March 22, 1974
Page 7942
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET ACT OF 1974
Mr. ERVIN. Mr. President, I wish to express my deep gratitude to the distinguished Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) and the distinguished Senator from Illinois (Mr. PERCY) for the magnificent assistance they have given in co-managing the bill.
I wish to express my gratitude to all members of the staff and particularly to Robert Bland Smith, Jr. and Bill Goodwin of the staff of the Committee on Government Operations for the assistance they have given me on the floor, and I wish to acknowledge my great obligation to Robert A. Wallace, consultant to the committee, and to Herbert Jasper for the assistance they have given me. I think as a result of the labors of these gentlemen and the two committees involved and the staffs of both committees, the Senate has adopted a bill which makes a long stride toward the effort to set up machinery by which Congress can do its part to put the federal financial house in order.
Mr. PERCY. Mr. President, my comments will be very brief. I know that all of us are very encouraged by the 80 to 0 vote on the budget reform bill. All of us would recognize that it is not a perfect piece of legislation, but it is a good piece of legislation as could be put together now, and it will have to evolve to meet the situation in the future.
Congress is all too commonly accused of inaction coupled with ineptness. We are accused of inordinate delay, verging on irresponsibility. I think my colleagues will appreciate the significance of the fact that we began this great effort of reform only 17 months ago, in October 1972, when the Senate adopted the Debt Ceiling Act of 1972 and thereby created the Joint Study Committee on Budget Control. We have acted with all the speed adequate deliberations would allow. And, I believe we have produced an extremely significant reform that over time will prove to be of revolutionary importance.
Senator ERVIN, our distinguished chairman, has observed that this bill is one of the finest examples of the legislative process in his experience. I wholly concur. In it we have accommodated the diverse views of all committees and Senators. Yet we have retained a strong reform bill. We have chosen responsibility, not irresponsibility. We have chosen a new course of concern for the people's money, rather than continued unconcern. We have chosen to regain control of our own processes, rather than to let our control continue to erode. We have chosen to strengthen our institutions, rather than to continue to let them weaken.
For me, passage of this bill today represents the culmination of 17 months of work toward reform. On October 13, 1972, I introduced an amendment to H.R. 16810, the 1972 debt ceiling bill, to provide for a Committee on the Budget and the setting of an annual spending ceiling that would govern all spending. Later, in February, 1973, I introduced a bill, along with my distinguished colleagues Senator HARRY BYRD and Senator ALAN CRANSTON, to provide for a new congressional budget process. In our Committee on Government Operations we created a new Subcommittee on Budgeting, Management and Expenditures. One of its major purposes was to develop legislation to implement the work of the Joint Study Committee on Budget Control by producing workable budget reform legislation. On April 11, 1973, I introduced with Senator ERVIN the bill we have just passed, S. 1541. I feel a deep sense of personal fulfillment and satisfaction that the product we have wrought has been so overwhelmingly adopted.
I wish particularly to commend the distinguished Senator from North Carolina for his leadership of our committee during a year in which his time has been full of so many other important duties on behalf of the Senate and the Nation. Next I think we should all acknowledge our debt to Senator METCALF for his determined and impartial chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Budgeting, Management and Expenditures.
The senior Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) has brought to bear his deep knowledge of congressional processes in order to fashion a more workable bill. Senator JAVITS is responsible for the bill's new emphasis on social goals and on public information about revenue losses due to special tax provisions. Senator ROTH and Senator NUNN have made a substantial contribution through their determination to enact a really meaningful reform. Senator BROCK has been one of the earliest advocates of reform and has contributed in many important ways to the advancement of the bill.
Finally, I wish again to call attention to the very distinguished Senator from West Virginia, the assistant majority leader (Mr. ROBERT C. BYRD) for his invaluable efforts directed at all times toward achieving a better bill.
Mr. WILLIAM L. SCOTT. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
Mr. PERCY. I yield.
Mr. WILLIAM L. SCOTT. I appreciate the Senator's yielding, and I would certainly add my commendation to him and the floor leader, the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. ERVIN), for the work they have put into this bill, as well as their committee. I certainly hope it proves to be an effective measure that the Senate has unanimously adopted. I have reservations as to whether it will prove to be the cure-all that we hope will be accomplished. I doubt that we are going to find that the Senate is going to live by the dates that have been set. I hope it will. I heard the distinguished Senator from Arkansas (Mr. McCLELLAN) make his comments some hours ago on this point, and I share his views and comments.
Frankly, I introduced a bill that would transfer the whole Office of Management and Budget from the executive branch to the legislative branch. In the event this bill does not pass, I hope serious consideration will be given to stronger measures, either the bill I introduced, cosponsored by the minority leader (Mr. HUGH SCOTT), or the measure which the Senator from Nebraska (Mr. CURTIS) has introduced.
The thrust of my remarks is that I hope this works. I have doubt that it will.
I appreciate the Senator's yielding.
