April 24, 1978
Page 11264
MUSKIE ON SUNSET
HON. JAMES J. BLANCHARD OF MICHIGAN IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Monday, April 24, 1978
Mr. BLANCHARD. Mr. Speaker, recently the distinguished Senator from Maine, EDMUND S. MUSKIE, gave a very thoughtful speech on the current public attitude toward Government and the overwhelming need for us to enact meaningful "sunset" legislation. While his address would be relevant to our work at any point, it is particularly timely in view of the upcoming debate on the first budget resolution of 1979.
I would like to share Senator MUSKIE's thoughts with our colleagues, particularly with those who are cosponsors of my "sunset" legislation in the House — the identical version of the Muskie bill in the Senate:
REMARKS BY SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE,
ST. JOSEPH COLLEGE,
PHILADELPHIA, PA.,
APRIL 11, 1978
I want to talk to you today about the State of your Government in Washington — a Government of which I am now a part — and which your generation will inherit before the next decade is out.
The news I bring from Washington is mixed.
The good news is that for most of us, 1978 is a pretty good year. We are coming out of the worst recession since the 1930's. Unemployment is slowly but surely coming down. The economy is slowly but surely picking up steam. We are at peace abroad and at home. We have little immediate reason for complaint.
The bad news is that many of us are uneasy about the state of national affairs. Unemployment may be coming down, but inflation is heating up. Our most thorny problems — energy and inflation — defy easy solution. We are less certain in our optimism for the future — and more nostalgic for times now passed.
Much of our uncertainty is directed at Government as the cause of all our ills.
The polls tell us that even with Vietnam and Watergate well in the past, Americans continue to have little confidence in their Government in Washington. Three quarters of the people believe Government is wasting their hard-earned money.
We in Congress get particularly low marks. Only a third of the public approves of the way we do our job.
But the public is not the only one who's frustrated with Government these days.
For years, Presidents have complained that when they push a button to get something done, nothing happens. President Carter is learning this painful lesson now. He may be the President, but up against an entrenched bureaucracy, an Independent Congress, and well-established special interests, he is not always in charge.
And, believe it or not, some of us members of Congress are frustrated as well.
Over the last fifteen years, Congress has been at the forefront of tremendous economic and social change. Government has labored to produce a Governmental remedy to every injustice and need under the sun.
Clearly, the Nation has made much progress as a result.
We have made tremendous strides toward racial equality.
We have raised the standard of living for many poor Americans.
And we have provided health care to many who previously could not afford it.
Surely, we all have reason to be proud.
Yet today, our Nation has many unmet needs. And they bear a striking resemblance to those we first addressed through Government programs a decade ago.
Economic opportunities for blacks have increased dramatically. And yet unemployment among black inner city youth is a National disaster.
We have not yet eliminated poverty. Indeed, we have not even lessened the imbalance in income distribution between rich and poor to any great degree.
And we still have not cracked the fundamental health problem — providing high quality care at a cost all can afford.
We have pursued these and other problems at no small cost to the Federal budget.
And we have reaped an even greater cost, in the form of massive frustration with Government at every turn.
This frustration stems, I believe, not from Government having tried to solve problems — but from not having solved them well enough.
It stems not from a disenchantment with the goals we've set — but with a Government grown so large and ineffective that it is suffocating the very goals it seeks to achieve.
Finding a remedy for this frustration is the most important — and difficult — challenge to
Government today. For we have little hope of solving the truly serious problems we face — from inflation to energy to jobs — as long as Government bears this burden of no trust.
And I am convinced that we cannot meet that challenge unless Government is prepared to change its ways.
In my view, the task of meeting this challenge must fall first of all to the Congress.
It is the Congress which is the arbiter of national priorities, through the legislation we enact.
It is the Congress which is vested with control over Government spending, through the constitutional power of the purse.
And it is the Congress which has generated most of the activities of Government which now give us both hope and despair.
If Government has become unresponsive to the people, it is the Congress which must bear much of the blame. For it is our job not just to take the credit for new programs, but to see to it that all tax dollars are well spent.
Today, I believe that Congress is failing to meet its responsibilities on both important counts. Instead, we find ourselves increasingly unable to respond to problems which arise. For to a surprising degree the hands of Congress are tied by legislative commitments we've made in the past.
