October 11, 1978
Page 35497
Mr. PERCY. I concur with that. We all have great admiration for the teamwork that has been shown. I think it is really the Senate at its finest.
I have read books about great Senators in the past and great accomplishments in the past, but I think in retrospect this team of MUSKIE and BELLMON will be viewed as having established a process the leadership of which is extraordinarily hard to duplicate.
But I think if the Senator from Illinois has accomplished nothing else in his12 years in the Senate and in his work through the years, he will have contributed to this important budget process. We are very gratified to have had the opportunity to work so intimately with Sam Ervin, our distinguished colleague. He believed deeply in this process. He specialized in shaping budget impoundment control and, while Senator MUSKIE and I specialized in the budgetary process. I think that the process itself is more important than any single piece of legislation that just establishes a program which meets a specific, current need. The process on the other hand, I think will live forever. I shall make just a few more comments on the budget process itself and then comment on my pending amendment.
The congressional budget process is not perfect — we know that — for it is a human institution subject to all the frailties of human character. If Senators and Representatives are of a mind to exceed the limitations in the budget resolution, they can do so. If the members of the two budget committees see fit they can simply rubber stamp the OMB budget that is sent up here each year.
We could reduce the budget process to a shambles sometime in the future if we ever wanted to. Fortunately, we have not done that to date. There are few among us who would advocate that route, and our Budget Committee has installed a much needed measure of discipline in the Congress of the United States.
(Mr. SASSER assumed the chair.)
Mr. PERCY. Without the budget process this year, for example, it is not certain that Congress would have acknowledged the role its spending plays in inflation. The cumulative deficits of the past 3 fiscal years exceed $150 billion. This year, the budget process focused Congressional attention on the effects deficits of this magnitude have on inflation. The business community even feels the deficits are the sole cause of our present high inflation rate. But whatever the causes, the deficit does indeed play a major role in inflating the economy. Due to the budget process, we were able to cut the January budget's proposed deficit by 35 percent, by over $20 billion. This is a vast improvement over the $60 billion forecast by the President in his budget message.
Sunset legislation is a companion to budget reform. Together they can function to bring Government spending under control and, as I mentioned before, even rein in the deficit.
But the budget process cannot restrain Government spending alone. Sunset legislation is essential to serve notice that the Federal Government, which is now responsible for 22 percent of our GNP, has reached its natural limits in the economy. Programs are going to have to perform well because they are going to have to compete for limited resources in ways they never have in the past.
Writing in the September issue of Dun's Review, Walter E. Hoadley, chief economist of the Bank of America, touched on this issue in the context of proposition 13. I would like to quote a brief passage from his essay:
Since Proposition 13, there has been a freeze of state and local wages and salaries; revised tax revenue projections (lower at the city and county levels, but higher at the state and federal levels because taxpayers will have smaller real estate tax deductions); and a big debate over the magnitude of the state surplus for the year ahead that will influence how much expenditures have to be cut twelve months hence. There is also a consensus that California's overall economic growth and employment increase will be only very slightly impeded in 1978-79.
And then Mr. Hoadley hit the nail on the head:
Seldom before have government officials had to face the hard realities of setting major spending priorities. And obviously there's more ahead.
California voters have written the word in 10-foot letters for us to read in Washington.
I am delighted that the distinguished Senator from California, the assistant majority leader (Mr. CRANSTON) is on the floor today, because he certainly can interpret for us the meaning of proposition 13 and what it would mean to this Government.
Government must begin to operate more smoothly and in a more businesslike manner. Taxpayers will not stand idly by while more and more of our resources are consumed by State, local and Federal governments. Essential services, regulations for safety and health and some assistance for the needy are within governments' bounds. But if we are to avoid a curtailment of the Federal Government's role and the imposition of a rigid limit on our options, we must show the taxpayers we will act more responsibly with their money.
Sunset is a major step in that direction and I have been a supporter of it since the bill was first drafted in our Governmental Affairs Committee. It was reported by our committee only after a long series of extraordinarily good hearings, with private as well as governmental witnesses.