Mr. PERCY. Mr. President, the concern expressed by the Senator from Virginia is well-founded. I know that the Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) and I worked hard on this bill for many, many months, and we had some sharp differences of opinion on approaches. While we had our differences on approaches, we never veered from the goal. I am glad to say that, after listening to the arguments of the distinguished Senator from Maine, I sometimes admitted that the opinions I had previously held and had been clinging to, receded.
But we are all concerned over the fact that in the last 5 years we have added $88 billion to the public debt, and if we include the off-budget items such as Ex-Im Bank and other Government-sponsored agencies such as the Federal National Mortgage Association, the total deficit in the budget in the past 5 years is $109 billion, all in a period of high economic activity. I trust that, now that we have this legislation, when we bring it out of conference in final form and send it to the President for signature, we will really look at the question in the spirit of what we are trying to achieve. What we are trying to stop is inflation, which is on the verge of being ruinous for the people of this country, particularly the low-income people.
I recently took note of what Dr. Arthur Burns, Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve System, said in a statement before the Committee on Appropriations of the House on February 21:
We have had deficits far too often over the years, and this pattern has raised serious doubts about our government's ability to exercise rational control over its tax and expenditure policies.
Since 1950, we have had deficits in four years out of five, and the size and frequency of those deficits has tended to increase over the years.
Numerous measures will be needed to restore general price stability. Among these, none is more important in my judgment than reform of the Federal budget.
We will have a marked impact on inflation if we have the will to restrain our expenditures and bring them more in line with our income; if we try to work together to accomplish this objective.
We now have an orderly procedure in which to do that. This measure was passed in the great tradition of bipartisan action by Congress. No ideology was involved in it. We recognize that we must find ways of putting Congress in order, and that we must spend the people's money more prudently. The procedure is here established so we can do that.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
Mr. PERCY. I yield.
Mr. MUSKIE. I would like especially to pay tribute to the distinguished chairman of the Government Operations Committee (Mr. ERVIN). Many of us undertook to make a contribution and an input into this legislation, but if he had not stepped in to assume leadership and to bring together potentially disagreeing elements in the Government Operations Committee, this effort might well have failed. He did so at a time when he was enormously occupied with the Watergate matter. This bill took a lot of time. He came in at the last moment, when he had not had the benefit of the background of the committee discussion that the rest of us had.
I would like to pay tribute to him and also to the distinguished Senator from Illinois (Mr. PERCY), the distinguished Senator from Tennessee (Mr. BROCK), and other members of the committee.
I would like to make this one comment with respect to the observations of the distinguished Senator from Virginia (Mr. WILLIAM L. SCOTT). What we undertook to do in this bill was to achieve a balance between imposing the discipline of established procedures without imposing strictures that would make the Senate restive and with which the Senate would refuse to live.
That is not an easy balance to achieve. We might have erred on the side of looseness; we might have erred on the side of firmness; but the objective was to strike a balance because, in the
last analysis, neither this bill nor any other bill that might have been conceived will work unless individual Senators in the aggregate want to make it work.
There is a framework here that I think is workable. I think it can be done. It represents a compromise, but I think the essential structure of what was established several months ago in the Government Operations Committee can be retained. Those of us who had a part in dealing with it to be sufficiently familiar with it believe it is workable. But it will not work unless Senators are willing to change their style of living in this body. That includes me, and I will not undertake to lecture anybody else. However, it is going to mean that we are going to have to keep our noses to the grindstone on a 10-month basis each year in following the deadlines to which the Senator from Virginia made reference. It is going to require that our entire office staffs are attuned to what is happening in the budget process for many weeks in a row.
That is not going to be easy to do, but I think it can be done. I think that with some 35 or 40 Senators, all told, now having had some responsibility for the bill in committee, and other Senators having had exposure to it for several days on the floor of the Senate, this vote represents an indication of a determination on the part of the Senate to make this process work.
So I move on to the next step with cautious optimism, I may say to the distinguished Senator from Virginia.
Mr. PERCY. Mr. President, I should like to say to our beloved majority leader that although we had a difference of opinion, I do not think we have a difference of opinion when I say that we are undertaking to ask our own Senate staffs to serve at levels of pay that are insufficient. The House has raised the salaries of its officers. I would hope that we could bring the salaries of our own Senate staffs up to a standard of living that is commensurate with their contribution and to the rising cost of living. We cannot ask families of our own staffs to bear this burden when for 5 years we have not raised their salaries.
Mr. ERVIN. Mr. President, this bill would never have reached the present stage had it not been for the diligent efforts of the distinguished Senator from Montana (Mr. METCALF), chairman of the Subcommittee on Budgeting, Management and Expenditures of the Committee on Government Operations. He conducted the original hearings, and in the development of the bill he manifested an earnest dedication to devising a workable piece of legislation. It is impossible for me to pay too high a tribute to Senator Metcalf for the great work and the ideas he brought to this legislation.
I would also like to say that other members of the committee, such as the distinguished Senator from Georgia (Mr. NUNN), did tremendous work on the bill. They all deserve the thanks of the Senate.