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“ISSUES THAT DEFINE THE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1586-H1593 on March 23, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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ISSUES THAT DEFINE THE REPUBLICAN MAJORITY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, I want to spend this evening's Republican special order hour talking about a number of issues that define our Republican majority and what we are trying to accomplish here in the United States Congress. I want to invite any of our conference members who may be monitoring today's proceedings and this special order to come down on the floor and join in this discussion if they have anything to add to it or to relate to the rest of the Members of this great body.
One of the topics that I wanted to discuss tonight is an effort by the administration to greatly expand the percentage of land in America that is owned and possessed by the government as opposed to private landowners.
I recently had a chance to go to Russia with an 8-member delegation, the purpose of which was to discuss national missile defense and the legislation that we just passed last week relative to establishing a missile defense policy. The absence of property rights there captured my attention.
In Russia, all land is owned by the government. Even since the fall of Communism, Russian politicians have failed to make the transition to private land ownership, despite growing public fondness for this dramatic step. As more Russians exchange ideas with the rest of the world, they are collectively coming to an obvious conclusion that government is a poor steward of the land. The sad irony is the propensity of our own Federal Government to ignore so self-evident a truth.
The White House has proposed a virtual real estate spending spree involving the government snatching up private land faster than one can say glasnost or perestroika. Well, perhaps it is time for a little honesty, openness and restructuring here at home, too.
Westerners bristled during the State of the Union performance when the President announced his land legacy initiative, a ten and a quarter billion dollar land grab. Remember, the Federal Government already owns 30 percent of all land in the United States and a staggering 50 percent of all land in the west.
Now add to the Federal estate, expanding land acquisitions by State and local government, and it is not hard to conclude that America's destination is the very point of Russia's departure. The Clinton administration seems bent on breaking this bond between the American people and the earth, the very stricture of President Teddy Roosevelt's 1902 Reclamation Act which opened the door for water development, irrigation and agriculture in the west.
The Federal Government is notoriously ill-suited to manage the land it now holds, let alone more. For example, last year, the General Accounting Office reported to Congress widespread financial mismanagement, fraud, abuse and so on, in the United States Forest Service. The Service could not even identify how it spent $215 million of its operations and program funds.
Similar abuses have been reported within the National Park Service, which spent $784,000 of taxpayer money on the construction of a single outhouse in Pennsylvania. The Park Service has built similar royal commodes in Montana's Glacier National Park, and last year congressional hearings focused on the devastating impact of Federal land use policies on rural communities. Testimony from county commissioners documented how designating more Federal land erodes the tax base for schools and other critical services.
The Federal payment in lieu of taxes program designed to alleviate these burdens does not work well, they said. Historically, America's land policy has always favored private property ownership but under the lands legacy initiative, choice private lands currently thriving in the capable hands of America's farmers and ranchers will be relinquished to the control of Federal land managers with Washington, D.C. agendas.
At a time when the agriculture economy is enduring record low commodity prices, Congress should instead encourage private land management through positive incentives and tax relief. Indeed, this is why I introduced the Family Farm Preservation Act in the 106th Congress, to keep family farms and ranchers productive and in the family, keep their ranches in the family. The bill exempts family farms from the death tax when passed to succeeding generations.
Congress should address capital gains and other tax burdens, reform the Endangered Species Act and more aggressively expand trade markets. These steps would enable America's farmers to continue providing open space and the world's safest and most efficient food supply. In America, the right to liberty entails the right to hold property, especially land.
American politicians and their Russian counterparts would do well to consider John C. Freemont's 1856 observation that the valves upon which this Nation rests are, quote, free soil, free men and free speech; or we could all learn to speak Russian.
Growing the size of the Federal Government is a general theme that more than defines just the administration's efforts on acquiring additional public lands throughout America and restricting the available lands for private ownership. Growing the size of the Federal Government is really what divides both sides of the aisle here in the United States Congress.
We heard the previous Members engaged in a Democrat special order hour on the House Floor this evening talking about the United States census as though the Constitution as it relates to the census is somehow irrelevant but what matters more is the amount of the public wealth that is redistributed to the rest of the American people on the basis of how one counts bodies. That is a huge difference of vision in what constitutes real freedom and real liberty as we head into the next century.
Our plan is something that is very, very different. It entails a bold agenda here on the floor of the House of Representatives, to talk about smaller government, to talk about lower taxes, to talk about reducing the Federal burden of regulatory law in the lives of Americans on a daily basis. It is a pro-freedom agenda, a pro-liberty agenda. First and foremost in that agenda is our efforts to strength Social Security.
The Republican budget proposal sets aside every penny of the $1.8 trillion surplus in the Social Security trust fund to provide retirement security to three generations of Americans. Seniors, baby boomers and their children can all count on retirement security without a cut in benefits or an increase in taxes.
