companies that invested in solyndra so we can get a more clear picture from that angle? >> we think they are very good suggestions. with that, the hearing is now adjourned. [inaudible conversations] ..

>> nearly 100,000 americans are hospitalized each year due to

food-borne illnesses. dr. elisabeth hagen explained the reasons. this is about an hour. >> well, good morning here, and thank you for coming 20 our ogilvy exchange. we'll hear from dr. hagen today and then your questions. when you do ask a question, identify yourself and your question. she's the undersecretary of food safety at the u.s. department of agriculture, and she was sworn in in august of 2010, and she oversees the policies and programs of the food safety inspection service, the health regulatory part of usda. she's advanced a science base public health agenda there, and

that's really important, and she's directed outbreaking consumer complaint investigations overseeing risk assessments and regulatory programs. as you know, food safety's in the news all the time. yesterday, the c brings c announced at least 13 people died from eating contaminated cantaloupes, and it was traced back to colorado. her agency does not deal specifically with that, but more on meat issues. there's a number of meat issues as well. the usda recalled 40,000 pounds of ground beef because of possible e. coli contamination. there's the recall of turkey this summer. we had exchange with dr. michael taylor from the fda. this is something we have interest in and you do as well. thank you, all, for coming. again, if you have questions, identify yourself and your organization, and if you're tweeting from this event, our

tash tack is ogilvy exchange. i'll turn it over. >> thank you. it's nice to see you, tony, right up in the front row. [laughter] do i talk into the mic or step back? okay. we'll do slides this morning. this is fun because i don't normally do slides when i'm out doing speeches, but when we looked at the attendance, it's a mixed group of attendees in terms of perspectives and understanding of food safety regulation here in the united states, so i hope this is not too simplistic for all of you or really for any of you, but i hoped to walk through the basics and see where the conversations takes us if that's okay with everybody. okay, so, i don't normally do slides, i have to figure out how to do this at the same time. all right. good. so the first question is why do

we care about this? why do we have a number of agencies involved in the regulation of food, safety of food in the country? well, because this is serious, serious business. the cdc estimated last year over 48 million americans get sick every year from foodborne illness. one in every six americans in this room could get sick this year from the food they eat. it causes over 128,000 hospitalizations killing over 3,000 people every year. for some foodborne illnesses, those the most vulnerable among us are the most vulnerable to food like elderly. this is something that we need to do belter on and we are constantly striving to do better on. the cost estimates range.

i'm there's some high as $150 billion, some other estimates are lower, but regardless, it's the costs that are in the billions here in terms of health care costs, lost time at work, lost wages, just general societal costs. this deserves our attention and best efforts. most importantly, it's preventable. these are preventable illnesses. we need to be doing better. we need to be doing something about this. so people often ask me what's the single most challenging thing about making food safer? i don't know that there is a single challenge. i think this is very complex when we look at what's in front of us now in 2011, so i just wanted to list a couple of things here, and i think these apply really to all the products that are under regulation by the government, but especially those we regulate at the food and safety inspection service. i guess the same is said for

fresh produce. these are raw agricultural products by and large. when you look at what happens when the meat or poultry production system, i mean, live animals on one side of the system, and you have ham bergeres and chicken nuggets and soup go out on the other side of the system. that's a significant challenge to reduce risk on live animals and come up with safe products in the end. there's a markettedly increased demand. there's a lot of people to feed in the country, over 300 million, and we feed people all over the world, and people want things in different varieties year round and to be cheap and safe. there's a markettedly increased demand for the food products that we regulate. changes in production supply change and distribution. well, there was a time when supply chains only crossed county lines, but now they cross oceans and continents. this is a significant change over the last 20-50 year, and

it's more complex to trace things back and have control over what's going into the products. there's just a changing biology for human beings and animals. some of the organisms we see oh typical stereotypes we now see being greater threats are different than they were years ago. we have to be on alert all the time. we pay attention to chemical hazards, and we have novel vehicles. there's e. coli in cookie doug, years ago, that was not an issue. there's a risk in types of foods that's a surprise to most people to see so many illnesses related to peanut butter. we do live in a post-9/11 world, so we have to think of the increased risk of potential contamination. we've done a lot of work on that

front in terms of our food defense programs. as i talked about earlier, changing consumers' expectations and demands. looking at our products -- so people want ground beef, but it has to be 97% lean or 93% lean or 80% lean, all different formulations, and, again, consumers expect and deserve that the products are all safe. they want access year round. we want strawberries in january, so there's supply chains to have available at all times. there's different demands than we had in years past. final finally, the at-risk population. young children, that's not an increasing population u but certainly we have an aging population, we have more people living longer because of medical interventions. we have people receiving transplants, people are living

entire lives with hiv/aids, and they are at most risk for these illnesses. we need to pay attention to that. what are we doing aught -- about it? for the past 15-plus years or so, our agency has been evolving really from an inspection agency that started back in 1906 after the jungle was written to a public health agency and understanding the reason we inspect all of these probings is because we want to keep people safe from harm. we've been on that path for some time now, and under this administration, our efforts have only been strengthened. a couple words about what the food safety and inspection service does, and then i'll give a quick comparison with fda. we are the agency that falls under my missionary, the office of food safety at usda. what do we do?

we protect public health by ensuring the safety and proper labeling of the commercial meat, powell ri, and egg -- poultry, and egg product supply. we are a lot of people. we're inspectors, scientists, veterinarians, policymakers, and administrative professionals. we are in front line inspection work. our inspectors and plant personnel are in more than 6200 food establishments every single day. we ensure the safe processing of over 150 million head of livestock every year and over 9 billion birds. that's a lot of product that is passing through our hands and passing through the inspection system. in addition to the presence and inspection work we do, we have other functions like outbreak response. we work closely with state and local public health authorities and with the center for disease control and with fda when we have something that crosses

jurisdictions. we have a big enforcement role. we do laboratory testing, three laboratories that test thousands and thousands of samples per year. as i mentioned, we do a lot of work in food defense and food safety education is one of the big priorities. just to contrast, i'm not from the food and drug administration, so i won't say too much. just to remind folks in the room, the food and drug administration is responsible for the safety of produce, dairy, seafood, and many other foods. in terms of thinking about food safety, who comes in at what point along the way, ated food and drug administration, they are responsible for animal drugs and feed. a few words about the modernization act, historic piece of legislation you're all aware of, this really -- even though it doesn't apply to usda per se, it's a step forward for the community and everybody who cares about a safe food supply and wants to keep moving

