Joni Ernst

Mr. President, Claims · 362 wordsduring my 12 years in the Senate, I have exposed many outlandish examples of government waste. For example, I uncovered that Washington sent nearly $500 million to China to pay for everything from poetry projects to dangerous research on bats.¹ Another $870 million of U.S. taxpayer money went to Russia.² This includes more than $770,000 from the National Institutes of Health sent to a state-run lab in Russia to put cats on treadmills.³ How did I uncover these crazy trails of money to our foreign adversary? It is quite simple. For 20 years now, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act has required unclassified government spending to be put online in a searchable public website, usspending.gov.⁴ This allows taxpayers to see for themselves how the money they are sending to Washington is spent. Bureaucrats, however, have been hiding tens of billions of dollars distributed through secret spending arrangements known as other transaction agreements, or OTAs, by not publicly disclosing these expenditures on USAspending.gov. The Pentagon alone has obligated $77.7 billion for thousands of OTAs over just the past 5 years through over 30,000 hard-to-track contracts.⁵ The lack of transparency with OTAs is having a real impact. According to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon ``cannot assess the extent to which OTAs are delivering capabilities to the warfighter.’’⁶ The Office of the Inspector General also found the Pentagon doesn’t even have an accurate count of OTAs or their dollar values.⁷ OTAs are also being used by the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation, Energy, as well as NASA. We recently learned that NIH’s new ARPA-H biomedical research contracts are being processed as OTAs through the Interior Department.⁸ This means if you want to know the details behind NIH’s biomedical research contracts, you practically have to be a data wizard and know where to look deep in the Department of--where did I say?--Department of the Interior’s databases. I know, it makes no sense. As we witnessed last week, we can’t get answers from Dr. Fauci about what NIH has been funding because he is hiding behind the Fifth Amendment.⁹ Taxpayers deserve to know how their dollars are being spent in Washington, Reasoning · 9 wordsand we have an obligation here to show them. Claims · 73 wordsIn June, the Senate unanimously passed my bipartisan Stop Secret Spending Act to require OTAs to be publicly disclosed on USAspending.gov just like all other government spending.¹⁰ I very much appreciate Senators Peters and Hassan, whose support was critical for making this happen. I was also delighted last month when the House approved the bipartisan companion bill introduced by Representatives Moore and Panetta, ¹¹which is now at the desk here in the Senate. Reasoning · 49 wordsWe all know Congress can’t agree on very much these days, Unearned certaintyso it makes a very powerful statement when folks on both sides of the aisle and from both Chambers come together by passing this transparency bill to hold Washington accountable for how Americans’ tax dollars are being spent. Claims · 91 wordsWith fraudsters stealing $1.4 billion every single day, we need this information now so we can account for who is taking tax dollars and why they are taking them.¹²Unearned certainty Earlier today, I attended the meeting of the Vice President’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud at the White House, ¹³and the success of this effort depends on being able to track how dollars are being spent. Unfortunately, some Governors are impeding anti-fraud efforts by blocking access to spending information about how tax dollars from Washington are being spent in their own States. Reasoning · 7 wordsWe can’t stop what we can’t see, The ask · 49 wordsbut we can do our part by passing the Stop Secret Spending Act today. This bill will end the secrecy about how tens of billions of dollars are being spent every single year. There are no excuses for delaying sending this bill to the President today to become law. Positioning · 19 wordsIn fact, the only reason to oppose the Stop Secret Spending Act is if you have something to hide.PositioningFalse choice The ask · 58 wordsAs if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 2069, which was received from the House. I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.