[Senate Hearing 106-331] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 106-331 NOMINATION OF JOSHUA GOTBAUM ======================================================================= HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION ON THE NOMINATION OF JOSHUA GOTBAUM, TO BE CONTROLLER, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET __________ OCTOBER 28, 1999 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental AffairsU.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 61-294 cc WASHINGTON : 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office, Washington, DC 20402 COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS FRED THOMPSON, Tennessee, Chairman WILLIAM V. ROTH, Jr., Delaware JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut TED STEVENS, Alaska CARL LEVIN, Michigan SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois PETE V. DOMENICI, New Mexico ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey THAD COCHRAN, Mississippi MAX CLELAND, Georgia ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire Hannah S. Sistare, Staff Director and Counsel Robert J. Shea, Counsel Henry R. Wray, GAO Detailee Joyce A. Rechtschaffen, Minority Staff Director and Counsel Peter A. Ludgin, Minority Professional Staff Member Darla D. Cassell, Administrative Clerk C O N T E N T S ------ Opening statements: Page Senator Thompson............................................. 1 Senator Durbin............................................... 7 WITNESS Thursday, October 28, 1999 Joshua Gotbaum, to be Controller, Office of Management and Budget Testimony.................................................... 2 APPENDIX Biographical and financial information....................... 13 Prehearing questions......................................... 19 NOMINATION OF JOSHUA GOTBAUM TO BE CONTROLLER, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET ---------- THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1999 U.S. Senate, Committee on Governmental Affairs, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:07 a.m., in room SD-628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Fred Thompson, Chairman of the Committee, presiding. Present: Senators Thompson and Durbin. OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN THOMPSON Chairman Thompson. This morning, the Governmental Affairs Committee is holding a hearing to consider the nomination of Joshua Gotbaum to be Controller in the Office of Management and Budget. The Controller is charged with oversight of implementation of the Chief Financial Officers Act, a piece of legislation Congress passed to remedy decades of serious neglect in Federal financial management. According to the General Accounting Office, major problems in the government's financial systems include its inability to properly account for and report billions of dollars of property, equipment, materials, and supplies; determine the proper amount of various reported liabilities, including post- retirement health benefits for military employees, accounts payable, and other liabilities; and actively report major portions of the net cost of government operations. The importance of the position of Controller cannot be overstated. Proper financial management is critical to the efficient operation of our Federal Government. This Controller will have a heavy burden to bear in moving the government toward greater fiscal responsibility, especially as we prepare for the first performance reports under the Results Act. Mr. Gotbaum filed responses to a biographical and financial questionnaire,\1\ answered pre-hearing questions submitted by the Committee,\2\ and had his financial statements reviewed by the Office of Government Ethics. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- \1\ The biographical and financial questionnaire appears in the Appendix on page 13. \2\ The responses to pre-hearing questions appears in the Appendix on page 19. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Without objection, this information will be made a part of the hearing record, with the exception of the financial data, which is on file in the Committee offices. In addition, the hearing record will remain open for 2 weeks. Our Committee rules require that all witnesses at nomination hearings give their testimony under oath. Mr. Gotbaum, would you please stand and raise your right hand? Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you, God? Mr. Gotbaum. I do. Chairman Thompson. Please be seated. Mr. Gotbaum, do you have anyone you would like to introduce at this time? TESTIMONY OF JOSHUA GOTBAUM, TO BE CONTROLLER, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET Mr. Gotbaum. Thank you very much, Senator. If I might, I would like to introduce my wife's grandmother, Mrs. Winnifred Dunn. Chairman Thompson. How do you do? Mr. Gotbaum. She came up from Roanoke, Virginia. Chairman Thompson. Pleased to have you with us. Mr. Gotbaum. My wife, unfortunately, could not be here. She is at her father's hospital bed. Chairman Thompson. I understand. Well, we wish you the best in that regard. Do you have a statement to make at this time? Mr. Gotbaum. I have a brief statement, sir. Chairman Thompson. Proceed. Mr. Gotbaum. I am honored to have been nominated by the President for the position of Controller in the Office of Federal Financial Management at OMB. As this Committee above all knows, the Controller and OFFM are a quite important part of the architecture you set in place almost