forward. a couple key pieces of the act, it does give the fda mandate for prevention, greater oversight of imimportanted food, mandatory recall authority, and requires they enhance collaboration with various public health agencies. as i said, we're not directly impacted by food casted modernization act, but there's many pieces of it requiring consultation with the secretary and with some of our programs, and we have had a very good working relationship with fda about this. they have used us heavily in a consul at a timive role. -- consulting role. here's a side by side of who does what. taking on the regulation of cat fish thanks to a provision in the 2008 farm bill, proposed 5 rule on that the end of last year, and we're still analyzing comments on that. there's a split egg

jurisdiction. we're in every plant every single day. by law in any establishment that slaughters, we have to be present during the entire operation. if it's one shift, it's eight hours, two shirts, we're there for 16 hours. in processing establishments, we're there once during every shift. fsis does not have on-site jury diction, but there's the animal health service that is do a lot of work on the farms. we do a lot of safety education and we partnered on really great efforts in the last couple years. so i wanted to talk a little bit how we currently collaborate with other key players in the food safety system and those who track food born disease. it's the presence of the food safety working group. the president formed this group in the first three months of coming into office in 2009, and

of the charge to us was a good one to improve the food safety system. there was no proceeding outcomes when that charge was made. at the time, i was still with the agency with the opportunity to be a part of the working group from the beginning, 10 i can speak a little about what happened at the beginning and where we are now. we workedhearted in the first couple of months, and in july of 2009, we presented an initial report with our core principles and key findings and what was going to guide all agencies involved in the next couple of years. the first priority is that we need too prioritize prevention. that comes first and foremost. it may seem obvious, but articulating it matters a lot. we have to enhance surveillance and enforcement, and third, we have to improve response and recovery. it's not just response in the case of outbreaks or negative events. we need to recover as well, and we need to be able to give consumers good information about

what products are imp kateed wharks are not imp kateed, and, you know, when they can get back to the normal consuming patterns. another important example of our collaboration is food net. this project had been has been around since the mid-1990s, a big collaboration support for anyone who works in the prevention of foodborne disease. they give us our annual report card. when looking where to take the trends from, how do we know how we're doing? we look at these results every year. it's a collaboration between the usda, centers for disease control, and all the state health departments that take part this it. food net including about ten state health departments, actually win local city level, los angeles county, and it covers about 15% of the u.s. population, and we feel it is a representative catchman area. we look to them every year to tell us what's happening with

key food born pathogens and look at trends year to year. fda was the original founding partners and continues to be supportive in terms of funding and involved and engaged in every working group that food net has. healthy people 2010, 2020. we're now in the 2020 phase of this. it's an important collaboration as well. we set objectives, and there's a section on foodborne disease objectives, and we at the administration co-own the objectives. we are co-accountable for achieving those objectives. obviously, outbreak response is a place where we collaborate hsm. we stand to improve here and we are looking for ways to improve here. finally, attribution, this is one of the biggest challenges in working with food born disease and food safety and prevention. figuring out exactly what proportion of which illnesses are attributable to what

products is important particularly for policymakers when we think where the resources need to go. it sounds easy and count up the number of people who get sick, ask what made them sick, and you have attribution, but it's challenging. it's one the biggest challenges we've had. recognizing how important it is and what a challenge it is, and that's not simple. we've engaged in a particular collaboration called the inner agency food safety analytics collaboration, and the first, i would say half dozen projects or so all have to do with attribution, so this is a pretty unique thing we're doing together with our partners. excuse me. so, as we've been looking at how to do this at usda, the lens in which we need to view this, how do we approach this, we've kept the three priorities 234 mind for ourselves.

prevention, prevention, prevention. it's what we're most focused on. anything new from the agency has to keep people from getting sick or in the case of labeling, allow people to make their best informed choices when buying food for their families. we look a lot at the tools. if e we want to -- if we want to prevent illnesses, what tools need to be in the inspector's hands? how do you make sure new technologies and innovations move forward at the pace she should be? what tools do consumers need to have? what information do they need to have to take steps to keep themselves as safe as possible? so looking at prevention, we look at tools necessary to get there, and most importantly, we're thinking about and talking about an engaging people all the time. again, this sounds like something that should be obvious, but until you articulate it and say this is important, this is one of our utmost priorities, folks don't

always understand it or believe it. the people part of this is really two-fold. it's remembering always that there are real people behind the statistics, that these are families whose lives have been destroyed forever because of single celled organisms, and remembering these are not just numbers but real people impacted every day and connecting those stories with our people because our people really believe in what they do. a lot of our inspectors, you know, live in these communities, grew up in them, live in rural communities, and they are very invested in what they do, but getting 10,000 people engaged and completely invested is something that takes work, and so i think that's been a really important part of what we've been doing is talking about the real people out there impacted by our work every day, how important it is, and trying to connect our own people with the people that we protect, so we believe that we are an agency whose policies are based in science, and we have always

executed them largely through inspection, and we remain an agency that executed them through inspection. excuse me. so, we're not just talking about all of this, all 6 these steps to take. we're actually doing this, putting these steps into action, and these are the things we're doing. as i mentioned, prevention is where it starts. it's the question we ask over and over again. are the things we do preventing people from getting sick? we're emphasizing very heavily our ability to collect data, amize it, and use it. finally, we look at having a true form to fork effort. we know where our jurisdiction begins and where it ends. we're not looking for new jurisdiction, but we feel strongly that if we're really going to talk about how you make food safer, we have to talk about how you make food safer from start to finish. pathogens, chemicals, these things that make people sick, they doarpt pay attention to

jurisdiction or operate in silos, and we shouldn't be operating in them either. so i wanted to tell you a coupful specific things that -- a couple of specific things that we've been up to right now in case you're unaware and provide some starting places for questions i'm sure. as we've looked at -- as i said, implementing prevention based policies. i want to look in the production environment. this is the slaughter house door, and it ends here why food a districted, but we look up and downstream. what are we doing within the box of the activity where the employees are, where the work goes on, and where we appropriated to do our work. i broke it down into beef, powell ri, and -- poultry and ready to eat because that's the simple way to do it. we are looking at changes to the testing programs. we understand and agree we cannot test our way into food