This is the first time since Congress passed the Social Security Act back in 1935 that 100 percent of the money going into that trust fund is being set aside for retiring Americans. We, the Republicans, are putting the trust back into the Social Security trust fund. House Republicans plan to create what is called a safe deposit box, to put that money off-limits legally for the first time in more than 60 years. The Social Security trust fund will no longer be a slush fund for wasteful government spending.
The Clinton-Gore plan only sets aside 62 percent of payroll revenues for retirement security over the next 10 years, again, compared to 100 percent that the Republicans are proposing.
The White House proposal on Social Security and Medicare totals only
$1.68 trillion over the next 10 years compared to $1.8 trillion proposed by Republicans for retirement security on both Social Security and Medicare. I point out, Mr. Speaker, we accomplish this not by talking about proposals on the House Floor as we just heard a little while ago from our Democrat friends to grow the size of the Federal Government, to spend more money, to enlarge the size of the Federal bureaucracy. We talk about just the opposite and we do so because allowing the revenue that the Federal Government collects to be set aside for real priorities matters more to us, real priorities like saving Social Security and creating a solvent Medicare program as well.
In the fiscal year 2000 alone, the President's plan, their 62 percent plan, sets aside only $85 billion. The Republican plan, again, sets aside 100 percent, $137 billion.
Let me talk about how we accomplish this because we do so within an overall budget framework and a blueprint to allow retirement security for three generations, and historic tax relief.
When the American public put the Republican Party in charge of Congress in 1995, the annual Federal deficit was $175 billion and growing as far as the eye could see. In 1995, we promised the American people we would balance the budget and reduce the Federal debt. In 1997, we passed the balanced budget resolution and in 1998, just last year, we balanced the Federal budget. This was the first year the budget was in balance since 1969, the year man first walked on the moon.
We have begun paying down the $5.1 trillion national debt. In 1998, we paid the debt down by $51 billion, the first time in a generation a payment has been made on the Federal debt.
Just 4 years after being elected to the majority, we expect Federal revenue surpluses as far as the eye can see. With a strong economy, and the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, we expect over $130 billion in surpluses in the year 2000, and $2.6 trillion over the next 10 years.
This is only possible, Mr. Speaker, if we continue on our plan to shrink the size of the Federal Government, to slow the rate of growth in Federal budgeting, to stand in the way of efforts of our counterparts on the opposite side of the aisle and their liberal friends down in the White House to grow the size of the bureaucracy, to expand the scope of Federal regulation; and instead leave a greater quantity of the American people's wealth back home where it belongs, in the hands and in the pockets of those who work hard to earn it.
By shrinking the size of the Federal Government and by allowing the public wealth to be reinvested into the economy and in the American people, we allow for economic growth to occur at greater rates so that lower tax rates actually collect more revenue, not through higher tax percentages and higher tax rates but through a stronger, more vibrant economy, where private capital, private cash, is circulated over and over and over again to create jobs, to create economic growth and investments and other kinds of wealth and to allow our government to function as our Founders once envisioned it should.
That is how we create a budget surplus. That is how economists throughout the country have concluded that under a plan of smaller Federal budgeting and lower tax rates, we can expect a $2.6 trillion surplus over the next 10 years. That $2.6 trillion surplus is comprised of two elements. One, the on-budget surplus of approximately $800 billion as a result of working Americans paying Federal income taxes and other revenues. Under the budget plan, this 10-year surplus will be returned to working Americans as tax relief.
The second element, the off-budget surplus, comes from working Americans paying payroll taxes into the Social Security trust fund, money they expect will be there for them when they retire. The payroll tax revenues and interest total $1.8 trillion over 10 years. We are setting aside every penny of that surplus, the $1.8 trillion in the Social Security trust fund, to provide retirement security to three generations of Americans: Seniors, baby boomers and their children, who we believe should be able to count on retirement security without a cut in benefits or an increase in taxes.
I want to reiterate that this is the first time since Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935 that every penny of money going to that trust fund is being set aside for retiring Americans.
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I would like to ask Members to compare that with the White House plan on retirement security. The White House plan, and again, I mentioned this earlier, only sets aside 62 percent of payroll revenues for retirement security over the next 10 years compared to the 100 percent that the Republicans put aside.
The President of the United States himself just a few months ago stood right at the rostrum just in front of me and disclosed this plan as though it were something the American people should celebrate. In fact, many Members on the House floor rose to their feet in wild applause, suggesting that setting aside only 62 percent of the social security trust fund to save social security was somehow a good idea. I think for a day or two the American people may have actually bought it.
But as soon as the veneer was peeled back on that plan that the President put forward, economists and the American people in general realized that what the President had done was the same old Washington trick, the same old ploy of political partisans here in Washington, D.C., and that is to double-count imaginary money.