The necessity and urgency for this legislation is such that we can stand up and say to California, with proposition 13, and to Illinois, with its so-called Thompson proposition on the ballot, and to taxpayers' revolts all over the country. This is not an instant knee jerk response to something that has been thrust upon us in recent months. For years Senator MUSKIE, Senator ROTH, and
others on the Governmental Affairs Committee have been working on a process, beginning with the Budget Reform Act and leading to sunset, to find a way to eliminate inefficient, duplicative, overlapping programs that simply are not cost effective for the taxpayers. If we were spending our own personal money out of our pockets, would we spend it on some of these programs? Of course, we would not.
But Federal programs develop lives of their own. No matter how inefficient or ineffective the program, there are always a few people somewhere who will support and advocate it. Where are the forces to oppose it? Who is to rise up and say, "This is not really working"?
What we lacked was a process. Sunset,as the vision Senator ROTH and Senator MUSKIE had of this principle years ago, is the process that can bring this program review about.
That is why I say to my distinguished colleagues, the managers of the bill and other members of the Governmental Affairs Committee on the floor, that it is our responsibility to find a way to see that this legislation is not passed just in the Senate today, as it will be overwhelmingly. Who can vote against this if they have listened to proposition 13, and listened to their own constituents in their own States? Who could vote against it?
But the problem is not just to get it through the Senate. Our problem is to get it through the House and have it sent to the White House as a piece of legislation that can be signed by the President, not in the next Congress, but this year. None of us is interested in just making a record by saying, "Check that off; we passed S. 2; we did our job in the Senate."
Our job should be to spur the Members of the House of Representatives to consider this bill. Every Representative would be proud to take this legislation back home in the next 3 weeks, and say to their constituents, "We have responded to your wishes; we now have adopted a mechanism for ending ineffective programs."
It is our job to see that we get this to the House and send this legislation to the President.
There is our challenge; and I say the urgency of it is very, very great indeed. Sunset is a major step in the direction of responsible and responsive Government. It must be enacted.
Senator MUSKIE, who has labored long and hard to bring a well-rounded and workable bill to the floor, has recently made revisions which I support. I feel that one element is missing from our sunset legislation, however, and I am offering an amendment today which will improve the operation of the sunset procedure.
Mr. President, my amendment incorporates much of the Government Accountability Act which I introduced earlier this year. Representative BILL STEIGER is the House sponsor of the bill.
Senators LUGAR, BELLMON, and PACKWOOD are original cosponsors of this legislation.
Our bill — and this amendment — requires the President to submit to Congress a biannual report at the time he sends up his budget message. This report,which we have called the management report, will rank Federal programs by department, according to their effectiveness. All programs could not be rated in the same category. If an agency had 50 programs, it would have to list the 50 according to their relative effectiveness. Consequently, this agency would have 50 rankings.
This is an important part of my amendment because all agencies would have to sort out what their most and least effective programs are. The ranking would be inevitable and the evaluations would have to be made and not avoided, as is so often the case today.
In addition to this ranking, programs would also be rated as "excellent," "adequate," or "unsatisfactory." This is a type of report card that would tell us — and the public — how Federal programs are performing.
Some of us have served on the Appropriations Committee and we all serve on authorizing committees. We all know an argument can be made to justify almost any program. But this measure will require us to do what we all must do to manage in a proper way our own affairs. It will require Congress to do what every business must do in preparing its own budget for a calendar year or fiscal year. Under this amendment, the Federal Government is going to have to list its programs by department from top to bottom, select the one that is most cost-effective and doing the most good for the money being spent, and then rank the rest of them second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on.
The ranking will be done by each agency which will base its decisions on three criteria:
First, the clarity of the statutory design and objective on which the program is based;
Second, the design of the program as the agency has implemented the law; and
Third, the quality of the program's management.
The President would have discretion in designing the management report. He is required to give his reasons for the ranking and an assessment of the programs that Congress could improve on. Aside from these specific components, we leave the form and design of the report to the President.