safety. it's really important. testing is a way to know for the industry to know if the programs and policies they have in place for food safety are actually working to make food safer, and it's a way for us to know, so we have been looking at, you know, whether our testing programs and not only the methods themselves, but the algorithms we have are designed to do what we need them to do in this day and age. particularly with e. coli and contamination rates 245 are driven down so low and rates cut in half since we made it in ground beef, but we have to be able to detelgt and protect it and protect people. we're looking at how to improve testing programs. we're looking how to improve our policies. this is a big challenge for anybody who works in food safety. certainly in outbreaks, we want to trace back as quickly as

possible to stop more illnesses from occurring, but we have to trace back when people are not sick so we have the regulatory testing programs in place. we have multiple hurdles in place. if we find a p 3r0b some -- problem someplace down the line, certainly, if we can get -- the closer we back to the source of the problem, the more people we prevent getting sick in the first place. this is challenges. look at ground beef. that's made from multiple sources and they have multiple sources, and there's a lot of challenges associated with this, but it's something we need to be better at. it's something that secretary vilsack has charged us to be better at. pushing prevention upstream further in the process. everybody agrees you can't test your way into food safety in the in. it's all important, but the better we are at preventing contamination in the first place further upstream in the process, the better off we're all going to be. we took a huge step forward on september 13th, just a couple weeks ago when we announced the now policy.

non-0157s text. these are all in the same family as e. coli with the ability to make people very, very sick, have the ability to kill people, and they all have a predilection for very young children with attack rate and illness severity. 100,000 people a year get sick with these organisms. we think the policies in place for 0157 have been effective in controlling organisms, there's not an explicit policy in the control in the beef supply. there's a new policy, a pro-active approach designed to keep people from getting sick. we will begin a testing program at fsis in march of 2012, and the test results themselves are important because if we find more product unsafe, 245 product is diverted from commerce, but what they do with the testing

results are important. this is a major step forward in the safety of the beef supply, and we look forward to implementing it later, the beginning of the new year. so -- excuse me -- i'm sorry. next up i have poultry safety. a couple of things that are important to talk about here. in march of this year, we published new performance standards for what we call broilers. these are young chickens, whole birds, and turkeys. the performance standards for salmonella have not been updated in a very long time and no performance standards for others. it matters. with an expectation, there's a standard and the industry strives to achieve that standard, people are safer. performance standards matter and putting out these tough new performance standards is extremely important. our calculations are once implemented, we'll reduce salmonella by 25,000 a year just

by implementation of the performance standards. we think that's preventative public health policy at its best. another thing we're very engaged in, and i'd say the entire food safety community including folks who are more involved on the tracking and surveillance and really trying to understand this continued rise in human salmonella. despite all good efforts made, and when you look at the numbers in terms of boiler contamination rates, the numbers we track, the volume adjusted amount positive, there's a tremendous improvement in numbers. we've gone from 16% five years ago to less than 5%. again, this is not a true prevalence. it's important i say it's not a prevalence study skinned to determine pref -- prevalence, but it's the data we track. there's the new egg roll. there's a lot of new efforts made in driving down contamination of food products in the production environment, but we have salmonella and human

illness rates going in the wrong direction and everybody is trying to figure that out. is 1 that we're not -- is it not poultry and something else? something that we're missing? are we sampling in the wrong place to determine what's really going on? this is something food net is interested in as a group trying to really dig into the salmonella data, figure out what's driving that, what are the things we do now with a chicken parts baseline knowing that people don't buy whole birds to the extent they used to and they buy chicken parts, so we're veryings very interested to see what that data tells us if there's a higher rate of contamination in the chicken parts and whole birds, might that, you know, incentivize us to do something differently. in the wake of the recent large outbreak and recall of poultry and sometime before that, we need to look at the ground

poultry segment of the industry specifically and what to do that. i think we're going to see significance in the steps forward and this recall shook people up and got the attention of people and the industry is looking now at the steps it can be taking, best practices to be established, or if they are already established, how can they be shared? you'll see steps forward from the agency on ground poultry as well. just on ready to eat, one thing up here. this has been a success story too in terms of contamination rates from lis tear ya to ready to eat products. it's been a steady state of decline when you look at the curve and it goes like this after the list dlisteria rule was implemented. there's meats sliced and

packaged in the production environment and sealed up there and those that are purchased at the grocery store in terms of ability to cause illness and to cause harm, so we worked clog closely with the fda and academia, and we're engaged in a study looking at what happens in the retail environment, what are the factors that drive recontamination or continued growth of the retail environment and what's done to mitigate them? i mean, does everybody wear safety boots in the deli? different things to be done? that's one of the things we have been working on for some time, and very answer, to see the results of that. i mentioned the analysis -- excuse me -- for somewhere about six months now, we have been in the process of implementing a new data management and process decision making tool. one of the things we started to do with to stream line the hundreds of data streams and

system we have into a more comprehensive data system. they are not all part of it, but it's significant streamlining. it's designed to give us near realtime ability to look at the data we collect in the 6200-plus establishments every day. we feed it back to the front line work force, analysts at head quarters and identify trends and anomalies before they put the public at risk. this is something that we're very excited about, taking us longer to implement this than we had originally planned, but we're very invested in getting 2 right rather than implementing it quickly. finally, leading the true farm to fork effort, as i mentioned before, we think we have to be looking at food safety all the way through. we are not looking to go on the farm. we're not looking to regulate producers, but everything that happens on the farm impacts what we do. it impacts the amount of risk to be handled throughout the

system, and so we are, we know that we have a huge stake in improving or finding avenue to improve preharvest food safety. we've done a couple things already. in 2010, i think, we released the e. coli guidance for beef slaughter establishments and summarizes what's out there in technologies that they want to consider from the producers they buy from. we charged the national advisory committee on meat and poultry inspection -- excuse me -- to look at the issue as well. what we have been engaged in is this, i guess sort of grass roots type of discussions with producers, with pack #ers, with scientists. we have a huge research portfolio at the usda on pre-harvest food safety. how can we be helpful and bring people together? we're not looking to go on the farm and regulate or doing anything there, but we have to sponsor the discussion to make

people realize they have a stake in this. i would say that most of the producers we've talked to are more than willing to participate in some type of pre-harvest food safety initiative. there's constraints. we want the technologies that we're encouraging them or asking them to employ make food safer in the various producer environments, and we want to make sure that, you know, that the costs are manageable as well. we had a good dialogue over the last year on this issue. we're looking forward to a public -- i think the data is up there. my chief of staff is nodding her head. we have a register notice to publish any day on this on november 9. we want to bring people together, people who raise animals, the meatpackers, consumers, retail, everybody to talk about how can we be useful? how can government be useful on this? how can we move this forward? what types of things are