On the Republican side, we are convinced that the American people are fed up and sick and tired of that kind of accounting, playing fast and loose with their money. It is why we are so completely devoted to the cause of walling off the social security trust fund, keeping the Federal spenders' hands off of it, and preventing that social security trust fund from ever being raided by this government again. We want to set aside the full 100 percent, and leave it in the account of the social security trust fund for future generations.
The President's proposal, the combined proposal to strengthen both social security and Medicare, totals only $1.68 trillion over the next 10 years, compared to our plan of $1.8 trillion proposed by the Republicans for retirement security. That difference is a significant one, and it is one that every senior, every baby boomer, and every baby boomer concerned about the retirement prospects for their children should watch very closely.
Let me add two more points. When it comes to taxes, the White House has proposed a budget that raises taxes and fees by $172 billion over the next 5 years, which disproportionately affects agriculture, I might add, a number of agricultural financial institutions, insurance funds, as well as many of the supporting industries that farmers and ranchers rely upon; for example, herbicide and pesticide manufacturers and so on.
Now, the Republican tax cuts, our proposal is for tax cuts between
$10 billion and $15 billion this year, between $150 billion and $200 billion over the next 5 years, and $800 billion; when we add all that up, $800 billion over a 10-year period; once again, a dramatic difference between what the Democrats represent on the House Floor and what the Republicans represent in the House of Representatives.
The second key element of our agenda in Congress, particularly on the House side, is education flexibility, creating world class schools, schools that are second to none, and reclaiming our international prominence as a Nation of excellent educational institutions.
We will give local schools and school districts more flexibility to spend education dollars as they see fit. More decisions will be made at the local level where parents are involved, not here in Washington, D.C.; again, a dramatic departure from what we have seen represented through the U.S. Department of Education, under the leadership of the White House, and a new, bold Republican agenda that moves forward in a way that honors parents as real customers, teachers as real professionals, administrators and school board members as real leaders, and children as real Americans.
Too often Federal education funds are tied to the special interests of Washington, not to the best interests of children and teachers. Schools can teach our children more by cutting Washington's red tape and spending our Federal education dollars where the children need it, not where bureaucrats 2,000 miles away say it should go.
The Ed-Flex program, for example, a piece of legislation that we discussed again on the floor today with respect to some of the changes that the Senate made in a similar proposal, currently provides 12 States with the flexibility to wave certain Federal and State regulations.
Now, this is important. It is important because every schoolchild, every administrator, every school board member, knows the agony of complying with the rules, the regulations, the red tape handed down on high from Washington, D.C. to their local institutions.
The amount of Federal funds that go to schools is relatively small, on the order of maybe 7 or 8 percent at the most in certain schools, usually 6 to 7 percent in the average school district around the country. But in exchange for that relatively small percentage of Federal funds in an overall school budget, these administrators, teachers, and school board members are fade with an insurmountable burden of complying with mountains of paperwork that comes along with those dollars.
We want to cut those strings. We want to cut that red tape. We want to untangle the education quagmire that this Federal Government has created across the country, and move forward on an education agenda that is about the freedom to teach, the liberty to learn, treating parents like real customers and teachers like real professionals.
Mr. Speaker, I am joined by my good friend the gentleman from California, and I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) to add to the discussion.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I was all the way down on my boat on which I live, Mr. Speaker, and I heard the gentleman talk about private property in some of the agenda, so I put my tie back on, I think I got it on straight, and I even buttoned my tab.
I want to thank the gentleman for holding this special order, because there are a couple of areas which I want to the gentleman to talk about. One, I heard the gentleman on the social security issue. The other is where the President claims to put a percentage in Medicare, and actually draws out $9 billion out of Medicare.
When we talk about double-using figures in a budget, and the President takes out $9 billion and then puts in money, and then takes money out of social security and then puts 62 percent in, and he takes those billions of dollars and spends them on programs, then when it comes to our budget time he claims that we are cutting programs.
First of all, we believe in maintaining the caps. A balanced budget to us is very, very important. For those, it is not. We will see in every single bill except for defense that our liberal colleagues over here will increase spending, regardless of what the program is. They will pay for anything, a chicken in every pot. That is where our big disagreement is.
In the field of education, I was chairman of the Committee on K through 12 before I went on the Committee on Appropriations. GAO said that for direct lending programs, when it was capped at 10 percent, it cost $1 billion annually, $1 billion, not a million, just to administer it out of the government. That was when it was capped at 10 percent. It cost $4 billion to $5 billion to collect because the Department of Education did not have the collection funds.
The President wanted the direct lending program to go to 100 percent. I absolutely fought tooth, hook, and nail from doing that because of the waste, rather than letting it go to private.
