Including some turtles. Thats right. Your tax dollars actually paid for a study that put turtles on treadmills. So here we have our turtles on a treadmill. To no ones surprise, it turns out that turtles are really, really slow. Okay. Thats what our tax dollars went to. In fact, this wasteful study found that turtles moved at nearly the same pace as dead turtles on a treadmill. Arent you glad that washington bureaucrats used your hard earned dollars to conduct this study . Good grief, folks. Now how many of your tax dollars went to this study exactly . Well, folks, your guess is actually as good as mine because there is no legal obligation for most federal agencies to publicly disclose the price of government projects even though the american taxpayers are paying for them. Folks, this is your money, your money. So shouldnt you have a right to know how it is being spent . Its been said before, and i sure believe it, government functions best when it operates in the open. This is the basis of sunshine week which begins this sunday. Sunshine week is celebrated every year in march to remind us of just how important it is to have Government Transparency, especially when it comes to how our tax dollars are being spent. Transparency really is fundamental to the principles upon which our nation was founded. The people have power to affect the decisions made by those of us who are elected leaders and in turn congress has the authority to hold accountable the millions of unelected washington bureaucrats who ultimately write the rules and regulations that impact nearly every aspect of our lives and decide how our taxpayer dollars are spent. This year i have a couple of bright ideas to shine some light on how washington is spending your money. Lets talk about those darn government boondoggles, those federal projects that are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Frankly, we know nothing about them because the Government Agencies arent required to report this information to you. Well, i have a bill to help shed some light on these costly monstrosities. My billion dollar boondoggle act would require an annual report listing every single taxpayerfunded project that is 1 billion or more over budget or five years or more behind schedule. This will make it impossible for washington bureaucrats to continue throwing our tax dollars into bottomless money pits without being noticed. Unfortunately its not just the billions wasted on boondoggles being kept secret. Its the cost of the federal projects. So ive proposed a bill that requires every project supported with federal funds to include a price tag with the amount that is paid by taxpayers. That way when your money is being spent to put turtles on a treadmill, the ones i mentioned to you earlier, you, the taxpayer, can decide if the price is right. Of course, the waste doesnt stop there. Did you know that federal agencies spend over 1. 4 billion every year on advertising and Public Relations . This includes youll love this more than a quarter of a Million Dollars for costumed mascots like sammy soil and milkshake the cow, a quarter of a Million Dollars, nearly 10,000 to produce a Zombie Apocalypse survival guide. Yes, folks, i am not joking. And 30,000 for a martian new years eve party. And hundreds of thousands of dollars on tote bags, stress balls, fidget spinners and other trinkets. Well, folks, thankfully the Senate Homeland security and Governmental Affairs committee is voting today on my bill that forces agencies to disclose exactly how much they are spending on all of these government gimmicks. Folks, its time we bag the swag and end this unnecessary taxpayerfunded propaganda. With our National Debt now exceeding 23 trillion, theres literally no better time than sunshine week to start shedding more light on how washington is managing or maybe in this case mismanaging your money. The only reason to keep taxpayers in the dark is because these spending decisions cant withstand the scrutiny. And, folks, that is exactly why sunlight is the best disinfectant. Thank you, mr. President. I yield the floor. The presiding officer the senator from oklahoma. A senator there are a lot of things going on right now in d. C. And a lot of moving targets. A lot of americans are looking closely at whats happening with the covid19 virus. Were tracking whats happening in overseas in afghanistan and multiple issues on the stock market as well as whats happening with oil and gas right now. Mr. Lankford were spending a little bit of time in all those things saying we cant lose track of structural issues in government to say we can work on those issues that are right now in front of us but weve also got to look at the longterm issues to be able to deal with basic Government Transparency and basic accountability for government. So i want to highlight as several of my colleagues are here as well, highlighting some of the things that are on the floor or moved recently or we think can move on. One of those is the great act. This is a bipartisan bill that deals with basic transparency for grants. If you go back 20 years ago, the federal government gave away very few grants. Now 600 billion a year are done just for grants. My colleague joni ernst of iowa just highlighted some of the wasteful grants that are out there that as we go through it, we can try to get them one at a time or we can try to get a system in place where all grants have to go through a centralized data system where we can actually all look at the data and compare it across the government. To basically look for areas of inefficiency. Thats what the great act does. It creates a standard Data Elements so that we can look at how the money is being spent, americans money so we can actually evaluate it. That has overwhelmingly already passed. Were grateful to be able to get that done this year. Another we were able to get this done year that has passed the senate