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“ONE TRILLION DOLLARS MORE IS TOO MUCH” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H134-H135 on Jan. 4, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ONE TRILLION DOLLARS MORE IS TOO MUCH
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Kansas [Mr. Tiahrt] is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. TIAHRT. Mr. Speaker, I think that the Dole campaign is going to be very pleased with all of the support he is getting from across the aisle in the Democrat Party. I hope they will attend the fundraisers and help Senator Dole gain the Presidency of the United States, because I think he is a good leader, which is demonstrated right here by the support that he is getting from the Democrat party.
Although I currently disagree with the policy he has on this continuing resolution, I still see him as a fine leader, and the type of man that I want for President of the United States; and I am glad to see many of the members of the Democrat Party on the other side of the aisle join with us in their support for Majority Leader Dole over President Clinton on this.
I want to move on to something else, though, because I am really wondering how long the President is going to tolerate what is going on. I am wondering how long Congress is going to tolerate what is going on. I am wondering how long the American people are going to tolerate what is going on, even though we are finally talking about a balanced budget.
Now, we have been talking about a balanced budget a long time here in Congress. Ever since the 104th Congress has been going on, we have been very specifically targeting a balanced budget that would take 7 years to achieve. But now we are seeing a very dramatic change. The President is talking about it; even the liberals here in Congress are talking about it. But the President still wants to spend $1 trillion more over the next 7 years than Congress does, $1 trillion.
Now, that is a lot of money. To give you some kind of an idea how much money it is, if you were to have gone in business the day after Christ rose from the dead and you lost $1 million that day and every day up until today, almost 2,000 years, you would only be about 80 percent of the way to losing $1 trillion. That is only $800 billion that you would have lost.
One trillion dollars is a lot of money, and that is what the President wants to spend over what Congress has put in their budget. Do you ever wonder why?
There are some liberal organizations the President obviously supports that do not have the support of the majority of this Congress, like the national bureaucracy for the Education Association, our current welfare bureaucracy. We here in Congress would like to send the solution or the money closer to the problems and let the States deal with it. They are doing it very well in the State of Kansas where I come from, and I have confidence in Governor Graves and Rochelle Chronister, the Secretary of Rehabilitation Services. They are doing a very good job.
What we have seen here is something very ineffective. Particularly agencies like the Department of Energy have been horribly mismanaged. Secretary O'Leary, the Secretary of the Department of Energy, has become a focal point because of her travel, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It started last year when we were looking at different agencies. The General Accounting Office said that the Department of Energy was ineffective as a Cabinet-level agency. Vice President Gore in his National Performance Review said that they were 40 percent ineffective in the environmental management area, and it was going to cost taxpayers $70 billion over the next 30 years unless we do something about it.
Then we found out about the public relations office. The Department of Energy hires over 500 public relations employees at a cost of about
$25 million to taxpayers. Secretary O'Leary has a personal media consultant that she hires. She has even hired a private investigative firm to develop a list of unfavorable reporters and Congressmen so that she can ``work on these people a little.''
Let us focus a little bit on her travel, because today in the Subcommittee on General Oversight and Investigations, we found out that Secretary O'Leary has taken over 100 domestic and international trips. Now, some of this travel is needed, particularly in the domestic area, because that is where the Secretary of Energy's responsibilities lie. But the international travel, 16 trips, are outside the scope of her requirements as Secretary of the Department of Energy.
The GAO, the General Accounting Office, looked at two specific trips. One was to South Africa and one was to India. Now, this is reported in the Washington Times today. The trip to South Africa included 135 persons, 63 from the Department of Energy and 72 from the business and academic areas. It cost taxpayers about $1 million, $1,860,000, over $1 million.
The second trip to India had 37 people from the Government and 41 guests. It cost $729,000. One of the interesting things about this is that according to Chairman Barton from Texas, the Department of Energy charged these non-DOE visitors, these guests, $2,800 for coach fare on this, but the actual cost to taxpayers was $12,860.
So who is going to make up that $10,000? Well, the taxpayers are making it up, and I think it is kind of a sad state of affairs.
Second, we found out that Secretary O'Leary has transferred $400,000 from a nuclear weapons-related account over to her travel budget so she can make these trips.
What it all boils down to, Mr. Speaker, is that we must balance the budget. We must remove Secretary O'Leary; we must eliminate the Department of Energy as a Cabinet-level agency. Let us get the Government back to work, cull the deadwood out by eliminating the Department of Energy.
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