The government shut down at that time. That was one of the President's key points. We got blamed for it. But at the same time, our leadership said, Duke, we need to let this go to 40 percent. I said no, I want to zero, because we can get more student loans out of the private sector at reduced cost, instead of having Uncle Sam here do it.
They negotiated, they let it go to 40 percent. They put in just a few language words in the bill that neither the President nor the Democrats saw, but it limited the amount of money that went to the bureaucracy. We added and paid additional money to the Eisenhower grants. We increased IDEA for special education to the highest level ever that was possible. As a matter of fact, I was the chairman that started the IDEA program, along with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Bill Goodling), and when I was subcommittee chairman we enhanced and increased student loans by 50 percent by limiting the amount of bureaucracy.
I think the overall aspect of the differences, as the gentleman said it right, we want to give people the freedom, instead of having government control their lives.
I had a committee hearing. We had 16 different groups come in, and each of them had one of the best ideas in the whole world for education programs in their district. At the end of the hearing, I asked which of the 16 had any one of the other 15 in their districts, and not a single one.
I said, that is the whole point. What we want is to get you the money directly, let you decide what is good for your particular district, because there may be a difference from San Diego, where the Speaker is from, and Maryland, or the gentleman from Colorado, and let the teachers, the families, and the community make those kinds of decisions.
Yet, the big government way would be to take all 16 of them, spread them out, give very little money for them, and defuse all of them. That is what has happened over the last 40 years here.
In the field of education, we want to get the money to the classroom. There is a bureaucracy group here that wants to keep it. I would ask the gentleman and I would ask the Speaker, I want to Members to look up on the Web page, and I will say it very slowly, www.dsausa.org. That stands for the Democrat Socialists of America.
In there, their socialist agenda is government control of private property, just as the gentleman spoke of, where the government owns over 50 percent of the State where I belong, California. Yet, they want to enhance it even more. They want government-controlled health care, they want government control of education, they want the unions to have power over small business, because they support big government dominance. They want to pay for it by increasing our taxes to the highest progressive tax ever, and they want to pay for it also by cutting defense by one-half.
In there is the Progressive Caucus. There are 58 Democrat members in the Democrat Caucus that are poster children in the Web page for the Democrat socialists of America, 58 of them on my left side.
They want government control of health care. They want to tie up all the government lands, privately owned, to government control. If they cannot control it directly, they want to control it with the endangered species, they want to control it with OSHA, they want to control it with EPA, whatever. This is not the gentleman from California (Mr. Duke Cunningham) speaking, but on the Web page what their 12-point agenda is.
Mr. SCHAFFER. If the gentleman would yield for a question, I just want to make sure I heard that correctly. He said there were how many Members?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Fifty eight Members, Democrats, in the Progressive Caucus that are listed under the Democrat Socialists of America.
Mr. SCHAFFER. They have allowed their names to be used in that official capacity?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Their leadership is by the gentleman from Vermont
(Mr. Bernie Sanders). He was elected as an Independent but is a practicing socialist. It is scary.
Mr. SCHAFFER. I want to talk about really the bright line that separates the kind of direction in government, almost the kind of government that defines us as citizens in America by its definition and by its action versus what the gentleman and I stand for on the House Floor as members of the Republican Party, because with that line, many, many people are persuaded by the media and others that somehow we are all very similar around here; that Republicans and Democrats, there is very little difference among them.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Eighty-five percent of the media around here voted for Bill Clinton.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Quite right. My point is that with respect to education, for example, if we just use that example for a moment, we agree in the United States that there is a legitimate role for government to play in educating the American people; that utilizing public resources for the purpose of educating children, the poor, the rich, and those in between, is a worthwhile public goal and objective.
Where we differ, however, is when it comes to the one-size-fits-all style of rules and regulations that treat the child in Washington, D.C. as though he is the same, as though he may live in Colorado or perhaps even in California; that across this great country, the same bureaucrats apply the same rules in the same way to the same level of expense, and it results not only in an economic model that cannot succeed and is doomed to failure from the beginning, but it robs the children of America of a rightful claim they have to a first rate education and freedom-based schools, and schools that deploy the concept of liberty in providing a whole assortment of educational objectives inspired by competition.
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That is something that is very different between the two sides. That is the bright line, I would suggest, that separates the two parties.
I am sure there are folks who are monitoring today's discussion here now who believe this is some kind of exaggeration. But the gentleman is right, there are individuals who primarily come from the opposite party who, on a daily basis, move forward on an agenda to consolidate the power of the people in Washington, D.C., to empower bureaucrats at the expense of American people, and to establish these gigantic bureaucracies that provide rewards for themselves politically at election time, but which are very, very different from the traditions that we have established in America over the 223 years since Independence Hall.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, look at the historical voting pattern of some of my colleagues on the other side. The President, when they took the majority, tried to get government health care. Not a single Republican or Democrat voted for it, it was so bad.
