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.
“WASTEFUL SPENDING” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S2719-S2721 on May 12, 2016.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WASTEFUL SPENDING
Mr. COATS. Mr. President, that is not why I am here today. I come down every week, as my colleagues know, to talk about the waste of the week. While I am dealing with documented evidence of the waste of taxpayers' money through waste, fraud, and abuse and while we have totaled up well over $150 billion of documented waste, it is only a pebble in the sea, a grain of sand compared to what we are doing by allowing deficit spending to plunge us ever more into debt.
Without a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, this body has not had the discipline to match our spending with the revenues that come in or the political will to go to the American people and say: If you want this much government, this is how much it is going to cost. Instead, we say: We will give you what you want, and we will borrow the money to cover it because we don't have the tax revenue. And we don't have the will to say: We have to raise your taxes if this is what you want. It has put us in a dire situation from a financial standpoint. It is not talked about as much as it should be. But when I returned to the Senate, having been elected in 2010 to serve another term, our debt level was bad enough at that point at $10.7 trillion. But under this administration, in less than 8 years, it has almost doubled. It is now
$19.2 trillion, I think is the latest, and the clock is ticking. Tune in to my Web site and you will see the debt clock. It is stunning to sit there and look at how fast those digits are turning of money that is being borrowed, which we have to pay interest on and which is slowing down our economy and crippling our future generations.
I see the young pages sitting here on the steps. Many of them have listened to my ``Waste of the Week'' speeches. I want to tell you that my generation--I am not pointing fingers at one party or another--has failed to achieve some kind of fiscal discipline that will put you in a position where you can inherit from my generation something that my parents and our parents and our generation gave to us, and that is a prosperous, growing, dynamic economy that gave us the opportunity to get an education, gave us the opportunity to be engaged meaningfully in the workforce, become homeowners, raise a family, save for our kids' future.
I stand here as a father with 3 children and 10 grandchildren. It is sickening to me to think about the challenges they are going to have because my generation didn't step up to the responsibility of running a fiscally sound economy through the decisions we make in the U.S. Senate, U.S. Congress, and the White House. Yes, I have blamed this President for not treating this in a serious enough manner. We made every type of effort you could think of in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and we finally threw up our hands and gave up because of the six or seven things that were presented to the President over that period of time, he has rejected every one of them. I was part of one of those negotiations and was very involved with that negotiation. I directly dealt with the President and his top people. We gave him a lot of what he said he wanted, and in the end he turned it down.
I wish I had the clock ticking behind me. We are getting ever deeper into debt, and that will have a significant impact on the country.
I was speaking on the floor yesterday. The growth--if you can call it that--in the latest quarter is 0.5 percent. That is about as anemic as it gets, teetering on falling into a recession. That is what the statistic shows for growth during the first quarter of 2016. The number comes from the Department of Labor. It shows that there was a very low amount of new jobs. Those new jobs basically replaced those who were retiring. It is far below what we need to provide meaningful jobs for people in this country.
After having failed over a period of years to put together a credible, long-term plan to deal with our debt crisis, balance our budget, and stop adding more to our debt, I have come down to show my colleagues documented evidence of the waste, fraud, and abuse that nonpartisan agencies have inspected and told us about. For over 40 weeks, I have been in this cycle of coming to the Senate floor to identify yet a new waste, fraud, or abuse, and the total is significantly trending toward $200 billion worth of waste. It is no wonder that Americans at home are furious with the dysfunction that is taking place in Washington and demanding change. We see this on both sides of the aisle. The people have said: We have had it. It is enough. We are done with you guys and gals. We need to shake this place up. A revolution is taking place across the country. The country is finally grasping onto the fact that we have simply not been functional. The one way we can be functional, or at least do something, is to have the government's own accountability office, which looks into the programs that are part of what we have enabled and provides the needed spending for certain areas--if they see there is fraud, waste, and abuse, can't we at least do something about that? That is the reason I am here today.
I have been a strong supporter of the U.S. armed services. I am a veteran, and I served on the Armed Services Committee during my previous tenure in the Senate. I have a deep regard and respect for the need for adequate spending to provide for our common defense. That is the first obligation in the Constitution that we swear to when we are sworn into the U.S. Senate. There is no agency that is exempt or getting a pass if they are engaged in bad decisions that spend and waste money, especially if they don't correct those things that are pointed out by their own inspectors general or government agencies that look into all of this.
Today I am talking about the Department of Defense. They are not immune from issues of waste, fraud, and abuse, and we need to document those as well. One of the reasons we need to document those is they need every penny they have because their portion of the budget is continuing to shrink due to our dire fiscal situation. At the very least, we have to make sure they are not wasting money because it is needed to protect and provide security for Americans. This waste of the week involves expenditure in Afghanistan, where we have troops and commitments over there. They had a request for cargo planes. We need planes to transfer cargo between the bases and different parts of Afghanistan. So the decision was made to provide 20 cargo planes to fulfill that mission. The Department of Defense went to the country of Italy. Maybe they went to Italy because they are part of the coalition and felt obligated to buy some equipment from them, and so they bought 20 Italian cargo planes. The purpose of the purchase was to support the Afghan Air Force, and as I said to transport troops and equipment around the country.