a decade ago with the CFO Act. There has been very real progress since then. The creation of CFOs in major agencies, the development of accounting standards, and agency and government-wide financial reports, and the beginnings of improved financial systems. I also should mention beyond the CFO Act the Government Performance and Results Act, which has encouraged the Executive Branch to hold itself accountable to financial as well as other performance standards. It is important that we all recognize that there is much yet to do. We have made real advances in financial accountability, but many agencies are lagging in financial management. Many of our financial systems are not even ``solid state''--they are paper--much less ``state-of-the-art.'' Finally, all of us in the Federal Government, those who are doing very well and those who are doing less well, are still exploring the best ways to measure performance and results and are still looking how to incorporate those measures into everyday management of our programs and to our decisions about resources and into our plans for the future. I agreed to be nominated for this position because as one who cares intensely about management in the Federal Government, I hope to continue this progress. I am a realist. I know there are only 15 months left in this administration. Nonetheless, I believe that these are issues which are not partisan. I think they enjoy the support of people of good will throughout the parties and in the Congress and in the Executive Branch. And I think they ought to be a legacy of this administration for the next. And so that is the reason I hope to be there and to do so. In closing, let me say again that I am enormously grateful to this Committee for considering my nomination, for giving me this opportunity today. I look forward to answering your questions. I hope to earn your support and, if confirmed, the chance to work with you and others to advance the goals of better government that I think we all share. Chairman Thompson. Thank you very much. As indicated earlier, the Committee submitted some substantive pre-hearing questions to the nominee, and the nominee has also met with staff to discuss a variety of issues of congressional concern regarding the financial management of the Federal Government. Your written responses to these questions will be placed in the record. I will start my questioning with these three questions that we ask of all nominees. Is there anything that you are aware of in your background which might present a conflict of interest with the duties of the office to which you have been nominated? Mr. Gotbaum. No, sir. Chairman Thompson. Do you know of anything, personal or otherwise, that would in any way prevent you from fully and honorably discharging the responsibilities of Controller at the Office of Management and Budget? Mr. Gotbaum. No, sir. Chairman Thompson. Do you agree without reservation to respond to any reasonable summons to appear and testify before any duly constituted committee of Congress if you are confirmed? Mr. Gotbaum. Yes. Chairman Thompson. All right. You pointed out several of the statutes that Congress has enacted over the last decade: The Chief Financial Officers Act, the Government Management Reform Act, and the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. If our progress could be measured in terms of pieces of legislation that have been enacted, we would be in great shape. Each of these management reforms seeks to improve the financial management of the Federal Government, and this has been something that GAO has identified for a long time as being at the heart of the management problem. Up until fairly recently, there was very little in terms of accountability, very little in terms of determining what it costs to produce what we produce in the government. In one of its most recent reports on the government's implementation of the Federal Financial Management Improvements Act, GAO wrote this: ``The historic inability of many Federal agencies to accurately record and report financial management data on both a year-end and an ongoing basis for decisionmaking and oversight purposes continues to be a serious weakness. There has been little discernible progress since last year.'' Mr. Gotbaum, you are in a position to effect greater progress in this area. In your view, first of all, are the staff resources dedicated to financial management issues sufficient for OMB to identify and correct systemic problems, improve government-wide financial management practices, and implement these statutory requirements? Mr. Gotbaum. It is a fair question, Senator. Let me say first that I have read, obviously in preparation for this position, the GAO report and met and sat with not only the folks in OMB but the various chief financial officers and met with the IGs, etc. I think the picture presented by GAO is an accurate mixed picture, meaning we clearly have made real progress, and it would be unfair to the people who have worked on it not to recognize the real progress. It is also entirely accurate to say that there is a long way to go. And I can't tell you that I know, not having gotten in there yet, that we have the exact right level of resources. I think it is important to say, however, that--because I have been at OMB for a couple of years--that the way the organization works (because it really is a matrix organization) if it does its job well, is to leverage the resources of all of OMB. And so, from my perspective, Senator, the