Throughout the years, they have cut defense by almost half, and they still want to cut it even more. If we take a look at their control over the public lands like the gentleman talks about, where over 30 percent in the country and over 50 percent in the West is owned by the Federal Government, but, yet, they want it expanded by more.
If we go down to Maryland and Virginia, we see expansive lands being soaked into conservancies which basically locks hunters and fishers and ranchers out of the land.
Then we take a look at education, the direct lending program. We look at why most of us were against Goals 2000. Send the money to a State. If they want to run in that local school district a Goals 2000 without all the reporting, then that is fine. But then even under Goals 2000 what happened, how they changed it when the Democrats took control, there were 14 ``wills'' in there. Under legal terms, ``will'' means you must. They said it was only voluntary. It is only voluntary if one wants the money.
Then they tied other grants that say, for example, if one did not have Goals 2000, one did not have all these other voluntary grants, one never qualified for these other grants.
I heard the gentleman say that Federal dollars only accounted for 7 percent. But that 7 percent, with all those rules and regulations, controls a large percentage of the State money.
IDEA is a classic example of how it is destroying and trial lawyers are destroying the public education system through establishing cottage organizations. Talk to Alan Burson. He was a former Clinton appointee, now the superintendent of schools. He said his biggest trouble is with trial lawyers and the unions trying to progress the California schools.
Gray Davis is trying to make some changes, the new Governor, Democrat, in California. I am doing everything I can to help them both, because they are moving in the right direction of freeing up our schools, of making a transition when, over 40 years, they want to continue the same thing.
We are 20th of all the industrialized nations, Mr. Speaker, 20th in math and science. California is last in literacy. For example, the President wanted a new literacy program. Three billion dollars in the last budget. It sounds great when one is last in literacy. There are 14 of them in the Department of Education. Title I is one of those. We are saying let us eliminate 11 or 12 of them.
Let us focus, instead of authorizing them here and funding them here, let us fund the ones that work up here and get rid of all the bureaucracy, because one is paying the salaries, one is paying the retirement, one is paying for the building, one is paying for the paperwork and the overhead; and that keeps the money going down to the classroom.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, the functional leverage that the Federal Government utilizes in many of these programs is something the gentleman from California referred to, or I guess the phrase he used earlier, and can be described in the following way: the Federal Government describes these programs as voluntary.
If a school district or a State or an individual school wants to use the Federal funds that are set aside for a particular program, then they have to comply with the rules. But if they do not want the rules, they do not have to take the money.
Now the fallacy of that is the origin of the money, because the money is confiscated from taxpayers back in the gentleman's home State and my home State of Colorado. We just have to visualize this.
If we had to draw it out on a flowchart and look at it on an organizational chart or a map, the Federal Government taxes the income of the American people back home in our home States. That money comes back here to the Federal Government. It comes to us as policy makers in a budget in an appropriations process. We approve that money for the Federal Government, for the Clinton administration. That fund has grown over the years. They take that money, which rightfully belongs to the people, back home in our States and say, ``if you want it back, then you have to accept these rules. But you do not have to get the money back.''
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Oh, and by the way, Mr. Speaker, we are only going to give them 50 cents on the dollar because the other 50 cents funds the bureaucracy.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, it is already soaked up by bureaucracy. If one wants a portion of one's money back, then one has to play by our rules.
They are more than willing to have one decline the rules in the program, because that just means they are able to give one's cash to somebody else and make them happy.
So that really is the fallacy that I think many on the liberal side of the aisle, the Democrat side, fail to see; and that is, this money does not belong to the government. It did not originate here in Washington, D.C.
We are talking about the hard-earned cash of the American people who work hard every day to make ends meet, to put food on their table, to put a roof over their head, to raise their children in a country that they believe to be an honorable and noble place in all the world. That is who owns that money. That is where it comes from.
The people in Washington take it from them and give it back and suggest that we are going to give it back with strings attached, and it just does not work. We are for moving authority out of Washington, D.C., empowering States which have the rightful constitutional authority, by the way, to manage public schools and to establish school districts.
I come to this microphone all the time and defy my Democrat friends on the other side of the aisle to show any reference in the Constitution to the Federal Government's authority to manage local schools. I submit it is not there. Not a single one has ever been able to come to these microphones and show where the Constitution specifically enumerates authority to this Congress to manage local schools. Yet we do it every day through these pseudo voluntary programs which are nothing more than Federal blackmail.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, let me give my colleagues another point. The President, when the gentleman was talking about taxes, I thought the height of conceit was the President first, when we wanted to give tax breaks back, called the American people selfish if they wanted their tax money back.