helpful? we have this significant one-health effort imoing on at the department -- going on at the department. i'm the co-chair of the group just looking at how health and environments come together, and pre-harvest food safety is something to pay attention to in that setting. so we talked about what happens before that box we live in and i want to talk about what happens afterwards. i just want to say, again, that we are always working. our primary responsibility is to be sure food is as safe as possible before it ever reaches consumers. that is what we're doing every day, all 10,000 of us. no question about it. that's what industry, i believe, is striving for as well. we know that the system is not perfect. we know that there's inherent risk. we know there's still additional steps to be taken in the hands of food preparers to increase the safety of the products they put on their tables. we have been dedicated to the effort for a long time. there's an entire food safety

education staff at usda that does really terrific work. there's so many resources available. check out information on our website or foodsafety.gov website. there's work sheets for every circumstance you can imagine, cooking for groups, power outages, tailgating. we do them in english, spanish, american sign language, podcast, tweet. how many twitter followers do we have now? >> [inaudible] >> hundreds of thousands. that's awesome. i don't tweet because i don't know how, but the agency tweets, and people follow us. are you followers of ours on twitter? yes? yeah. we're doing everything we can. we introduced a monal app this year -- mobile app this year. karen's been on the website for a long time. she'll answer food safety question. there's a food safety app for blackberries and iphones because people don't often have

food safety questions in prompt of their -- in front of the computers, but they are at the store or somewhere else. ask her, hey, can i eat the pizza i left out last night? there's over 100 responses to -- 1500 responses to questions people ask. we answer the questions if can and we give people places to go. we are doing these things, getting better at pushing information out. we rely on people knowing what we regulation, where the website is, and what page they have to go to. there's a complete change there. getting the information out in a modern, 21st century way. one the big commitments this year is a full-on public service advertising campaign. the food safe families campaign was done in partnership with the ad council, the folks who brought you many, many, many legendary figures like snooky

the bear, this is your brain on drugs. we partnered with the ad council this year. there's panel of stake holders from the industry, academia, and we wanted to breakthrough the apathy. we know people heard this before. they know they say they do these things, wash hands, use a meat thermometer, but we know that in practice people don't necessarily really do these things, and is it because they don't get that one in six americans get sick? they don't get that their child could have their lives impacted forever if they get sick? is it that? is it just about raising awareness? is it about practicality? what is it? we wanted to do something different and catch people's attention. we decided to go with the four messages that have traditionally been used which is to clean. the clean to separate to cook and to chill. we wanted to do something different to grab people's

attention. i brought -- we're hoping this is going to work. i'm told is works. david's saying it's working. i don't know if you saw ads on tv. they released in june. we're trying now to do radio and print. we brought of couple along today. every time we see one, we're like, yay! everyone gets excited. [laughter] [inaudible] [inaudible]

>> david was going to share one more with us. >> two outs, runner on third -- [inaudible] >> one in six americans get sick from food poise ping this year. keep your family safer. check the steps at foodsafety.gov. >> this is a sampling of what we do. we are trying to drive traffic to the foodsafety.gov website that has every piece of consumer information education that you want when it comes to food safety, and we reached a lot of people already. we know more people are

looking. for instance, there was a 700% increase to the web scythe in the first -- website in the first week it launched. there's people looking through the website, and we know numbers are important. we reached 20 million people with the launch of the campaign. numbers are important, but whether people change behavior is what's most important. we have to measure what we're doing, and we have baseline data that we're compiling and tracking. it's very helpful to have groups that do annual health and food survey on how many people use meat there thermometers. we need to track how we do and if we're impacting people's behavior with this campaign. we're very excited about what we do, and i think we've wanted and needed this kind of national level exposure and attention to food safety for a very long time. finally, what would a presentation be without a plan.

i won't talk the plan in detail, but we just recently released this, and i put it up here only because it's important that people understand we are not just talking about these things and not just kind of pulling miscellaneous policy ideas out of the air because they seem like a good idea. it's a strategy. we know where we are going and what to achieve. we're going to hold ourselves accountable for getting there. this particular strategic plan was written for us in a very different kind of way because strategic plans are dry and boring lengthy documents that sit in binders on shelf ofs and people don't look at them after they initially see them. we want people to understand what we're saying and back to the idea we're 10,000 people to be fully invested and engaged in doing this work for american consumers, and this is what it means in your job every day. this is what we want to accomplish, and you should have a direct line of sight between the work you do every day and

the objectives this agency is trying to achieve. it's up there, and it's available -- on the website now, i think, yeah? >> [inaudible] >> yeah. if anybody wants to look at it. i did want to mention that's where we are right now. we are a public health regulatory agency. it is our sole responsibility to protect consumers from harm in everything that we're doing every day moves us a little bit closer to achieving that goal. so i think i'll leave it there. >> anyone with questions, wait for the microphone. c-span is taping this. give your name and affiliation. >> hi, i'm pam from "flavor" magazine. on the matter of labeling. labeling lets people make the best most informed choices. i'm relatively new at this, but what i understand labeling on poultry and eggs, free range,

little about that label. can you talk about your view of that label in particular and whether it gives consumers the information they need to know? i think it creates 234 their mind an idea of chickens running on a green hillside, and that's not the case. >> well, i will, without skirting the issue too much, i'll say that a lot of labeling programs like that are -- do not happen through our agency. those are certifications or determinations that are made elsewhere. i believe free range falls under that category. our focus has been on do labels tell consumers what they need to know? in places where we make the differences ated foot safety and inspection service, we take steps forwards. for example, one of the things we did end of last year was to revive a very old rule that had been stagnating for some time about the labeling of single

ingredient products so whole cuts of meat, chicken breasts, steaks, roast, chops, people are consciousness of what they are buying and how they put meals together now. starting in january of next year, people know the same nutrition fact, content, in these products like every other food they buy at the store. we think it's important when products have been enhanced or injected with sodium or other solutions or things like that, that will alter their nutritional content and value. it's important that people know that and be able to make those choices. for us, it's not about good or bad. there's room for all of these products onts market, but we're focused orphan trying to make sure people have as much information as possible. >> ellen ferguson, "congressional quarterly." two questions. one, i understand the new rule