but not passed the house yet is providing accountability through transparency. It may seem simple but let me begin with the basic principle. No Small Business owner in america gets up every day and reads the federal register. That just doesnt happen. If youre running a Small Business, youre running your Small Business. Youre not getting up every day reading the federal register to see the latest regulation. Even if you did, the pages and pages and pains of regulation pages of regulation, you cant make sense of it. This basic providing accountability through transparency asks a simple question. Can we force the agencies when they actually do a new regulation to condense it down to a hundred words or less . In plain english . So you can actually figure out what this regulation is trying to do. So when you see a regulation come out, you can actually understand it without having to hire an attorney to be able to go and interpret it for you. That has overwhelmingly already passed the senate and were waiting for that to be able to pass the house as well. Basic simplification of some of the Government Entities in trying to be able to help out. We passed and already been signed into law dealing with fraud. Again this was a simple piece that was just needed in government. We discovered that if someone is a trustee from a federal retiree from their retirement account, as a trustee they stole the money out of that persons account, we couldnt actually enforce the law now. We could on several other areas, if it was Social Security or disability but we couldnt on federal retirees. So we were able to get a bipartisan agreement to be able to pass this, to be able to take care of that. It was a very simple bill but its the way we need to be able to react when we see a problem, to actually go to solve that problem rather than to take forever to be able to do it. In speaking of forever to be able to solve, what i think is the most basic Government Transparency piece that we can put out there to be able to force real dialogue on budget issues is a simple bill that we have on shutdown prevention. If we can end government shutdowns, we can actually allow us to have more debate on budget issues here in this room where it should occur and take the pressure off of federal workers and federal families facing a shutdown and furloughs. Maggie hassan and i have a very simple bill. The bill simply says you get to the end of the fiscal year, if we dont have all the issues resolved on our budget, we continue debating those things here. We remain in session seven days a week until its actually resolved but in the meantime federal workers and their families are unaffected because the budget automatically continues into last years budget level until we get things resolved here. But in the meantime, we cant go home until we actually solve that problem. Its a straightforward solution to say were not going to have government shutdowns. Were not going to have the chaos across the whole country. We had 21 government shutdowns in 40 years. Weve got to stop that chaos. So it stops that chaos and it puts the pressure where the pressure needs to be, on us. When we finish our work, then we can move to the next thing. But if the budget work is not done, the most basic element of those appropriation bills, if theyre not finished we remain in session seven days a week until they are finished. We need to find ways to be more efficient as a government. Government shutdowns waste money by the billions. Rob portman and his team did a remarkable study to be able to look and see how much money was wasted in the last shutdown. And it was in the billions of dollars and not even every agency turned in all their information to rob portman and his team. We cant keep losing money that way. We cant keep that chaos going for all the federal workers and their families. We should have the arguments about budget. We have big ones that need to be resolved. But we should keep it here. So on this week as we pause for just a moment and all the other big issues that are pressing on us right now, im grateful that were also pausing for a moment to say what are the big issues that we should look long term on and how do we solve some of those issues for the future as well dealing with making government more efficient and trying to make government more transparent. Thank you, mr. President. I yield the floor. Mr. Portman mr. President . The presiding officer the senator from ohio. Mr. Portman mr. President , im here to join my colleagues speaking on the floor in advance of government sunshine week but before i do that let me commend my colleague from oklahoma about the comments for the need for more transparency in government and our grantmaking progress. We have made progress. His predecessor in congress tom coburn worked on this issue. We came up with legislation when i was on the other side of pennsylvania avenue, to pull all grants and contracts on line which was a start. But the data act takes that to the next level to make sure there is uniformity in government. We still have difficulty with some agencies getting the information out there but hes absolutely right. It would make a difference because if people know how the money is being spent, its much more likely it will be spent wisely all the way down to the zip code in terms of where grants are going, what kind of federal taxpayer dollars are being spent in our communities and whether its being spent well. Government shutdowns of course, i couldnt agree more with my colleague. They have not worked to help make our government more efficient. Nsks, we always in fact, we always spend more after the fact. People are furloughed and when they go back to work they get back pay. We have a lot of dislocations that are unfair. People that have to go to work that are essential employees think of our t. S. A. Employees not to get paid. A lot of them had car payments or