Just 3 months ago, the President, when he heard we were going to give tax relief to working families, said that he is opposed to giving money back to working families because ``they may not know how to spend it wisely.'' That implies government knows how to do it better. I just totally disagree with that. It is not their money. It is the people's money that send it here in the first place, and we should give it back.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, it was not government that created a great country in America. It was always faith and belief in the American people, the ingenuity of the American individual, and the abundant spirit of those early pioneers and colonists and so on that defined our country as different than the rest of the world.
It is an interesting thing that we often do not get a chance to consider too often here on the floor except for perhaps in these special orders, but in the Declaration of Independence, it was laid out very differently than the rest of the world had experienced up until that time, where we held certain truths to be self-evident, that we are all created equal and that we are all endowed by God with certain inalienable rights.
This is different than what the people of England had known, and it is different than, frankly, anywhere in Europe had ever acknowledged or any other great political civilization up to that time. For them, power always came from the government, and it was distributed to the people usually based on a system of favoritism of sorts.
But we decided it was very different here, that the people ultimately run the country. The gentleman from California and I, as individuals, not Members of Congress, but as individual citizens back home have a tremendous amount of authority that is loaned to representatives at election time.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield for just a second?
Mr. SCHAFFER. Certainly I yield to the gentleman.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, I see we have been joined by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), a member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I used to serve on the committee with the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) who is chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
The gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), along with GAO, the President's own department, identified 760 Federal education programs that take away, which is the reason we get less than half of every dollar down to education.
I hope the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) will yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), because I think, of all of the people in this body, as far as seeing the waste and fraud that goes on in education from the Federal Government, the gentleman from Michigan
(Mr. Hoekstra) has been there to find it out.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, it is my great pleasure to yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra).
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman and apologize for being a little late. I had the opportunity to listen to some of the gentleman's discussion on education. I think he was talking about land use earlier.
I thought it would be helpful for me to come and participate only so that I can in some ways learn from the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham), my colleague that we miss on the Committee on Education and the Workforce but who is now on the Committee on Appropriations. We actually have a great partnership in making sure that the dollars that we spend here in Washington actually get down to the local level.
The gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer) and myself have had the opportunity to go around the country, and we have been in 16 different States, we have been in the district of the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Schaffer), we have been in my district, where we have built a record of the good things that are happening in education. There are a lot of good things that are happening in education.
As we have been in Colorado, as we have been in Michigan, as we have been in California, Ohio, Illinois, Milwaukee, New York, we have been in Kentucky, the thing that we have seen consistently is that education excels when people at the local level are given the freedom and the latitude to take the money that we give them, and they all come back and they say ``your dollars are critical, and they help us do some things that we might otherwise not be able to do,'' but they say, ``get the dollars down here, but then let us have the flexibility.''
As the gentleman said, all these programs do not go to K through 12, the 760 programs. Some of them have nothing to do with K through 12 or higher ed. But we think that there is well over 500 programs that do go to K through 12 or higher ed. Each one of these are the funding stream. We call it a funnel or a silo. Each silo comes with a whole series of rules and regulations and applications. Once one gets the money, one has got to report back. Then one is audited.
That is why, like the gentleman indicated, we believe that, when the American people send a dollar to Washington for education, somewhere between 60 cents or 70 cents, maybe as low as 50 cents, only 50 cents gets into a local classroom and an immediate impact to a child. Fifty cents, 60 cents gets lost in the bureaucracy. It gets lost in the red tape.
We just appointed the conference committee today on Ed-Flex, which is intended to eliminate some of the bureaucracy, some of the red tape, and allow local school districts to make the decisions for the kids in their classrooms.
I think it is a real step forward and a real opportunity and one that I hope we can build on through this Congress. Ed-Flex is only the beginning of a process of not eliminating Federal involvement, but really recognizing where the power and this partnership is. The power and the partnership is at the local level.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would like the gentleman from Michigan maybe to discuss a little further, the Ed-Flex concept is one of essentially turning those dollars that we talked about earlier back to the States with fewer strings, fewer regulations attached. We are, perhaps, not to the point that some Americans would hope we are at where we could just leave that cash back at home in the States' pockets and let the States distribute these dollars directly without having them funneled through Washington and turn around and go back home to the States. But it is, it does signal a new direction.
Trying to accomplish things in this body is sometimes like steering a barge. It takes a long time to make the turn. But it does signal, the Ed-Flex bill that we voted on today, the conference report, it does signal a new direction in where the Republican is taking the country with respect to education, realizing that States, school board members, State legislators, Governors, teachers, principals, administrators of all sorts have better ideas than we do here in Washington, better ideas than the administration does in the Department of Education.
We can get these dollars directly to kids in a way that helps those children without encumbering those dollars and stealing them and having them lost in this mountain of bureaucracy back here in Washington. It is a new direction and an exciting one.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham).
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Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I know that firsthand, not secondhand. My wife is the Director of Administration at Encinitas Union School Districts in the State of California; my sister-in-law is the director for all special education for all San Diego City schools under Alan Burson, who I just spoke about.