At the time the Afghans had old, out-of-date, Soviet-era Russian planes and the Department of Defense wanted to replace them, so again they went to Italy to purchase these planes. The purchase price for 20 of these cargo planes was $486 million. That is a lot of money, but I am not here to say they should have paid less or should have paid more. That is what the price was and that is what they negotiated. This was documented by two inspectors general who looked at this program and said: Wait a minute. We have a problem here, guys. The first problem was they didn't buy 20 cargo planes, they only bought 16 planes. The price was $486 million for 20 planes, and somehow only 16 arrived. I am not sure what happened to the other four planes, so there were problems from the beginning.
It became abundantly clear early on that these planes were not made to fly in the type of conditions that exist in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has a lot of desert, sand, wind, and these planes apparently have all kinds of problems flying in that kind of atmosphere. You would have thought that since we were there, we would know this because our own planes fly in that atmosphere. I think somebody basically didn't do their homework and say: Before we pay out $486 million, maybe we ought to make sure the planes we are buying to replace the old Soviet planes, which we know don't work, can fly in the atmosphere here. Since we have had problems with some of our own planes, we need to make sure these planes are capable of holding up under these type of conditions.
As it turned out, they flew the planes for only 9 months, and in those 9 months they accumulated 235 hours of flight time, and one of the reasons for that is because they were constantly in the maintenance shop having repairs made because of the conditions they were flying in. The planes were purchased on the basis that they could get 4,500 hours out of each plane and that would carry a lot of cargo. I can understand why they wanted them, but because the problems they had were so extensive, it turned out they needed a lot of spare parts. When they looked in terms of what it would cost to buy new spare parts for these planes, the total came up to another $200 million. So on top of the
$486 million, another $200 million would have to be added to that. Since they didn't have the money to do that, they said: Let's take 6 of the remaining 16 planes off the airfield and tear them down for spare parts. So now we are down to 10 planes. We started with 20, somehow they only got 16, and now they decommissioned 6 planes and used them for spare parts for the other planes so they wouldn't have to spend the
$200 million. Now we are down to 10 planes at a cost of $486 million, but even after that they continued to have problems and so they decided to scrap the whole thing.
You would have thought somebody somewhere with different conditions would want to buy those planes. We are now down to 10 planes. Maybe they could have taken the spare parts off those planes and maybe salvage a few more, but, no, the decision was made to scrap those planes and decommission them. So they decided the next step was that since we can't use them, let's just tear them apart. This is a nice picture of what happened to the planes.
Here we have a nice pile of scrap. They said we have to salvage something so they said: Let's sell the scrap. We spent $486 million for planes that were sold for scrap. We sold the scrap for 6 cents a pound and we retrieved $32,000. We spent $486 million, decommissioned 6 planes so we could get spare parts, which meant we only had 10 planes, and since that didn't work, they just took a bulldozer to that, scrapped it, and now this machine is picking up the scrap and probably putting it in the container and selling it for 6 cents a pound.
I come down here every week, and these stories are just mind-
boggling. The taxpayer hears about these stories and some might say: In this atmosphere, maybe we shouldn't be exposing all of this. No, we are exposing it so we can stop this and have an efficient and effectively run government doing the essential things the Federal Government needs to do and not getting itself into this constant week after week after week--look, there have been books written by Senators. My former colleague Tom Coburn wrote a book about waste, which basically documented hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. He stepped down from office 2 years ago, and we miss him. I am just trying to carry on his legacy, probably in a less effective way than he did, by exposing what is happening with Americans' tax dollars.
Every day people haul themselves out of bed, start their coffee, get in the car, go to work, come home, try to save money, look at their paycheck, and when they see the amount of money that is being deducted for taxes, they say: Ok. Well, maybe that is what we need to do to protect our country and provide for programs. And then when they learn about stuff like this, they say: What am I going to work for, just to turn this money over to Washington so they can spend it and make decisions like this.
This is one of 40-some presentations I have given on the Senate floor, and I will keep doing this as long as I stay in the Senate because our people need to know and put pressure on their representatives. They need to think about this so the next person they elect to walk into the White House will hopefully have the courage to address our fiscal problems in a way that is not going to put our next generation in such dire situations.
With that, I add to our ever-growing list of waste, fraud, and abuse another $486 million for a total of $162,764,055,817. Think how that money could be used for essential items like Zika, Ebola, research at the National Institutes of Health, education, paving roads, doing infrastructure repairs--any number of things that need to be done, which is how that money could be better used than selling used airplane scrap for 6 cents a pound. Think about the money that could be returned to the taxpayers that they wouldn't have to pay in taxes if we could simply run a much more efficient, effective government.
Spending is a huge issue. It needs to be addressed in this election. The American people need to be aware of where we stand. Where we stand today is substantially worse than when I arrived to start my second term in the Senate 5\1/2\ years ago.
Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________
