But I hope that we understand if you bring teachers in on a system where they see children's lives in jeopardy, and in many cases their own lives are placed in jeopardy, or if you bring them in situations where their lives are not placed in jeopardy directly in some kind of concrete way but they are in a polluted environment that is injuring not only the health of the children but also their health, how long do you think we will keep these qualified teachers?
I think we ought to think in terms of the GI education bill that allowed thousands and thousands of returning GIs to get an education, a broad sweeping approach. This country has done that kind of thing only a few times in its history, but it has been very important.
The GI bill set up a situation where the need for a highly educated work pool, workforce, was met by the people who came out of those programs. We did not really know exactly what they were going to do later. But we have outstanding scientists, outstanding lawyers, politicians. A lot of people came through the GI bill into the schools and never would have gotten an education otherwise. It is a massive program. It was not an incremental program. It was not a nickel-and-
dime program. It was a massive program which was necessary.
We ought to see what we are facing now as the day after Pearl Harbor. There are many, and certainly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle insist that there should be no more, big Federal programs, big spending programs.
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I agree that government should be reduced, and we are proud of the fact it has been reduced. I agree there is a lot of waste in government. I have said it over and over again, you do not need the CIA spending $20 billion or more. You can downsize our overseas bases.
There are a number of ways you can save money in government, but do not get locked into an ideological approach, a dogma, that says that no program should be big enough to meet the challenge.
If, on the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, we came to the conclusion that, yes, there is a need to mobilize the country, there is a need to spend a great deal of money to marshal resources to meet the threat, but somebody said, well, it costs too much, where would we be? It would be absurd for anyone to argue that the mobilization to meet the threat that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor posed, or Hitler posed operating in concert with Japan, the threat to the world's freedom, the direct threat to our own well-being, nobody would be so absurd as to say you cannot spend the money that is necessary to do it.
The problem is when it comes to educational reform, we really do not believe we are threatened. We really do not believe the very foundations of society can be rocked if we have jobs and opportunities out there available and a large population that needs jobs, and are not qualified and cannot get to those jobs, and the reason that happens is just because we fail to provide adequate opportunities.
We really do not believe that our competitors in other parts of the world can outstrip us, despite all the advantages that we have, we are on top of the economic heap right now; really do not believe that can be threatened if some other nations showing much more vision about educating their population would overtake us in the critical areas of information technology and the kinds of things you can do only with information technology.
Right now you have India. That is not a superpower and never claims to be a superpower, but India is a major source of computer programmers for the United States. Bangladore, India, some people call the computer capital of the world, computer programming capital. Large numbers of American companies are contracting with groups in Bangladore to do their computer work, and large numbers of companies are bringing personnel from there here to work.
Here is a country not nearly with as many advantages and resources that we have, but they have made a choice educationally which is paying great dividends in terms of being able to employ their work force in a foreign country.
We should not allow the situation to develop where we have to rely on foreign sources for the work force of the future because those foreign centers in the final analysis will take the know-how back to their own countries and increase the competition.
We may be on top of the heap now and consider ourselves invulnerable economically, but that is not the case. Let's declare a state of emergency and start thinking about the things with the greatest sense of urgency, and get away from the incremental approach where everybody in this capital that has some power has some idea of what should be done with education.
The Committee on Appropriations more and more writes education bills, taking the power away from the authorizing committee, because they have the power to do it, not the know-how. Many things proposed in the Committee on Appropriations are not harmful, they will do some good, but the whole idea of a scatter gun approach, that any man with power interested in education is able to impose his will on us because they can get the appropriate bill passed and an amount of money appropriated, that is the wrong approach to education reform.
We need a comprehensive approach where we understand that large amounts of resources are needed, and we must focus on what is most important and set some priorities.
I think the President, some people accused him last night of giving a laundry list not only of education programs, but other programs, I think he understands that laundry list has priorities. He understands some of the connections.
I am confident this President can deliver on his educational agenda, as well as the rest of his agenda. I have had a lot of calls from people asking me and people who are really concerned about the child care initiatives and the education agenda of the President. Those announcements have been going on for the last 10 days, announcements coming from the White House about new programs for child care, tax credits and more money for day care centers.
There are large numbers of people among my constituents that are very interested in the reality of those things, will he be able to deliver, and those questions, of course, have come in the last few days as a result of the problems that have come forward from the White House with respect to the President's personal life.
My answer to the constituents who want to know will we really get the child care initiative program implemented, does he have the ability to go forward and do this, where some people want the training, they finally think that people who want to go into the child care field can get some training which allows them to qualify for a job which is a decent paying job and be in a position to be promoted, will it really happen? Will we get more money, so day care centers are not just for the very poorest people, but also for some working families that are not on welfare.
All these questions are being asked, and my answer to them is yes, this President can deliver, and he will deliver. I have seen nothing happen at the White House which says that he will not be able to deliver on the agenda which was laid out last night.
I answer some people by saying, look, Thomas Jefferson in his first year in office was confronted with a problem where they were trying to drive him out of office, accusations were made about his private life, and the press of that day had a drum beat going to try to get him out of office. But they did not succeed. Thomas Jefferson refused to even address their criticisms, to address their charges.
Thomas Jefferson kept his focus on what he was doing, and Thomas Jefferson delivered the Louisiana purchase, which doubled the size of the Nation at a very low price. Thomas Jefferson fathered the Lewis and Clark expedition. Thomas Jefferson restored certain liberties that the Federalists had carelessly begun to take away from people. His accomplishments were magnificent, despite the fact he was confronted with a major challenge on the basis of his personal life.
There is no reason to assume that this President cannot deliver because of the present challenges. There is no way to assume that he will not be around or be able to negotiate and to drive his program through to conclusion. I think it is very important to understand that.
I have been here 16 years. I was here when another government was set up in the basement of the White House. People have forgotten Irangate. They have forgotten that in the basement of the White House there was an operation running which was raising money, where money was being raised to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Not only were they raising money, but they entered into a deal for Iran to buy arms, to let Iran buy arms from us, and use the money raised from that to fund the Contras. That was a government operating out of the basement of the White House, contrary to what Congress had already clearly stated in legislation they should not do.
This Nation survived that, and no President was impeached as a result of that, and that was far more serious than anything I have heard recently. I think it is important that we keep our focus on the things that are important to the American people.
Common sense dictates that the agenda set forth last night ought to be realized. We ought to allow the President the opportunity to deliver that to the American people. I think it can happen. At the heart of it, I think, should be his educational initiative. At the heart of his educational initiative should be the school construction priority. We are going to hear more about this in the future. I do not intend to let it get lost again.
Last year we had a great start. The President mentioned in the first session of the 105th Congress a school construction initiative. Later on negotiations took place with the White House and the school construction initiative was taken off the table. We must not let that happen again. From start to finish, we must focus on the fact that if you care about children, if you want to improve American education, at the core of the improvement process has to be a massive school construction initiative in this Nation.
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