But charter schools were an initiative to try to do that same thing, to take away some of the rules and bureaucracy. The National Education Association fought us tooth, hook and nail against charter schools when they started, and Governor Wilson really pushed those in the State of California, and they have been successful.
Another freedom that we would like to use is, and the President talked about our welfare reform bill, which he vetoed twice and he finally signed it, but we have less than half of welfare recipients on the roll now than we had before. Instead of the taxpayers having to pay out billions of dollars for welfare recipients, which the average was 16 years on welfare, that is how bad it was, now those people are working, pridefully working, their children have a chance in society, and they are paying into the revenue stream. And guess what? The States, the governors, who do not have the flexibility right now, since they have one-half the welfare rolls and they have the dollars, they cannot take those welfare dollars and apply them to education. We want to allow the States to use that, the governors, to take that money and use it for education.
I think those kinds of initiatives are going to improve our education system; freeing up the States to allow them to do these things without the red tape from Washington, D.C.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will further yield, we are shifting the barge, but there are powerful currents that are trying to put us back on the track that we have been in for the last 15 years.
Take a look at the debate we had on the floor of the House here today. In the Senate, on Ed-Flex, they added a very simple amendment. They said for those school districts, or for the school districts that are getting money for reducing class size, for hiring additional teachers, there is another mandate out there from the Federal Government, which is funding for children with special needs. We promised local school districts in the State, we did not, I do not think any of us were here when that mandate went through, but Washington said we will cover 40 percent of that cost for these children with special needs. That is a priority for us in Washington. We are going to mandate that the States do it and we will pick up 40 percent of the cost.
Last year, we had a record percentage that we cover the cost. We were all the way up to, what, 11, maybe 12 percent? Somewhere between 11 and 12 percent.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. The highest in over 30 years.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. The highest in over 30 years. And all they did in the Senate was, on the teacher funding, we know there is a tremendous burden on the local school for special ed, so we will give them the flexibility of either hiring teachers, because maybe they have already taken care of the class size issue, or they are struggling with a couple of different priorities. But rather than Washington coming in and saying they can only use the money for teachers, they wanted to say they can use the money for teachers or they can use the money for their special ed program.
And we had a fairly spirited debate here on the floor of the House with one group saying hiring teachers is exactly what they should do with that money and they should not be able to use it for anything else. Luckily, we prevailed today in saying they have the flexibility of using it for teachers or using it for special ed so that the local school district can make that decision.
I would think that local administrators, a local school board with parental involvement, is better equipped to make that very basic decision: Are we going to take this money and use it for addressing some of the needs in our special ed program or are we going to use it to reduce class size? Let the people at the local level decide.
We won a skirmish in that process of moving the money and the decision-making back to the local level, but there are many here who believe that we know best what needs to go on in the local school districts. I have this litany that says we have a group of people here in Washington who believe that Washington ought to build our schools, hire our teachers, develop the curriculum, test our kids, buy technology, teach them about the arts, teach them about sex, teach them about drugs, feed them lunch, feed them breakfast, provide them with an after-school snack and have midnight basketball. But other than that, it is their local school.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. If the gentleman will continue to yield to me for two quick examples. I want to give two quick examples in the way Federal regulations take the money away from the schools.
First of all, the IDEA program. We could put in more money. We could put the 40 percent. But according to Alan Burson, a Clinton appointee, now the superintendent of San Diego City schools, he said the trial lawyers are eating up the money that we are giving special education and we are losing good teachers because they are having to go to the courts. They are not lawyers, but they are being forced out of special education. Teachers that just want to help kids.
The second is that we had a bill that offered construction companies a tax incentive for school construction. The President vetoed that. We talk about smoke and mirrors, and they say, well, we are for the children. I asked them in the D.C. bill and also in the President's bill. He wants construction. He wants the Federal dollars to pay for it, not local dollars or tax breaks, because then it falls under Davis-
Bacon. The union wage. That costs 35 percent more than letting private contractors do it.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield only so that we can explain what Davis-Bacon is. Davis-Bacon means that there are bureaucrats here in the Labor Department who send out forms all around the country and say that in Detroit the prevailing wage for an asphalt layer is X amount of dollars, and in Holland, Michigan, where I am from, it is X amount of dollars. And then if the school builds a project using even
$1 dollar of Federal money, they have to pay these ``prevailing wages''. They are inflated wages.
I believe that the average age of one of these surveys is 7 years old. I mean it is not even up-to-date data.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. The point that is important is that it is an inflated wage. In Washington, D.C. we could have saved millions of dollars for waiving Davis-Bacon for school construction here because the schools were falling apart.