issue is: Can and does and will OFFM and the folks in the management side of OMB leverage the resources, leverage the expertise, leverage the contacts, and leverage the clout of the divisions (the so- called Resource Management Organizations, or ``RMO's'') that have individual staff members assigned to individual agencies? In some areas, I know that they have done that and have done that well. When the Health Care Financing Administration a couple of years ago came forward and said ``We are in trouble, we know we are in trouble, we are not sure that we can comply with Y2K, and it is going to take both additional resources and effort,'' the folks from the management side of OMB and the resource side working together. While no one would say that we are out of that woods yet, it is clear that there has been a lot of effort. So I think the critical thing here, Senator, is that the organization be active, that it leverage the rest of OMB, that it leverage the CFOs' Council. One of the things that I have got to say, Senator, that is enormously encouraging is to go to a CFO Council meeting, because agency after agency after agency, these are folks who are recognizing that they have common problems. They have common challenges and common issues, and they are working together to solve them. And as you know, Senator, there are lots of places in the Federal Government where agency after agency after agency faces the same issue and doesn't know it; doesn't look to anybody else for help and doesn't look to anybody else for advice. And so what's really encouraging about the CFO Council is that it is a real mechanism for solving common problems together. And so what I hope would happen, if confirmed, is that using these resources and setting up some kind of standards and reporting for progress, those two things together ought to provide the encouragement we need to make the progress we need. I think the GAO is accurate in their report. But if it takes a periodic GAO report to figure out when we are or are not up to snuff, then we are not going to be up to snuff, because one of the basic tenets of Management 101 is if you don't measure it, you can't improve it. And so that is what---- Chairman Thompson. That is what the Results Act is supposed to do for us. Mr. Gotbaum. Yes, sir, it is. Chairman Thompson. Ultimately. And it has taken a good while to get there. These reports are coming in, the performance plans and so forth, and they are not up to snuff. But you are going to be in the center of this, and that means that you are going to be in a key position to do something about it, because it is really--we talk too much in terms of crises around here, but it looks to me like that we are facing one in terms of the way the government operates. We are arguing now over a 1 percent across the board or 1.4 percent across the board, and trying to fill a $4 billion hole. GAO has identified over $200 billion of waste and fraud, and pointing out to these agencies, in pretty specific terms, where we are losing money. The Navy has identified--is it $300 billion?--$3 billion that they identified as lost in transit. So, you know, we are trying to get a handle on that, and one of the reasons it has been so difficult to get a handle on it has been because of the inadequacies in our financial system. Now we have passed the Results Act, and I think as most everyone knows, what we are trying to do there is identify what our goals are in government. What are we really trying to do? Not churn paper, but what results are we really trying to achieve for the citizens, and then figuring out some way to measure that. What are the results of what we are doing? But that is all based on adequate financial data, and the GAO tells us we have lousy financial data. And so that is at the heart of it. Much of the data required by the Results Act comes from financial systems that are in place, and according to GAO, many of the government's financial accounting systems are badly flawed. They wrote recently that: Agencies do not have a single integrated financial system to rely on and they rely on ad hoc programming and analysis of data that is not reconciled and often requires adjustments. As a result, the risk of material misstatements increases and reliable data cannot be produced in a timely and efficient manner. This is in the case of most Federal agencies. According to the GAO, most agencies' fiscal year 2000 performance plans suffer from the same three key weaknesses as their fiscal year 1999 plans, one of which was the lack of credible performance data. In fact, GAO found that the plans of 20 out of 24 major agencies provide little confidence that their performance data will be credible. So I would ask you what steps will you take to ensure that we have a good foundation of performance data with which to proceed in implementing performance-based management. Mr. Gotbaum. This is a very important question. It is one I got a chance to discuss with your staff in the interview. There is a part, Senator, where I agree with and a part where, I have got to be honest, I disagree with the emphasis in the GAO's report. We all think that the Results Act is an incredibly important issue. We also recognize--and we are pretty honest about it--that we are in the early stages of it. There is a range: Some agencies do, in my view, an extremely good job. Some agencies do a job that I wouldn't want to have to defend. Most agencies are in the middle and are working at this seriously but aren't there yet. I want to draw an important distinction because I think it matters to this Committee on an ongoing basis: For many agencies, they don't yet know what are the right measures of performance. GAO is raising a second issue--which is a real issue, but it is a second issue--which is that they also don't have established systems and the kind of audit trail that you would need to ascertain the validity of those performance measures. Because we are still in the developmental stages of GPRA, because we are still at the point where we are trying to nudge agencies to think about what kind of information--(what kind of performance information to use for our grants program versus an operating program, what kind of performance information to use for procurement rather than other kinds of systems, etc.)