A brief look at some numbers from the budget illustrates the reason for my concern.
President Carter's budget for next year will be at least $40 billion larger than last year's spending total.
Of that $40 billion increase, fully three quarters is automatically committed before the first budget decision is made. That $30 billion will be spent on programs we call "uncontrollable" — programs which mandate certain benefits regardless of cost, and over which neither Congress nor the President has any control save through amending or repealing existing law. Uncontrollable spending includes such programs as social security, veterans' benefits, medicaid, medicare and welfare.
Only $2.5 billion of the increase in next year's budget is available for all other domestic needs — education, housing, mass transit, pollution control and many more.
More shocking than these numbers is the budget trend they confirm. Over roughly the last ten years, uncontrollable spending has grown from about 55% of the budget to more than 75% of all Federal spending for fiscal 1979. From 1968 to 1977, the budget grew from $180 billion to $400 billion. Of that increase, a staggering 37% went for three uncontrollable programs alone — social security, medicare and medicaid.
Meanwhile, other spending on which the public places a high priority has been squeezed out. For example, Federal spending for education has actually grown less than the budget as a whole over this same period.
Why doesn't Congress do something to rein in uncontrollable spending? Because most of these programs, in addition to being popular, are almost permanent. They never come up on a regular basis, for thorough, top-to-bottom review.
To be sure, they are amended from time to time, to correct the worst examples of waste. By and large, they are protected from the normal political and budget pressures of our democratic process. So each year we watch them devour ever larger amounts of scarce resources. And each year we are left with less room in the budget to meet changing national needs.
To make a bad situation worse. the meteoric rise in uncontrollable, spending is not the only factor tying our hands. Uncontrollable programs are the big ticket items, and so they command the greatest concern.
But the vast majority of Federal programs are relatively modest, short-term efforts aimed at a highly specific need. And today. these programs constitute a maze of government activity that no mere mortal can comprehend.
We have both health and community development programs in the hundreds — veterans and education programs in the dozens.
We have over a hundred different agencies with regulatory responsibilities. And twenty-two separate offices have health programs that they run.
In a single office in the Department of Housing and Urban development, there is one program to promote development in inner cities, and another to encourage development in the suburbs.
Of the many health programs we have, there are 29 related to cancer prevention alone. That ought to be enough to meet any conceivable need. Yet a comprehensive cancer prevention plan proposed by the State of New Jersey early last year has yet to be funded, because individual Federal agencies couldn't get together in a joint effort to help the state.
Legislation to remedy this kind of problem has seldom been used, because each agency insists on going its own separate way. Only one state in the country, for example, has succeeded in untangling dozens of overlapping planning programs into a single, unified plan.
In 1973, the Federal Register contained 35,000 pages of rules and regulations governing the way Federal laws are carried out. Only four years later, the size of the Register had almost doubled, to 65,000 pages.
Twenty-four States and 44 cities now have their own office in Washington to keep up with everything the Federal Government churns out.
And it's not hard to understand why. Many programs overlap. Others work at cross purposes to each other.
No agency knows what any other is doing. And until recently, many congressional committees did not even know how many programs fell within their jurisdiction.
In sum, over the last fifteen years, Congress has created an array of programs so complex that government cannot deliver the very services we've enacted into law.
What good does it do us to have 29 different cancer programs when they can't work together to do the job?
What good does it do us to spend billions to revive our older cities and at the same time encourage people to leave the cities behind?
The answer is, of course, that it makes no sense at all.
Why, then, doesn't Congress do something to make the system more sane?
The answer to that question lies in the way Congress works.
Over the years, Congress has responded to a host of individual problems and needs. We have done so with the best of intentions. But we have also done so one program at a time.
Today, our good intentions notwithstanding, we've accumulated so many programs that we have no idea how they all mesh. And we have even less idea how much the public's tax dollars have bought.
Pressure to continue all these programs is strong.
Support for reexamining them simply does not exist. Every agency, committee and lobby wants its own program to not only continue but grow. No one is willing to take the risk that fewer programs might be for the good.
As a result, we are all paying the price, in the form of government immobilized by the past.