What I am going to do is offer an amendment. The President wants school construction. If he really wants to help the children, let us waive Davis-Bacon for school construction. Let the schools on the local level save the 35 percent and let them decide if they need more teachers, or if they need more school construction, of if they need money for special education. Give them the freedom.
Do my colleagues think the unions and the trial lawyers are going to support that? No. They will tell everyone they are for the children, but when it comes down to it, they will support the unions and the trial lawyers over the children, and that is what is upsetting about this. We want people to do it. They want to waste the money here through bureaucracy and they want to waste it through unions and they want to waste it through trial lawyers that take away the money we give to the schools.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think we need to take the same kind of fresh approach on education that we took on welfare.
In the welfare debate, if my colleagues will remember, the governors came to us and said we have plans and ideas to help those people who are on welfare, but we have to go to Health and Human Services and we have to ask for waivers. We have plans that are approved by our State legislature, a lot of times in a bipartisan way. The executive in the State has agreed to it, and we come here to Washington and we have a bureaucrat who says, no, we cannot do that.
Now, I have to say, wait a minute, who do we think is going to take better care of the people in our States, those who are elected and serving in that State legislature or in the Governor's mansion or some bureaucrat here in Washington?
We really need to do the same kind of thing on education, where there are governors that are coming here and they are saying we get 7 to 10 percent of our money from Washington and we get 50 percent of our paperwork, all of our rules and regulations, from Washington. We have some States that are experimenting with one form of charter schools, others are experimenting with scholarships to students or tax credits for extra instructional assistance, and they say we have great ideas that are having an impact, but the Federal Government is holding us back from what we really think will help our kids.
So we need to bring the same kind of fresh thinking to reforming education or the education monster here in Washington so that we can actually go out and effectively help children at the local level.
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I think we are on our way to begin that process, but we do definitely have a significant way to go.
Mr. SCHAFFER. I would like to point out, my colleague mentioned the welfare model as a perfect example of what we can anticipate by focusing on a decentralized strong State approach to education reform. Again, using welfare as a model, just even a year or so after the Welfare Reform Bill was passed, we saw headlines like these that I saved from Colorado: ``Welfare Rolls Dropped 25 Percent.'' That was in one year. Welfare rolls have now dropped 43 percent in 18 months.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would continue to yield, would it not be great if we did education reform and we started reading headlines that said, test scores improve by 25 percent, math and science scores up by 25 percent?
Mr. SCHAFFER. That was my point exactly. 6,730 fewer families on welfare. This was in Colorado. And this was just 12 months after the Welfare Reform Bill pass. ``Workers Coming Off Welfare to Get Job Help'' is another of headline.
I just use these as examples. Because what we saw is, when the Congress moved authority out of Washington with respect to welfare, put governors and state legislators in charge to apply local values, local solutions to local problems, we saw welfare numbers drop dramatically throughout the country, about a 35 percent reduction in the welfare case load nationwide, 43 percent in Colorado.
I again use that as an example to show that freedom works, that liberating States works. And we can see our low test scores come up if we give States the authority to help them come up. We can see crime in schools and discipline problems in schools be reduced if we give local authorities the ability to create and design programs that they know will work locally.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I want to play off the welfare thing, because as we are doing welfare correctly and improving the system, I really want the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) to reinforce the point that he made earlier that says, as we are reducing the amount of money that we are spending in welfare, maybe we are freeing up some of that money so that it can be used on education.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, I would. And not a single one of the Members that I spoke about on that DSAUSA.org and the 58 Members that are listed in that in the progressive caucus, not a single one of them voted for the balanced budget. Not a single one of them voted for welfare reform. They all voted against tax relief. And that is there agenda.
Mr. Speaker, this is an easy way to remember what we are going to do over the next 2 years, and I want my colleagues to remember this. It is called best schools in military. B is for balanced budget. E is for education reform. S is for saving Social Security. T is for tax relief. Schools, different from education, is the infrastructure in schools construction to get the money there to do that. And military is to beef up, which we have not talked about, which is in sad shape and emergency shape. It is our defense. Those are the agenda items that we are going to focus on in this next Congress.
Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, I once again want to reemphasize the general theme that we have spoken about tonight, whether it was the opening remarks I had made about property rights or discussion about Social Security, balancing the budget, tax reform, fixing our schools, or even providing a national defense, which is something we did not discuss much tonight.
But that is the focus of a Republican party who has taken the majority here since 1995 and moving forward boldly in an effort to get our Government back to its constitutional authority, to move authority out of Washington, D.C., return authority back to the States and to the people ultimately, to talk about strategies to decentralize education bureaucracy and move real decision-making back to our parents and school board members and administrators.
In the end, that is the truest expression of compassion and a caring, humanitarian, conservative agenda that we stand for here on the House floor, to treat families as though they matter, to treat children like real Americans, and treat teachers like real professionals.
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