Summary:

All articles in Senate section

APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES
(Senate - June 22, 2000)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S5588-S5609] APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will proceed to H.R. 4577, which the clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4577) making appropriations for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies for fiscal year ending September 30, 2001, and for other purposes. The Senate proceeded to consider the bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all after the enacting clause be stricken, and the text of the S. 2553, as reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee, be inserted in lieu thereof, the bill as amended be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendment, and no points of order be waived by virtue of this agreement. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Amendment No. 3590 (The text of the amendment (No. 3590) is printed in today's Record under ``Amendments Submitted.'') Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am pleased to make the opening statement on the pending appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health, Human Services and Education. The subcommittee, which the distinguished Senator from Iowa and I work on, has the responsibility for funding these three very important and major departments. We have come forward with a bill which has program level funding of $104.5 billion. While that seems like a lot of money--and is a lot of money--by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's health, by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's education--and the Federal Government is a relatively minor participant, 7 percent to 8 percent, but an important participant--and by the time you take care of the Department of Labor and very important items on worker safety, it is tough to find adequate funding. We have structured this bill in collaboration with requests from virtually all Members of the Senate who have had something to say about what the funding priorities should be based on their extensive experience across the 50 States of the United States. We have come forward on the Department of Education with a funding budget in excess of $40 billion, more than $4.6 billion more than last year, and some $100 million over the President's request. We have established the priorities which the Congress sees fit. We have increased the maximum Pell grants. We have increased special education by $1.3 billion, trying to do a share of the Federal Government on that important item. We have increased grants for the disadvantaged by almost $400 million. We have moved on the Department of Health and Human Services for a total budget of over $44 billion, which is an increase of almost $2.5 billion over last year. We have increased Head Start by some $1 billion, so it is now in excess of $6 billion. We have structured a new drug demand reduction initiative, taking the very substantial funds which are available within our subcommittee, and redirecting $3.7 billion to try to deal with the demand reduction issue. It is my view that demand reduction is the long-range answer--that and rehabilitation--to the drug problem in America. We may be spending in excess of $1 billion soon in aid to Colombia, and it is my view that there is an imbalance in the $18 billion which we now spend, with two- thirds--about $12 billion--going to so-called supply interdiction and fighting street crime. They are important. As district attorney of Philadelphia, my office was very active in fighting street crime against drug dealers. In the long run, unless we are able to reduce demand for drugs in the United States, suppliers from Latin America will find a way to grow drugs, and sellers on America's street corners will find ways to distribute it, which is why we have made this initiative to try to come to grips with the demand side. Last year, we structured a program to deal with youth violence prevention. We have increased the funding by some $280 million so that now it is being directed in a coordinated way against youth violence, and some substantial progress has been made in the almost intervening year since this program was initiated. A very substantial increase in funding has been provided in this bill for the National Institutes of Health. I would suggest that of all the items for program level funding in this $104.5 billion bill, the funding for the National Institutes of Health may well be the most important. I frequently say that the NIH is the crown jewel of the Federal Government, and add to that, in fact, it may be the only jewel of the Federal Government. Senator Harkin and I, in conjunction with Congressman Porter and Congressman Obey on the House side, have taken the lead on NIH. Four years ago, we added almost $1 billion; 3 years ago we added $2 billion; last year we added $2.3 billion, which was cut slightly in across-the-board cuts to [[Page S5589]] about $2.2 billion; and this year we are adding $2.7 billion. There have been phenomenal achievements by NIH in a broad variety of maladies. There is nothing more important than health. Without health, none of us can function. It is so obvious and so fundamental. These maladies strike virtually all Americans. I will enumerate the diseases which NIH is combating and making enormous progress: Alzheimer's disease, AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, cancers--leukemia, breast, prostate, pancreatic, lung, ovarian--heart disease, stroke, asthma, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, autism, osteoporosis, hepatitis C, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, kidney disease, and mental health. I daresay that there is not a family in America not touched directly by one of these ailments. For a country which has a gross national product of $8 trillion and a Federal budget of $1.85 trillion, this is not too much money to be spending on NIH. We are striving to fulfill the commitment that the Senate made to double NIH funding in the course of 5 years. We are doing a lot. We are not quite meeting that target, but we are determined to succeed at it. This bill also includes $11.6 billion for the Department of Labor, an increase for Job Corps, an increase for youth offenders, trying to deal with juvenile offenders to stop them from becoming recidivous. There is no doubt if one takes a functional illiterate without a trade or skill and releases that functional illiterate without a skill from prison, that illiterate, unable to cope in society, is likely to return to a life of crime. Focusing on youthful offenders, we think, is very important. We have met the President's figures on occupational safety and health, NLRB, mine safety, and for a specific problem we have topped the President's figure slightly by $2.5 million, seeing the ravages of black lung and mine safety-related programs that I have personally observed both in Pennsylvania's anthracite region in the northeastern part of my State and the bituminous area in the western part of my State. I was dismayed when the subcommittee came forward with its budget to have the President immediately articulate a veto message. I note my distinguished colleague from Iowa nodding in the affirmative. He did a little more during the Appropriations Committee markup and not in the affirmative. I left it to my colleague to have a comment or two about the President of his own party. I learned a long time ago, after coming to the Senate, that we have to cross party lines if we want to get anything done in this town. I am pleased and proud to say Senator Harkin and I have established a working partnership. When he chaired this subcommittee, I was the ranking member. I like it better when I chair and he is the ranking member. He spoke up in very forceful terms criticizing the President, the President's men, and the President's women for coming forward with that veto statement when we have strained to put together this total bill of $104.5 billion, and it has been tough going to get the allocations from the Appropriations Committee. I thank Senator Stevens, the chairman, and Senator Byrd, the ranking member, for coming up with this money. When the President asked for $1.3 billion for construction and $1.4 billion for additional teachers and class size, we put that money in the budget. We did add, however, that if the local boards make a determination, factually based, that the money is better used in some other line, the local school boards can spend the money in that line, giving priority to what the President has asked for, but recognizing that cookie cutters do not apply to all school districts in America. We have structured some different priorities in this bill. The last time I read the Constitution, it was Congress who had the principal authority on appropriations. It is true the President must sign the bill, but to issue a veto threat after the subcommittee reports out a bill, before the full committee acts on it, before the full Senate acts on it, before there is a conference seems to me to be untoward. Regrettably, in the past, this bill has not been finished until after the end of the fiscal year, so we have been unable to engage in a discussion with the President and a discussion with the American people about what are the priorities established by Congress. I emphasize that this is a bill which receives input from virtually all Members. We have hundreds of letters which pour into this subcommittee which we consider, and the same is true on the House side. This is no small matter as to who may be assessing the priorities for America. For the President to say his priorities are the only ones to be considered seems to me untoward. That is as noncritical a word as I can fashion at the moment. I thank the majority leader, Senator Lott, for scheduling this bill early. We intend to conference this bill promptly with the House and have a bill ready for final passage in July--hopefully in early July--and then let us see the President's reaction. We are prepared to take to the American people the basic concept that if school districts do not need additional buildings, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.3 billion for something else. If some school districts do not have a problem with the number of teachers they have, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.4 billion for something else. This is a very brief statement of a very complicated bill. At the outset, I thank my colleague, Senator Harkin, for his diligence and his close cooperation in bringing the bill to the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Labor-HHS bill has reached the floor relatively early this year. In the past few years, we have been sort of on the caboose end of the train. It is an extremely important bill. It addresses many issues that are vital to the strength of our Nation--our health, education, job training, the administration of Social Security and Medicare, biomedical research, and child care, just to name a few. Given its importance, I think it should be one of the first appropriations bills considered. But this is certainly the earliest this bill has gotten to the floor in many years. I am thankful for that. At the outset, I thank my chairman, Senator Specter, and his great staff for their hard work in putting together this bill. As usual, Senator Specter has done so in a professional and bipartisan fashion. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his patience. This is always one of the most difficult bills to put together. This year the job has been especially difficult. I also thank the chairman of the full committee, Senator Stevens, and the ranking member, Senator Byrd, for their support this year. Their help has been invaluable. Before I say a few words about the contents of the bill, I think it is important to briefly discuss this year's budget resolution because we operate within its framework. I believe this year's budget resolution shortchanged funding for important discretionary activities, including education, health, and job training. The funds were, instead, used to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to give the Department of Defense more money than it even requested. Our subcommittee's inadequate allocation was the inevitable result of that ill-advised budget resolution. But that allocation forced our subcommittee to reach outside its normal jurisdiction to find mandatory offsets to fund the critical programs in this bill. Some may criticize the bill for that reason. Some of those criticisms are valid. For example, I hope to work with my colleagues--hopefully when we get to conference--to reverse the reductions in social services block grants. There are many good provisions in this bill. It increases funding for NIH, as Senator Specter said, by a historic amount, $2.7 billion. Education programs are increased by $4.6 billion. Head Start is increased by $1 billion. The $2.7 billion increase for NIH will keep us on our way to doubling NIH funding over 5 years. We are on the verge of tremendous biomedical breakthroughs as we decode the mysteries of the human genome and explore the uses of human stem cells. We are doing the right thing by continuing to support important biomedical research. [[Page S5590]] The bill increases funding for child care from the $1.2 billion level last year to $2 billion this year. The availability, affordability, and quality of child care are major concerns for working families, and they desperately need these funds. Only about 1 in every 10 eligible children is served by this program. These dollars will go to working Americans who really need the help. Again, I want to make sure the record reflects that last year, during our negotiations, our chairman, Senator Specter, guaranteed that we would have this increase this year. He lived up to that commitment. We had a tremendous increase in the child care program, and we thank Senator Specter for his commitment and for keeping his word to get that increase for child care this year. I am proud we could also increase funding for education programs by, as I said, $4.6 billion. That includes a $350 increase in the maximum Pell grant to $3,650, the highest ever. In this year that we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the bill includes a $1.3 billion increase in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. We have also funded a new Office of Disability Policy at the Department of Labor. At HHS, we were able to add funds for several other programs funded under the Developmental Disabilities Act. This bill also places great importance on women's health and includes over $4 billion for programs that address the health needs of women. I again might add that Senator Specter and I worked together on a women's health initiative that is part and parcel of this bill, and that is what that $4 billion is for. The bill also includes a $50 million line item to address the issue of medical errors and to help health care practitioners and health care institutions, hospitals, and other health care facilities, to begin the process of developing methodologies and ways of cutting down on medical errors. Medical errors are now the fifth leading cause of death in America. As we have looked at this, we found it is not just one person or one institution or one cause; there is a whole variety of different reasons. Quite frankly, I think our institutions and our practitioners have not kept up with the new technologies of today which in most of the private sector have helped us so much with productivity and which I believe in the health care sector can really help us cut down on medical errors. But that is what that $50 million is there to do. The bill is not without its problems. As I mentioned, we do have a problem with the social services block grant. Hopefully, we will get this bill to conference and we will be able to fix that at that time. Also, the provisions in the bill that have the money for school modernization and for class size reductions are not targeted enough. They are just broadly thrown in there. Again, we had this battle last year. When it finally came down to it, the Congress agreed with the White House, in a partnership, that we needed to put the money in there for class size reduction. I believe the same needs to be done for school modernization. We only put in 7 cents out of every dollar that goes for elementary and secondary education in America. We only provide 7 cents. A lot of that goes for, as I said, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A lot of that goes for title I programs to help low-income areas. When it is all over with, we have just a penny or two left of every dollar that we can give out to elementary and secondary schools. So when we put in money for school modernization, we ought to make sure that is what it goes for. Schools desperately need this money. Our property taxpayers all over this country are getting hit, time and time again, to pay more in property taxes, which can be very regressive, to help pay for modernizing their schools. As we know, most of the schools need to be modernized; they have leaky roofs, and toilets that won't flush, water that is bad, and air conditioning--a lot of times they don't even have air conditioning-- heating plants that are inadequate. As I pointed out, one out of every four elementary and secondary schools in New York City today are still heated by coal. And again, these tend to be in the lowest income areas. So we need to target that money. It is not in this bill. That is one of the problems with it. Again, I hope we can work that out as we go to conference. It is a national disgrace that the nicest places our children see are shopping malls, sports arenas, and movie theaters, and the most run down places they see are their public schools. Again, we have to fix these in conference. I thank Senator Specter, once again, for being so open and working with us in a very strong bipartisan fashion. We worked together to shape this bill. Overall, it is a good bill, with a few exceptions that we have to fix once we go to conference. I want to make clear, I support the bill in its present form. I hope we get a good vote on it as it leaves here and goes to conference. I reserve my right, however, on the conference report, when it comes back. I am hopeful we can get it to conference with a strong vote, sit down with our House counterparts, and work out our differences. Hopefully, we can come back to the floor having fixed the class size, school modernization, and social services block grant problems we have in this bill. I thank Chairman Specter for working in a bipartisan fashion. I hope we can get through this bill reasonably rapidly today, hopefully get to conference next week. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming. Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I call up the amendment I have at the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Wyoming [Mr. Enzi] proposes an amendment numbered 3593. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: On page 23, between lines 12 and 13, insert the following: Sec. . None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. Mr. HARKIN. I didn't hear the unanimous consent request. The PRESIDING OFFICER. It was to dispense with the reading of the amendment. The Senator from Arkansas. Amendment No. 3594 to Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment I send to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson] proposes an amendment numbered 3594 to amendment No. 3593. Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Mr. REID. I object. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard. The clerk will continue the call of the roll. The assistant legislative clerk continued the call of the roll. [[Page S5591]] Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, the amendment has been offered dealing with ergonomics, and it is not an unexpected amendment. This has been a contentious issue on this bill for many years. We have had the matter before. I have conferred with Senator Harkin, and there is no doubt we ought to proceed with the debate and let people have their say and let us see how the debate progresses. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized. Mr. REID. Mr. President, I want to make sure we understand late today that we are not the ones who have offered this contentious amendment. This is a very important bill that involves hundreds of billions of dollars. The two managers have worked on this, and they have a bill we can make presentable to the rest of the Senate. I just want to make sure, when I am called upon, and others are called upon, we are not the ones who offered this contentious amendment. We are not going to move off this amendment--that is the point I am making--until it is resolved one way or the other. If there is some concern about that, I think the people who want this bill moved should try to invoke cloture. It won't be invoked, but that is the only alternative. Amendment No. 3594, As Modified Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I send a modification of my amendment to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment is modified. The amendment (No. 3594), as modified, reads as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. This amendment shall take effect October 2, 2000. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized. Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, let me just make an observation. I hear the threats that they are going to filibuster this amendment. This amendment deals with Labor-HHS appropriations. The Senate has the right to vote on whether or not we are going to spend the money in the Department of Labor to implement regulations that have a dramatic impact on business, on workers. We have a right to vote on it. The House voted on it; the Senate is going to vote on it. We have voted on this amendment in one way or another almost every year since 1995. This is not a new issue. So now some people are saying, wait a minute, we are not going to take this tough vote. Didn't we just have a vote on hate crimes? I think we had two. Didn't we have a vote on campaign finance? Some people didn't want to vote on those two issues on this side of the aisle. Didn't we vote on a Patients' Bill of Rights? Really, what the minority is saying is, we want to vote on our issues, but not on an issue that is relevant. Every amendment I just mentioned was not relevant to the underlying Department of Defense authorization bill. But still we ended up allowing those votes. We didn't have to. Now we have a relevant amendment to the underlying bill, Labor-HHS, the Department of Labor appropriations bill. We think the administration is going too far in the proposed regulations which they planned on having effective in December--these regulations the Clinton administration is trying to run through without significant hearings and without oversight and real analysis of how much it would cost. Here is an example. On cost alone, the Department of Labor said--OSHA said--this regulation will cost $4 billion. The Small Business Administration, which they control, said the cost could be 15 times as much, or $60 billion a year. This Congress is not going to vote on a regulation that could cost $60 billion a year as estimated by the Small Business Administration? The private sector estimates range to over $100 billion per year. Wow, that is a lot of money. Shouldn't we vote on it? Are these good regulations or not? Are we going to be able to stop them or not? Do we want to stop them? What are the regulations? They deal with ergonomics and with motion. OSHA--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration--is saying: We want to have some control over motion, and we think maybe this is harmful, and therefore we are going to control it. It may mean lifting boxes, or sitting at your desk, or anything minuscule, or something large. The Department of Labor is coming in and saying: You need a remedy, you need to change the way you do business, because we know how to do your business better, and if it increases costs, that is too bad--not to mention the fact that they say we are going to change workers comp rules in every State in the Nation. I wonder what Senator Byrd from West Virginia thinks about changing workers comp rules in West Virginia. I used to serve in the Oklahoma legislature. I worked on those laws and rules in our State. Are we going to have the Federal Government come up with a reimbursement rate of 90 percent when our State already passed a workers comp rule of 67 percent? Does the Federal Government know better? My suggestion is that my colleagues from Arkansas and Wyoming, in introducing this amendment, have every right to offer an amendment that says: We are going to withhold funds on this regulation. We don't want a regulation to go into effect in December without us having additional time to consider it, without knowing how much it is going to cost. Maybe it should be postponed or suspended; maybe we should let the next administration deal with it. Let's vote on it. For people to say, wait a minute, we don't like this amendment, so we are going to filibuster--there are probably a lot of amendments I don't like. Are we going to filibuster all of those? I think that would be grossly irresponsible. We need to let the Senate work its way. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a question? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Would the Senator tell us under which Secretary of Labor and how long ago this proposed ergonomics rule was promulgated? How many years of study have we put in on it? Mr. NICKLES. The original rule came out, I believe, in 1995, and it made very little sense. The latest proposal had over 600 pages. The business community and others who looked at it said it was not workable. The Department of Labor has come back and said let's revise it and make it more workable. Did they show us results? No. They said let's overrule the States' workers comp. If this went into effect--and I don't think it will, so maybe that is why people don't want to vote on it. But does this Congress really want to overrule every States' workers comp law? I don't think so. I think it would be a mistake. To answer the question, this administration has been trying to promulgate this rule for about 5 years. We have been successful most of those years in putting in restrictions to stop them. Unfortunately, we didn't get it in last year. To me, it was one of the biggest mistakes Congress made last year--not stopping this administration. Now they are trying to promulgate the rule, I might mention, right after the elections, right before the next President. I think a delay is certainly in order. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a further question on that? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Again, it was my understanding that it was former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole who first committed the Department to issue an ergonomic standard to protect workers on carpal tunnel syndrome and MSDs, as they are called. It has been under study for 10 years; is that right? Mr. WELLSTONE. The Senator is right. Mr. NICKLES. I think he asked me. They may have been working on this Department of Labor takeover of, I don't know what--workers involvement. But they issued the rule on November 23 of last year--a rule that has 600 pages. They may have been working on it for 10 years, but I doubt that. This administration hasn't been in office quite that long. But with enormous expense. I think, again, we should have a vote. To give an example, I came from manufacturing, and we lifted and moved a [[Page S5592]] lot of heavy things. I don't really think somebody from the Department of Labor could come into Nickles Machine Corporation and say: Hey, we know the limits on what somebody can lift as far as pistons and cylinders and bearings are concerned. Therefore, we suggest you put a maximum on it. Or maybe every Senator--everybody has a machine shop, or every Senator has a bottling company. Somebody comes into the Senate every day and loads the Coke machines and the Pepsi machines. This rule says that you can't lift that many cases; that you can't lift two cases at once, or one case, or maybe you can only lift a six- pack or something. The net result would be an estimate that bottlers would have to hire twice as many people. Maybe this is an employment bill. My point is you could increase costs dramatically with draconian results without even knowing what we are doing. I think a delay and not to have a regulation with this kind of economic consequence coming right after the election and right before the swearing in of a new administration makes good sense. Let's postpone this until the next administration. I thank my colleagues for their efforts. I yield the floor. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, my colleague has the floor. But could I have my colleagues' forbearance for a 15-second request? Mr. President, I would like to respond to some of what was said by the Senator from Oklahoma; in other words, after Senator Enzi, and go back and forth on this, pro-con. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my speech, Senator Wellstone be recognized as ranking member of the subcommittee that deals with this, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Hutchinson be allowed to follow that. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Allard). Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member. This is not a new issue for either of us. We have been holding hearings on it. It has been in the press. We both knew about it. He was here to debate it. This is not a surprise. I am pleased that I am going to be able to make my floor statement. I think perhaps after the floor statement maybe the other side would like to join me in proposing this amendment. I think there will definitely be additional Members who will want to join me in this. Mr. President, I rose today and offered an amendment that simply prohibits the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, from expending funds to finalize its proposed ergonomics rule for 1 year. It was mentioned before that last year we didn't get a prohibition against them proceeding with it. You will hear in a bit how much that little error has cost us. But before I tell you why this amendment is critically necessary, I want to tell you what this amendment is not about. This amendment is not about whether or not OSHA should have any ergonomics rule. It is not a prohibition on ergonomics regulations generally. And it is most definitely not a dispute over the importance of protecting American workers. Clearly protecting workplace safety and health is of paramount importance. As the chairman of the subcommittee that deals with worker safety, I feel a special responsibility to oversee the agency charged with safeguarding these workers. But I am not fulfilling this responsibility if I merely rubber stamp anything OSHA does just because OSHA says it is acting in the interest of worker safety and health. I have a duty to make certain that OSHA is acting responsibly, appropriately, and in the best interests of workplace safety and health. Sadly, OSHA has not done so with this proposed ergonomic rule. That is what this amendment is about. Because of this rule and the way OSHA is going about it, the amendment merely requires that OSHA wait a reasonable 1-year period before issuing a final ergonomics rule. That is to keep OSHA from making drastic mistakes to add to those already made. Let me tell you why it is imperative that Congress act now to require OSHA to take this reasonable additional amount of time for this rulemaking. In a nutshell, OSHA is using questionable rulemaking procedures; OSHA omitted the analysis of the economic impact; OSHA hasn't resolved conflicting laws; and this rule infringes on State workers compensation--to name a few of the problems that riddle this overly ambitious rule. OSHA's haste to get through the rulemaking process is very clear. The rule OSHA has proposed is arguably the largest, broadest, most onerous and most expensive rule in the history of the agency--probably any agency. But OSHA has made it very clear that it intends to finalize the rule this year--just over a year from the time the proposed rule was published. This narrow-minded commitment to year's end can only mean that OSHA has already made up its mind in favor of the rule and thinks it will leave a mammoth and far-reaching legacy for the current Presidential administration. I would suggest it will be closer to the legacy of the OSHA home office inspections. Perhaps you remember the letter issued by OSHA about the time we left for Christmas recess, the one that suggested OSHA was going to go into each home where people work and look for safety violations. From the time we found out about it, it only took 48 hours to see how far- reaching, imposing, and stupid that decision was. Of course, the whole Nation realized the implications of the home inspections even quicker. I am extremely concerned that OSHA is blinded by the motivation to get it done during this administration and is not taking the time to carefully consider all the aspects and effects of this important rule. For example, the public comment period for the proposed rule was much shorter than OSHA typically permits--even for much less significant rules. OSHA has never before finalized such a significant rule in a year's time. Moreover, in its haste to get through this rulemaking process, OSHA, until recently, omitted an analysis of the economic impact of the rule on the U.S. Postal Service, on State and local government employees in State plans, and on railroad employees--all together, over 10 million employees. These aren't optional economic impacts. These are mandatory, in light of the dollars involved. OSHA is apparently so busy with other things that it did not do the analysis for these entities until the end of last month, despite the fact that the Postal Service requested an analysis 5 months prior. To add insult to injury, OSHA has only given these folks 2\1/2\ months to comment on the complex analysis that OSHA forgot to do, and OSHA won't even consider extending the overall comment deadline for these folks. It is because they are trying to get it done this year. They have had 5 months to prepare it, and they tell the Postal Service that they have to analyze it in 2\1/2\ months--no extension. Even more troubling than the fact that OSHA is rushing the rule is the way OSHA is going about it. OSHA's ambitions with this rule are so big and overreaching that OSHA has truly bitten off more than it can chew, and may be playing fast and loose with the rulemaking process and your tax dollars. In fact, OSHA has bitten off so much with this rule that it is apparently paying others to chew for it--too big a bite. They can't chew it all. So to make it happen in 1 year, they are going to pay others to do some of their chewing. I use the word ``apparently'' because of the difficulty getting answers. Responding to inquiries first made by Congressman David McIntosh, OSHA recently disclosed that it has paid at least 70 contractors a total of $1.75 million--almost $2 million--to help it with the ergonomics rulemaking. They are paying these contractors with our tax dollars in order to speed the process up on a bad rule. Congressman McIntosh's staff discovered that OSHA may have failed to disclose an additional 47 contracts for who knows how much more money. OSHA's own documentation reveals that it paid 28 contractors $10,000 each to testify at the public rulemaking hearing. Going through some of the accounting information, I even noticed that one contractor had turned in an [[Page S5593]] itemized bill for less--and was still paid the $10,000. When I asked OSHA for evidence of public notification that it was paying these witnesses, OSHA gave me none. I am very concerned that OSHA is paying so much money for outside contracts for this rulemaking that I intend to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of this issue. Let me state things I already know. I think you will be convinced, as I am, that we absolutely need to put the brakes on this rulemaking and force OSHA to straighten this mess out before it finalizes the rule. First, OSHA does not seem to want to have me have this information. Some of it is just good accounting stuff. As the only accountant in the Senate, I am really interested. I have requested documents from OSHA that would give a clear picture of its relationship with some of these contractors, but OSHA has so far refused to give them to me, claiming a ``privilege.'' That applies to private citizens, not to Congress. We have the right to know where the dollars that we are spending go, unequivocally. Now, Congressman McIntosh has been able to obtain some key documents from the contractors themselves, but OSHA placed strict constraints on Congressman McIntosh's ability to share them with fellow lawmakers. This is stuff that came from the contractors, and OSHA can still get its hands in and keep us from using it the way it ought to be used. OSHA did grudgingly agree that I could look at the documents--not take them or copy them or quote from them--but only in Congressman McIntosh's office. When I asked OSHA, as a courtesy, to permit Congressman McIntosh's staff member, Barbara Kahlow, to bring the documents to me, just to look at them, abiding by the rules, OSHA said no. I am so concerned about this issue that I went over to Congressman McIntosh's office last night after I finished working at the Senate to look at these documents for myself. Now, fortunately, Congressman McIntosh's negotiations made that possible. Can anyone believe that documents concerning money we are spending have to have special negotiations before I can look at them? It comes under my committee. I am in charge of the oversight on that committee. Let me recap that: I was told that the contracts and expenditures are privileged. I was told that information couldn't be brought to my office. I was told I could not copy any information. I was told I could not quote any information. I was told that I couldn't quote from the documents. I had to use extra time to go to the House side to even see those documents. I am not afraid of a little walk over to the House. I just couldn't understand why OSHA was going to so much trouble to keep the documents from me. I physically went to Congressman McIntosh's office last night and looked at the documents. Because of OSHA, I can't quote these documents. I can't show you copies. But I can tell you what I saw. I saw that not only did OSHA pay 28 expert witnesses $10,000 a pop, and one of them didn't even ask for that much, it also appears that OSHA did the following: OSHA gave detailed outlines to at least some of the witnesses telling them what they were to say in the testimony; second, they had OSHA lawyers tell at least one expert witness that they wanted a stronger statement from the witness regarding the role of physical factors. That is an important scientific issue. These are supposed to be experts. They told him to make it stronger. Third, heavily edited testimony of at least some of the witnesses is evidenced. OSHA held practice sessions to coach the witnesses in their testimony. I have never heard of that around here. This sounds a lot like OSHA told its expert witnesses what to say. This sounds like OSHA made up its mind a long time ago in favor, and has been stacking the evidence to support its position. I respect OSHA's need to enlist expert assistance in technical or scientific rulemaking. I expect them to get the right information. I would like to think it wasn't biased when they got it. And I have to say, I don't respect any agency paying witnesses to say what the agency tells them to say, and then holding the witnesses' testimony up as ``best available evidence.'' Best available evidence is what the OSH Act requires to support this standard. It doesn't say anything about paying witnesses or coaching witnesses. It doesn't say anything about telling them to change their testimony. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence that it is promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, so OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? That has been the problem with the past years of looking at regulating ergonomics. OSHA makes up the rules. OSHA does the tests. OSHA says their tests are good. OSHA gets ready to propose a rule and realizes they have made a drastic mistake. That has happened in the past. That is why this little document is the first published proposed ergonomics regulation. It didn't happen until November of last year. This document, this is the first time we have gotten a look at this document. It is the first time it has been officially printed. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence in its promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, and has already told them what to say, so that OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? No wonder OSHA has promulgated such a greedy, overreaching rule. Maybe I could pass all the OSHA reform legislation I wanted if I could pay 28 witnesses $10,000 apiece to come in and say what I wanted them to say in my hearings. Does that seem like a conflict of interest? I wouldn't do things that way. In fact, we had a hearing recently about one of the most objectionable parts of this rule, the work restriction protection provisions. I will talk about those in a few minutes. We had to tell one of the witnesses we selected that we couldn't pay his transportation costs--not a $10,000 bonus to testify; we couldn't pay his transportation costs. We did this in part for financial reasons and in part because we wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety that can result from spending taxpayers' dollars on a witness who is supposed to be giving an unbiased opinion. This witness came to Washington anyway--on his own dime. He didn't have his State pay for it. He paid for it out of his pocket to testify at my hearing because he felt so strongly about the terrible effects of this ergonomics rule. Needless to say, I am very disturbed by what I have seen to date about this issue. OSHA's response is that it has always paid witnesses for their testimony. I can't find that in any public documents. I can't find that disclosure. I can't find where they actually said that they were paying them, and this was paid testimony. It seems that ought to be disclosed. Whether or not this is true, it remains to be seen whether OSHA has ever paid this many witnesses this much money and participated this thoroughly in crafting the substance of a witness' testimony. OSHA has also tried to give me the typical excuse of a teenager caught doing something wrong: Hey, everybody is doing it. To that, let me first respond with the typical, but sage parental response: If everybody were jumping off a bridge, would OSHA jump off a bridge, too? That doesn't sound like good safety to me. Second, everybody is most certainly not doing it. Representatives of both the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, two agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, dealing with scientific things, have stated publicly that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. Let me say that again. The Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, have stated publicly--you can read it in the paper--that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. As the DOT general counsel put it ``Paying experts would not get us what we need to know.'' Finally, just because OSHA may have these things in the past, in my book that does not make this practice OK in this instance. On the contrary, it [[Page S5594]] makes any other instances of witness coaching equally objectionable. Two wrongs don't make a right. We can't do anything about past rulemakings, but we can do something about this one--if we act now. Clearly, more needs to be learned about this subject, but if we don't pass this amendment, OSHA is going to forge ahead and finalize a document that they have already determined is the perfect answer even before the comments have been sifted through. They will finalize a possibly--no, almost assuredly--be a tainted rule, and we won't have another opportunity to stop them. A vote for this amendment makes certain that we will have sufficient time to conduct a thorough congressional investigation into this issue and force OSHA to clean up its rulemaking procedures if necessary. Lest you think my concerns about this rule are only procedural, rest assured these procedural concerns are only half the problem here. This rule has serious substantive flaws. Much has been written and debated about the many problems with this rule--its vagueness, its coverage of preexisting and non-work related injuries, the harshness of its single trigger. I expect you have all heard something about these topics and my colleagues will talk more about these later today. In my investigation of the rule, I found two particularly troubling issues. Both involve the reach of the long arm of this overly ambitious rule into arenas outside of OSHA's jurisdiction--both with disastrous effects. First, the rule will have a devastating effect on patients and facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. OSHA has created a potential conflict between the ergonomics rule and health care regulations. Congress recognized the importance to patient dignity of permitting patients to choose how they are moved and how they receive certain types of care when it passed the Nursing Home Act of 1987. This act and corresponding regulations mandate this important freedom of choice for patients. The ergonomics rule, on the other hand imposes many requirements on all health care facilities and providers concerning patient care and movement. Thus, these facilities and providers may be forced to choose between violating the ergonomics rule or violating both the Nursing Home Act and the patient dignity. Moreover, OSHA's rule forces impossible choices about resource allocation between patient care versus employee care. The only way for businesses to absorb the cost of this rule under any situation is to pass the cost along to consumers. However, some ``consumers'' are patients dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. The Federal Government sets an absolute cap on what these individuals can pay for medical services. Thus, the facilities that provide care for these patients simply cannot charge a higher cost. Simply put, these facilities and providers are unable to absorb the cost of the ergonomics rule. And there is no question these facilities will face a cost. OSHA's own estimate of the cost of compliance in the first year will total $526 million for nursing and personal care facilities and residential care. And you have to remember, we are saying that they really use conservative, from their point of view, estimates of costs. The industry estimates that the per-facility cost for a typical nursing home will be $60,000. But my issue with this rule is not that it will cost these facilities so much money--it is that it will cost elderly and poor patients access to quality care. You have probably heard about some of the facilities going out of business because of some appropriations measures we passed. We have corrected them a little bit. But my issue with this is not what it will cost these facilities, but what it will cost the elderly and the poor in access to quality care. Sadly these patients are already in danger of losing quality care. Many facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare are in serious financial straits due in part to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Ten percent of nursing homes are already in bankruptcy. And the Clinton administration just announced a request for an additional $20 billion for Medicaid and Medicare so that the reimbursement cap can be raised. All this is before the costly ergonomics rule places its additional tax on an already overtaxed system. Implementing this sweeping and expensive proposed ergonomics standard is simply more than this industry can bear. Let me assure those who say this Medicaid/Medicare quandary will not have very broad impact--let me assure them that it will. Nearly 80 percent of all patients in Nursing Homes and over 8 million home health patients are dependent on Medicare or Medicaid. How will these patients receive health care if the ergonomics rule forces nursing homes and home health organizations out of business? The answer is, they won't. But it does not appear that OSHA has even considered that consequence. Perhaps OSHA is assuming that Congress will clean up after it by raising reimbursement rates to accommodate OSHA's rule? If this is the case, then OSHA itself has invited us to step in, prohibit OSHA from finalizing this rule and OSHA back to the drawing board. A vote in favor of this amendment will ensure that OSHA resolves the mess its rule creates for providers and patients before issuing a final rule. That ought to be a basic consideration for us in this body. The second problem I am very concerned with is OSHA's encroachment into State workers' compensation. A provision of the rule would require employers to compensate certain injured employees 90 to 100 percent of their salary. OSHA calls this requirement ``work restriction protection'' or WRP. But it sounds an awful lot like workers' compensation doesn't it? They told us they don't have the money to do the job, and now OSHA apparently wants a new job--to be a Workers Compensation Administration. That is why we held a hearing, to see what was involved in that. But there are two problems with that. First, the statute that created OSHA tells us that OSHA is not to meddle with workers' compensation. Second, OSHA's intrusion into the world of workers' compensation will hinder its ability to perform its true and very important function--improving workplace safety and health. All of the States already do Workers Comp. Thirty years ago, when Congress wrote the Occupational Health and Safety Act, it made an explicit statement about OSHA and workers' compensation. It wrote that the act should not be interpreted to: . . . supersede or in any manner affect any workmen's compensation law, or to enlarge or diminish or affect in any other manner the common law or statutory rights, duties, or liabilities of employers and employees under any law with respect to injuries, diseases, or death of employees arising out of, or in the course of, employment. Twice this provision uses the broad phrase ``affect in any manner'' to describe what OSHA should not do to State workers' compensation. As someone with the privilege of being one of this country's lawmakers, it is hard for me to imagine how Congress could have drafted a broader or more explicit prohibition on OSHA's interference with State workers' compensation. Perhaps more importantly, this provision of the law makes good sense. All 50 States have intricate workers' compensation systems that strike a delicate balance between the employer and employee. Each party gives up certain rights in exchange for certain benefits. For example, an employer gives up the ability to argue that a workplace accident was not its fault, but in exchange receives a promise that the employee cannot pursue any other remedies against it. The injury gets taken care of, the injury gets paid for, and the worker gets compensated. Each State has reached its own balance through years of experience and trial and error. Many of us have served in State legislatures where one of the perpetual questions coming before the legislature is changes to workers compensation. It is a very intricate process. Significantly, Congress has never taken this autonomy away from the States by mandating Federal workers compensation requirements and, in fact, put those statements in, to which I referred earlier, where they are clearly not to get into workers compensation. The States have special mechanisms set up for resolving disputes and vindicating rights under the workers compensation systems. OSHA wants to create its own Federal workers compensation system, but [[Page S5595]] only for musculoskeletal disorders, MSDs. But OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower to decide the numerous disputes that inevitably will arise because of the WRP provision. I ask all Senators to talk with their State workers compensation people. I have not found any of them who did not think this was intrusive, who did not think this gets into their business which they have crafted for years and years. OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower these States have to decide the numerous disputes that will arise. All of a sudden, OSHA will have to decide disputes over the existence of medical conditions, the causation of the medical conditions, the right to compensation. But what happens to workplace safety and health while OSHA is being a workers compensation administration? The devastating effect on workers compensation has been recognized by workers compensation commissioners across the country. The Western Governors' Association has issued a resolution harshly criticizing the WRP provisions. Moreover, Charles Jeffress met with a large group of workers compensation administrators, and when I asked him how many spoke in favor of this provision, he answered: None. It was not quite that definite, but he answered definitely none. Significantly, this meeting took place before the proposed rule was published, so Mr. Jeffress obviously did not take their lack of support to heart in drafting the proposed rule. If this lack of responsiveness is any indication, we can have no confidence OSHA will take this provision out of the final rule. A vote for this amendment ensures that OSHA will have to take additional time to consider all the negative feedback it has received on this issue alone. Hopefully, with this additional time, OSHA will recognize that it should stay out of the workers compensation business and get back to the important business of truly protecting this country's working men and women. From all of these facts and circumstances, I hope it is as clear to you as it is to me that OSHA is not ready to take sensible, informed, reliable action on ergonomics. Unfortunately, it is equally clear that OSHA is going to push forward anyway unless we take some action. Because of the magnitude of this issue, it is absolutely imperative that cool heads prevail over politics. We must ensure that OSHA takes the time to investigate and solve problems with the rule without taking shortcuts. Nobody puts them under the deadline except themselves, but they are obviously convinced of the deadline. If we do not act now to impose a reasonable 1-year delay of the finalization of the rule, OSHA will forge ahead and produce a sloppy final product that not only fails to advance worker health and safety, but also threatens the viability of State workers compensation, health care, the poor and elderly, not to mention businesses all across the country. If even one of these issues I raised troubles you--and I think they should all trouble all of us deeply--then you must recognize the desperate need for a 1-year delay. I urge your support of this amendment. I am joined in offering this amendment by my colleagues, Senators Lott, Nickles, Jeffords, Bond, Hutchinson, Brownback, Sessions, Hagel, DeWine, Crapo, Bennett, Thompson, Burns, Collins, Frist, Gregg, Coverdell, Voinovich, Fitzgerald, Abraham, Snowe, Ashcroft, Grams, Hutchison, Thomas, and Allard. I ask unanimous consent that they all be added to the amendment as original cosponsors. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the amendment that will ensure we have this delay to do it right. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I do not know quite where to start. My colleague from Oklahoma had said earlier, and both my friends from Wyoming and Arkansas had said, we ought to have a debate. We will. We ought to be focusing on this issue. We will focus on this issue. There are many important issues we should focus on in the Senate. This is an important issue. I want to speak about it. In my State, by the way, two-thirds of senior citizens have no prescription drug coverage at all. I would like to focus on that issue. I would like to make sure 700,000 Medicare recipients have coverage. Education, title I--I would like to talk about a lot of different issues, but this issue is before us. I hope we will be able to speak to many different issues in several months to come. First, my colleague, Senator Enzi, complains about the rule, but there is no final rule. It is not final yet. That is the point. OSHA, which is doing exactly what it should do, Secretary Jeffress is doing exactly what he should do by law--holding hearings, getting input--they are going to issue a final rule. They have not issued a final rule. My colleague jumps to conclusions and joins the effort over 10 years to block a rule, but the rule has not been made. There may be significant changes. When my colleague complains about the rule, let's be clear, they have not finished the process. We do not know what the final rule is yet. But for some reason, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are so anxious to block this basic worker protection that they already feel confident about attacking a rule that does not exist. Second, my colleagues say that OSHA is rushing. Senator Harkin was quite right in saying to Senator Nickles: Wait a minute, didn't this go back to Secretary Elizabeth Dole? Wasn't Secretary Dole the first to talk about the problem of repetitive stress injury and the need to provide some protection for working men and women in our country? This has been going on for a decade. And Senator Jeffords and OSHA and the administration are rushing? By the way, I say to my colleagues, time is not neutral. From the point of view of people--I am going to be giving some examples because this debate needs to be put in personal terms. It is about working people's lives, from the point of view of people who suffer from this injury, from the point of view of people who are in terrible pain, from the point of view of people who may not be able to work, from the point of view of people who can have their lives destroyed because of this injury, because of our failure to issue a standard. We are not rushing. Can I assure all Senators that we are not rushing from their point of view? Then my colleague talks about home office inspections. This is a red herring. We agree, OSHA agrees, they are not going to be inspecting home offices. Why bring up an issue that is not an issue? My colleagues talk about the WRP, the work restriction protection, and all about the ways in which it will undercut State worker comp laws. But you know what, in our committee hearing, we heard from witnesses that it has no effect on workers comp laws. We will debate that more. But no one, no Senator should be under the illusion that OSHA is about to issue a rule that is going to undercut or overturn State comp laws. Then I hear my colleague, my good friend, complain about OSHA's use of contractors. They have hea

Major Actions:

All articles in Senate section

APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES
(Senate - June 22, 2000)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S5588-S5609] APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will proceed to H.R. 4577, which the clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4577) making appropriations for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies for fiscal year ending September 30, 2001, and for other purposes. The Senate proceeded to consider the bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all after the enacting clause be stricken, and the text of the S. 2553, as reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee, be inserted in lieu thereof, the bill as amended be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendment, and no points of order be waived by virtue of this agreement. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Amendment No. 3590 (The text of the amendment (No. 3590) is printed in today's Record under ``Amendments Submitted.'') Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am pleased to make the opening statement on the pending appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health, Human Services and Education. The subcommittee, which the distinguished Senator from Iowa and I work on, has the responsibility for funding these three very important and major departments. We have come forward with a bill which has program level funding of $104.5 billion. While that seems like a lot of money--and is a lot of money--by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's health, by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's education--and the Federal Government is a relatively minor participant, 7 percent to 8 percent, but an important participant--and by the time you take care of the Department of Labor and very important items on worker safety, it is tough to find adequate funding. We have structured this bill in collaboration with requests from virtually all Members of the Senate who have had something to say about what the funding priorities should be based on their extensive experience across the 50 States of the United States. We have come forward on the Department of Education with a funding budget in excess of $40 billion, more than $4.6 billion more than last year, and some $100 million over the President's request. We have established the priorities which the Congress sees fit. We have increased the maximum Pell grants. We have increased special education by $1.3 billion, trying to do a share of the Federal Government on that important item. We have increased grants for the disadvantaged by almost $400 million. We have moved on the Department of Health and Human Services for a total budget of over $44 billion, which is an increase of almost $2.5 billion over last year. We have increased Head Start by some $1 billion, so it is now in excess of $6 billion. We have structured a new drug demand reduction initiative, taking the very substantial funds which are available within our subcommittee, and redirecting $3.7 billion to try to deal with the demand reduction issue. It is my view that demand reduction is the long-range answer--that and rehabilitation--to the drug problem in America. We may be spending in excess of $1 billion soon in aid to Colombia, and it is my view that there is an imbalance in the $18 billion which we now spend, with two- thirds--about $12 billion--going to so-called supply interdiction and fighting street crime. They are important. As district attorney of Philadelphia, my office was very active in fighting street crime against drug dealers. In the long run, unless we are able to reduce demand for drugs in the United States, suppliers from Latin America will find a way to grow drugs, and sellers on America's street corners will find ways to distribute it, which is why we have made this initiative to try to come to grips with the demand side. Last year, we structured a program to deal with youth violence prevention. We have increased the funding by some $280 million so that now it is being directed in a coordinated way against youth violence, and some substantial progress has been made in the almost intervening year since this program was initiated. A very substantial increase in funding has been provided in this bill for the National Institutes of Health. I would suggest that of all the items for program level funding in this $104.5 billion bill, the funding for the National Institutes of Health may well be the most important. I frequently say that the NIH is the crown jewel of the Federal Government, and add to that, in fact, it may be the only jewel of the Federal Government. Senator Harkin and I, in conjunction with Congressman Porter and Congressman Obey on the House side, have taken the lead on NIH. Four years ago, we added almost $1 billion; 3 years ago we added $2 billion; last year we added $2.3 billion, which was cut slightly in across-the-board cuts to [[Page S5589]] about $2.2 billion; and this year we are adding $2.7 billion. There have been phenomenal achievements by NIH in a broad variety of maladies. There is nothing more important than health. Without health, none of us can function. It is so obvious and so fundamental. These maladies strike virtually all Americans. I will enumerate the diseases which NIH is combating and making enormous progress: Alzheimer's disease, AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, cancers--leukemia, breast, prostate, pancreatic, lung, ovarian--heart disease, stroke, asthma, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, autism, osteoporosis, hepatitis C, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, kidney disease, and mental health. I daresay that there is not a family in America not touched directly by one of these ailments. For a country which has a gross national product of $8 trillion and a Federal budget of $1.85 trillion, this is not too much money to be spending on NIH. We are striving to fulfill the commitment that the Senate made to double NIH funding in the course of 5 years. We are doing a lot. We are not quite meeting that target, but we are determined to succeed at it. This bill also includes $11.6 billion for the Department of Labor, an increase for Job Corps, an increase for youth offenders, trying to deal with juvenile offenders to stop them from becoming recidivous. There is no doubt if one takes a functional illiterate without a trade or skill and releases that functional illiterate without a skill from prison, that illiterate, unable to cope in society, is likely to return to a life of crime. Focusing on youthful offenders, we think, is very important. We have met the President's figures on occupational safety and health, NLRB, mine safety, and for a specific problem we have topped the President's figure slightly by $2.5 million, seeing the ravages of black lung and mine safety-related programs that I have personally observed both in Pennsylvania's anthracite region in the northeastern part of my State and the bituminous area in the western part of my State. I was dismayed when the subcommittee came forward with its budget to have the President immediately articulate a veto message. I note my distinguished colleague from Iowa nodding in the affirmative. He did a little more during the Appropriations Committee markup and not in the affirmative. I left it to my colleague to have a comment or two about the President of his own party. I learned a long time ago, after coming to the Senate, that we have to cross party lines if we want to get anything done in this town. I am pleased and proud to say Senator Harkin and I have established a working partnership. When he chaired this subcommittee, I was the ranking member. I like it better when I chair and he is the ranking member. He spoke up in very forceful terms criticizing the President, the President's men, and the President's women for coming forward with that veto statement when we have strained to put together this total bill of $104.5 billion, and it has been tough going to get the allocations from the Appropriations Committee. I thank Senator Stevens, the chairman, and Senator Byrd, the ranking member, for coming up with this money. When the President asked for $1.3 billion for construction and $1.4 billion for additional teachers and class size, we put that money in the budget. We did add, however, that if the local boards make a determination, factually based, that the money is better used in some other line, the local school boards can spend the money in that line, giving priority to what the President has asked for, but recognizing that cookie cutters do not apply to all school districts in America. We have structured some different priorities in this bill. The last time I read the Constitution, it was Congress who had the principal authority on appropriations. It is true the President must sign the bill, but to issue a veto threat after the subcommittee reports out a bill, before the full committee acts on it, before the full Senate acts on it, before there is a conference seems to me to be untoward. Regrettably, in the past, this bill has not been finished until after the end of the fiscal year, so we have been unable to engage in a discussion with the President and a discussion with the American people about what are the priorities established by Congress. I emphasize that this is a bill which receives input from virtually all Members. We have hundreds of letters which pour into this subcommittee which we consider, and the same is true on the House side. This is no small matter as to who may be assessing the priorities for America. For the President to say his priorities are the only ones to be considered seems to me untoward. That is as noncritical a word as I can fashion at the moment. I thank the majority leader, Senator Lott, for scheduling this bill early. We intend to conference this bill promptly with the House and have a bill ready for final passage in July--hopefully in early July--and then let us see the President's reaction. We are prepared to take to the American people the basic concept that if school districts do not need additional buildings, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.3 billion for something else. If some school districts do not have a problem with the number of teachers they have, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.4 billion for something else. This is a very brief statement of a very complicated bill. At the outset, I thank my colleague, Senator Harkin, for his diligence and his close cooperation in bringing the bill to the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Labor-HHS bill has reached the floor relatively early this year. In the past few years, we have been sort of on the caboose end of the train. It is an extremely important bill. It addresses many issues that are vital to the strength of our Nation--our health, education, job training, the administration of Social Security and Medicare, biomedical research, and child care, just to name a few. Given its importance, I think it should be one of the first appropriations bills considered. But this is certainly the earliest this bill has gotten to the floor in many years. I am thankful for that. At the outset, I thank my chairman, Senator Specter, and his great staff for their hard work in putting together this bill. As usual, Senator Specter has done so in a professional and bipartisan fashion. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his patience. This is always one of the most difficult bills to put together. This year the job has been especially difficult. I also thank the chairman of the full committee, Senator Stevens, and the ranking member, Senator Byrd, for their support this year. Their help has been invaluable. Before I say a few words about the contents of the bill, I think it is important to briefly discuss this year's budget resolution because we operate within its framework. I believe this year's budget resolution shortchanged funding for important discretionary activities, including education, health, and job training. The funds were, instead, used to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to give the Department of Defense more money than it even requested. Our subcommittee's inadequate allocation was the inevitable result of that ill-advised budget resolution. But that allocation forced our subcommittee to reach outside its normal jurisdiction to find mandatory offsets to fund the critical programs in this bill. Some may criticize the bill for that reason. Some of those criticisms are valid. For example, I hope to work with my colleagues--hopefully when we get to conference--to reverse the reductions in social services block grants. There are many good provisions in this bill. It increases funding for NIH, as Senator Specter said, by a historic amount, $2.7 billion. Education programs are increased by $4.6 billion. Head Start is increased by $1 billion. The $2.7 billion increase for NIH will keep us on our way to doubling NIH funding over 5 years. We are on the verge of tremendous biomedical breakthroughs as we decode the mysteries of the human genome and explore the uses of human stem cells. We are doing the right thing by continuing to support important biomedical research. [[Page S5590]] The bill increases funding for child care from the $1.2 billion level last year to $2 billion this year. The availability, affordability, and quality of child care are major concerns for working families, and they desperately need these funds. Only about 1 in every 10 eligible children is served by this program. These dollars will go to working Americans who really need the help. Again, I want to make sure the record reflects that last year, during our negotiations, our chairman, Senator Specter, guaranteed that we would have this increase this year. He lived up to that commitment. We had a tremendous increase in the child care program, and we thank Senator Specter for his commitment and for keeping his word to get that increase for child care this year. I am proud we could also increase funding for education programs by, as I said, $4.6 billion. That includes a $350 increase in the maximum Pell grant to $3,650, the highest ever. In this year that we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the bill includes a $1.3 billion increase in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. We have also funded a new Office of Disability Policy at the Department of Labor. At HHS, we were able to add funds for several other programs funded under the Developmental Disabilities Act. This bill also places great importance on women's health and includes over $4 billion for programs that address the health needs of women. I again might add that Senator Specter and I worked together on a women's health initiative that is part and parcel of this bill, and that is what that $4 billion is for. The bill also includes a $50 million line item to address the issue of medical errors and to help health care practitioners and health care institutions, hospitals, and other health care facilities, to begin the process of developing methodologies and ways of cutting down on medical errors. Medical errors are now the fifth leading cause of death in America. As we have looked at this, we found it is not just one person or one institution or one cause; there is a whole variety of different reasons. Quite frankly, I think our institutions and our practitioners have not kept up with the new technologies of today which in most of the private sector have helped us so much with productivity and which I believe in the health care sector can really help us cut down on medical errors. But that is what that $50 million is there to do. The bill is not without its problems. As I mentioned, we do have a problem with the social services block grant. Hopefully, we will get this bill to conference and we will be able to fix that at that time. Also, the provisions in the bill that have the money for school modernization and for class size reductions are not targeted enough. They are just broadly thrown in there. Again, we had this battle last year. When it finally came down to it, the Congress agreed with the White House, in a partnership, that we needed to put the money in there for class size reduction. I believe the same needs to be done for school modernization. We only put in 7 cents out of every dollar that goes for elementary and secondary education in America. We only provide 7 cents. A lot of that goes for, as I said, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A lot of that goes for title I programs to help low-income areas. When it is all over with, we have just a penny or two left of every dollar that we can give out to elementary and secondary schools. So when we put in money for school modernization, we ought to make sure that is what it goes for. Schools desperately need this money. Our property taxpayers all over this country are getting hit, time and time again, to pay more in property taxes, which can be very regressive, to help pay for modernizing their schools. As we know, most of the schools need to be modernized; they have leaky roofs, and toilets that won't flush, water that is bad, and air conditioning--a lot of times they don't even have air conditioning-- heating plants that are inadequate. As I pointed out, one out of every four elementary and secondary schools in New York City today are still heated by coal. And again, these tend to be in the lowest income areas. So we need to target that money. It is not in this bill. That is one of the problems with it. Again, I hope we can work that out as we go to conference. It is a national disgrace that the nicest places our children see are shopping malls, sports arenas, and movie theaters, and the most run down places they see are their public schools. Again, we have to fix these in conference. I thank Senator Specter, once again, for being so open and working with us in a very strong bipartisan fashion. We worked together to shape this bill. Overall, it is a good bill, with a few exceptions that we have to fix once we go to conference. I want to make clear, I support the bill in its present form. I hope we get a good vote on it as it leaves here and goes to conference. I reserve my right, however, on the conference report, when it comes back. I am hopeful we can get it to conference with a strong vote, sit down with our House counterparts, and work out our differences. Hopefully, we can come back to the floor having fixed the class size, school modernization, and social services block grant problems we have in this bill. I thank Chairman Specter for working in a bipartisan fashion. I hope we can get through this bill reasonably rapidly today, hopefully get to conference next week. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming. Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I call up the amendment I have at the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Wyoming [Mr. Enzi] proposes an amendment numbered 3593. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: On page 23, between lines 12 and 13, insert the following: Sec. . None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. Mr. HARKIN. I didn't hear the unanimous consent request. The PRESIDING OFFICER. It was to dispense with the reading of the amendment. The Senator from Arkansas. Amendment No. 3594 to Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment I send to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson] proposes an amendment numbered 3594 to amendment No. 3593. Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Mr. REID. I object. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard. The clerk will continue the call of the roll. The assistant legislative clerk continued the call of the roll. [[Page S5591]] Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, the amendment has been offered dealing with ergonomics, and it is not an unexpected amendment. This has been a contentious issue on this bill for many years. We have had the matter before. I have conferred with Senator Harkin, and there is no doubt we ought to proceed with the debate and let people have their say and let us see how the debate progresses. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized. Mr. REID. Mr. President, I want to make sure we understand late today that we are not the ones who have offered this contentious amendment. This is a very important bill that involves hundreds of billions of dollars. The two managers have worked on this, and they have a bill we can make presentable to the rest of the Senate. I just want to make sure, when I am called upon, and others are called upon, we are not the ones who offered this contentious amendment. We are not going to move off this amendment--that is the point I am making--until it is resolved one way or the other. If there is some concern about that, I think the people who want this bill moved should try to invoke cloture. It won't be invoked, but that is the only alternative. Amendment No. 3594, As Modified Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I send a modification of my amendment to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment is modified. The amendment (No. 3594), as modified, reads as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. This amendment shall take effect October 2, 2000. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized. Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, let me just make an observation. I hear the threats that they are going to filibuster this amendment. This amendment deals with Labor-HHS appropriations. The Senate has the right to vote on whether or not we are going to spend the money in the Department of Labor to implement regulations that have a dramatic impact on business, on workers. We have a right to vote on it. The House voted on it; the Senate is going to vote on it. We have voted on this amendment in one way or another almost every year since 1995. This is not a new issue. So now some people are saying, wait a minute, we are not going to take this tough vote. Didn't we just have a vote on hate crimes? I think we had two. Didn't we have a vote on campaign finance? Some people didn't want to vote on those two issues on this side of the aisle. Didn't we vote on a Patients' Bill of Rights? Really, what the minority is saying is, we want to vote on our issues, but not on an issue that is relevant. Every amendment I just mentioned was not relevant to the underlying Department of Defense authorization bill. But still we ended up allowing those votes. We didn't have to. Now we have a relevant amendment to the underlying bill, Labor-HHS, the Department of Labor appropriations bill. We think the administration is going too far in the proposed regulations which they planned on having effective in December--these regulations the Clinton administration is trying to run through without significant hearings and without oversight and real analysis of how much it would cost. Here is an example. On cost alone, the Department of Labor said--OSHA said--this regulation will cost $4 billion. The Small Business Administration, which they control, said the cost could be 15 times as much, or $60 billion a year. This Congress is not going to vote on a regulation that could cost $60 billion a year as estimated by the Small Business Administration? The private sector estimates range to over $100 billion per year. Wow, that is a lot of money. Shouldn't we vote on it? Are these good regulations or not? Are we going to be able to stop them or not? Do we want to stop them? What are the regulations? They deal with ergonomics and with motion. OSHA--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration--is saying: We want to have some control over motion, and we think maybe this is harmful, and therefore we are going to control it. It may mean lifting boxes, or sitting at your desk, or anything minuscule, or something large. The Department of Labor is coming in and saying: You need a remedy, you need to change the way you do business, because we know how to do your business better, and if it increases costs, that is too bad--not to mention the fact that they say we are going to change workers comp rules in every State in the Nation. I wonder what Senator Byrd from West Virginia thinks about changing workers comp rules in West Virginia. I used to serve in the Oklahoma legislature. I worked on those laws and rules in our State. Are we going to have the Federal Government come up with a reimbursement rate of 90 percent when our State already passed a workers comp rule of 67 percent? Does the Federal Government know better? My suggestion is that my colleagues from Arkansas and Wyoming, in introducing this amendment, have every right to offer an amendment that says: We are going to withhold funds on this regulation. We don't want a regulation to go into effect in December without us having additional time to consider it, without knowing how much it is going to cost. Maybe it should be postponed or suspended; maybe we should let the next administration deal with it. Let's vote on it. For people to say, wait a minute, we don't like this amendment, so we are going to filibuster--there are probably a lot of amendments I don't like. Are we going to filibuster all of those? I think that would be grossly irresponsible. We need to let the Senate work its way. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a question? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Would the Senator tell us under which Secretary of Labor and how long ago this proposed ergonomics rule was promulgated? How many years of study have we put in on it? Mr. NICKLES. The original rule came out, I believe, in 1995, and it made very little sense. The latest proposal had over 600 pages. The business community and others who looked at it said it was not workable. The Department of Labor has come back and said let's revise it and make it more workable. Did they show us results? No. They said let's overrule the States' workers comp. If this went into effect--and I don't think it will, so maybe that is why people don't want to vote on it. But does this Congress really want to overrule every States' workers comp law? I don't think so. I think it would be a mistake. To answer the question, this administration has been trying to promulgate this rule for about 5 years. We have been successful most of those years in putting in restrictions to stop them. Unfortunately, we didn't get it in last year. To me, it was one of the biggest mistakes Congress made last year--not stopping this administration. Now they are trying to promulgate the rule, I might mention, right after the elections, right before the next President. I think a delay is certainly in order. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a further question on that? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Again, it was my understanding that it was former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole who first committed the Department to issue an ergonomic standard to protect workers on carpal tunnel syndrome and MSDs, as they are called. It has been under study for 10 years; is that right? Mr. WELLSTONE. The Senator is right. Mr. NICKLES. I think he asked me. They may have been working on this Department of Labor takeover of, I don't know what--workers involvement. But they issued the rule on November 23 of last year--a rule that has 600 pages. They may have been working on it for 10 years, but I doubt that. This administration hasn't been in office quite that long. But with enormous expense. I think, again, we should have a vote. To give an example, I came from manufacturing, and we lifted and moved a [[Page S5592]] lot of heavy things. I don't really think somebody from the Department of Labor could come into Nickles Machine Corporation and say: Hey, we know the limits on what somebody can lift as far as pistons and cylinders and bearings are concerned. Therefore, we suggest you put a maximum on it. Or maybe every Senator--everybody has a machine shop, or every Senator has a bottling company. Somebody comes into the Senate every day and loads the Coke machines and the Pepsi machines. This rule says that you can't lift that many cases; that you can't lift two cases at once, or one case, or maybe you can only lift a six- pack or something. The net result would be an estimate that bottlers would have to hire twice as many people. Maybe this is an employment bill. My point is you could increase costs dramatically with draconian results without even knowing what we are doing. I think a delay and not to have a regulation with this kind of economic consequence coming right after the election and right before the swearing in of a new administration makes good sense. Let's postpone this until the next administration. I thank my colleagues for their efforts. I yield the floor. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, my colleague has the floor. But could I have my colleagues' forbearance for a 15-second request? Mr. President, I would like to respond to some of what was said by the Senator from Oklahoma; in other words, after Senator Enzi, and go back and forth on this, pro-con. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my speech, Senator Wellstone be recognized as ranking member of the subcommittee that deals with this, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Hutchinson be allowed to follow that. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Allard). Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member. This is not a new issue for either of us. We have been holding hearings on it. It has been in the press. We both knew about it. He was here to debate it. This is not a surprise. I am pleased that I am going to be able to make my floor statement. I think perhaps after the floor statement maybe the other side would like to join me in proposing this amendment. I think there will definitely be additional Members who will want to join me in this. Mr. President, I rose today and offered an amendment that simply prohibits the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, from expending funds to finalize its proposed ergonomics rule for 1 year. It was mentioned before that last year we didn't get a prohibition against them proceeding with it. You will hear in a bit how much that little error has cost us. But before I tell you why this amendment is critically necessary, I want to tell you what this amendment is not about. This amendment is not about whether or not OSHA should have any ergonomics rule. It is not a prohibition on ergonomics regulations generally. And it is most definitely not a dispute over the importance of protecting American workers. Clearly protecting workplace safety and health is of paramount importance. As the chairman of the subcommittee that deals with worker safety, I feel a special responsibility to oversee the agency charged with safeguarding these workers. But I am not fulfilling this responsibility if I merely rubber stamp anything OSHA does just because OSHA says it is acting in the interest of worker safety and health. I have a duty to make certain that OSHA is acting responsibly, appropriately, and in the best interests of workplace safety and health. Sadly, OSHA has not done so with this proposed ergonomic rule. That is what this amendment is about. Because of this rule and the way OSHA is going about it, the amendment merely requires that OSHA wait a reasonable 1-year period before issuing a final ergonomics rule. That is to keep OSHA from making drastic mistakes to add to those already made. Let me tell you why it is imperative that Congress act now to require OSHA to take this reasonable additional amount of time for this rulemaking. In a nutshell, OSHA is using questionable rulemaking procedures; OSHA omitted the analysis of the economic impact; OSHA hasn't resolved conflicting laws; and this rule infringes on State workers compensation--to name a few of the problems that riddle this overly ambitious rule. OSHA's haste to get through the rulemaking process is very clear. The rule OSHA has proposed is arguably the largest, broadest, most onerous and most expensive rule in the history of the agency--probably any agency. But OSHA has made it very clear that it intends to finalize the rule this year--just over a year from the time the proposed rule was published. This narrow-minded commitment to year's end can only mean that OSHA has already made up its mind in favor of the rule and thinks it will leave a mammoth and far-reaching legacy for the current Presidential administration. I would suggest it will be closer to the legacy of the OSHA home office inspections. Perhaps you remember the letter issued by OSHA about the time we left for Christmas recess, the one that suggested OSHA was going to go into each home where people work and look for safety violations. From the time we found out about it, it only took 48 hours to see how far- reaching, imposing, and stupid that decision was. Of course, the whole Nation realized the implications of the home inspections even quicker. I am extremely concerned that OSHA is blinded by the motivation to get it done during this administration and is not taking the time to carefully consider all the aspects and effects of this important rule. For example, the public comment period for the proposed rule was much shorter than OSHA typically permits--even for much less significant rules. OSHA has never before finalized such a significant rule in a year's time. Moreover, in its haste to get through this rulemaking process, OSHA, until recently, omitted an analysis of the economic impact of the rule on the U.S. Postal Service, on State and local government employees in State plans, and on railroad employees--all together, over 10 million employees. These aren't optional economic impacts. These are mandatory, in light of the dollars involved. OSHA is apparently so busy with other things that it did not do the analysis for these entities until the end of last month, despite the fact that the Postal Service requested an analysis 5 months prior. To add insult to injury, OSHA has only given these folks 2\1/2\ months to comment on the complex analysis that OSHA forgot to do, and OSHA won't even consider extending the overall comment deadline for these folks. It is because they are trying to get it done this year. They have had 5 months to prepare it, and they tell the Postal Service that they have to analyze it in 2\1/2\ months--no extension. Even more troubling than the fact that OSHA is rushing the rule is the way OSHA is going about it. OSHA's ambitions with this rule are so big and overreaching that OSHA has truly bitten off more than it can chew, and may be playing fast and loose with the rulemaking process and your tax dollars. In fact, OSHA has bitten off so much with this rule that it is apparently paying others to chew for it--too big a bite. They can't chew it all. So to make it happen in 1 year, they are going to pay others to do some of their chewing. I use the word ``apparently'' because of the difficulty getting answers. Responding to inquiries first made by Congressman David McIntosh, OSHA recently disclosed that it has paid at least 70 contractors a total of $1.75 million--almost $2 million--to help it with the ergonomics rulemaking. They are paying these contractors with our tax dollars in order to speed the process up on a bad rule. Congressman McIntosh's staff discovered that OSHA may have failed to disclose an additional 47 contracts for who knows how much more money. OSHA's own documentation reveals that it paid 28 contractors $10,000 each to testify at the public rulemaking hearing. Going through some of the accounting information, I even noticed that one contractor had turned in an [[Page S5593]] itemized bill for less--and was still paid the $10,000. When I asked OSHA for evidence of public notification that it was paying these witnesses, OSHA gave me none. I am very concerned that OSHA is paying so much money for outside contracts for this rulemaking that I intend to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of this issue. Let me state things I already know. I think you will be convinced, as I am, that we absolutely need to put the brakes on this rulemaking and force OSHA to straighten this mess out before it finalizes the rule. First, OSHA does not seem to want to have me have this information. Some of it is just good accounting stuff. As the only accountant in the Senate, I am really interested. I have requested documents from OSHA that would give a clear picture of its relationship with some of these contractors, but OSHA has so far refused to give them to me, claiming a ``privilege.'' That applies to private citizens, not to Congress. We have the right to know where the dollars that we are spending go, unequivocally. Now, Congressman McIntosh has been able to obtain some key documents from the contractors themselves, but OSHA placed strict constraints on Congressman McIntosh's ability to share them with fellow lawmakers. This is stuff that came from the contractors, and OSHA can still get its hands in and keep us from using it the way it ought to be used. OSHA did grudgingly agree that I could look at the documents--not take them or copy them or quote from them--but only in Congressman McIntosh's office. When I asked OSHA, as a courtesy, to permit Congressman McIntosh's staff member, Barbara Kahlow, to bring the documents to me, just to look at them, abiding by the rules, OSHA said no. I am so concerned about this issue that I went over to Congressman McIntosh's office last night after I finished working at the Senate to look at these documents for myself. Now, fortunately, Congressman McIntosh's negotiations made that possible. Can anyone believe that documents concerning money we are spending have to have special negotiations before I can look at them? It comes under my committee. I am in charge of the oversight on that committee. Let me recap that: I was told that the contracts and expenditures are privileged. I was told that information couldn't be brought to my office. I was told I could not copy any information. I was told I could not quote any information. I was told that I couldn't quote from the documents. I had to use extra time to go to the House side to even see those documents. I am not afraid of a little walk over to the House. I just couldn't understand why OSHA was going to so much trouble to keep the documents from me. I physically went to Congressman McIntosh's office last night and looked at the documents. Because of OSHA, I can't quote these documents. I can't show you copies. But I can tell you what I saw. I saw that not only did OSHA pay 28 expert witnesses $10,000 a pop, and one of them didn't even ask for that much, it also appears that OSHA did the following: OSHA gave detailed outlines to at least some of the witnesses telling them what they were to say in the testimony; second, they had OSHA lawyers tell at least one expert witness that they wanted a stronger statement from the witness regarding the role of physical factors. That is an important scientific issue. These are supposed to be experts. They told him to make it stronger. Third, heavily edited testimony of at least some of the witnesses is evidenced. OSHA held practice sessions to coach the witnesses in their testimony. I have never heard of that around here. This sounds a lot like OSHA told its expert witnesses what to say. This sounds like OSHA made up its mind a long time ago in favor, and has been stacking the evidence to support its position. I respect OSHA's need to enlist expert assistance in technical or scientific rulemaking. I expect them to get the right information. I would like to think it wasn't biased when they got it. And I have to say, I don't respect any agency paying witnesses to say what the agency tells them to say, and then holding the witnesses' testimony up as ``best available evidence.'' Best available evidence is what the OSH Act requires to support this standard. It doesn't say anything about paying witnesses or coaching witnesses. It doesn't say anything about telling them to change their testimony. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence that it is promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, so OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? That has been the problem with the past years of looking at regulating ergonomics. OSHA makes up the rules. OSHA does the tests. OSHA says their tests are good. OSHA gets ready to propose a rule and realizes they have made a drastic mistake. That has happened in the past. That is why this little document is the first published proposed ergonomics regulation. It didn't happen until November of last year. This document, this is the first time we have gotten a look at this document. It is the first time it has been officially printed. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence in its promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, and has already told them what to say, so that OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? No wonder OSHA has promulgated such a greedy, overreaching rule. Maybe I could pass all the OSHA reform legislation I wanted if I could pay 28 witnesses $10,000 apiece to come in and say what I wanted them to say in my hearings. Does that seem like a conflict of interest? I wouldn't do things that way. In fact, we had a hearing recently about one of the most objectionable parts of this rule, the work restriction protection provisions. I will talk about those in a few minutes. We had to tell one of the witnesses we selected that we couldn't pay his transportation costs--not a $10,000 bonus to testify; we couldn't pay his transportation costs. We did this in part for financial reasons and in part because we wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety that can result from spending taxpayers' dollars on a witness who is supposed to be giving an unbiased opinion. This witness came to Washington anyway--on his own dime. He didn't have his State pay for it. He paid for it out of his pocket to testify at my hearing because he felt so strongly about the terrible effects of this ergonomics rule. Needless to say, I am very disturbed by what I have seen to date about this issue. OSHA's response is that it has always paid witnesses for their testimony. I can't find that in any public documents. I can't find that disclosure. I can't find where they actually said that they were paying them, and this was paid testimony. It seems that ought to be disclosed. Whether or not this is true, it remains to be seen whether OSHA has ever paid this many witnesses this much money and participated this thoroughly in crafting the substance of a witness' testimony. OSHA has also tried to give me the typical excuse of a teenager caught doing something wrong: Hey, everybody is doing it. To that, let me first respond with the typical, but sage parental response: If everybody were jumping off a bridge, would OSHA jump off a bridge, too? That doesn't sound like good safety to me. Second, everybody is most certainly not doing it. Representatives of both the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, two agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, dealing with scientific things, have stated publicly that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. Let me say that again. The Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, have stated publicly--you can read it in the paper--that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. As the DOT general counsel put it ``Paying experts would not get us what we need to know.'' Finally, just because OSHA may have these things in the past, in my book that does not make this practice OK in this instance. On the contrary, it [[Page S5594]] makes any other instances of witness coaching equally objectionable. Two wrongs don't make a right. We can't do anything about past rulemakings, but we can do something about this one--if we act now. Clearly, more needs to be learned about this subject, but if we don't pass this amendment, OSHA is going to forge ahead and finalize a document that they have already determined is the perfect answer even before the comments have been sifted through. They will finalize a possibly--no, almost assuredly--be a tainted rule, and we won't have another opportunity to stop them. A vote for this amendment makes certain that we will have sufficient time to conduct a thorough congressional investigation into this issue and force OSHA to clean up its rulemaking procedures if necessary. Lest you think my concerns about this rule are only procedural, rest assured these procedural concerns are only half the problem here. This rule has serious substantive flaws. Much has been written and debated about the many problems with this rule--its vagueness, its coverage of preexisting and non-work related injuries, the harshness of its single trigger. I expect you have all heard something about these topics and my colleagues will talk more about these later today. In my investigation of the rule, I found two particularly troubling issues. Both involve the reach of the long arm of this overly ambitious rule into arenas outside of OSHA's jurisdiction--both with disastrous effects. First, the rule will have a devastating effect on patients and facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. OSHA has created a potential conflict between the ergonomics rule and health care regulations. Congress recognized the importance to patient dignity of permitting patients to choose how they are moved and how they receive certain types of care when it passed the Nursing Home Act of 1987. This act and corresponding regulations mandate this important freedom of choice for patients. The ergonomics rule, on the other hand imposes many requirements on all health care facilities and providers concerning patient care and movement. Thus, these facilities and providers may be forced to choose between violating the ergonomics rule or violating both the Nursing Home Act and the patient dignity. Moreover, OSHA's rule forces impossible choices about resource allocation between patient care versus employee care. The only way for businesses to absorb the cost of this rule under any situation is to pass the cost along to consumers. However, some ``consumers'' are patients dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. The Federal Government sets an absolute cap on what these individuals can pay for medical services. Thus, the facilities that provide care for these patients simply cannot charge a higher cost. Simply put, these facilities and providers are unable to absorb the cost of the ergonomics rule. And there is no question these facilities will face a cost. OSHA's own estimate of the cost of compliance in the first year will total $526 million for nursing and personal care facilities and residential care. And you have to remember, we are saying that they really use conservative, from their point of view, estimates of costs. The industry estimates that the per-facility cost for a typical nursing home will be $60,000. But my issue with this rule is not that it will cost these facilities so much money--it is that it will cost elderly and poor patients access to quality care. You have probably heard about some of the facilities going out of business because of some appropriations measures we passed. We have corrected them a little bit. But my issue with this is not what it will cost these facilities, but what it will cost the elderly and the poor in access to quality care. Sadly these patients are already in danger of losing quality care. Many facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare are in serious financial straits due in part to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Ten percent of nursing homes are already in bankruptcy. And the Clinton administration just announced a request for an additional $20 billion for Medicaid and Medicare so that the reimbursement cap can be raised. All this is before the costly ergonomics rule places its additional tax on an already overtaxed system. Implementing this sweeping and expensive proposed ergonomics standard is simply more than this industry can bear. Let me assure those who say this Medicaid/Medicare quandary will not have very broad impact--let me assure them that it will. Nearly 80 percent of all patients in Nursing Homes and over 8 million home health patients are dependent on Medicare or Medicaid. How will these patients receive health care if the ergonomics rule forces nursing homes and home health organizations out of business? The answer is, they won't. But it does not appear that OSHA has even considered that consequence. Perhaps OSHA is assuming that Congress will clean up after it by raising reimbursement rates to accommodate OSHA's rule? If this is the case, then OSHA itself has invited us to step in, prohibit OSHA from finalizing this rule and OSHA back to the drawing board. A vote in favor of this amendment will ensure that OSHA resolves the mess its rule creates for providers and patients before issuing a final rule. That ought to be a basic consideration for us in this body. The second problem I am very concerned with is OSHA's encroachment into State workers' compensation. A provision of the rule would require employers to compensate certain injured employees 90 to 100 percent of their salary. OSHA calls this requirement ``work restriction protection'' or WRP. But it sounds an awful lot like workers' compensation doesn't it? They told us they don't have the money to do the job, and now OSHA apparently wants a new job--to be a Workers Compensation Administration. That is why we held a hearing, to see what was involved in that. But there are two problems with that. First, the statute that created OSHA tells us that OSHA is not to meddle with workers' compensation. Second, OSHA's intrusion into the world of workers' compensation will hinder its ability to perform its true and very important function--improving workplace safety and health. All of the States already do Workers Comp. Thirty years ago, when Congress wrote the Occupational Health and Safety Act, it made an explicit statement about OSHA and workers' compensation. It wrote that the act should not be interpreted to: . . . supersede or in any manner affect any workmen's compensation law, or to enlarge or diminish or affect in any other manner the common law or statutory rights, duties, or liabilities of employers and employees under any law with respect to injuries, diseases, or death of employees arising out of, or in the course of, employment. Twice this provision uses the broad phrase ``affect in any manner'' to describe what OSHA should not do to State workers' compensation. As someone with the privilege of being one of this country's lawmakers, it is hard for me to imagine how Congress could have drafted a broader or more explicit prohibition on OSHA's interference with State workers' compensation. Perhaps more importantly, this provision of the law makes good sense. All 50 States have intricate workers' compensation systems that strike a delicate balance between the employer and employee. Each party gives up certain rights in exchange for certain benefits. For example, an employer gives up the ability to argue that a workplace accident was not its fault, but in exchange receives a promise that the employee cannot pursue any other remedies against it. The injury gets taken care of, the injury gets paid for, and the worker gets compensated. Each State has reached its own balance through years of experience and trial and error. Many of us have served in State legislatures where one of the perpetual questions coming before the legislature is changes to workers compensation. It is a very intricate process. Significantly, Congress has never taken this autonomy away from the States by mandating Federal workers compensation requirements and, in fact, put those statements in, to which I referred earlier, where they are clearly not to get into workers compensation. The States have special mechanisms set up for resolving disputes and vindicating rights under the workers compensation systems. OSHA wants to create its own Federal workers compensation system, but [[Page S5595]] only for musculoskeletal disorders, MSDs. But OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower to decide the numerous disputes that inevitably will arise because of the WRP provision. I ask all Senators to talk with their State workers compensation people. I have not found any of them who did not think this was intrusive, who did not think this gets into their business which they have crafted for years and years. OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower these States have to decide the numerous disputes that will arise. All of a sudden, OSHA will have to decide disputes over the existence of medical conditions, the causation of the medical conditions, the right to compensation. But what happens to workplace safety and health while OSHA is being a workers compensation administration? The devastating effect on workers compensation has been recognized by workers compensation commissioners across the country. The Western Governors' Association has issued a resolution harshly criticizing the WRP provisions. Moreover, Charles Jeffress met with a large group of workers compensation administrators, and when I asked him how many spoke in favor of this provision, he answered: None. It was not quite that definite, but he answered definitely none. Significantly, this meeting took place before the proposed rule was published, so Mr. Jeffress obviously did not take their lack of support to heart in drafting the proposed rule. If this lack of responsiveness is any indication, we can have no confidence OSHA will take this provision out of the final rule. A vote for this amendment ensures that OSHA will have to take additional time to consider all the negative feedback it has received on this issue alone. Hopefully, with this additional time, OSHA will recognize that it should stay out of the workers compensation business and get back to the important business of truly protecting this country's working men and women. From all of these facts and circumstances, I hope it is as clear to you as it is to me that OSHA is not ready to take sensible, informed, reliable action on ergonomics. Unfortunately, it is equally clear that OSHA is going to push forward anyway unless we take some action. Because of the magnitude of this issue, it is absolutely imperative that cool heads prevail over politics. We must ensure that OSHA takes the time to investigate and solve problems with the rule without taking shortcuts. Nobody puts them under the deadline except themselves, but they are obviously convinced of the deadline. If we do not act now to impose a reasonable 1-year delay of the finalization of the rule, OSHA will forge ahead and produce a sloppy final product that not only fails to advance worker health and safety, but also threatens the viability of State workers compensation, health care, the poor and elderly, not to mention businesses all across the country. If even one of these issues I raised troubles you--and I think they should all trouble all of us deeply--then you must recognize the desperate need for a 1-year delay. I urge your support of this amendment. I am joined in offering this amendment by my colleagues, Senators Lott, Nickles, Jeffords, Bond, Hutchinson, Brownback, Sessions, Hagel, DeWine, Crapo, Bennett, Thompson, Burns, Collins, Frist, Gregg, Coverdell, Voinovich, Fitzgerald, Abraham, Snowe, Ashcroft, Grams, Hutchison, Thomas, and Allard. I ask unanimous consent that they all be added to the amendment as original cosponsors. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the amendment that will ensure we have this delay to do it right. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I do not know quite where to start. My colleague from Oklahoma had said earlier, and both my friends from Wyoming and Arkansas had said, we ought to have a debate. We will. We ought to be focusing on this issue. We will focus on this issue. There are many important issues we should focus on in the Senate. This is an important issue. I want to speak about it. In my State, by the way, two-thirds of senior citizens have no prescription drug coverage at all. I would like to focus on that issue. I would like to make sure 700,000 Medicare recipients have coverage. Education, title I--I would like to talk about a lot of different issues, but this issue is before us. I hope we will be able to speak to many different issues in several months to come. First, my colleague, Senator Enzi, complains about the rule, but there is no final rule. It is not final yet. That is the point. OSHA, which is doing exactly what it should do, Secretary Jeffress is doing exactly what he should do by law--holding hearings, getting input--they are going to issue a final rule. They have not issued a final rule. My colleague jumps to conclusions and joins the effort over 10 years to block a rule, but the rule has not been made. There may be significant changes. When my colleague complains about the rule, let's be clear, they have not finished the process. We do not know what the final rule is yet. But for some reason, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are so anxious to block this basic worker protection that they already feel confident about attacking a rule that does not exist. Second, my colleagues say that OSHA is rushing. Senator Harkin was quite right in saying to Senator Nickles: Wait a minute, didn't this go back to Secretary Elizabeth Dole? Wasn't Secretary Dole the first to talk about the problem of repetitive stress injury and the need to provide some protection for working men and women in our country? This has been going on for a decade. And Senator Jeffords and OSHA and the administration are rushing? By the way, I say to my colleagues, time is not neutral. From the point of view of people--I am going to be giving some examples because this debate needs to be put in personal terms. It is about working people's lives, from the point of view of people who suffer from this injury, from the point of view of people who are in terrible pain, from the point of view of people who may not be able to work, from the point of view of people who can have their lives destroyed because of this injury, because of our failure to issue a standard. We are not rushing. Can I assure all Senators that we are not rushing from their point of view? Then my colleague talks about home office inspections. This is a red herring. We agree, OSHA agrees, they are not going to be inspecting home offices. Why bring up an issue that is not an issue? My colleagues talk about the WRP, the work restriction protection, and all about the ways in which it will undercut State worker comp laws. But you know what, in our committee hearing, we heard from witnesses that it has no effect on workers comp laws. We will debate that more. But no one, no Senator should be under the illusion that OSHA is about to issue a rule that is going to undercut or overturn State comp laws. Then I hear my colleague, my good friend, complain about OSHA's use of contractors. The

Summary:

All articles in Senate section

APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES
(Senate - June 22, 2000)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S5588-S5609] APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will proceed to H.R. 4577, which the clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4577) making appropriations for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies for fiscal year ending September 30, 2001, and for other purposes. The Senate proceeded to consider the bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all after the enacting clause be stricken, and the text of the S. 2553, as reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee, be inserted in lieu thereof, the bill as amended be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendment, and no points of order be waived by virtue of this agreement. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Amendment No. 3590 (The text of the amendment (No. 3590) is printed in today's Record under ``Amendments Submitted.'') Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am pleased to make the opening statement on the pending appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health, Human Services and Education. The subcommittee, which the distinguished Senator from Iowa and I work on, has the responsibility for funding these three very important and major departments. We have come forward with a bill which has program level funding of $104.5 billion. While that seems like a lot of money--and is a lot of money--by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's health, by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's education--and the Federal Government is a relatively minor participant, 7 percent to 8 percent, but an important participant--and by the time you take care of the Department of Labor and very important items on worker safety, it is tough to find adequate funding. We have structured this bill in collaboration with requests from virtually all Members of the Senate who have had something to say about what the funding priorities should be based on their extensive experience across the 50 States of the United States. We have come forward on the Department of Education with a funding budget in excess of $40 billion, more than $4.6 billion more than last year, and some $100 million over the President's request. We have established the priorities which the Congress sees fit. We have increased the maximum Pell grants. We have increased special education by $1.3 billion, trying to do a share of the Federal Government on that important item. We have increased grants for the disadvantaged by almost $400 million. We have moved on the Department of Health and Human Services for a total budget of over $44 billion, which is an increase of almost $2.5 billion over last year. We have increased Head Start by some $1 billion, so it is now in excess of $6 billion. We have structured a new drug demand reduction initiative, taking the very substantial funds which are available within our subcommittee, and redirecting $3.7 billion to try to deal with the demand reduction issue. It is my view that demand reduction is the long-range answer--that and rehabilitation--to the drug problem in America. We may be spending in excess of $1 billion soon in aid to Colombia, and it is my view that there is an imbalance in the $18 billion which we now spend, with two- thirds--about $12 billion--going to so-called supply interdiction and fighting street crime. They are important. As district attorney of Philadelphia, my office was very active in fighting street crime against drug dealers. In the long run, unless we are able to reduce demand for drugs in the United States, suppliers from Latin America will find a way to grow drugs, and sellers on America's street corners will find ways to distribute it, which is why we have made this initiative to try to come to grips with the demand side. Last year, we structured a program to deal with youth violence prevention. We have increased the funding by some $280 million so that now it is being directed in a coordinated way against youth violence, and some substantial progress has been made in the almost intervening year since this program was initiated. A very substantial increase in funding has been provided in this bill for the National Institutes of Health. I would suggest that of all the items for program level funding in this $104.5 billion bill, the funding for the National Institutes of Health may well be the most important. I frequently say that the NIH is the crown jewel of the Federal Government, and add to that, in fact, it may be the only jewel of the Federal Government. Senator Harkin and I, in conjunction with Congressman Porter and Congressman Obey on the House side, have taken the lead on NIH. Four years ago, we added almost $1 billion; 3 years ago we added $2 billion; last year we added $2.3 billion, which was cut slightly in across-the-board cuts to [[Page S5589]] about $2.2 billion; and this year we are adding $2.7 billion. There have been phenomenal achievements by NIH in a broad variety of maladies. There is nothing more important than health. Without health, none of us can function. It is so obvious and so fundamental. These maladies strike virtually all Americans. I will enumerate the diseases which NIH is combating and making enormous progress: Alzheimer's disease, AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, cancers--leukemia, breast, prostate, pancreatic, lung, ovarian--heart disease, stroke, asthma, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, autism, osteoporosis, hepatitis C, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, kidney disease, and mental health. I daresay that there is not a family in America not touched directly by one of these ailments. For a country which has a gross national product of $8 trillion and a Federal budget of $1.85 trillion, this is not too much money to be spending on NIH. We are striving to fulfill the commitment that the Senate made to double NIH funding in the course of 5 years. We are doing a lot. We are not quite meeting that target, but we are determined to succeed at it. This bill also includes $11.6 billion for the Department of Labor, an increase for Job Corps, an increase for youth offenders, trying to deal with juvenile offenders to stop them from becoming recidivous. There is no doubt if one takes a functional illiterate without a trade or skill and releases that functional illiterate without a skill from prison, that illiterate, unable to cope in society, is likely to return to a life of crime. Focusing on youthful offenders, we think, is very important. We have met the President's figures on occupational safety and health, NLRB, mine safety, and for a specific problem we have topped the President's figure slightly by $2.5 million, seeing the ravages of black lung and mine safety-related programs that I have personally observed both in Pennsylvania's anthracite region in the northeastern part of my State and the bituminous area in the western part of my State. I was dismayed when the subcommittee came forward with its budget to have the President immediately articulate a veto message. I note my distinguished colleague from Iowa nodding in the affirmative. He did a little more during the Appropriations Committee markup and not in the affirmative. I left it to my colleague to have a comment or two about the President of his own party. I learned a long time ago, after coming to the Senate, that we have to cross party lines if we want to get anything done in this town. I am pleased and proud to say Senator Harkin and I have established a working partnership. When he chaired this subcommittee, I was the ranking member. I like it better when I chair and he is the ranking member. He spoke up in very forceful terms criticizing the President, the President's men, and the President's women for coming forward with that veto statement when we have strained to put together this total bill of $104.5 billion, and it has been tough going to get the allocations from the Appropriations Committee. I thank Senator Stevens, the chairman, and Senator Byrd, the ranking member, for coming up with this money. When the President asked for $1.3 billion for construction and $1.4 billion for additional teachers and class size, we put that money in the budget. We did add, however, that if the local boards make a determination, factually based, that the money is better used in some other line, the local school boards can spend the money in that line, giving priority to what the President has asked for, but recognizing that cookie cutters do not apply to all school districts in America. We have structured some different priorities in this bill. The last time I read the Constitution, it was Congress who had the principal authority on appropriations. It is true the President must sign the bill, but to issue a veto threat after the subcommittee reports out a bill, before the full committee acts on it, before the full Senate acts on it, before there is a conference seems to me to be untoward. Regrettably, in the past, this bill has not been finished until after the end of the fiscal year, so we have been unable to engage in a discussion with the President and a discussion with the American people about what are the priorities established by Congress. I emphasize that this is a bill which receives input from virtually all Members. We have hundreds of letters which pour into this subcommittee which we consider, and the same is true on the House side. This is no small matter as to who may be assessing the priorities for America. For the President to say his priorities are the only ones to be considered seems to me untoward. That is as noncritical a word as I can fashion at the moment. I thank the majority leader, Senator Lott, for scheduling this bill early. We intend to conference this bill promptly with the House and have a bill ready for final passage in July--hopefully in early July--and then let us see the President's reaction. We are prepared to take to the American people the basic concept that if school districts do not need additional buildings, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.3 billion for something else. If some school districts do not have a problem with the number of teachers they have, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.4 billion for something else. This is a very brief statement of a very complicated bill. At the outset, I thank my colleague, Senator Harkin, for his diligence and his close cooperation in bringing the bill to the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Labor-HHS bill has reached the floor relatively early this year. In the past few years, we have been sort of on the caboose end of the train. It is an extremely important bill. It addresses many issues that are vital to the strength of our Nation--our health, education, job training, the administration of Social Security and Medicare, biomedical research, and child care, just to name a few. Given its importance, I think it should be one of the first appropriations bills considered. But this is certainly the earliest this bill has gotten to the floor in many years. I am thankful for that. At the outset, I thank my chairman, Senator Specter, and his great staff for their hard work in putting together this bill. As usual, Senator Specter has done so in a professional and bipartisan fashion. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his patience. This is always one of the most difficult bills to put together. This year the job has been especially difficult. I also thank the chairman of the full committee, Senator Stevens, and the ranking member, Senator Byrd, for their support this year. Their help has been invaluable. Before I say a few words about the contents of the bill, I think it is important to briefly discuss this year's budget resolution because we operate within its framework. I believe this year's budget resolution shortchanged funding for important discretionary activities, including education, health, and job training. The funds were, instead, used to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to give the Department of Defense more money than it even requested. Our subcommittee's inadequate allocation was the inevitable result of that ill-advised budget resolution. But that allocation forced our subcommittee to reach outside its normal jurisdiction to find mandatory offsets to fund the critical programs in this bill. Some may criticize the bill for that reason. Some of those criticisms are valid. For example, I hope to work with my colleagues--hopefully when we get to conference--to reverse the reductions in social services block grants. There are many good provisions in this bill. It increases funding for NIH, as Senator Specter said, by a historic amount, $2.7 billion. Education programs are increased by $4.6 billion. Head Start is increased by $1 billion. The $2.7 billion increase for NIH will keep us on our way to doubling NIH funding over 5 years. We are on the verge of tremendous biomedical breakthroughs as we decode the mysteries of the human genome and explore the uses of human stem cells. We are doing the right thing by continuing to support important biomedical research. [[Page S5590]] The bill increases funding for child care from the $1.2 billion level last year to $2 billion this year. The availability, affordability, and quality of child care are major concerns for working families, and they desperately need these funds. Only about 1 in every 10 eligible children is served by this program. These dollars will go to working Americans who really need the help. Again, I want to make sure the record reflects that last year, during our negotiations, our chairman, Senator Specter, guaranteed that we would have this increase this year. He lived up to that commitment. We had a tremendous increase in the child care program, and we thank Senator Specter for his commitment and for keeping his word to get that increase for child care this year. I am proud we could also increase funding for education programs by, as I said, $4.6 billion. That includes a $350 increase in the maximum Pell grant to $3,650, the highest ever. In this year that we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the bill includes a $1.3 billion increase in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. We have also funded a new Office of Disability Policy at the Department of Labor. At HHS, we were able to add funds for several other programs funded under the Developmental Disabilities Act. This bill also places great importance on women's health and includes over $4 billion for programs that address the health needs of women. I again might add that Senator Specter and I worked together on a women's health initiative that is part and parcel of this bill, and that is what that $4 billion is for. The bill also includes a $50 million line item to address the issue of medical errors and to help health care practitioners and health care institutions, hospitals, and other health care facilities, to begin the process of developing methodologies and ways of cutting down on medical errors. Medical errors are now the fifth leading cause of death in America. As we have looked at this, we found it is not just one person or one institution or one cause; there is a whole variety of different reasons. Quite frankly, I think our institutions and our practitioners have not kept up with the new technologies of today which in most of the private sector have helped us so much with productivity and which I believe in the health care sector can really help us cut down on medical errors. But that is what that $50 million is there to do. The bill is not without its problems. As I mentioned, we do have a problem with the social services block grant. Hopefully, we will get this bill to conference and we will be able to fix that at that time. Also, the provisions in the bill that have the money for school modernization and for class size reductions are not targeted enough. They are just broadly thrown in there. Again, we had this battle last year. When it finally came down to it, the Congress agreed with the White House, in a partnership, that we needed to put the money in there for class size reduction. I believe the same needs to be done for school modernization. We only put in 7 cents out of every dollar that goes for elementary and secondary education in America. We only provide 7 cents. A lot of that goes for, as I said, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A lot of that goes for title I programs to help low-income areas. When it is all over with, we have just a penny or two left of every dollar that we can give out to elementary and secondary schools. So when we put in money for school modernization, we ought to make sure that is what it goes for. Schools desperately need this money. Our property taxpayers all over this country are getting hit, time and time again, to pay more in property taxes, which can be very regressive, to help pay for modernizing their schools. As we know, most of the schools need to be modernized; they have leaky roofs, and toilets that won't flush, water that is bad, and air conditioning--a lot of times they don't even have air conditioning-- heating plants that are inadequate. As I pointed out, one out of every four elementary and secondary schools in New York City today are still heated by coal. And again, these tend to be in the lowest income areas. So we need to target that money. It is not in this bill. That is one of the problems with it. Again, I hope we can work that out as we go to conference. It is a national disgrace that the nicest places our children see are shopping malls, sports arenas, and movie theaters, and the most run down places they see are their public schools. Again, we have to fix these in conference. I thank Senator Specter, once again, for being so open and working with us in a very strong bipartisan fashion. We worked together to shape this bill. Overall, it is a good bill, with a few exceptions that we have to fix once we go to conference. I want to make clear, I support the bill in its present form. I hope we get a good vote on it as it leaves here and goes to conference. I reserve my right, however, on the conference report, when it comes back. I am hopeful we can get it to conference with a strong vote, sit down with our House counterparts, and work out our differences. Hopefully, we can come back to the floor having fixed the class size, school modernization, and social services block grant problems we have in this bill. I thank Chairman Specter for working in a bipartisan fashion. I hope we can get through this bill reasonably rapidly today, hopefully get to conference next week. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming. Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I call up the amendment I have at the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Wyoming [Mr. Enzi] proposes an amendment numbered 3593. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: On page 23, between lines 12 and 13, insert the following: Sec. . None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. Mr. HARKIN. I didn't hear the unanimous consent request. The PRESIDING OFFICER. It was to dispense with the reading of the amendment. The Senator from Arkansas. Amendment No. 3594 to Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment I send to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson] proposes an amendment numbered 3594 to amendment No. 3593. Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Mr. REID. I object. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard. The clerk will continue the call of the roll. The assistant legislative clerk continued the call of the roll. [[Page S5591]] Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, the amendment has been offered dealing with ergonomics, and it is not an unexpected amendment. This has been a contentious issue on this bill for many years. We have had the matter before. I have conferred with Senator Harkin, and there is no doubt we ought to proceed with the debate and let people have their say and let us see how the debate progresses. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized. Mr. REID. Mr. President, I want to make sure we understand late today that we are not the ones who have offered this contentious amendment. This is a very important bill that involves hundreds of billions of dollars. The two managers have worked on this, and they have a bill we can make presentable to the rest of the Senate. I just want to make sure, when I am called upon, and others are called upon, we are not the ones who offered this contentious amendment. We are not going to move off this amendment--that is the point I am making--until it is resolved one way or the other. If there is some concern about that, I think the people who want this bill moved should try to invoke cloture. It won't be invoked, but that is the only alternative. Amendment No. 3594, As Modified Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I send a modification of my amendment to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment is modified. The amendment (No. 3594), as modified, reads as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. This amendment shall take effect October 2, 2000. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized. Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, let me just make an observation. I hear the threats that they are going to filibuster this amendment. This amendment deals with Labor-HHS appropriations. The Senate has the right to vote on whether or not we are going to spend the money in the Department of Labor to implement regulations that have a dramatic impact on business, on workers. We have a right to vote on it. The House voted on it; the Senate is going to vote on it. We have voted on this amendment in one way or another almost every year since 1995. This is not a new issue. So now some people are saying, wait a minute, we are not going to take this tough vote. Didn't we just have a vote on hate crimes? I think we had two. Didn't we have a vote on campaign finance? Some people didn't want to vote on those two issues on this side of the aisle. Didn't we vote on a Patients' Bill of Rights? Really, what the minority is saying is, we want to vote on our issues, but not on an issue that is relevant. Every amendment I just mentioned was not relevant to the underlying Department of Defense authorization bill. But still we ended up allowing those votes. We didn't have to. Now we have a relevant amendment to the underlying bill, Labor-HHS, the Department of Labor appropriations bill. We think the administration is going too far in the proposed regulations which they planned on having effective in December--these regulations the Clinton administration is trying to run through without significant hearings and without oversight and real analysis of how much it would cost. Here is an example. On cost alone, the Department of Labor said--OSHA said--this regulation will cost $4 billion. The Small Business Administration, which they control, said the cost could be 15 times as much, or $60 billion a year. This Congress is not going to vote on a regulation that could cost $60 billion a year as estimated by the Small Business Administration? The private sector estimates range to over $100 billion per year. Wow, that is a lot of money. Shouldn't we vote on it? Are these good regulations or not? Are we going to be able to stop them or not? Do we want to stop them? What are the regulations? They deal with ergonomics and with motion. OSHA--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration--is saying: We want to have some control over motion, and we think maybe this is harmful, and therefore we are going to control it. It may mean lifting boxes, or sitting at your desk, or anything minuscule, or something large. The Department of Labor is coming in and saying: You need a remedy, you need to change the way you do business, because we know how to do your business better, and if it increases costs, that is too bad--not to mention the fact that they say we are going to change workers comp rules in every State in the Nation. I wonder what Senator Byrd from West Virginia thinks about changing workers comp rules in West Virginia. I used to serve in the Oklahoma legislature. I worked on those laws and rules in our State. Are we going to have the Federal Government come up with a reimbursement rate of 90 percent when our State already passed a workers comp rule of 67 percent? Does the Federal Government know better? My suggestion is that my colleagues from Arkansas and Wyoming, in introducing this amendment, have every right to offer an amendment that says: We are going to withhold funds on this regulation. We don't want a regulation to go into effect in December without us having additional time to consider it, without knowing how much it is going to cost. Maybe it should be postponed or suspended; maybe we should let the next administration deal with it. Let's vote on it. For people to say, wait a minute, we don't like this amendment, so we are going to filibuster--there are probably a lot of amendments I don't like. Are we going to filibuster all of those? I think that would be grossly irresponsible. We need to let the Senate work its way. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a question? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Would the Senator tell us under which Secretary of Labor and how long ago this proposed ergonomics rule was promulgated? How many years of study have we put in on it? Mr. NICKLES. The original rule came out, I believe, in 1995, and it made very little sense. The latest proposal had over 600 pages. The business community and others who looked at it said it was not workable. The Department of Labor has come back and said let's revise it and make it more workable. Did they show us results? No. They said let's overrule the States' workers comp. If this went into effect--and I don't think it will, so maybe that is why people don't want to vote on it. But does this Congress really want to overrule every States' workers comp law? I don't think so. I think it would be a mistake. To answer the question, this administration has been trying to promulgate this rule for about 5 years. We have been successful most of those years in putting in restrictions to stop them. Unfortunately, we didn't get it in last year. To me, it was one of the biggest mistakes Congress made last year--not stopping this administration. Now they are trying to promulgate the rule, I might mention, right after the elections, right before the next President. I think a delay is certainly in order. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a further question on that? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Again, it was my understanding that it was former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole who first committed the Department to issue an ergonomic standard to protect workers on carpal tunnel syndrome and MSDs, as they are called. It has been under study for 10 years; is that right? Mr. WELLSTONE. The Senator is right. Mr. NICKLES. I think he asked me. They may have been working on this Department of Labor takeover of, I don't know what--workers involvement. But they issued the rule on November 23 of last year--a rule that has 600 pages. They may have been working on it for 10 years, but I doubt that. This administration hasn't been in office quite that long. But with enormous expense. I think, again, we should have a vote. To give an example, I came from manufacturing, and we lifted and moved a [[Page S5592]] lot of heavy things. I don't really think somebody from the Department of Labor could come into Nickles Machine Corporation and say: Hey, we know the limits on what somebody can lift as far as pistons and cylinders and bearings are concerned. Therefore, we suggest you put a maximum on it. Or maybe every Senator--everybody has a machine shop, or every Senator has a bottling company. Somebody comes into the Senate every day and loads the Coke machines and the Pepsi machines. This rule says that you can't lift that many cases; that you can't lift two cases at once, or one case, or maybe you can only lift a six- pack or something. The net result would be an estimate that bottlers would have to hire twice as many people. Maybe this is an employment bill. My point is you could increase costs dramatically with draconian results without even knowing what we are doing. I think a delay and not to have a regulation with this kind of economic consequence coming right after the election and right before the swearing in of a new administration makes good sense. Let's postpone this until the next administration. I thank my colleagues for their efforts. I yield the floor. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, my colleague has the floor. But could I have my colleagues' forbearance for a 15-second request? Mr. President, I would like to respond to some of what was said by the Senator from Oklahoma; in other words, after Senator Enzi, and go back and forth on this, pro-con. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my speech, Senator Wellstone be recognized as ranking member of the subcommittee that deals with this, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Hutchinson be allowed to follow that. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Allard). Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member. This is not a new issue for either of us. We have been holding hearings on it. It has been in the press. We both knew about it. He was here to debate it. This is not a surprise. I am pleased that I am going to be able to make my floor statement. I think perhaps after the floor statement maybe the other side would like to join me in proposing this amendment. I think there will definitely be additional Members who will want to join me in this. Mr. President, I rose today and offered an amendment that simply prohibits the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, from expending funds to finalize its proposed ergonomics rule for 1 year. It was mentioned before that last year we didn't get a prohibition against them proceeding with it. You will hear in a bit how much that little error has cost us. But before I tell you why this amendment is critically necessary, I want to tell you what this amendment is not about. This amendment is not about whether or not OSHA should have any ergonomics rule. It is not a prohibition on ergonomics regulations generally. And it is most definitely not a dispute over the importance of protecting American workers. Clearly protecting workplace safety and health is of paramount importance. As the chairman of the subcommittee that deals with worker safety, I feel a special responsibility to oversee the agency charged with safeguarding these workers. But I am not fulfilling this responsibility if I merely rubber stamp anything OSHA does just because OSHA says it is acting in the interest of worker safety and health. I have a duty to make certain that OSHA is acting responsibly, appropriately, and in the best interests of workplace safety and health. Sadly, OSHA has not done so with this proposed ergonomic rule. That is what this amendment is about. Because of this rule and the way OSHA is going about it, the amendment merely requires that OSHA wait a reasonable 1-year period before issuing a final ergonomics rule. That is to keep OSHA from making drastic mistakes to add to those already made. Let me tell you why it is imperative that Congress act now to require OSHA to take this reasonable additional amount of time for this rulemaking. In a nutshell, OSHA is using questionable rulemaking procedures; OSHA omitted the analysis of the economic impact; OSHA hasn't resolved conflicting laws; and this rule infringes on State workers compensation--to name a few of the problems that riddle this overly ambitious rule. OSHA's haste to get through the rulemaking process is very clear. The rule OSHA has proposed is arguably the largest, broadest, most onerous and most expensive rule in the history of the agency--probably any agency. But OSHA has made it very clear that it intends to finalize the rule this year--just over a year from the time the proposed rule was published. This narrow-minded commitment to year's end can only mean that OSHA has already made up its mind in favor of the rule and thinks it will leave a mammoth and far-reaching legacy for the current Presidential administration. I would suggest it will be closer to the legacy of the OSHA home office inspections. Perhaps you remember the letter issued by OSHA about the time we left for Christmas recess, the one that suggested OSHA was going to go into each home where people work and look for safety violations. From the time we found out about it, it only took 48 hours to see how far- reaching, imposing, and stupid that decision was. Of course, the whole Nation realized the implications of the home inspections even quicker. I am extremely concerned that OSHA is blinded by the motivation to get it done during this administration and is not taking the time to carefully consider all the aspects and effects of this important rule. For example, the public comment period for the proposed rule was much shorter than OSHA typically permits--even for much less significant rules. OSHA has never before finalized such a significant rule in a year's time. Moreover, in its haste to get through this rulemaking process, OSHA, until recently, omitted an analysis of the economic impact of the rule on the U.S. Postal Service, on State and local government employees in State plans, and on railroad employees--all together, over 10 million employees. These aren't optional economic impacts. These are mandatory, in light of the dollars involved. OSHA is apparently so busy with other things that it did not do the analysis for these entities until the end of last month, despite the fact that the Postal Service requested an analysis 5 months prior. To add insult to injury, OSHA has only given these folks 2\1/2\ months to comment on the complex analysis that OSHA forgot to do, and OSHA won't even consider extending the overall comment deadline for these folks. It is because they are trying to get it done this year. They have had 5 months to prepare it, and they tell the Postal Service that they have to analyze it in 2\1/2\ months--no extension. Even more troubling than the fact that OSHA is rushing the rule is the way OSHA is going about it. OSHA's ambitions with this rule are so big and overreaching that OSHA has truly bitten off more than it can chew, and may be playing fast and loose with the rulemaking process and your tax dollars. In fact, OSHA has bitten off so much with this rule that it is apparently paying others to chew for it--too big a bite. They can't chew it all. So to make it happen in 1 year, they are going to pay others to do some of their chewing. I use the word ``apparently'' because of the difficulty getting answers. Responding to inquiries first made by Congressman David McIntosh, OSHA recently disclosed that it has paid at least 70 contractors a total of $1.75 million--almost $2 million--to help it with the ergonomics rulemaking. They are paying these contractors with our tax dollars in order to speed the process up on a bad rule. Congressman McIntosh's staff discovered that OSHA may have failed to disclose an additional 47 contracts for who knows how much more money. OSHA's own documentation reveals that it paid 28 contractors $10,000 each to testify at the public rulemaking hearing. Going through some of the accounting information, I even noticed that one contractor had turned in an [[Page S5593]] itemized bill for less--and was still paid the $10,000. When I asked OSHA for evidence of public notification that it was paying these witnesses, OSHA gave me none. I am very concerned that OSHA is paying so much money for outside contracts for this rulemaking that I intend to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of this issue. Let me state things I already know. I think you will be convinced, as I am, that we absolutely need to put the brakes on this rulemaking and force OSHA to straighten this mess out before it finalizes the rule. First, OSHA does not seem to want to have me have this information. Some of it is just good accounting stuff. As the only accountant in the Senate, I am really interested. I have requested documents from OSHA that would give a clear picture of its relationship with some of these contractors, but OSHA has so far refused to give them to me, claiming a ``privilege.'' That applies to private citizens, not to Congress. We have the right to know where the dollars that we are spending go, unequivocally. Now, Congressman McIntosh has been able to obtain some key documents from the contractors themselves, but OSHA placed strict constraints on Congressman McIntosh's ability to share them with fellow lawmakers. This is stuff that came from the contractors, and OSHA can still get its hands in and keep us from using it the way it ought to be used. OSHA did grudgingly agree that I could look at the documents--not take them or copy them or quote from them--but only in Congressman McIntosh's office. When I asked OSHA, as a courtesy, to permit Congressman McIntosh's staff member, Barbara Kahlow, to bring the documents to me, just to look at them, abiding by the rules, OSHA said no. I am so concerned about this issue that I went over to Congressman McIntosh's office last night after I finished working at the Senate to look at these documents for myself. Now, fortunately, Congressman McIntosh's negotiations made that possible. Can anyone believe that documents concerning money we are spending have to have special negotiations before I can look at them? It comes under my committee. I am in charge of the oversight on that committee. Let me recap that: I was told that the contracts and expenditures are privileged. I was told that information couldn't be brought to my office. I was told I could not copy any information. I was told I could not quote any information. I was told that I couldn't quote from the documents. I had to use extra time to go to the House side to even see those documents. I am not afraid of a little walk over to the House. I just couldn't understand why OSHA was going to so much trouble to keep the documents from me. I physically went to Congressman McIntosh's office last night and looked at the documents. Because of OSHA, I can't quote these documents. I can't show you copies. But I can tell you what I saw. I saw that not only did OSHA pay 28 expert witnesses $10,000 a pop, and one of them didn't even ask for that much, it also appears that OSHA did the following: OSHA gave detailed outlines to at least some of the witnesses telling them what they were to say in the testimony; second, they had OSHA lawyers tell at least one expert witness that they wanted a stronger statement from the witness regarding the role of physical factors. That is an important scientific issue. These are supposed to be experts. They told him to make it stronger. Third, heavily edited testimony of at least some of the witnesses is evidenced. OSHA held practice sessions to coach the witnesses in their testimony. I have never heard of that around here. This sounds a lot like OSHA told its expert witnesses what to say. This sounds like OSHA made up its mind a long time ago in favor, and has been stacking the evidence to support its position. I respect OSHA's need to enlist expert assistance in technical or scientific rulemaking. I expect them to get the right information. I would like to think it wasn't biased when they got it. And I have to say, I don't respect any agency paying witnesses to say what the agency tells them to say, and then holding the witnesses' testimony up as ``best available evidence.'' Best available evidence is what the OSH Act requires to support this standard. It doesn't say anything about paying witnesses or coaching witnesses. It doesn't say anything about telling them to change their testimony. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence that it is promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, so OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? That has been the problem with the past years of looking at regulating ergonomics. OSHA makes up the rules. OSHA does the tests. OSHA says their tests are good. OSHA gets ready to propose a rule and realizes they have made a drastic mistake. That has happened in the past. That is why this little document is the first published proposed ergonomics regulation. It didn't happen until November of last year. This document, this is the first time we have gotten a look at this document. It is the first time it has been officially printed. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence in its promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, and has already told them what to say, so that OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? No wonder OSHA has promulgated such a greedy, overreaching rule. Maybe I could pass all the OSHA reform legislation I wanted if I could pay 28 witnesses $10,000 apiece to come in and say what I wanted them to say in my hearings. Does that seem like a conflict of interest? I wouldn't do things that way. In fact, we had a hearing recently about one of the most objectionable parts of this rule, the work restriction protection provisions. I will talk about those in a few minutes. We had to tell one of the witnesses we selected that we couldn't pay his transportation costs--not a $10,000 bonus to testify; we couldn't pay his transportation costs. We did this in part for financial reasons and in part because we wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety that can result from spending taxpayers' dollars on a witness who is supposed to be giving an unbiased opinion. This witness came to Washington anyway--on his own dime. He didn't have his State pay for it. He paid for it out of his pocket to testify at my hearing because he felt so strongly about the terrible effects of this ergonomics rule. Needless to say, I am very disturbed by what I have seen to date about this issue. OSHA's response is that it has always paid witnesses for their testimony. I can't find that in any public documents. I can't find that disclosure. I can't find where they actually said that they were paying them, and this was paid testimony. It seems that ought to be disclosed. Whether or not this is true, it remains to be seen whether OSHA has ever paid this many witnesses this much money and participated this thoroughly in crafting the substance of a witness' testimony. OSHA has also tried to give me the typical excuse of a teenager caught doing something wrong: Hey, everybody is doing it. To that, let me first respond with the typical, but sage parental response: If everybody were jumping off a bridge, would OSHA jump off a bridge, too? That doesn't sound like good safety to me. Second, everybody is most certainly not doing it. Representatives of both the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, two agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, dealing with scientific things, have stated publicly that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. Let me say that again. The Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, have stated publicly--you can read it in the paper--that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. As the DOT general counsel put it ``Paying experts would not get us what we need to know.'' Finally, just because OSHA may have these things in the past, in my book that does not make this practice OK in this instance. On the contrary, it [[Page S5594]] makes any other instances of witness coaching equally objectionable. Two wrongs don't make a right. We can't do anything about past rulemakings, but we can do something about this one--if we act now. Clearly, more needs to be learned about this subject, but if we don't pass this amendment, OSHA is going to forge ahead and finalize a document that they have already determined is the perfect answer even before the comments have been sifted through. They will finalize a possibly--no, almost assuredly--be a tainted rule, and we won't have another opportunity to stop them. A vote for this amendment makes certain that we will have sufficient time to conduct a thorough congressional investigation into this issue and force OSHA to clean up its rulemaking procedures if necessary. Lest you think my concerns about this rule are only procedural, rest assured these procedural concerns are only half the problem here. This rule has serious substantive flaws. Much has been written and debated about the many problems with this rule--its vagueness, its coverage of preexisting and non-work related injuries, the harshness of its single trigger. I expect you have all heard something about these topics and my colleagues will talk more about these later today. In my investigation of the rule, I found two particularly troubling issues. Both involve the reach of the long arm of this overly ambitious rule into arenas outside of OSHA's jurisdiction--both with disastrous effects. First, the rule will have a devastating effect on patients and facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. OSHA has created a potential conflict between the ergonomics rule and health care regulations. Congress recognized the importance to patient dignity of permitting patients to choose how they are moved and how they receive certain types of care when it passed the Nursing Home Act of 1987. This act and corresponding regulations mandate this important freedom of choice for patients. The ergonomics rule, on the other hand imposes many requirements on all health care facilities and providers concerning patient care and movement. Thus, these facilities and providers may be forced to choose between violating the ergonomics rule or violating both the Nursing Home Act and the patient dignity. Moreover, OSHA's rule forces impossible choices about resource allocation between patient care versus employee care. The only way for businesses to absorb the cost of this rule under any situation is to pass the cost along to consumers. However, some ``consumers'' are patients dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. The Federal Government sets an absolute cap on what these individuals can pay for medical services. Thus, the facilities that provide care for these patients simply cannot charge a higher cost. Simply put, these facilities and providers are unable to absorb the cost of the ergonomics rule. And there is no question these facilities will face a cost. OSHA's own estimate of the cost of compliance in the first year will total $526 million for nursing and personal care facilities and residential care. And you have to remember, we are saying that they really use conservative, from their point of view, estimates of costs. The industry estimates that the per-facility cost for a typical nursing home will be $60,000. But my issue with this rule is not that it will cost these facilities so much money--it is that it will cost elderly and poor patients access to quality care. You have probably heard about some of the facilities going out of business because of some appropriations measures we passed. We have corrected them a little bit. But my issue with this is not what it will cost these facilities, but what it will cost the elderly and the poor in access to quality care. Sadly these patients are already in danger of losing quality care. Many facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare are in serious financial straits due in part to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Ten percent of nursing homes are already in bankruptcy. And the Clinton administration just announced a request for an additional $20 billion for Medicaid and Medicare so that the reimbursement cap can be raised. All this is before the costly ergonomics rule places its additional tax on an already overtaxed system. Implementing this sweeping and expensive proposed ergonomics standard is simply more than this industry can bear. Let me assure those who say this Medicaid/Medicare quandary will not have very broad impact--let me assure them that it will. Nearly 80 percent of all patients in Nursing Homes and over 8 million home health patients are dependent on Medicare or Medicaid. How will these patients receive health care if the ergonomics rule forces nursing homes and home health organizations out of business? The answer is, they won't. But it does not appear that OSHA has even considered that consequence. Perhaps OSHA is assuming that Congress will clean up after it by raising reimbursement rates to accommodate OSHA's rule? If this is the case, then OSHA itself has invited us to step in, prohibit OSHA from finalizing this rule and OSHA back to the drawing board. A vote in favor of this amendment will ensure that OSHA resolves the mess its rule creates for providers and patients before issuing a final rule. That ought to be a basic consideration for us in this body. The second problem I am very concerned with is OSHA's encroachment into State workers' compensation. A provision of the rule would require employers to compensate certain injured employees 90 to 100 percent of their salary. OSHA calls this requirement ``work restriction protection'' or WRP. But it sounds an awful lot like workers' compensation doesn't it? They told us they don't have the money to do the job, and now OSHA apparently wants a new job--to be a Workers Compensation Administration. That is why we held a hearing, to see what was involved in that. But there are two problems with that. First, the statute that created OSHA tells us that OSHA is not to meddle with workers' compensation. Second, OSHA's intrusion into the world of workers' compensation will hinder its ability to perform its true and very important function--improving workplace safety and health. All of the States already do Workers Comp. Thirty years ago, when Congress wrote the Occupational Health and Safety Act, it made an explicit statement about OSHA and workers' compensation. It wrote that the act should not be interpreted to: . . . supersede or in any manner affect any workmen's compensation law, or to enlarge or diminish or affect in any other manner the common law or statutory rights, duties, or liabilities of employers and employees under any law with respect to injuries, diseases, or death of employees arising out of, or in the course of, employment. Twice this provision uses the broad phrase ``affect in any manner'' to describe what OSHA should not do to State workers' compensation. As someone with the privilege of being one of this country's lawmakers, it is hard for me to imagine how Congress could have drafted a broader or more explicit prohibition on OSHA's interference with State workers' compensation. Perhaps more importantly, this provision of the law makes good sense. All 50 States have intricate workers' compensation systems that strike a delicate balance between the employer and employee. Each party gives up certain rights in exchange for certain benefits. For example, an employer gives up the ability to argue that a workplace accident was not its fault, but in exchange receives a promise that the employee cannot pursue any other remedies against it. The injury gets taken care of, the injury gets paid for, and the worker gets compensated. Each State has reached its own balance through years of experience and trial and error. Many of us have served in State legislatures where one of the perpetual questions coming before the legislature is changes to workers compensation. It is a very intricate process. Significantly, Congress has never taken this autonomy away from the States by mandating Federal workers compensation requirements and, in fact, put those statements in, to which I referred earlier, where they are clearly not to get into workers compensation. The States have special mechanisms set up for resolving disputes and vindicating rights under the workers compensation systems. OSHA wants to create its own Federal workers compensation system, but [[Page S5595]] only for musculoskeletal disorders, MSDs. But OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower to decide the numerous disputes that inevitably will arise because of the WRP provision. I ask all Senators to talk with their State workers compensation people. I have not found any of them who did not think this was intrusive, who did not think this gets into their business which they have crafted for years and years. OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower these States have to decide the numerous disputes that will arise. All of a sudden, OSHA will have to decide disputes over the existence of medical conditions, the causation of the medical conditions, the right to compensation. But what happens to workplace safety and health while OSHA is being a workers compensation administration? The devastating effect on workers compensation has been recognized by workers compensation commissioners across the country. The Western Governors' Association has issued a resolution harshly criticizing the WRP provisions. Moreover, Charles Jeffress met with a large group of workers compensation administrators, and when I asked him how many spoke in favor of this provision, he answered: None. It was not quite that definite, but he answered definitely none. Significantly, this meeting took place before the proposed rule was published, so Mr. Jeffress obviously did not take their lack of support to heart in drafting the proposed rule. If this lack of responsiveness is any indication, we can have no confidence OSHA will take this provision out of the final rule. A vote for this amendment ensures that OSHA will have to take additional time to consider all the negative feedback it has received on this issue alone. Hopefully, with this additional time, OSHA will recognize that it should stay out of the workers compensation business and get back to the important business of truly protecting this country's working men and women. From all of these facts and circumstances, I hope it is as clear to you as it is to me that OSHA is not ready to take sensible, informed, reliable action on ergonomics. Unfortunately, it is equally clear that OSHA is going to push forward anyway unless we take some action. Because of the magnitude of this issue, it is absolutely imperative that cool heads prevail over politics. We must ensure that OSHA takes the time to investigate and solve problems with the rule without taking shortcuts. Nobody puts them under the deadline except themselves, but they are obviously convinced of the deadline. If we do not act now to impose a reasonable 1-year delay of the finalization of the rule, OSHA will forge ahead and produce a sloppy final product that not only fails to advance worker health and safety, but also threatens the viability of State workers compensation, health care, the poor and elderly, not to mention businesses all across the country. If even one of these issues I raised troubles you--and I think they should all trouble all of us deeply--then you must recognize the desperate need for a 1-year delay. I urge your support of this amendment. I am joined in offering this amendment by my colleagues, Senators Lott, Nickles, Jeffords, Bond, Hutchinson, Brownback, Sessions, Hagel, DeWine, Crapo, Bennett, Thompson, Burns, Collins, Frist, Gregg, Coverdell, Voinovich, Fitzgerald, Abraham, Snowe, Ashcroft, Grams, Hutchison, Thomas, and Allard. I ask unanimous consent that they all be added to the amendment as original cosponsors. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the amendment that will ensure we have this delay to do it right. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I do not know quite where to start. My colleague from Oklahoma had said earlier, and both my friends from Wyoming and Arkansas had said, we ought to have a debate. We will. We ought to be focusing on this issue. We will focus on this issue. There are many important issues we should focus on in the Senate. This is an important issue. I want to speak about it. In my State, by the way, two-thirds of senior citizens have no prescription drug coverage at all. I would like to focus on that issue. I would like to make sure 700,000 Medicare recipients have coverage. Education, title I--I would like to talk about a lot of different issues, but this issue is before us. I hope we will be able to speak to many different issues in several months to come. First, my colleague, Senator Enzi, complains about the rule, but there is no final rule. It is not final yet. That is the point. OSHA, which is doing exactly what it should do, Secretary Jeffress is doing exactly what he should do by law--holding hearings, getting input--they are going to issue a final rule. They have not issued a final rule. My colleague jumps to conclusions and joins the effort over 10 years to block a rule, but the rule has not been made. There may be significant changes. When my colleague complains about the rule, let's be clear, they have not finished the process. We do not know what the final rule is yet. But for some reason, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are so anxious to block this basic worker protection that they already feel confident about attacking a rule that does not exist. Second, my colleagues say that OSHA is rushing. Senator Harkin was quite right in saying to Senator Nickles: Wait a minute, didn't this go back to Secretary Elizabeth Dole? Wasn't Secretary Dole the first to talk about the problem of repetitive stress injury and the need to provide some protection for working men and women in our country? This has been going on for a decade. And Senator Jeffords and OSHA and the administration are rushing? By the way, I say to my colleagues, time is not neutral. From the point of view of people--I am going to be giving some examples because this debate needs to be put in personal terms. It is about working people's lives, from the point of view of people who suffer from this injury, from the point of view of people who are in terrible pain, from the point of view of people who may not be able to work, from the point of view of people who can have their lives destroyed because of this injury, because of our failure to issue a standard. We are not rushing. Can I assure all Senators that we are not rushing from their point of view? Then my colleague talks about home office inspections. This is a red herring. We agree, OSHA agrees, they are not going to be inspecting home offices. Why bring up an issue that is not an issue? My colleagues talk about the WRP, the work restriction protection, and all about the ways in which it will undercut State worker comp laws. But you know what, in our committee hearing, we heard from witnesses that it has no effect on workers comp laws. We will debate that more. But no one, no Senator should be under the illusion that OSHA is about to issue a rule that is going to undercut or overturn State comp laws. Then I hear my colleague, my good friend, complain about OSHA's use of contractors. They have hea

Major Actions:

All articles in Senate section

APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES
(Senate - June 22, 2000)