As one who believes strongly in an active federal role, I am very much troubled by this situation we are in.
Our dilemma limits both present and future budgets — and the national priorities they define.
It denies Congress the money and the public support it needs to effectively carry out its legislative work.
It raises a particularly serious issue for your generation. For your future could be even more heavily mortgaged to the past, unless Congress is willing to mend its ways.
And there is another, more tangible threat which concerns me very much. It is that if Congress cannot bring spending under control, Government may well drive inflation through the roof.
In a recession, it is important for government to spend money to keep the economy from going dry. When unemployment is high, government spending replaces private consumption, which declines during hard times.
But as we head into an inflationary period — which by all accounts we are doing today — excessive government spending only makes inflation worse.
That means that over the next few years — or as long as inflation poses a threat — if we want to spend more money on a good program, we're going to have to throw a bad one out.
This is not lofty rhetoric about making government more effective. It is a hard fact of life — one that Congress can ignore only at substantial political peril to itself, and at devastating economic peril to the Nation as a whole.
With all this talk of gloom and doom, where should Congress go from here? For starters, Congress took an important step toward controlling government spending four years ago, when it adopted the Congressional Budget Act. In agreeing to budget reform, Congress for the first time committed itself to considering the budget as a whole — of setting spending limits each year and trying to abide by them.
As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee since that new process began, I can report that our experience so far has been mixed.
On the positive side, budget reform has dramatically increased the awareness in Congress of the costs of actions we take.
On the negative side, budget reform has failed to give us the discipline over spending that we need.
The temptation to always spend more on existing programs is irresistibly great. And in our yearly battle between the budget total and its individual parts, the parts always seem to win.
So the lesson of budget reform for me is that the process does not go far enough. For unless and until Congress gains control over the individual parts of the budget, we will never have truly effective control ever the budget as a whole.
Two years ago, I introduced a bill in the Senate which I believe can help provide the kind of extra discipline that we need. Known as the "sunset" bill, this proposal embodies a very simple approach. First, it would require that all Federal programs come up for review on a regular basis.
Only those programs which Congress specifically decided to reenact would remain on the books.
Second, the bill would require that all programs of similar purpose come up for review at the same time. This provision would give Congress much needed perspective on the entire Federal effort in an area at once, instead of the usual one program at a time.
When the sunset bill was first introduced, it had enormous political appeal. More than half the Senate and over a hundred members of the House added their names to the bill's support.
In the campaign of 1978, sunset was a ready-made issue for voters concerned about government out of control.
Today, that political climate has changed — and the outlook for sunset is bleak. Efforts are afoot in the Senate and House to do the bill in — and replace it with legislation which resembles sunset only in name.
And the closer we get to a vote, the harder it is to find the support we thought we had. Opponents of sunset argue that it will create a workload too great for Congress to manage well. They argue that termination is too heavy-handed an approach to encourage program review.
I believe these arguments are a smokescreen for other, more political concerns. The real opposition to sunset, I believe, is rooted in the very system which makes sunset such a good idea — a system that rewards politicians if we pass new programs, but not if we take some away.
And sunset, for all its ultimate promise, offers none of us the immediate acclaim we've come to expect.
Over the long haul, sunset can help free up scarce resources — and that will be a boon to us all. Indeed, that is the essence of my support and hard work for this idea for the last two years.
But others view the sunset idea as a threat to benefits they've fought hard to win.
I do not share their worry. And it concerns me very much.
Our national interests are not set in concrete. And we are not well served by a government which is.
We have a great unfinished agenda — one begun two hundred years ago. To fulfill it we will need to call on every resource we have. Today, we may all have to forgo something we want, so that tomorrow we will have the resources we need.
We cannot afford a government which does not spend our money well.
We cannot afford the inflation which will come if government does not tighten its belt.
And we cannot afford a continuing vote of no confidence from the people we are bound to serve.
Sunset offers us one of the few opportunities I've seen to respond to these various needs. It may not be a perfect answer — but I haven't heard anything better. And I think we ought to give it a try.
As widely as sunset is feared, it will not change the spending patterns of government overnight.
All it can do is open up the political process through which our democratic system works best — so that we can again have a government which reassures and unites the hopes of this great land.