house payments they couldnt make during the last government shutdown. Just unfair. Weve got to get at that. Weve got legislation that actually twothirds of members of this side of the aisle have supported and yet we have not been able to make that bipartisan. So i appreciate the fact that my colleague from oklahoma has a bipartisan approach to that. We tried for four or five congresses now to pass legislation that simply says at the end of the fiscal year, if you havent completed all the bills, then the government continues to operate but 1 spending is cut every 120 days and every 90 days thereafter to give the appropriations committees here the incentive to get to work and get the budget bills done. That i think would work. It used to be a bipartisan approach. Its not now. Im interested in looking at other options including what the senator from oklahoma was talking about in terms of providing more pressure on us here to get our work done, because these shutdowns clearly havent worked to help the government become more efficient. They have had the opposite impact. Today is a discussion about transparency and im going to talk about one that maybe is going to surprise some people, but its about the lack of transparency and about 150 billion a year that is taxpayer money thats put into research and development. Its money that we as taxpayers pay to places like the National Institutes of health, the National Institutes of health does Great Research and so the federal dollars go in there to try to develop cures for vexes but also for diseases but also health care research. The department of energy which does a lot of basic research on science in our country. Im going to focus on that funding today and a specific problem that we have right now. Its about ensuring the government remains accountable to taxpayers. Its about ensuring that hardworking american taxpayers know where their money is going. And its about a specific issue of that money going to research that is then taken by other countries, particularly by china, and the need for us to address that issue in part through transparency and part through new criminal statutes to ensure there is accountability. Last fall the permanent subcommittee on investigations did a study, and it was about a yearlong study. And we looked at this issue of chinas talent Recruitment Programs and more broadly other countries, but specifically what china has been doing to find researchers here in the United States that they think are doing interesting work and recruiting those people to be able to provide that research and sometimes to have the person actually go to china to provide that research. The issue that we focused on in our report was intellectual property at Research Institutions and at our colleges and universities. And it was a shocking report, and we issued it late last year. It showed, as you probably know now from some of the press accounts that have arisen since then, that in fact china was recruiting individuals who were giving up their research that was taxpayer paid. China has made no secret of its goal to surpass the United States to be the worlds leader in Scientific Research but that doesnt mean they should use our Research Institution here in america, paid for by us, to accomplish that goal. These talent Recruitment Programs, most notably the thousand Talents Program recruits researchers at american universities, american Research Institutions to do the same research usually at shadow labs in china or to just transfer taxpayerfunded Research Back to china. This is an issue that has been going on for two decades, we found out, and really kind of right under the nose of the f. B. I. And others. The f. B. I. Testified at our hearing and said they readily acknowledged that they were asleep at the switch essentially. They had not been on top of it, and that only recently had they begun to focus on it. Weve seen the results of that, by the way. Until very recently, little was done to stop it, but recent lip there has been a lot of publicity. You know about the recent arrest of dr. Charles leeber at harvard university. He lied to investigators about his participation in the plan and thats what they charged him with. Most recently today we hear about dr. James lewis at West Virginia university who pleaded guilty to fraudulently requesting time off to raise a newborn when he was actually in china conducting research as part of his agreement with this same group, the thousand talents plan. This is a definite conflict of interest. For example, professor leeber is accusing 50,000 a month from the talent Recruitment Program, also 150,000 in funding for his expenses. Remember hes already being paid by harvard. But also accepting 1. 5 million to set up a shadow lab in china. He did not tell his employer, harvard, about this. Again, he was not able to be honest in talking to the federal prosecutors, which is how he became charged. So the fraud that he was committing was not the charge because thats not a criminal offense. It needs to be one. With regard to the guy from West Virginia who just pleaded guilty yesterday, we dont know all the details yet there, but we know that this again is research that was being done, we assume parliament funded by taxpayers partly funded by taxpayers and this talent Recruitment Program was able to get that research. This can lead to obviously a real problem because its helping to fuel not just the chinese economy, but also the chinese military, some of some f professor leebers research was done for our military and they got military research and we assume military secrets as well. They provide a Reputational Risk to the universities were talking about, of course, and so many others around the country. But its also just unfair to taxpayers because this is government funded for the benefit of america, not to one of our stiffest global competitors. So we are working with the Trump