proposed on the 6th, won't take affect for a year; is that correct? >> march of 2012, 10 it's about -- so it's about six months from now. >> why is that? two, how is your agency affected by the budget, your 2011 budget and how do you think you'll be affected by 20 # 12, and will you will able to carry out and take care of the additional? >> to the first question, the reason for the delay is we have to -- the industry, the portion of the industry wants to adopt testing itself, and i should make clear this is a requirement of the agency. the industry may or may not choose to adopt those testing programs themselves. they need to be able to get things in place and get things up to speed. the test kits for these organisms have been in development i believe for some time. since test kit manufacturers were aware that the agency might move in this direction, but we have to make sure that the technology exists for companies

to be able to take the steps that they need to take, and the other issue is our international partners. there are always issues coming up in terms of -- we operate through equivalency in terms of imported food safety. people that exports products in the united states have to meet equivalent requirements to those that we have here note united states. so there are products that can be, dprins, produced -- for instance, produced before the requirements were in place and could be on the water before they were implemented. we allow for time there to be sure this makes food safer and we want the industry to consider what steps to take in implementing the program, we want them to have the time to do that. to the question about the budget, i would say, you know, i don't have a first of all, and i don't know what's going to happen with the budge. i don't think anybody in the room is certain what's going to happen to anybody's budget for that matter, but what i've told

the agency over and over again is that we need to keep our values and our priorities up prompt, and our priority and our responsibility is to protect the consumers from harm, and we need to figure out how to do that, and whatever budget climate that we are in, but there's no question that there are going to be challenges. at fsis, as i mentioned in the presentation, we have to be present in every meat and poultry plant in order for the plants to be able to operate, and so that's a significant piece of information. i have heard and read people speculate about whether there's enough inspectors to keep food safe. we have to have enough inspectors to keep food safe, so i don't -- i can't say for sure how we'll be impacted. we have certainly been taking steps for the last year or more. the administrator and i, to make sure that we are, you know, reducing duplication where it may exist, taken a look at lots

of positions at headquarters, and we've done a lot of things in terms of process improvement, to make sure we are as lean as possible, but our absolute priority is to continue to protect american consumers regardless of what circumstances we find ourselves in. >> hi, i'm coleman with capitol hill news and congressmen #* -- comem tear. thank you for this forum. it's terrific. two questions for you. you mentioned that post 9/11 you implemented a food dpefs system. i wonder if you can elaborate on that. you also mentioned that you've been stengthenned by the current administration, and i'd like you to tell us how. thank you. >> sure. i would say there's a couple things about the food defense. there's an entire office that handles food defense that's undergone name changes over the year, but we have emergency preparedness and response

professionals who now lead all of our efforts, and so we're thinking about where the as a vulnerabilities are and work closely with law enforcement to participate things and prepare for events that may occur. we have encouraged establishments to have food defense plans, not just food safety plans, but defense plans as well. there's a strategic objective in the strategic plan about food defense plans. it's just, you know, a combination of awareness, being on the alert, looking at what products are the most vulnerable and putting, you know, steps in place to reduce the risk as much as possible and ready to move if we have, if we ever experience that type of event. the food emergency response network is a laboratory network that is co-managed, co-led by the food and drug administration, and the food safety inspection service, a network of state laboratories

working closely with us through the years and cooperate #* -- cooperative agreements to be trained and have the capacity to look for threat agents that we might not be able to look for in sort of normal public health labs or in regular food testing labs. we've taken 5 lot of steps there. something to be individual leapt about all the time. i would say to the second question, how have we been strengthened by the administration? well, we have a president who said to us very early on, this is important. this is really important. as i side, no predetermined outcome, but there needs to be steps taken to improve safety of the food supply and improve confidence consumers have in the safety of the food supply. i think it starts at the top. you know, it always starts at the top. tone starts at the top. you got marching orders by the president to do things differently, come together and figure out, you know, to bring ourselves 20 a place where we

have parody a not one-half of the system with authorities that the other half doesn't have. the administration at the white house has been extremely supportive us. i'm fortunate to work for a secretary who is out front about this in the beginning co-chairing the food safety working group, and he takes this very seriously. he's been a real supporter of the things we'vemented to do, so i think there's -- we've wanted to do, so i think there's just a tone and attitude that just matters. this is one of the most basic things we can be and should be doing for the american people which is improving the food safety plan. >> good morning. >> morning. >> thank you for the talk. i'm martin with the humane society of the united states. in better economic times, there were not sufficient inspectors out there. can you talk about any sort of technology or technological initiatives that you're exploring to use technology to augment the capacity for

inspection. >> well, let me make sure i understand. they're not a sufficient number of food inspectors out there? >> border control or people inspecting ports at the homeland security, it's a staggering challenge, and i'm just wondering if there are ways that you're exploring technology like video surveillance to try to improve the -- >> right. yeah, so thanks for the question. a few things. we are actually at a historically low vacancy rate for personnel, and that includes veterinarians because of efforts we made. there's a recognition government-wide of the fact that we needed to have more public health veterinarians in particular in the federal work force, 10 we stepped up recruitment and retention efforts on that front and filling inspector vacancy is a huge challenge. again, we are a little bit

different situation than fda in that we are required by law to have people in plants every single day, and we have to staff the plants so they operate and we can perform our mandated functions. we're always looking, you know, looking for ways to keep the vacancy rates down because we have to and because it's also the right thing to do for our employees, but your question about video monitoring -- excuse me -- we have released earlier this year some guidelines about the use of video surveillance equipment, and so this does not replace inspection in any way, shape, or form, particularly are humane handling of animals, but we put out guidelines so industry understood how we expect them to use video monitoring, but also to make that clear that this was not going to -- having a camera in the pens does not replace having a vet out there. we can use that, the videotape,

we can use information we get from the videotape in terms of looking at records and things like that, so, yeah, always exploring new technologies, but it's clear in the statutes that we need to have people there, people on the line. we think the model works. there's a lot of questions over the years about car cues by car cues inspection. the laws were written a long time august, but the system works. if nothing else, having people in the plant every single day holds industry accountable in a way that's very important. the people are never going to get replaced. >> good morning. i'm alexander from russian division international. thank you very much for your presentation. i have a question based on my personal experience before my work in the united states. i lived and worked in the united kingdom. model is the same situation, maybe more often topics of food safety are in the british