--the danger is that we could freeze agency decisions too early. If agencies get the sense that the GAO and us and you care more about the verifiability of performance data, they are going to take easy hits. They are going to start picking the easily quantifiable stuff: ``How many grant applications I have processed?'' rather than ``What is my average time,'' or ``How satisfied are the recipients of my grants over the service they got?'' This is not to say that GAO shouldn't push and you shouldn't push on the issue of verifiability of financial systems. There is plenty of room for improvement there. But what I would hope is that you also push on the broader first job of GPRA, which is to say to agencies: Are you using the best performance measures you can? Are they performance measures that are really suited to what your job is? I got to say that in the 2 years that we have had the Performance Act, there has been real improvement. We are a long way from Valhalla, but there has been real improvement. And what that says to me personally is that we can make more progress. Chairman Thompson. I was talking to some people yesterday about--they were talking about, as one of their measurable criteria, the number of reports they had produced. And I said, ``What if they are lousy reports?'' Mr. Gotbaum. Yes, sir. Chairman Thompson. See, that is what we have got to get to. That is what you are talking about, isn't it? Mr. Gotbaum. Yes. And I will give you another for instance. This is a case where OMB was later to the game than I wish we had been. Each year we send a huge set of instructions to the Federal agencies saying these are the rules by which you should prepare your budget reports. It is called Circular A11. And this year for the first time, we said to agencies: In addition to your GPRA reports, you got to start integrating your performance information into your budget justifications, into your budget submissions. Now, we have suggested this in the past, but now it is in words of one sentence--in words of a few syllables, directly in the A-11. Now, I am a realist. Do I think that as a result of that change 4 months ago that all of a sudden every agency's budget submission is now going to be rife with the kind of performance data that you would like and we would like? No, sir, I don't. But I do think it can--and if we enforce it aggressively--step up the quality. Chairman Thompson. Oh, I think that is very important. I think that one of the big things that we have been lacking is some connection between performance and budget. And we have got to do better in Congress. We have these hearings and identify these problems, and these agencies waste/lose millions, sometimes billions of dollars. Down the hall they are having some kind of appropriations process that hardly takes it into account. But it has got to be a combination of Congress plus the OMB. Most of the attention is on the ``B'' part over there because people don't credit for the ``M'' much unless there is some easily understood number like fewer employees, government employees, or something like that. When you look at it, first of all, most of them are military and, second of all, we are outsourcing stuff. So it is not costing the government any less. There are a few less bodies on the full-time payroll. So you have got a real problem, but we understand, I think, the nature of that and how difficult it is, but how important the job that you are going to take on is, because you are the guys who are supposed to be managing, seeing that the agencies do what they are supposed to do. They clearly have not been, and a key part of that problem is the financial management problem, and that is where you are going to be. So it looks to me like you understand that and you are going to come in with some fresh energy and maybe some fresh ideas as to how to break through, and we look forward to working with you on that. Mr. Gotbaum. Thank you, Sir. Chairman Thompson. Senator Durbin. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR DURBIN Senator Durbin. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Gotbaum, thank you for being here today. I would like to just ask you basically two questions. The first relates to a friend of mine who had an experience back in Springfield, Illinois. He is an old buddy. He had a heart problem. And so he went to one doctor, and this doctor said, ``You are going to have to stop drinking beer,'' which was a big change in his life-style. So I said to him, ``What did you do?'' And he said, ``I got another doctor.'' And I said, ``What did that doctor tell you?'' He said, ``Well, if I gave up bread, I could keep drinking beer.'' And he said, ``I haven't touched a slice of bread in weeks.'' We seem to have a similar thing going on here when it comes to the Congressional Budget Office and OMB and the budget process. It appears that those of us on both sides of the aisle here pick and choose from projections and forecasts from OMB and CBO when they help our case. I found that yesterday. We were in a markup, a conference committee on the Labor-HHS bill, and some moments the Chairman would be quoting CBO dogma and other moments OMB dogma when the occasion presented itself. Do you have any perspective on this role of the dueling agencies and whether or not this is healthy or whether there is any objective standard we can use to say here is credibility, here is partisanship? Where can we have a credible line drawn? Mr. Gotbaum. Well, Senator, since there are members of the OMB staff here and I am from the administration, of course, I should say that the OMB numbers are right. But let me be more direct. Chairman Thompson. They have been quoting CBO numbers lately. [Laughter.] Senator Durbin. We are all guilty of this. Mr. Gotbaum. I told you the partisanship in here was much more complicated than I could handle. I have participated in this as Executive Associate Director of OMB for a couple of years and watched it from other positions. I got to say, Senator--and this is a personal view-- these are two independent, very professional organizations-- even when I disagree with CBO or when I disagree with OMB staff, I got to say these are terrifically competent folks, very professional, very dedicated. I think the fact that there are two--that they are independent, that they are watching each other, that they are calling each other's fouls--probably at the end of the day is more helpful to the process than if you didn't have that. I think the OMB staff is fantastic; in a government that is full of very good civil servants, I think it is the best group of civil servants I have ever seen. However, it is also the case that because we are from the administration, even though we are professional, hard-working, dedicated, and try to call them as we see them, the folks up here in Congress are always going to have that nagging doubt. And so I think the CBO has made a real contribution. That doesn't mean, Senator, that we won't have differences on the margin. It doesn't mean we won't have differences on some call. We will and we do, etc. But I think given what you get for having a second opinion that is of quality, I think we are all a little better off. And that doesn't mean that I wouldn't be grateful if my former colleague, Barry Anderson, and Dan Crippen occasionally didn't lean our way, but the fact of the matter is the process works better than if we didn't have them. The other thing I should say, Senator is that one of the things that happens from the legislative process here is that you all focus necessarily on the disagreements. You focus on the cases where we and they disagree, or you focus on the cases where Democrats and Republicans disagree or the House and the Senate disagree. The vast majority of estimates that we do and they do, way over 90 percent, are close together. And that is part of the reason why we get some confidence when we have the disagreements. Senator Durbin. Let me address one other issue, and Senator Thompson has already alluded to it--the ``M'' part of OMB. You made a speech to the National Academy of Public Administration last summer and alluded to an issue of great concern to me. That is the issue of food safety and the multiplicity of Federal agencies, 12 different Federal agencies with jurisdiction over the safety of food in the United States, 35 different laws, clearly duplication, overlap, and waste taking place. This is something that this Committee, the Governmental Affairs Committee, addressed over 22 years ago and said we have got to do something about that in a hurry--22 years ago. And the obvious conclusion is we haven't done much. I am just curious as to when it comes to the role of OMB and talking about this kind of duplication at the Federal level, where we have clearly mired ourselves down into a tangle of jurisdictional fights downtown, jurisdictional fights on the Hill, jurisdictional fights in the industry, what role can the voice of OMB play in changing this? Mr. Gotbaum. Senator, this is another example of the point I made to Senator Thompson. OMB has a very difficult, frequently misunderstood, and frequently painful role, which is it is our job, on behalf of the President, to reconcile disagreements, to force agencies to look beyond their stovepipes as best we can, and in some cases just keep score, make sure that we are doing this stuff. There is a young woman at OMB who actually was my special assistant for a while, a woman named Wendy Taylor. She is 30 years old. She is from Lawrence, Kansas. She is as smart as my mother thinks I am. And she is in OIRA, the Information and Regulatory Affairs shop of OMB. She worked with the folks on the agriculture branch, the health branch, etc., Every couple of years we do go back and look at cross-cutting issues like food safety (we always look at cross-cutting issues, but which cross-cutting issue we look at changes over time). And so within the administration, we forced an inter-agency discussion. Now, we also work in the world of the real. There are still multiple agencies that do this stuff but that doesn't mean that we are not watching, working, and trying to make improvements. And let me just mention