The second part of the amendment directs the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to identify programs, including those of the independent regulatory agencies, that have seemingly contradictory aims or inconsistencies. In some cases, the OMB Director might find an existing but contradictory program arrangement beneficial, in which case he is required to explain the reasons for retaining the arrangement and the effect on the management of the program. In short, the burden of proof will be on the programs to prove themselves.
Mr. President, that is the long and short of my amendment. It fits in well to S. 2 and the sunset procedure. It enhances our ability to make the changes sunset promises. I would like to commend those who have generated this concept and helped bring it to our attention.
Both Representative STEIGER and I are indebted to Laurence Silberman for the nucleus of this idea. Mr. Silberman is no newcomer to the workings of the Federal Government, for he has served in the past as Ambassador, Under Secretary of Labor, and Deputy Attorney General. His article discussing the Federal bureaucracy appeared in the summer 1978 edition of the journal Commonsense.
Mr. President, I should also like to express my deep appreciation to my life-long friend and many times colleague Dr. Robert Goldman, senior member of the American Enterprise Institute staff, for his pointing out to me early on the importance of Ambassador Silberman's persuasive essay in the Commonsense journal. He has worked with me to find a practical way to bring it into being.
I would say if the Senate adopts this amendment and S. 2 today, and we later see it passed in the House and sent to the President before the end of the week,the Government Accountability Act will probably have had one of the shortest periods of consideration in the recorded workings of the Senate. An idea this good needs to be implemented and I give full credit to those who have conceived of it. Congressman STEIGER and I worked together to implement this idea and put it into practical draft language, but we wish to pay tribute to the original author of the concept.
In his article, Mr. Silberman points out that although there is widespread agreement that the size of American Government should be brought under control, there is no similar widespread agreement on what areas should be trimmed or reorganized to be made more efficient. In short, he contends, that "since there is no uniform method of evaluating programs, generating a national political consensus as to prime targets for elimination is extremely difficult."
The sunset procedure will run up against existing interest groups in its attempt to make the Government lean and efficient. The management report will help counterbalance the effect of the interest groups.
It is highly appropriate that the management report should be included as part and parcel of S. 2. In section 302 of the bill, for example, committees will have to include with their committee funding resolutions their plans for program reexamination. In addition to estimated schedules for completion of the reviews and cost of the reexaminations, committees are required to give their reasons for selection of specific programs. The President's management report will be a sound document on which to base reexamination.
Furthermore, the executive agencies are already peripherally involved in sunset under section 303, where they are required to report to OMB and House and Senate committees with recommendations for reexamination. Under section 704, agencies are given the responsibility of providing committees with studies and analyses which the committee may request.
My amendment is based on these premises. OMB already ranks programs for its internal purposes because it facilitates their own reviews. It is an essential part of the policy planning process and is even more important when resources are finite. Several former OMB Directors — George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger — have written me of their support for this idea and Roy Ash, also a former budget director, has told me that it is perfectly workable.
This is a final refinement of sunset and I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the RECORD a column by George Will that appeared in Sunday's Washington Post, endorsing this concept.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Oct. 8, 1978]
REPORT CARDS FOR FEDERAL PROGRAMS
(By George F. Will)
Laurence H. Silberman has a curry-seasoned temperament and a sandpapery turn of mind. He has been under secretary of labor and deputy attorney general. He was ambassador to Yugoslavia where, because of the attention he called to political persecutions,the regime considered him, to his credit, obnoxious.
Today he exemplifies one benefit the Republican Party has derived from losing the White House. He now has time to think and write about his experiences in the executive branch. And when, as is frequently the case, he has a good idea, it is his habit to share it evenhandedly with people who do, and even some who do not, express an interest in it.
His latest idea is to require presidents to submit to Congress periodic reports rating federal programs as "excellent," "adequate" or "unsatisfactory," and ranking the programs within each department. "The hard, miserable, squirmy but incontestable truth,"he says, "is that . . . we Americans cannot seem to eliminate any government programs no matter how wasteful they may be. This should be of equal concern to those who wish to maintain or even expand the present level of government as well as thosewho believe . . that government's share of GNP must be reduced. Indeed, our reluctance to initiate new programs is surely in part attributable to the widespread realization that a program, once initiated, achieves instant immortality."