headline news, but the thing that i couldn't see in the country and the wonderful years that i live here, it's a jmf, genetically modified food. i'm wondering maybe you in the united states have another criteria system, another entity that's addressing the problem. all food in the united states more clean from genes than in the united kingdom. i don't see this as a topic at all. maybe i'm wrong, but it's a huge topic in the united kingdom, but absolutely no news here in this country. is it because of clean food or another criteria system? >> i think it's just because the newspapers you're reading. i think there's a lot of attention to the issue of genetically modified food here in the united states. the main focus really is i think on whether they should be

labeled in all cases or not. that seems to be the significant concern. that debate continuing on. there are folks who feel strongly they should be labeled. again, people are interested than ever in what goes into their food, what is not in the food, how it was raised, what conditions the animals were raised under. there's a debate about that, and i don't think the issue has been settled. >> hi, i'm maria halles with the american observer, and thank you very much forever your presentation -- thank you very much for your presentation today. my question is a follow-up. with respect to the debt situation and certainly you do not have a crystal ball. i don't think anyone has which makes a lot of us quite nervous, but be that as it may and because you are so very organized in your strategic planning, what plan do you have in effect should there be market

reductions in the budget? i heard you say that, you know, you need inspectors on site, but beyond that, do you have a plan? if so, what is -- what -- in that plan, what are the important matters in a very small brief statement, and what are some of the things that might go? >> well, it's an important question, and as i said before, we still have a job to do, and i believe that regardless of the state of the economy whether we're in a terrific place or in a terrible place, people need their food to be safe. it does not change. it's a constant. i think congress recognized that. we certainly, you know, we certainly have received less in their budgets and anticipate we'll receive less in the budgets in the coming year than we have before, but i think there is widespread reck necessary of the fact that people --

recognition of the fact that people still need safe food regardless of what state that we're in. i think like everybody out there, we have to ask ourselves what are the things that we absolutely need to be doing, and what are our core functions, core mission, and are their -- that's the process we are involved in now at fsis and the department of agriculture, and i, you know, i speak -- i guess speaking for the government, that's what we're looking at. what is our core function? what are the most important things? what are the nice to-haves? that's the process we're engaged in now. we are certainly looking at, you know, the number of positions we have. we are not looking at reducing positions in the field because we simply can't. we're certainly looking at our headquarters' functions, where we can find efficiencies there. we're looking at every single

aspect of the operations. we're looking at what to do in the laboratories. one of the things that we're doing is trying too find ways to make sure that every single sample we take at the expense of the american taxpayers gives us as much nchtion as humanly -- information as humanly possible about the safety of that food. the system, where we align, for example, sample scheduling what people inspect in the labs from what's coming in from the field. we're looking at every single opportunity to find efficiencies, anticipating that budget times will be difficult going forward, and we're going to have to see what happens from there. >> we have time for two more questions. >> tony from food and water. good morning. >> good morning, tony. >> i like to sit up front also in church. [laughter] >> glad to hear you go to church, tony. >> the question i have is last night, the agency released an advised press release, the

second recall. with the editor's note that had confirm story information in terms of the specific type of salmonella. along with the anti by october ticks is that an ongoing situation with the agency, and did that press get out to the medical community? >> whether it's ongoing precedent, i don't know. whatever we have a public health alert with additional information after that goes out, we do generally update them, but i wouldn't say it's a new policy. ..

that information that we have added all those kind of groups to our list of the recall notification over the recent years to make sure the public health community as well as physicians. >> and with this is the good press and i'm going to try to get to in here. >> [inaudible] >> first of all, you mentioned the ground turkey operate and there might be upcoming regulations if you could elaborate on that. and second, if you know there is a big out right now just because

the issue of listeria is in the news and a lot of people don't know about it. if you can talk about what you guys have done over the last decade, the last most deadly outbreak was the listeria outbreak in a hot dog and possibly deli meat. >> thanks for your questions. good to finally see you in person. so, about the ground turkey. i'm not going to commit to any specific things that i will tell you the agency has come up with a plan of short-term, medium-term and sort of long-term items that we need to be looking at. the first thing that we did, the very first thing that we do is a recall. we make sure no more product is going out and products coming back that's the first step we take in these situations to prevent more people from getting sick. we have what we call an incident investigation team for several weeks, all tied disciplinary team that included policymakers and enforcement people, a field officer people looking at every single thing, every single piece

of data and every component of the operation to find out what we can learn about what happened in that particular plan and the next steps are to look at whether any of the practices that we might have found their might be generalized and whether there are steps we need to take in order to improve the safety across the industry. you'll see more from us on this issue but there are some short term and a very long term things we need to engage in. you're second question about listeria, forgive me i don't know of the year the final rule was published, but the agency took a different approach to the control of listeria and products with the publication of the final rule in the 2003 is that right? i don't even know. we basically tiered sampling set up the kind of risk-based sampling and risk-based approach to things depending what type of

intervention companies we are putting in place. so, some companies do what we call just sanitation's adjust the operations they have in place and try to demonstrate listeria control. some companies go and number of steps further and a couple of steps in the production environment and then the entire microbial that gets added before the product is packaged up. so this is just a different approach and basically we sample the company's according to the type of risk group we feel the fall into and we have a lot of collaboration with industry on dhaka rule we had a lot of collaboration with stakeholders from elsewhere, consumer groups and people on the hill, and i think that that was a success because the agency -- this is before i got there but i will go ahead and say we -- i think we involved of the people who were going to be impacted by this and really build a rule that was headed for success. as i said, we have seen a

tremendous decrease in the contamination rate of products that we regulate over the years. we are now at well over half of a percentage in terms of contamination rate and that's pretty significant. the issue with listeria is not so much that there are so many illnesses from it, and most people who get it will never even know they get it. most people who get listeria have a mild gastrointestinal illness that people who are particularly susceptible such as pregnant women, and the elderly can get really sick and the mortality rate is very, very significant. so that's why people often ask us why you have these policies focus on something that causes 15 or 1600 illnesses a year? because if you get it to have a good chance of becoming very ill or even dying if you are in a certain risk of a group so as a policy we have remained very important and we continue to look at these other factors, too. so when we learn about the difference between the prepackaged items and those that we see at retail, okay, what can we do?

lubber the next steps we can to get retail? what are the practices we can encouraged by that sector of the industry? >> thank you for coming. we appreciate you coming here and we will welcome you to the exchange. thank you. [applause]

