CALENDAR YEAR

First, the legislation would change the Federal fiscal year, which ends June 30, to coincide with the calendar year. The champion of this idea is Senator Magnuson. Under his leadership the establishment of a calendar year budget cycle for the Federal Government has been gaining considerable support in the Congress. I believe that in the previous Congress over a majority of the Senators cosponsored or expressed support for his proposal.

My first suggestion then is the improvement of the congressional budget process for the adoption of the Magnuson idea of moving to a calendar year.

Mr. President, the Congress has not completed action on all appropriations bills before the fiscal year for which the funds are being appropriated since World War II. In fact, less than 10 percent of the appropriated measures in the last decade were enacted before the start of the fiscal year. None were passed prior to the start of the fiscal year in either 1969 or 1970. We did better in the last Congress passing five out of 16 bills before the fiscal year in 1971 and three out of 12 bills before the start of the fiscal year 1972.

This, Mr. President, is intolerable. Delay in appropriating Federal funds is not conducive to planning or effective use of Federal funds. It is particularly disastrous for local education agencies and State and local governments. As a former member of the Maryland Legislature, I can say that knowing by December the Federal programs and their funding would be beneficial to the States in planning and budgeting for their fiscal years.

While there are many causes of the delay, such as proliferation of Federal programs and responsibilities, I am convinced that a move to the calendar year is an important first step in the improvement of our budget process.

BUDGET CEILING

Second, under my proposal, Congress would set its own budget ceiling and create a mechanism to make Congress discipline itself fiscally and make those hard decisions necessary in determining the country's priorities. This concept would work in the following manner. The Ways and Means and the Appropriations Committees of the House of Representatives, together with the Finance and the Appropriations Committees of the Senate, would meet jointly at the beginning of the new session to examine the President's budget and then make recommendations to both the House and the Senate on a budget ceiling. The full House and the Senate would then concur or modify the ceiling recommended by the joint committee. Once a joint resolution was enacted, however, the amount specified would be the spending ceiling for the year, unless Congress later lowered or raised the ceiling by a subsequent law.

My bill also provides a mechanism for forcing the Congress to abide by the ceiling which it set.

It does this by instructing the Appropriations Committee to determine the differences, as an average percent increase or decrease, by the congressional ceiling and then utilize such percentage as the guideline in considering all appropriation measures. Perhaps an example

would clarify the workings of this procedure. Let us assume that the budget set by the Congress represented a 10-percent increase. The Appropriations Committee would then instruct its subcommittee that a 10-percent increase was the general guideline to be followed. If, for example, the Interior Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee approved a 20-percent increase in the Interior Appropriations bill, and this sum were approved by the full committee, and upheld on the floor, the Appropriations Committee would then reduce the percentage guideline for other appropriations measures which may mean that the new guideline would be 9.8 percent. This proposal will result in all members having an interest in all appropriations measures, for an increase or decrease in one appropriations bill will lower or raise the percentage for other appropriations measures.

In short, Congress will be forced to face up to an unpleasant fact. Priority setting does not just mean passing, authorizing or appropriating bills with additional money, but also requires the balancing of the new proposals with other competing claims on limited Federal

resources.

IMPROVE OVERSIGHT

Third, the bill would greatly strengthen the legislative oversight role of the Congress. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 contemplated additional legislative review. While this idea was and is excellent, I do not believe that the act provided an adequate mechanism for achieving its goal. Therefore, this proposal is aimed at assuring an adequate, and not a cursory review, is made by the legislative committees of the Congress. It would do this by requiring each standing committee of the House and the Senate to establish a Subcommittee on Legislative Review. When a committee already has a subcommittee, with the responsibility with respect to a subject matter, that subcommittee, assisted by the Legislative Review Subcommitee, may evaluate the program or legislation.

However, if the subcommittee having jurisdiction failed to evaluate and make a report of its review and study at least once every 3 years, the Subcommittee on Legislative Review would then be mandated to conduct a review.

To make it absolutely certain that a review would be forthcoming in any event once every 5 years, the General Accounting Office would be required to make a study and report to the appropriate committee and the Congress if the review had not been done by either the appropriate subcommittee or the new Legislative Review Subcommittee, by the end of the fourth year.

This procedure will guarantee that the vital oversight function of the Congress will be accomplished.

FEDERAL PROGRAM EVALUATION DIGEST

Fourth, my bill would require the preparation of a Federal program evaluation digest. Presently, there is published each year the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. This catalog runs some 817 pages and lists about 1,200 programs. It has proved useful to our citizens and our communities in determining what Federal programs or benefits are available and how to apply for them.

I see the need in the Congress, and elsewhere, for a similar publication that, in effect, would be a handy reference guide for all Federal programs. The Federal Program Evaluation Digest, would to the extent feasible, be cross-referenced to the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance and contain the following information:

First, the name of the program, the statute authorizing the program, specify the Federal officials administering the program, and give a brief description of the program;

Second, the original purposes, goals, and objectives of the program, and any changes thereto;

Third, an evaluation by the head of the program on whether and how the purposes, goals, and objectives are being achieved;

Fourth, references to any study, conducted partially or completely with Federal funds, evaluating the program, and to the maximum extent practicable, references to any study conducted completed with non-federal funds, evaluating the program;

Fifth, the total administrative costs of the program paid out of Federal funds, the total costs of the program paid out of Federal funds, and the total of such administrative costs so paid as a percentage of such total costs so paid;

Sixth, the average cost to the program for each recipient; and

Seventh, cross-references to the program and matters related to the program which are included in the latest available catalog of Federal domestic assistance-including any supplements thereto.

There is a major distinction, however, in that this digest, unlike the catalog of Federal domestic assistance, would include all Federal programs and not just domestic programs except to the extent that national defense does not permit a program's listing.