Text of this article available as: TXT PDF [Pages S5588-S5609] APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will proceed to H.R. 4577, which the clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: A bill (H.R. 4577) making appropriations for the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies for fiscal year ending September 30, 2001, and for other purposes. The Senate proceeded to consider the bill. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Pennsylvania. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all after the enacting clause be stricken, and the text of the S. 2553, as reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee, be inserted in lieu thereof, the bill as amended be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendment, and no points of order be waived by virtue of this agreement. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Amendment No. 3590 (The text of the amendment (No. 3590) is printed in today's Record under ``Amendments Submitted.'') Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am pleased to make the opening statement on the pending appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health, Human Services and Education. The subcommittee, which the distinguished Senator from Iowa and I work on, has the responsibility for funding these three very important and major departments. We have come forward with a bill which has program level funding of $104.5 billion. While that seems like a lot of money--and is a lot of money--by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's health, by the time you handle the priorities for the nation's education--and the Federal Government is a relatively minor participant, 7 percent to 8 percent, but an important participant--and by the time you take care of the Department of Labor and very important items on worker safety, it is tough to find adequate funding. We have structured this bill in collaboration with requests from virtually all Members of the Senate who have had something to say about what the funding priorities should be based on their extensive experience across the 50 States of the United States. We have come forward on the Department of Education with a funding budget in excess of $40 billion, more than $4.6 billion more than last year, and some $100 million over the President's request. We have established the priorities which the Congress sees fit. We have increased the maximum Pell grants. We have increased special education by $1.3 billion, trying to do a share of the Federal Government on that important item. We have increased grants for the disadvantaged by almost $400 million. We have moved on the Department of Health and Human Services for a total budget of over $44 billion, which is an increase of almost $2.5 billion over last year. We have increased Head Start by some $1 billion, so it is now in excess of $6 billion. We have structured a new drug demand reduction initiative, taking the very substantial funds which are available within our subcommittee, and redirecting $3.7 billion to try to deal with the demand reduction issue. It is my view that demand reduction is the long-range answer--that and rehabilitation--to the drug problem in America. We may be spending in excess of $1 billion soon in aid to Colombia, and it is my view that there is an imbalance in the $18 billion which we now spend, with two- thirds--about $12 billion--going to so-called supply interdiction and fighting street crime. They are important. As district attorney of Philadelphia, my office was very active in fighting street crime against drug dealers. In the long run, unless we are able to reduce demand for drugs in the United States, suppliers from Latin America will find a way to grow drugs, and sellers on America's street corners will find ways to distribute it, which is why we have made this initiative to try to come to grips with the demand side. Last year, we structured a program to deal with youth violence prevention. We have increased the funding by some $280 million so that now it is being directed in a coordinated way against youth violence, and some substantial progress has been made in the almost intervening year since this program was initiated. A very substantial increase in funding has been provided in this bill for the National Institutes of Health. I would suggest that of all the items for program level funding in this $104.5 billion bill, the funding for the National Institutes of Health may well be the most important. I frequently say that the NIH is the crown jewel of the Federal Government, and add to that, in fact, it may be the only jewel of the Federal Government. Senator Harkin and I, in conjunction with Congressman Porter and Congressman Obey on the House side, have taken the lead on NIH. Four years ago, we added almost $1 billion; 3 years ago we added $2 billion; last year we added $2.3 billion, which was cut slightly in across-the-board cuts to [[Page S5589]] about $2.2 billion; and this year we are adding $2.7 billion. There have been phenomenal achievements by NIH in a broad variety of maladies. There is nothing more important than health. Without health, none of us can function. It is so obvious and so fundamental. These maladies strike virtually all Americans. I will enumerate the diseases which NIH is combating and making enormous progress: Alzheimer's disease, AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, cancers--leukemia, breast, prostate, pancreatic, lung, ovarian--heart disease, stroke, asthma, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, autism, osteoporosis, hepatitis C, arthritis, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, kidney disease, and mental health. I daresay that there is not a family in America not touched directly by one of these ailments. For a country which has a gross national product of $8 trillion and a Federal budget of $1.85 trillion, this is not too much money to be spending on NIH. We are striving to fulfill the commitment that the Senate made to double NIH funding in the course of 5 years. We are doing a lot. We are not quite meeting that target, but we are determined to succeed at it. This bill also includes $11.6 billion for the Department of Labor, an increase for Job Corps, an increase for youth offenders, trying to deal with juvenile offenders to stop them from becoming recidivous. There is no doubt if one takes a functional illiterate without a trade or skill and releases that functional illiterate without a skill from prison, that illiterate, unable to cope in society, is likely to return to a life of crime. Focusing on youthful offenders, we think, is very important. We have met the President's figures on occupational safety and health, NLRB, mine safety, and for a specific problem we have topped the President's figure slightly by $2.5 million, seeing the ravages of black lung and mine safety-related programs that I have personally observed both in Pennsylvania's anthracite region in the northeastern part of my State and the bituminous area in the western part of my State. I was dismayed when the subcommittee came forward with its budget to have the President immediately articulate a veto message. I note my distinguished colleague from Iowa nodding in the affirmative. He did a little more during the Appropriations Committee markup and not in the affirmative. I left it to my colleague to have a comment or two about the President of his own party. I learned a long time ago, after coming to the Senate, that we have to cross party lines if we want to get anything done in this town. I am pleased and proud to say Senator Harkin and I have established a working partnership. When he chaired this subcommittee, I was the ranking member. I like it better when I chair and he is the ranking member. He spoke up in very forceful terms criticizing the President, the President's men, and the President's women for coming forward with that veto statement when we have strained to put together this total bill of $104.5 billion, and it has been tough going to get the allocations from the Appropriations Committee. I thank Senator Stevens, the chairman, and Senator Byrd, the ranking member, for coming up with this money. When the President asked for $1.3 billion for construction and $1.4 billion for additional teachers and class size, we put that money in the budget. We did add, however, that if the local boards make a determination, factually based, that the money is better used in some other line, the local school boards can spend the money in that line, giving priority to what the President has asked for, but recognizing that cookie cutters do not apply to all school districts in America. We have structured some different priorities in this bill. The last time I read the Constitution, it was Congress who had the principal authority on appropriations. It is true the President must sign the bill, but to issue a veto threat after the subcommittee reports out a bill, before the full committee acts on it, before the full Senate acts on it, before there is a conference seems to me to be untoward. Regrettably, in the past, this bill has not been finished until after the end of the fiscal year, so we have been unable to engage in a discussion with the President and a discussion with the American people about what are the priorities established by Congress. I emphasize that this is a bill which receives input from virtually all Members. We have hundreds of letters which pour into this subcommittee which we consider, and the same is true on the House side. This is no small matter as to who may be assessing the priorities for America. For the President to say his priorities are the only ones to be considered seems to me untoward. That is as noncritical a word as I can fashion at the moment. I thank the majority leader, Senator Lott, for scheduling this bill early. We intend to conference this bill promptly with the House and have a bill ready for final passage in July--hopefully in early July--and then let us see the President's reaction. We are prepared to take to the American people the basic concept that if school districts do not need additional buildings, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.3 billion for something else. If some school districts do not have a problem with the number of teachers they have, they ought to be able to use their share of the $1.4 billion for something else. This is a very brief statement of a very complicated bill. At the outset, I thank my colleague, Senator Harkin, for his diligence and his close cooperation in bringing the bill to the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Labor-HHS bill has reached the floor relatively early this year. In the past few years, we have been sort of on the caboose end of the train. It is an extremely important bill. It addresses many issues that are vital to the strength of our Nation--our health, education, job training, the administration of Social Security and Medicare, biomedical research, and child care, just to name a few. Given its importance, I think it should be one of the first appropriations bills considered. But this is certainly the earliest this bill has gotten to the floor in many years. I am thankful for that. At the outset, I thank my chairman, Senator Specter, and his great staff for their hard work in putting together this bill. As usual, Senator Specter has done so in a professional and bipartisan fashion. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for his patience. This is always one of the most difficult bills to put together. This year the job has been especially difficult. I also thank the chairman of the full committee, Senator Stevens, and the ranking member, Senator Byrd, for their support this year. Their help has been invaluable. Before I say a few words about the contents of the bill, I think it is important to briefly discuss this year's budget resolution because we operate within its framework. I believe this year's budget resolution shortchanged funding for important discretionary activities, including education, health, and job training. The funds were, instead, used to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to give the Department of Defense more money than it even requested. Our subcommittee's inadequate allocation was the inevitable result of that ill-advised budget resolution. But that allocation forced our subcommittee to reach outside its normal jurisdiction to find mandatory offsets to fund the critical programs in this bill. Some may criticize the bill for that reason. Some of those criticisms are valid. For example, I hope to work with my colleagues--hopefully when we get to conference--to reverse the reductions in social services block grants. There are many good provisions in this bill. It increases funding for NIH, as Senator Specter said, by a historic amount, $2.7 billion. Education programs are increased by $4.6 billion. Head Start is increased by $1 billion. The $2.7 billion increase for NIH will keep us on our way to doubling NIH funding over 5 years. We are on the verge of tremendous biomedical breakthroughs as we decode the mysteries of the human genome and explore the uses of human stem cells. We are doing the right thing by continuing to support important biomedical research. [[Page S5590]] The bill increases funding for child care from the $1.2 billion level last year to $2 billion this year. The availability, affordability, and quality of child care are major concerns for working families, and they desperately need these funds. Only about 1 in every 10 eligible children is served by this program. These dollars will go to working Americans who really need the help. Again, I want to make sure the record reflects that last year, during our negotiations, our chairman, Senator Specter, guaranteed that we would have this increase this year. He lived up to that commitment. We had a tremendous increase in the child care program, and we thank Senator Specter for his commitment and for keeping his word to get that increase for child care this year. I am proud we could also increase funding for education programs by, as I said, $4.6 billion. That includes a $350 increase in the maximum Pell grant to $3,650, the highest ever. In this year that we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the bill includes a $1.3 billion increase in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. We have also funded a new Office of Disability Policy at the Department of Labor. At HHS, we were able to add funds for several other programs funded under the Developmental Disabilities Act. This bill also places great importance on women's health and includes over $4 billion for programs that address the health needs of women. I again might add that Senator Specter and I worked together on a women's health initiative that is part and parcel of this bill, and that is what that $4 billion is for. The bill also includes a $50 million line item to address the issue of medical errors and to help health care practitioners and health care institutions, hospitals, and other health care facilities, to begin the process of developing methodologies and ways of cutting down on medical errors. Medical errors are now the fifth leading cause of death in America. As we have looked at this, we found it is not just one person or one institution or one cause; there is a whole variety of different reasons. Quite frankly, I think our institutions and our practitioners have not kept up with the new technologies of today which in most of the private sector have helped us so much with productivity and which I believe in the health care sector can really help us cut down on medical errors. But that is what that $50 million is there to do. The bill is not without its problems. As I mentioned, we do have a problem with the social services block grant. Hopefully, we will get this bill to conference and we will be able to fix that at that time. Also, the provisions in the bill that have the money for school modernization and for class size reductions are not targeted enough. They are just broadly thrown in there. Again, we had this battle last year. When it finally came down to it, the Congress agreed with the White House, in a partnership, that we needed to put the money in there for class size reduction. I believe the same needs to be done for school modernization. We only put in 7 cents out of every dollar that goes for elementary and secondary education in America. We only provide 7 cents. A lot of that goes for, as I said, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. A lot of that goes for title I programs to help low-income areas. When it is all over with, we have just a penny or two left of every dollar that we can give out to elementary and secondary schools. So when we put in money for school modernization, we ought to make sure that is what it goes for. Schools desperately need this money. Our property taxpayers all over this country are getting hit, time and time again, to pay more in property taxes, which can be very regressive, to help pay for modernizing their schools. As we know, most of the schools need to be modernized; they have leaky roofs, and toilets that won't flush, water that is bad, and air conditioning--a lot of times they don't even have air conditioning-- heating plants that are inadequate. As I pointed out, one out of every four elementary and secondary schools in New York City today are still heated by coal. And again, these tend to be in the lowest income areas. So we need to target that money. It is not in this bill. That is one of the problems with it. Again, I hope we can work that out as we go to conference. It is a national disgrace that the nicest places our children see are shopping malls, sports arenas, and movie theaters, and the most run down places they see are their public schools. Again, we have to fix these in conference. I thank Senator Specter, once again, for being so open and working with us in a very strong bipartisan fashion. We worked together to shape this bill. Overall, it is a good bill, with a few exceptions that we have to fix once we go to conference. I want to make clear, I support the bill in its present form. I hope we get a good vote on it as it leaves here and goes to conference. I reserve my right, however, on the conference report, when it comes back. I am hopeful we can get it to conference with a strong vote, sit down with our House counterparts, and work out our differences. Hopefully, we can come back to the floor having fixed the class size, school modernization, and social services block grant problems we have in this bill. I thank Chairman Specter for working in a bipartisan fashion. I hope we can get through this bill reasonably rapidly today, hopefully get to conference next week. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming. Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I call up the amendment I have at the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Wyoming [Mr. Enzi] proposes an amendment numbered 3593. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: On page 23, between lines 12 and 13, insert the following: Sec. . None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. Mr. HARKIN. I didn't hear the unanimous consent request. The PRESIDING OFFICER. It was to dispense with the reading of the amendment. The Senator from Arkansas. Amendment No. 3594 to Amendment No. 3593 (Purpose: To limit the use of funds for standards relating to ergonomic protection) Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment I send to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Arkansas [Mr. Hutchinson] proposes an amendment numbered 3594 to amendment No. 3593. Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The amendment is as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa. Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Mr. REID. I object. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard. The clerk will continue the call of the roll. The assistant legislative clerk continued the call of the roll. [[Page S5591]] Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, the amendment has been offered dealing with ergonomics, and it is not an unexpected amendment. This has been a contentious issue on this bill for many years. We have had the matter before. I have conferred with Senator Harkin, and there is no doubt we ought to proceed with the debate and let people have their say and let us see how the debate progresses. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada is recognized. Mr. REID. Mr. President, I want to make sure we understand late today that we are not the ones who have offered this contentious amendment. This is a very important bill that involves hundreds of billions of dollars. The two managers have worked on this, and they have a bill we can make presentable to the rest of the Senate. I just want to make sure, when I am called upon, and others are called upon, we are not the ones who offered this contentious amendment. We are not going to move off this amendment--that is the point I am making--until it is resolved one way or the other. If there is some concern about that, I think the people who want this bill moved should try to invoke cloture. It won't be invoked, but that is the only alternative. Amendment No. 3594, As Modified Mr. HUTCHINSON. Mr. President, I send a modification of my amendment to the desk. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment is modified. The amendment (No. 3594), as modified, reads as follows: Strike all after the first word, and insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to promulgate, issue, implement, administer, or enforce any proposed, temporary, or final standard on ergonomic protection. This amendment shall take effect October 2, 2000. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized. Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, let me just make an observation. I hear the threats that they are going to filibuster this amendment. This amendment deals with Labor-HHS appropriations. The Senate has the right to vote on whether or not we are going to spend the money in the Department of Labor to implement regulations that have a dramatic impact on business, on workers. We have a right to vote on it. The House voted on it; the Senate is going to vote on it. We have voted on this amendment in one way or another almost every year since 1995. This is not a new issue. So now some people are saying, wait a minute, we are not going to take this tough vote. Didn't we just have a vote on hate crimes? I think we had two. Didn't we have a vote on campaign finance? Some people didn't want to vote on those two issues on this side of the aisle. Didn't we vote on a Patients' Bill of Rights? Really, what the minority is saying is, we want to vote on our issues, but not on an issue that is relevant. Every amendment I just mentioned was not relevant to the underlying Department of Defense authorization bill. But still we ended up allowing those votes. We didn't have to. Now we have a relevant amendment to the underlying bill, Labor-HHS, the Department of Labor appropriations bill. We think the administration is going too far in the proposed regulations which they planned on having effective in December--these regulations the Clinton administration is trying to run through without significant hearings and without oversight and real analysis of how much it would cost. Here is an example. On cost alone, the Department of Labor said--OSHA said--this regulation will cost $4 billion. The Small Business Administration, which they control, said the cost could be 15 times as much, or $60 billion a year. This Congress is not going to vote on a regulation that could cost $60 billion a year as estimated by the Small Business Administration? The private sector estimates range to over $100 billion per year. Wow, that is a lot of money. Shouldn't we vote on it? Are these good regulations or not? Are we going to be able to stop them or not? Do we want to stop them? What are the regulations? They deal with ergonomics and with motion. OSHA--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration--is saying: We want to have some control over motion, and we think maybe this is harmful, and therefore we are going to control it. It may mean lifting boxes, or sitting at your desk, or anything minuscule, or something large. The Department of Labor is coming in and saying: You need a remedy, you need to change the way you do business, because we know how to do your business better, and if it increases costs, that is too bad--not to mention the fact that they say we are going to change workers comp rules in every State in the Nation. I wonder what Senator Byrd from West Virginia thinks about changing workers comp rules in West Virginia. I used to serve in the Oklahoma legislature. I worked on those laws and rules in our State. Are we going to have the Federal Government come up with a reimbursement rate of 90 percent when our State already passed a workers comp rule of 67 percent? Does the Federal Government know better? My suggestion is that my colleagues from Arkansas and Wyoming, in introducing this amendment, have every right to offer an amendment that says: We are going to withhold funds on this regulation. We don't want a regulation to go into effect in December without us having additional time to consider it, without knowing how much it is going to cost. Maybe it should be postponed or suspended; maybe we should let the next administration deal with it. Let's vote on it. For people to say, wait a minute, we don't like this amendment, so we are going to filibuster--there are probably a lot of amendments I don't like. Are we going to filibuster all of those? I think that would be grossly irresponsible. We need to let the Senate work its way. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a question? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Would the Senator tell us under which Secretary of Labor and how long ago this proposed ergonomics rule was promulgated? How many years of study have we put in on it? Mr. NICKLES. The original rule came out, I believe, in 1995, and it made very little sense. The latest proposal had over 600 pages. The business community and others who looked at it said it was not workable. The Department of Labor has come back and said let's revise it and make it more workable. Did they show us results? No. They said let's overrule the States' workers comp. If this went into effect--and I don't think it will, so maybe that is why people don't want to vote on it. But does this Congress really want to overrule every States' workers comp law? I don't think so. I think it would be a mistake. To answer the question, this administration has been trying to promulgate this rule for about 5 years. We have been successful most of those years in putting in restrictions to stop them. Unfortunately, we didn't get it in last year. To me, it was one of the biggest mistakes Congress made last year--not stopping this administration. Now they are trying to promulgate the rule, I might mention, right after the elections, right before the next President. I think a delay is certainly in order. Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a further question on that? Mr. NICKLES. Yes. Mr. HARKIN. Again, it was my understanding that it was former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole who first committed the Department to issue an ergonomic standard to protect workers on carpal tunnel syndrome and MSDs, as they are called. It has been under study for 10 years; is that right? Mr. WELLSTONE. The Senator is right. Mr. NICKLES. I think he asked me. They may have been working on this Department of Labor takeover of, I don't know what--workers involvement. But they issued the rule on November 23 of last year--a rule that has 600 pages. They may have been working on it for 10 years, but I doubt that. This administration hasn't been in office quite that long. But with enormous expense. I think, again, we should have a vote. To give an example, I came from manufacturing, and we lifted and moved a [[Page S5592]] lot of heavy things. I don't really think somebody from the Department of Labor could come into Nickles Machine Corporation and say: Hey, we know the limits on what somebody can lift as far as pistons and cylinders and bearings are concerned. Therefore, we suggest you put a maximum on it. Or maybe every Senator--everybody has a machine shop, or every Senator has a bottling company. Somebody comes into the Senate every day and loads the Coke machines and the Pepsi machines. This rule says that you can't lift that many cases; that you can't lift two cases at once, or one case, or maybe you can only lift a six- pack or something. The net result would be an estimate that bottlers would have to hire twice as many people. Maybe this is an employment bill. My point is you could increase costs dramatically with draconian results without even knowing what we are doing. I think a delay and not to have a regulation with this kind of economic consequence coming right after the election and right before the swearing in of a new administration makes good sense. Let's postpone this until the next administration. I thank my colleagues for their efforts. I yield the floor. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, my colleague has the floor. But could I have my colleagues' forbearance for a 15-second request? Mr. President, I would like to respond to some of what was said by the Senator from Oklahoma; in other words, after Senator Enzi, and go back and forth on this, pro-con. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following my speech, Senator Wellstone be recognized as ranking member of the subcommittee that deals with this, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Hutchinson be allowed to follow that. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Allard). Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the ranking member. This is not a new issue for either of us. We have been holding hearings on it. It has been in the press. We both knew about it. He was here to debate it. This is not a surprise. I am pleased that I am going to be able to make my floor statement. I think perhaps after the floor statement maybe the other side would like to join me in proposing this amendment. I think there will definitely be additional Members who will want to join me in this. Mr. President, I rose today and offered an amendment that simply prohibits the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, from expending funds to finalize its proposed ergonomics rule for 1 year. It was mentioned before that last year we didn't get a prohibition against them proceeding with it. You will hear in a bit how much that little error has cost us. But before I tell you why this amendment is critically necessary, I want to tell you what this amendment is not about. This amendment is not about whether or not OSHA should have any ergonomics rule. It is not a prohibition on ergonomics regulations generally. And it is most definitely not a dispute over the importance of protecting American workers. Clearly protecting workplace safety and health is of paramount importance. As the chairman of the subcommittee that deals with worker safety, I feel a special responsibility to oversee the agency charged with safeguarding these workers. But I am not fulfilling this responsibility if I merely rubber stamp anything OSHA does just because OSHA says it is acting in the interest of worker safety and health. I have a duty to make certain that OSHA is acting responsibly, appropriately, and in the best interests of workplace safety and health. Sadly, OSHA has not done so with this proposed ergonomic rule. That is what this amendment is about. Because of this rule and the way OSHA is going about it, the amendment merely requires that OSHA wait a reasonable 1-year period before issuing a final ergonomics rule. That is to keep OSHA from making drastic mistakes to add to those already made. Let me tell you why it is imperative that Congress act now to require OSHA to take this reasonable additional amount of time for this rulemaking. In a nutshell, OSHA is using questionable rulemaking procedures; OSHA omitted the analysis of the economic impact; OSHA hasn't resolved conflicting laws; and this rule infringes on State workers compensation--to name a few of the problems that riddle this overly ambitious rule. OSHA's haste to get through the rulemaking process is very clear. The rule OSHA has proposed is arguably the largest, broadest, most onerous and most expensive rule in the history of the agency--probably any agency. But OSHA has made it very clear that it intends to finalize the rule this year--just over a year from the time the proposed rule was published. This narrow-minded commitment to year's end can only mean that OSHA has already made up its mind in favor of the rule and thinks it will leave a mammoth and far-reaching legacy for the current Presidential administration. I would suggest it will be closer to the legacy of the OSHA home office inspections. Perhaps you remember the letter issued by OSHA about the time we left for Christmas recess, the one that suggested OSHA was going to go into each home where people work and look for safety violations. From the time we found out about it, it only took 48 hours to see how far- reaching, imposing, and stupid that decision was. Of course, the whole Nation realized the implications of the home inspections even quicker. I am extremely concerned that OSHA is blinded by the motivation to get it done during this administration and is not taking the time to carefully consider all the aspects and effects of this important rule. For example, the public comment period for the proposed rule was much shorter than OSHA typically permits--even for much less significant rules. OSHA has never before finalized such a significant rule in a year's time. Moreover, in its haste to get through this rulemaking process, OSHA, until recently, omitted an analysis of the economic impact of the rule on the U.S. Postal Service, on State and local government employees in State plans, and on railroad employees--all together, over 10 million employees. These aren't optional economic impacts. These are mandatory, in light of the dollars involved. OSHA is apparently so busy with other things that it did not do the analysis for these entities until the end of last month, despite the fact that the Postal Service requested an analysis 5 months prior. To add insult to injury, OSHA has only given these folks 2\1/2\ months to comment on the complex analysis that OSHA forgot to do, and OSHA won't even consider extending the overall comment deadline for these folks. It is because they are trying to get it done this year. They have had 5 months to prepare it, and they tell the Postal Service that they have to analyze it in 2\1/2\ months--no extension. Even more troubling than the fact that OSHA is rushing the rule is the way OSHA is going about it. OSHA's ambitions with this rule are so big and overreaching that OSHA has truly bitten off more than it can chew, and may be playing fast and loose with the rulemaking process and your tax dollars. In fact, OSHA has bitten off so much with this rule that it is apparently paying others to chew for it--too big a bite. They can't chew it all. So to make it happen in 1 year, they are going to pay others to do some of their chewing. I use the word ``apparently'' because of the difficulty getting answers. Responding to inquiries first made by Congressman David McIntosh, OSHA recently disclosed that it has paid at least 70 contractors a total of $1.75 million--almost $2 million--to help it with the ergonomics rulemaking. They are paying these contractors with our tax dollars in order to speed the process up on a bad rule. Congressman McIntosh's staff discovered that OSHA may have failed to disclose an additional 47 contracts for who knows how much more money. OSHA's own documentation reveals that it paid 28 contractors $10,000 each to testify at the public rulemaking hearing. Going through some of the accounting information, I even noticed that one contractor had turned in an [[Page S5593]] itemized bill for less--and was still paid the $10,000. When I asked OSHA for evidence of public notification that it was paying these witnesses, OSHA gave me none. I am very concerned that OSHA is paying so much money for outside contracts for this rulemaking that I intend to hold a hearing to get to the bottom of this issue. Let me state things I already know. I think you will be convinced, as I am, that we absolutely need to put the brakes on this rulemaking and force OSHA to straighten this mess out before it finalizes the rule. First, OSHA does not seem to want to have me have this information. Some of it is just good accounting stuff. As the only accountant in the Senate, I am really interested. I have requested documents from OSHA that would give a clear picture of its relationship with some of these contractors, but OSHA has so far refused to give them to me, claiming a ``privilege.'' That applies to private citizens, not to Congress. We have the right to know where the dollars that we are spending go, unequivocally. Now, Congressman McIntosh has been able to obtain some key documents from the contractors themselves, but OSHA placed strict constraints on Congressman McIntosh's ability to share them with fellow lawmakers. This is stuff that came from the contractors, and OSHA can still get its hands in and keep us from using it the way it ought to be used. OSHA did grudgingly agree that I could look at the documents--not take them or copy them or quote from them--but only in Congressman McIntosh's office. When I asked OSHA, as a courtesy, to permit Congressman McIntosh's staff member, Barbara Kahlow, to bring the documents to me, just to look at them, abiding by the rules, OSHA said no. I am so concerned about this issue that I went over to Congressman McIntosh's office last night after I finished working at the Senate to look at these documents for myself. Now, fortunately, Congressman McIntosh's negotiations made that possible. Can anyone believe that documents concerning money we are spending have to have special negotiations before I can look at them? It comes under my committee. I am in charge of the oversight on that committee. Let me recap that: I was told that the contracts and expenditures are privileged. I was told that information couldn't be brought to my office. I was told I could not copy any information. I was told I could not quote any information. I was told that I couldn't quote from the documents. I had to use extra time to go to the House side to even see those documents. I am not afraid of a little walk over to the House. I just couldn't understand why OSHA was going to so much trouble to keep the documents from me. I physically went to Congressman McIntosh's office last night and looked at the documents. Because of OSHA, I can't quote these documents. I can't show you copies. But I can tell you what I saw. I saw that not only did OSHA pay 28 expert witnesses $10,000 a pop, and one of them didn't even ask for that much, it also appears that OSHA did the following: OSHA gave detailed outlines to at least some of the witnesses telling them what they were to say in the testimony; second, they had OSHA lawyers tell at least one expert witness that they wanted a stronger statement from the witness regarding the role of physical factors. That is an important scientific issue. These are supposed to be experts. They told him to make it stronger. Third, heavily edited testimony of at least some of the witnesses is evidenced. OSHA held practice sessions to coach the witnesses in their testimony. I have never heard of that around here. This sounds a lot like OSHA told its expert witnesses what to say. This sounds like OSHA made up its mind a long time ago in favor, and has been stacking the evidence to support its position. I respect OSHA's need to enlist expert assistance in technical or scientific rulemaking. I expect them to get the right information. I would like to think it wasn't biased when they got it. And I have to say, I don't respect any agency paying witnesses to say what the agency tells them to say, and then holding the witnesses' testimony up as ``best available evidence.'' Best available evidence is what the OSH Act requires to support this standard. It doesn't say anything about paying witnesses or coaching witnesses. It doesn't say anything about telling them to change their testimony. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence that it is promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, so OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? That has been the problem with the past years of looking at regulating ergonomics. OSHA makes up the rules. OSHA does the tests. OSHA says their tests are good. OSHA gets ready to propose a rule and realizes they have made a drastic mistake. That has happened in the past. That is why this little document is the first published proposed ergonomics regulation. It didn't happen until November of last year. This document, this is the first time we have gotten a look at this document. It is the first time it has been officially printed. How can OSHA expect the public and Congress to have any confidence in its promulgating regulations in the best interest of worker safety and health if it is asking supposed experts to tell OSHA what it wants to hear, and has already told them what to say, so that OSHA can promulgate whatever rule the administration thinks is in its own interest? No wonder OSHA has promulgated such a greedy, overreaching rule. Maybe I could pass all the OSHA reform legislation I wanted if I could pay 28 witnesses $10,000 apiece to come in and say what I wanted them to say in my hearings. Does that seem like a conflict of interest? I wouldn't do things that way. In fact, we had a hearing recently about one of the most objectionable parts of this rule, the work restriction protection provisions. I will talk about those in a few minutes. We had to tell one of the witnesses we selected that we couldn't pay his transportation costs--not a $10,000 bonus to testify; we couldn't pay his transportation costs. We did this in part for financial reasons and in part because we wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety that can result from spending taxpayers' dollars on a witness who is supposed to be giving an unbiased opinion. This witness came to Washington anyway--on his own dime. He didn't have his State pay for it. He paid for it out of his pocket to testify at my hearing because he felt so strongly about the terrible effects of this ergonomics rule. Needless to say, I am very disturbed by what I have seen to date about this issue. OSHA's response is that it has always paid witnesses for their testimony. I can't find that in any public documents. I can't find that disclosure. I can't find where they actually said that they were paying them, and this was paid testimony. It seems that ought to be disclosed. Whether or not this is true, it remains to be seen whether OSHA has ever paid this many witnesses this much money and participated this thoroughly in crafting the substance of a witness' testimony. OSHA has also tried to give me the typical excuse of a teenager caught doing something wrong: Hey, everybody is doing it. To that, let me first respond with the typical, but sage parental response: If everybody were jumping off a bridge, would OSHA jump off a bridge, too? That doesn't sound like good safety to me. Second, everybody is most certainly not doing it. Representatives of both the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, two agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, dealing with scientific things, have stated publicly that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. Let me say that again. The Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that promulgate lots of supertechnical regulations, have stated publicly--you can read it in the paper--that they do not pay expert witnesses, except possibly for travel expenses. As the DOT general counsel put it ``Paying experts would not get us what we need to know.'' Finally, just because OSHA may have these things in the past, in my book that does not make this practice OK in this instance. On the contrary, it [[Page S5594]] makes any other instances of witness coaching equally objectionable. Two wrongs don't make a right. We can't do anything about past rulemakings, but we can do something about this one--if we act now. Clearly, more needs to be learned about this subject, but if we don't pass this amendment, OSHA is going to forge ahead and finalize a document that they have already determined is the perfect answer even before the comments have been sifted through. They will finalize a possibly--no, almost assuredly--be a tainted rule, and we won't have another opportunity to stop them. A vote for this amendment makes certain that we will have sufficient time to conduct a thorough congressional investigation into this issue and force OSHA to clean up its rulemaking procedures if necessary. Lest you think my concerns about this rule are only procedural, rest assured these procedural concerns are only half the problem here. This rule has serious substantive flaws. Much has been written and debated about the many problems with this rule--its vagueness, its coverage of preexisting and non-work related injuries, the harshness of its single trigger. I expect you have all heard something about these topics and my colleagues will talk more about these later today. In my investigation of the rule, I found two particularly troubling issues. Both involve the reach of the long arm of this overly ambitious rule into arenas outside of OSHA's jurisdiction--both with disastrous effects. First, the rule will have a devastating effect on patients and facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. OSHA has created a potential conflict between the ergonomics rule and health care regulations. Congress recognized the importance to patient dignity of permitting patients to choose how they are moved and how they receive certain types of care when it passed the Nursing Home Act of 1987. This act and corresponding regulations mandate this important freedom of choice for patients. The ergonomics rule, on the other hand imposes many requirements on all health care facilities and providers concerning patient care and movement. Thus, these facilities and providers may be forced to choose between violating the ergonomics rule or violating both the Nursing Home Act and the patient dignity. Moreover, OSHA's rule forces impossible choices about resource allocation between patient care versus employee care. The only way for businesses to absorb the cost of this rule under any situation is to pass the cost along to consumers. However, some ``consumers'' are patients dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. The Federal Government sets an absolute cap on what these individuals can pay for medical services. Thus, the facilities that provide care for these patients simply cannot charge a higher cost. Simply put, these facilities and providers are unable to absorb the cost of the ergonomics rule. And there is no question these facilities will face a cost. OSHA's own estimate of the cost of compliance in the first year will total $526 million for nursing and personal care facilities and residential care. And you have to remember, we are saying that they really use conservative, from their point of view, estimates of costs. The industry estimates that the per-facility cost for a typical nursing home will be $60,000. But my issue with this rule is not that it will cost these facilities so much money--it is that it will cost elderly and poor patients access to quality care. You have probably heard about some of the facilities going out of business because of some appropriations measures we passed. We have corrected them a little bit. But my issue with this is not what it will cost these facilities, but what it will cost the elderly and the poor in access to quality care. Sadly these patients are already in danger of losing quality care. Many facilities dependent on Medicaid and Medicare are in serious financial straits due in part to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Ten percent of nursing homes are already in bankruptcy. And the Clinton administration just announced a request for an additional $20 billion for Medicaid and Medicare so that the reimbursement cap can be raised. All this is before the costly ergonomics rule places its additional tax on an already overtaxed system. Implementing this sweeping and expensive proposed ergonomics standard is simply more than this industry can bear. Let me assure those who say this Medicaid/Medicare quandary will not have very broad impact--let me assure them that it will. Nearly 80 percent of all patients in Nursing Homes and over 8 million home health patients are dependent on Medicare or Medicaid. How will these patients receive health care if the ergonomics rule forces nursing homes and home health organizations out of business? The answer is, they won't. But it does not appear that OSHA has even considered that consequence. Perhaps OSHA is assuming that Congress will clean up after it by raising reimbursement rates to accommodate OSHA's rule? If this is the case, then OSHA itself has invited us to step in, prohibit OSHA from finalizing this rule and OSHA back to the drawing board. A vote in favor of this amendment will ensure that OSHA resolves the mess its rule creates for providers and patients before issuing a final rule. That ought to be a basic consideration for us in this body. The second problem I am very concerned with is OSHA's encroachment into State workers' compensation. A provision of the rule would require employers to compensate certain injured employees 90 to 100 percent of their salary. OSHA calls this requirement ``work restriction protection'' or WRP. But it sounds an awful lot like workers' compensation doesn't it? They told us they don't have the money to do the job, and now OSHA apparently wants a new job--to be a Workers Compensation Administration. That is why we held a hearing, to see what was involved in that. But there are two problems with that. First, the statute that created OSHA tells us that OSHA is not to meddle with workers' compensation. Second, OSHA's intrusion into the world of workers' compensation will hinder its ability to perform its true and very important function--improving workplace safety and health. All of the States already do Workers Comp. Thirty years ago, when Congress wrote the Occupational Health and Safety Act, it made an explicit statement about OSHA and workers' compensation. It wrote that the act should not be interpreted to: . . . supersede or in any manner affect any workmen's compensation law, or to enlarge or diminish or affect in any other manner the common law or statutory rights, duties, or liabilities of employers and employees under any law with respect to injuries, diseases, or death of employees arising out of, or in the course of, employment. Twice this provision uses the broad phrase ``affect in any manner'' to describe what OSHA should not do to State workers' compensation. As someone with the privilege of being one of this country's lawmakers, it is hard for me to imagine how Congress could have drafted a broader or more explicit prohibition on OSHA's interference with State workers' compensation. Perhaps more importantly, this provision of the law makes good sense. All 50 States have intricate workers' compensation systems that strike a delicate balance between the employer and employee. Each party gives up certain rights in exchange for certain benefits. For example, an employer gives up the ability to argue that a workplace accident was not its fault, but in exchange receives a promise that the employee cannot pursue any other remedies against it. The injury gets taken care of, the injury gets paid for, and the worker gets compensated. Each State has reached its own balance through years of experience and trial and error. Many of us have served in State legislatures where one of the perpetual questions coming before the legislature is changes to workers compensation. It is a very intricate process. Significantly, Congress has never taken this autonomy away from the States by mandating Federal workers compensation requirements and, in fact, put those statements in, to which I referred earlier, where they are clearly not to get into workers compensation. The States have special mechanisms set up for resolving disputes and vindicating rights under the workers compensation systems. OSHA wants to create its own Federal workers compensation system, but [[Page S5595]] only for musculoskeletal disorders, MSDs. But OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower to decide the numerous disputes that inevitably will arise because of the WRP provision. I ask all Senators to talk with their State workers compensation people. I have not found any of them who did not think this was intrusive, who did not think this gets into their business which they have crafted for years and years. OSHA does not have the mechanisms or the manpower these States have to decide the numerous disputes that will arise. All of a sudden, OSHA will have to decide disputes over the existence of medical conditions, the causation of the medical conditions, the right to compensation. But what happens to workplace safety and health while OSHA is being a workers compensation administration? The devastating effect on workers compensation has been recognized by workers compensation commissioners across the country. The Western Governors' Association has issued a resolution harshly criticizing the WRP provisions. Moreover, Charles Jeffress met with a large group of workers compensation administrators, and when I asked him how many spoke in favor of this provision, he answered: None. It was not quite that definite, but he answered definitely none. Significantly, this meeting took place before the proposed rule was published, so Mr. Jeffress obviously did not take their lack of support to heart in drafting the proposed rule. If this lack of responsiveness is any indication, we can have no confidence OSHA will take this provision out of the final rule. A vote for this amendment ensures that OSHA will have to take additional time to consider all the negative feedback it has received on this issue alone. Hopefully, with this additional time, OSHA will recognize that it should stay out of the workers compensation business and get back to the important business of truly protecting this country's working men and women. From all of these facts and circumstances, I hope it is as clear to you as it is to me that OSHA is not ready to take sensible, informed, reliable action on ergonomics. Unfortunately, it is equally clear that OSHA is going to push forward anyway unless we take some action. Because of the magnitude of this issue, it is absolutely imperative that cool heads prevail over politics. We must ensure that OSHA takes the time to investigate and solve problems with the rule without taking shortcuts. Nobody puts them under the deadline except themselves, but they are obviously convinced of the deadline. If we do not act now to impose a reasonable 1-year delay of the finalization of the rule, OSHA will forge ahead and produce a sloppy final product that not only fails to advance worker health and safety, but also threatens the viability of State workers compensation, health care, the poor and elderly, not to mention businesses all across the country. If even one of these issues I raised troubles you--and I think they should all trouble all of us deeply--then you must recognize the desperate need for a 1-year delay. I urge your support of this amendment. I am joined in offering this amendment by my colleagues, Senators Lott, Nickles, Jeffords, Bond, Hutchinson, Brownback, Sessions, Hagel, DeWine, Crapo, Bennett, Thompson, Burns, Collins, Frist, Gregg, Coverdell, Voinovich, Fitzgerald, Abraham, Snowe, Ashcroft, Grams, Hutchison, Thomas, and Allard. I ask unanimous consent that they all be added to the amendment as original cosponsors. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the amendment that will ensure we have this delay to do it right. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized. Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I do not know quite where to start. My colleague from Oklahoma had said earlier, and both my friends from Wyoming and Arkansas had said, we ought to have a debate. We will. We ought to be focusing on this issue. We will focus on this issue. There are many important issues we should focus on in the Senate. This is an important issue. I want to speak about it. In my State, by the way, two-thirds of senior citizens have no prescription drug coverage at all. I would like to focus on that issue. I would like to make sure 700,000 Medicare recipients have coverage. Education, title I--I would like to talk about a lot of different issues, but this issue is before us. I hope we will be able to speak to many different issues in several months to come. First, my colleague, Senator Enzi, complains about the rule, but there is no final rule. It is not final yet. That is the point. OSHA, which is doing exactly what it should do, Secretary Jeffress is doing exactly what he should do by law--holding hearings, getting input--they are going to issue a final rule. They have not issued a final rule. My colleague jumps to conclusions and joins the effort over 10 years to block a rule, but the rule has not been made. There may be significant changes. When my colleague complains about the rule, let's be clear, they have not finished the process. We do not know what the final rule is yet. But for some reason, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are so anxious to block this basic worker protection that they already feel confident about attacking a rule that does not exist. Second, my colleagues say that OSHA is rushing. Senator Harkin was quite right in saying to Senator Nickles: Wait a minute, didn't this go back to Secretary Elizabeth Dole? Wasn't Secretary Dole the first to talk about the problem of repetitive stress injury and the need to provide some protection for working men and women in our country? This has been going on for a decade. And Senator Jeffords and OSHA and the administration are rushing? By the way, I say to my colleagues, time is not neutral. From the point of view of people--I am going to be giving some examples because this debate needs to be put in personal terms. It is about working people's lives, from the point of view of people who suffer from this injury, from the point of view of people who are in terrible pain, from the point of view of people who may not be able to work, from the point of view of people who can have their lives destroyed because of this injury, because of our failure to issue a standard. We are not rushing. Can I assure all Senators that we are not rushing from their point of view? Then my colleague talks about home office inspections. This is a red herring. We agree, OSHA agrees, they are not going to be inspecting home offices. Why bring up an issue that is not an issue? My colleagues talk about the WRP, the work restriction protection, and all about the ways in which it will undercut State worker comp laws. But you know what, in our committee hearing, we heard from witnesses that it has no effect on workers comp laws. We will debate that more. But no one, no Senator should be under the illusion that OSHA is about to issue a rule that is going to undercut or overturn State comp laws. Then I hear my colleague, my good friend, complain about OSHA's use of contractors. The