>> thomas friedman and michael mandelbaum of co-authored a new book on the economy titled that used to be us. they joined us on the washington journal for an hour. >> we are back with of theith t- co-authors of the new book and michaedman and michael mandelbaum that usedel to be us help america fell behind in the world of invented and how we can, back. you call this a wake-up call. you address the wake-up call. guest: we argue that the reason this book has a backward- looking title but a four-looking book, we had a formula for success in this country and it

has gotten away from the senate fundamental way. it was to educate our people, up to whatever the level of technology is, the cotton gin or the steam shot or the computer. second was infrastructure, road, helicopters. we had the world's most open immigration policy to attract energetic individuals. we had the most government- funded research. entrepreneurs could fall -- plucked off the flowers. that was our formula for success. it was backed hamilton and lincoln. but at the last decade, a decade that we call the terrible twos, you see the arrows pointing down on all five cylinders of tarp formula. host: you decided to write a book and a pep talk.

michael mandelbaum. guest: we are on a slow decline so this is a wake-up call. we got into this but it is also, and this is where we come to the pep talk, it also offers suggestions for how we get out of it. as tom said, we get out of it by going back to our traditions, how our values, our policies, things that we abandon or have forgotten of the last two decades. they hold the key to success in the future as they did in the past. we are optimistic, although frustrated optimist. we outlined the reason for our frustrations, but the country is doing wrong, but also the reason for our optimism. host: let me go back to this

success that the united states said. the first two things you talked about sound about -- sounded like a government stimulus, that the government has to get them up and off the ground. guest: yes and no. let's start with the broad view. we did not become the world's richest company or most powerful country by accident. we had the greatest public/private partnership in the world. we are capitalists. we believe in markets and innovation, but that is best exploited when you have the proper balance with the public's sight. when each is doing its part. i thought i was one lonely guy and did this all my own. you did not do anything at all. did you build that train station of a subway on your run? did you create that market on your room? you want to have a balance between the two. that is what we are calling for.

it has gotten out of balance. we talk about education or infrastructure. we haven't $2.2 trillion deficit in and for sure to spending. we could build better schools but we do not think that education is a government problem. we think it is of parenting problem. we think it is a teacher problem. we think it is a student problem. this actually requires collective action. does not like world war ii or pearl harbor. it is happening. pearl harbor is happening but you cannot see it. host: you start a book out

carping about china. -- talking about china. they have trillions of investment compared to our deficit, and they invest in their country. some of their industries are heavily subsidized by the government. why is it so different? guest: we compared it briefly to china for two reasons. a few of the things that china is doing are things that we ought to be doing. china is very good on infrastructure and we're not. by some estimates, we are $2.1 trillion in arrears in investing in infrastructure, and china has the can-do spirit that we used to have in the united states. but we are clear that the key to american renewal is not to imitate china. china has plenty of problems. china will not have a smooth path upward. we need to not imitate china's

economic or political system but get back to our own basic values in the best features of our own system. -- and the best features of our own system. we respect what china has done but we think that that china in the uc in the united states is really a comment on ourselves, looking at the mirror and not liking what we see. one of the themes of this book is to look in the mirror and not like everything that we say. we do need to change but not more like china. we need to be more like our own best selves. host: thomas friedman, let me get your response to this headline. their currency manipulation bill, what do you make of that? guest: i am all for taking on china whether stealing american intellectual property or manipulating its currency.

remember, when they overvalue their -- when they undervalue their currency, excuse me, they are subsidizing everything that they sell to us. for 10 issues are cheaper, your computer is cheaper. we do need to keep that in mind, but they are also taking american jobs. i just not think that is the only thing that will solve the problem. host: a lot of people calling in to you. a democratic collar in portland, oregon. -- caller in portland, oregon. caller: i heard him on another new show blaming baby boomers for being an obstacle for the american dream. i wanted to say debt i'll live with and economists -- i live with an economist to as good a

forecasting things like the housing boom and what that would cause. how that would affect our economy. when you said baby boomers were a problem today, i wanted to say that i get very angry and everyone -- every time someone blames me, a baby boomer, for causing this terrible thing. guest: let me defend, and myself. we're both baby boomers and we are very hard on ourselves, on our generation, because we have let things slide. we are the generation that has not squarely addressed the four major challenges that we see facing the country and that really forms the spine of "that used to be us." we need the boomer is what we dominate the society and economy is and we have the responsibility to face up to

these challenges. things at this live on our watch but we have it within our power to deal with these challenges and we can leave a better chance at -- country for the next generation. it is up to us to deal with the consequences of globalization is and the information technology revolution. it is up to us to deal with deficits and debt. it is up to us to deal with our pattern of energy consumption and its affect on the climate. but s a boomer, speaking as one who is just as guilty as anyone else, we cannot avoid responsibility for this slow decline. if you do not recognize our responsibility, we will not be of a change things or reverse the decline. host: that is one of the four major challenges for america in your book. adapting did globalization, adjusting to his permission technology, coping with budget deficits, and climate threats as well. guest: what they all have in

common is that they all unfold gradually. they are all products of our success. we invented the i.t. revolution, we had all this consumption which created all the debt, we created of world of such fast growth. they are products of our success. but we have faced them before. we have fixed social security, we got the deficit down, we had energy taxes. we have actually done all this before. that used to be us. the problem is that we are not doing it all. host: 8 tweet. guest: very good question. if you look at growth in china since the 2008 crisis, you see a huge spurt in this kind of debt- driven growth. one enormous here and suddenly

you see this happening, you have to ask a question, how efficient you think all of that money was spent in china? i think there is real reason to be concerned that the bubble there, of which we know is in real estate and could be in other things, but china has one advantage -- they have $3 trillion in the bank. we are driving around the world without a bumper. they have a bumper and a spare tire. they can avoid to be a little more like that and we are. guest: one of the major themes of our book is the hyper connectivity of the world. we are all much more connected than ever before, even than five years ago when he wrote "of the world is flat." if and when china is in trouble, and there is a real danger of a

real estate basel, that would be bad for china but we will not escape the effect. we should not be routine for a chinese collapse. oting for chinese collapse. caller: i watch thomas friedman on bloomberg and i kind of understand what he is saying. please do not cut me off. when it comes to the lending, the the last 30 years with the great divergence, and you depreciate the value of american citizens and property. when it comes to innovation, you have not allow people from all sectors to comment. with all of the major funds cutting people off, there's no way that anyone can bring new ideas. finally, as a millennial, 25

years old, some of you need to hold fashion retire. this is in congress and in the nectar sector. we cannot keep on living off the old ideas. it is not the 1950's and 1970's. you guys need to get over the cold war. germany is about to save america and you're talking about what happened with hitler. guest: i am not sure that germany is about to save america but i welcome anyone who believes -- and we argue this in the book -- there is a new generation out there full of spirit and ideas, and the more they bring to the marketplace, the better. steve jobs is also a baby boomer. he still has a few good ideas. host: michael mandelbaum, another tweet.