Bills embodying Silberman's idea have been introduced by Sen. Charles Percy (R-ill.) and Rep. William Steiger (R-Wis.). These bills, designed to cause government to exercise what Silberman calls "constructive powers of self-destruction," will not pass this year, and if passed next year they will not cause the instant death of much, if anything.
The problem is the "iron triangle": the collaborative relationship among congressional committees that pass, bureaucracies that administer and constituencies that benefit from particular programs. Silberman believes that the way to weaken this. "tight-knit triple alliance" is to strengthen the large but diffuse part of the public that favors reform. This part believes government should be pruned, but cannot agree on where to begin. The Percy-Steiger bills would facilitate agreement by supplying what Silberman calls "a common evaluative language."
Eventually Congress may pass something like Sen. Edmund Muskie's "sunset" bill to require most programs to be reauthorized — or liquidated — over a 10-year cycle. The Percy-Steiger bill would require the executive branch to help give shape to that system of legislative oversight. Clearly, Congress must force the issue by compelling the executive branch to act.
Already the phrase "zero-based budgeting" has joined "free coinage of silver" and other slogans in the graveyard of panaceas. The Carter administration's capacity for pruning was revealed in its "new"urban policy which, as David Broder reported, "included 160 suggestions for improving old programs left scattered in five agencies," but not one suggestion that "called for eliminating any single existing federal program — despite the almost universal acknowledgment that some of them are real losers."
To the president who once asked, "Why not the best?," Silberman says, "If not the best, at least not the worst." Unfortunately, the hard, miserable. squirmy but incontestable truth is this: A "sunset" law might merely involve reflexive reauthorization of almost everything, and a government "report card" of the sort Silberman proposes might break all records for grade inflation.
Silberman remembers the professor who confessed, tongue-in-cheek, that he had failed to devise a way to produce a class without a bottom half. But egalitarians opposed to the allocation of rewards on the basis of merit have weakened academic grading, and they have counterparts in government. However, the Percy-Steiger bill's strength is its shrewdness about the nation's psychology.
The "report card" might captivate a nation that is fond of lists and rankings, such as college football polls. The "report card" also would please journalists who are happiest when regarding public affairs as sport. Even in Washington there is more interest in elections than in government, because elections lend themselves to sports language — who is ahead, who has "momentum." Ranking of programs as "winners" and "losers" would generate public attention. That would serve the public interest, which is the object of the exercise.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, this amendment, so lucidly explained by my distinguished friend from Illinois, is certainly consistent with sunset and hopefully will strengthen the prospects for its implementation. I could wish that I had had more opportunity to explore its implications in hearings, but if difficulties develop in the course of implementing it, corrections can be made. I think the basic objective and the basic purpose are sound and consistent with the objectives of the sunset legislation.
No piece of legislation ever achieves its ultimate form to everyone's satisfaction. I think as long as we are working on sunset in an evolutionary sense, and have been for 3 years, it is appropriate to add this amendment at this point. I am prepared to accept the amendment.
Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I would just say, Mr. President, I am happy to accept the amendment as well. It is an intriguing concept. It does offer a promise which is not in the present legislation of helping develop a consensus as to where there are areas for elimination as well as areas of concentration to move ahead. I am pleased that the Senator from Illinois has offered this amendment. I accept it.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the amendment.
The amendment was agreed to.
Mr. PERCY. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the amendment was agreed to.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I move to lay that motion on the table.
The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I would like at this point to express my appreciation to the distinguished majority whip who has taken his time at the end of a very busy session to help us refine this legislation. There were questions still remaining which troubled him and others. I know how busy he was at that point. But realizing how important sunset was, and from a personal point of view how important it was to me, he was willing to take that time. He so satisfied himself that the bill in its present form is sound policy that he supports it as a major cosponsor.
I am delighted to yield to him at this point for whatever comments he may wish to make.