How many of my colleagues, while on the Senate floor have been confronted with an amendment increasing an appropriation for a program for which there was no ready source of information that the digest would contain?

I believe that such a digest would be a useful and valuable tool for improving our understanding of programs and our ability to determine priorities.

COST PER FAMILY

Finally, the legislation contains a provision requiring all bills and joint resolutions introduced, and the report of any bills or joint resolutions by a committee to either House, to include the average cost per taxpaying family. While admittedly this requirement is gimmick-like, I believe it is needed and will serve an important purpose. Congress in recent years has passed various laws designed to better inform the consumer, acts like the truth-in-lending, truth-in-packaging, and others. This provision may be viewed as "truth-in-legislating."

This provision will require, that in addition to our taking the credit and heralding the benefits of programs, we also apprise the electorate of the program costs.

Perhaps there are better methods of computing the costs, but I believe that the thrust of the proposal is healthy for us in the Congress and good for the American taxpayer. As drafted, when a Member introduces a bill or an amendment, it would have to include an estimate of the cost of the legislation for each taxpaying family. This will be

calculated by dividing the cost of the bill by the number of Federal tax returns filed with the Federal Government for the preceding calendar year. As an example, for taxable year 1971, 60 million taxable returns were filed with the Treasury. Since there are on the average 3.6 persons per family, the number of taxable returns approximates the number of families in the country. This will enable the average citizen to understand what a proposal means and costs to him personally. The late Senator Ellender in a floor speech tried to help the public comprehend the astronomical size of the debt, which then stood at nearly $400 billion. In this interesting and colorful floor speech, Senator Ellender said:

If every member of the United States Senate counted two, one-dollar bills every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week, it would take approximately 64 years to count $400 billion. If the senators worked the standard work year (8 hours per day for 260 days a year) taking no coffee breaks, or holidays or vacations, it would take them 267 years to accomplish the same count. At its current capacity, it would take the Bureau of Printing and Engraving about 171 years to print 400 billion one-dollar bills. Four hundred billion dollars in one-dollar bills would fill about 3,456 railway boxcars, making a train almost 36 miles long. The 400 billion one-dollar bills stacked on top of each other would reach about 27,095 miles, or 4.5 trips from New York to Los Angeles. Placed end to end, that many bills would make a path, 160 bills or 35 feet wide, to the moon.

This provision has a similar purpose. While citizens may have difficulty in comprehending billions, they will readily understand the cost per taxpaying family. This proposal should make Members of Congress more cost conscious and think harder and more realistically regarding the authorization and appropriation levels of the proposals he advances. Authorization levels in particular, that Congress has been approving, are often unrealistic. As former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Elliot Richardson observed in a recent report:

Historically, one set of committees in the House and Senate creates programs and another set actually provides the money for them. The political incentives for a member of an authorizing committee is to pass bills with big price tags and much publicity to show he "cares about solving problems." Such an incentive does not apply to members of appropriating committees. Time after time the figures on the price tag are higher than anything the executive branch can in good conscience request, and higher than anything that appropriations committees are willing to provide.

There results, then, an "Authorization-Appropriation gap"-A gap which has grown by $3 million in the last year alone and is now over $13 billion. For the public, the authorization-appropriation process has become, in a sense, a shell game. Hopes are raised by attention to the authorizinjg hoopla, only to be dashed by the less flamboyant hand of the appropriations process.

Mr. President, over-promising in authorization bills leads to big disappointment and disillusionment on the part of our citizens. In addition, this part of my proposal would direct the Library of Congress to tabulate a total cost per taxpaying family of the authorization AMD appropriations passed for each week and a running year-todate total. These totals would be printed weekly in the Congressional Record as soon as the tabulation is completed.

As the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 1972 stated:

Any procedural reform that encouraged the Congress to be aware of the overall effect of their individual actions would have substantial benefits for us all." . . . "It would be a healthy discipline for Congress to ask each sponsor of a spending bill to also say how the money is to be raised since a government that is running a $40 billion deficit obviously doesn't have spare cash lying around.

Mr. President, the Nation rejoices over the President's success in negotiating an end to the long and difficult war in Vietnam. We all hope and pray that the peace will be permanent so that the "Generation of peace" about which the President has so often spoken will come

to us.

The economic news has also been very encouraging as we have had considerable success in getting the economy straightened out and back on the right track-1972 was a year of strong economic advances, increased employment, and a lower rate of inflation.

We are encouraged by the prospects of permanent peace and prosperity without inflation for our citizens.

A few years ago it was fashionable to speak of the "peace dividend” that would be available after the war was concluded. Brookings Institution in the book entitled, "Setting National Priorities-the 1973 Budget" pointed out that the surplus, for a variety of reasons, has disappeared. The Brookings study says:

On balance, the tax changes enacted during the past ten years have reduced Federal revenues substantially; full employment revenues in fiscal 1973 will be $27 billion lower than they would have been under the tax laws in effect ten years ago. Moreover, the recent reductions in tax rates and the expanded scope of the Federal Government's activities have produced a situation in which the annual built-in growth in Federal expenditures now tends to absorb a very large part of the increase in Federal revenues generated by an expanding full employment economy. Indeed for the next several years the growth in Federal expenditures under existing programs and those proposed in the 1973 budget may exceed the growth in full employment revenues under current tax laws. By 1977, revenue increases may have equaled the growth in expenditures, but they are not likely to produce a surplus for use in launching major new governmental programs to meet emerging national priorities. This situation is in sharp contrast to earlier periods in the Nation's economic history, during which peace-time economic growth tended to produce larger gains in Federal revenues than were absorbed by ongoing Federal