one that I--because Wendy was working for me at the time--participated in. We said, ``All right, maybe we are not going to consolidate all these agencies for internal reasons or legislative reasons. But we can certainly force them to talk to each other about their own research budgets. We can make sure that in the area that is most likely for there to be overlap, `Guys, you ought to sit down and we ought to have a single, coordinated research budget in this area.' '' And so we created a food safety research institute. It is in early days, it has been in operation for a year. But it is getting folks to the table, forcing them to have what I think of as an integrated agenda for research, making sure that the funds we do have, whatever they are, are used sensibly. It is an example of where and how OMB works. We do this a lot. Personally, I have spent a lot of time as Executive Associate Director in those issues which cross stovepipes, so counterterrorism and dealing with weapons of mass destruction because it covers the Justice Department and the Defense Department and Health and Human Services, etc., is something which I watch over. That is another example. Federal agencies, they are created, they have their histories, they have their skills, they have their people. And sometimes you can and should make wholesale changes, but you ought to recognize that there are real costs to making them. Even if we don't go that far, we nonetheless ask, ``Are we allocating the Nation's resources in some way that makes sense among them?'' When we were talking about who trains local governments to prepare for the possible terrorist incidents we had a discussion and we said, ``DOD could do it, FBI could do it, HHS could do it, but obviously you can't have all three.'' This is the bread and butter business of OMB. It is something we do a lot. Senator Durbin. The real responsibility, of course, lies here on Capitol Hill, and perhaps at the initiative of the President, to change the laws to solve the problem. And at least you have to say that the conversation, the dialogue that you have discussed has to be positive. The only bad thing I know that came out of it was when one member of the Cabinet referred to it as ``a virtual unified food agency.'' I took that as in virtual reality, which is not reality but appears to be. And so that choice of words, I think, left something to be desired, but I thank you for your testimony, and I certainly support your nomination. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Thompson. Thank you very much. I couldn't let this opportunity pass without once again referring to basic problems that we are dealing with here. GAO and agency IGs have identified about 300 major management problems for the 24 agencies collectively. This includes the 26 problems on the GAO's current high-risk list. Agencies on the high-risk list specifically because of poor financial management include the Department of Defense, the Forest Service, Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. There are over 700 open GAO recommendations addressing high-risk problems alone, and another 450 open GAO recommendations on other major management problems. There are hundreds more open IG recommendations for the 300 management problems. Now, that is not to say that all the recommendations are even good ones or valid, but that is an awful lot of stuff out there that there seems to be not much happening on because so many of these agencies continue to appear on the high-risk list over and over and over again. Collectively, there are over 1,000 open, unresolved GAO and IG audit recommendations. Many of these major management problems, of course, relate to financial management. So this is just the scope, just reminding you of something that I know you know by now, the scope of the problem and what you are going to have to deal with. But I know you are committed to do that. You have an excellent background educationally and in terms of your work in the private sector and your government work, and I commend you for taking this on. And please work with us and give us your ideas and let us work together to see if we can't begin to address some of these things. You are right. A lot is going on. A lot of good work is being done by a lot of good people. But it is not our job to get together and congratulate each other on what we have done. It is our job to do better, because we are not doing as well as if we were in the private sector and had to be accountable. So we have got to move toward that. If you have nothing further, then I have nothing further, and we will try to move this nomination along as rapidly as possible. Mr. Gotbaum. Senator, let me just say thank you again. This is not to minimize the issues that you raise, because they are real and they are important. I think that in order for us to make progress, we need a combination of carrot and stick and reporting in the light and tough talk, privately, in the dark. I certainly don't want to dissemble under oath and to the chairman of my committee, so I am not going to tell you that we are going to solve all of this, but I can tell you that we are going to work at it seriously. We are going to work on the large ones that we can make progress on, and I look forward, if you all confirm me, to working with you in trying to get something accomplished. Thank you. Chairman Thompson. I appreciate that, and thank you very much. We are adjourned. 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