guest: a very good question and we devote a lot of attention to that in the bow. there two things that we sing aloud, and one is the political system. it is broken. the two parties are more polarized than ever before, for reasons deeply rooted for decades and cannot be fixed easily. that means that they barely even speak to each other, let alone cooperate on the big things that we need to move the country forward. there's been a serious degradation of the political system and we do have ideas in the book for fixing it. second, our values have changed. what we emphasize is that there has been a shift from all we call the sustainable values, values for the long term, to situational values, which said basically do whatever you can get away with at the moment. that is what led to the financial crisis. there is a problem with our politics but also with our

values. it is a problem with us and that's why we say we have to get back to what we used to be. we have to remember what used to be us and go back to that. host: let me read one of the critical views of the book from david from. -- frum. guest: one of the things that everyone is looking for is the press the button, and we go back to where we were. the reason there is no press here button is because we got here by getting away from our formula for success. the only way to get back is to get back to the formula for success.

education, infrastructure comic imitation, incentivize, and government-funded research. i do not know how to be more specific than that. everyone wants a simple, quick answer. we are are there going to have a hard decade or a bad century. we're going to spend this next decade, and do what got us here, this formula for success, or we will have a bad century. there is no quick fix. there is no simple answer to this. do what we were -- getting back to the fundamentals. host: in history, when was the last time that we rolled up our sleeves and got back to work? guest: we have the example of the greatest generation in world war ii and then we sacrifice during the cold war. we understood we had a major challenge, that it was long term, and we all had to contribute and make some sacrifices in order to prevail,

and we did. but at the end of the cold war, as we say, we misread our circumstances. we thought that this was a great, historic victory and it surely was. but it was also something else. he created a world in which individual americans would be and are more challenged economically than ever before. it was not at time to roll up our sleeves and take up our shoes. it was time to redouble our efforts in education and research and infrastructure. we need to understand that we face a challenge in some ways just as great as the challenges that the greatest generation faced, but not so obvious but just as serious. guest: let me make another point that we emphasize in the book, almost half of which is about education. why is that? as mike alluded to come something has happened in the last seven years and we have not been talking about it.

we went from connected to hyper connected. in different talks, we say in the book, i wrote "the world is flat" in 2004. the world spend -- has become connected. when i read that, twitter did not exist, the cloud did not exist, clinton did not exist -- linkedin did not exist. skype was just a typo for most people. there is a camera in there, there is a camera man there, there was a cameraman there. host: we may have been in a different study of them. guest: now there is a robotic camera and someone is that a toggle state. they have outsourced.

here is what has happened in the last seven years, we argue. what blue-collar workers are feeling in the 1970's and 1980's, now white-collar will feel it. we've gone from the threat of cheap labor to the threat of cheap genius. it is a huge challenge. there is only one answer, education, infrastructure, rural and government infrastructure. it is getting back to basics. host: are you talking about high skilled immigrants? guest: anyone who wants to come here and work hard. caller: i have a question. where did you get your research -- who did you speak to chris marker to just people of the government? and now like to make a comment so do not cut me off. mr. george soros has

organizations, tend to 15 different names. every time that they are on, they do not say, well, we are funded by george soros. a multi billionaire in brazil right now investing in oil. host: betty, what are you referring to? caller: he supported obama. he funded obama for his election. host: a little bit off track. we will take the first part of it. who are your sources? guest: that is an interesting question for weast talk to some government officials, members of congress, who were leaving congress and could speak freely. guest: all of the republicans. guest: in one chapter in particular, we talk to employers

and ask them, what are you looking for in an employee? we talked to a white-collar law firm. we talked to an indian outsourcing firm, a call center. we talk to dupont, and to the largest green collar firm, the u.s. army. we talked to general martin dempsey, who is head of education for the u.s. army, and now is the head of the army and the chief military officer of united states. very interesting, because they all basically said the same thing. we're looking for people with critical skills and initiative and a good educational background. and when we find such people, we will give them an interview. we will not necessarily hired them. first, they were all looking for the same kind of thing, white- collar, blue-collar, a green collar, you have to have advanced skills. and those skills show how difficult it is going to be to

get and keep good jobs and how important it is to upgrade our system of education in order to train americans and prepare them for the jobs that we need. in answer to your question, we went out and talked to people who are doing the work of america every day. " we found was surprising and i think that people will find it interesting. guest: and just to the caller's question, this is a non-partisan vote. we do not have a candidate. we have an agenda for america. we are not funded by george soros or anybody else. we're quite self-initiated. host: jim hines as this tweet. guest: it is certainly part of it. when the cold war ended, we unleased 1 billion people just like us. our dominance would naturally not be what it was.

others were going to catch up. what we want to prevent is an absolute decline. we recognize that india will rise and china will rise. they are customers and collaborators and competitors. but we want to make sure we do not have an absolute decline at the same time. guest: if i could just add, to summon our view of this, change is inevitable. decline is not inevitable. we do not have to decline and we will not decline if we adapt successfully to the changes going on around us. and that -- we wrote this book to say what changes we need to make to make us successful adaptation. host: thomas friedman we are talking wet and michael mandelbaum, co-authors of several successful books, including this one, "that used to be us." let's talk to dorothy, a

democrat in baltimore, maryland. caller: this is great. this is wonderful what you're talking about. i do not know what is wrong with people now. some people want to go back to a horse and buggies, typewriters. you're right -- we need technology. i do not see how this is partisan. this is the future of our children and grandchildren. and obama has strive to priestess' the people. and they call them partisan. host: both of you talk about education in this book. you use the advance -- the example of singapore. what is singapore doing right in education? guest: it is waking up every morning and asking one simple question, what world we living in?

we are a little question. how we take advantage of those trends? no natural resources. the import sand, ok? they have to import their sand. and yet they have a better standard of living. a singapore economists said something that struck us. we feel every change increase in temperatures and we adjust. you live in a brick house with central heating. you're not feeling anything right now. they are so alive to what is going on with the i.t. revolution. and they take education very seriously. on any given day in singapore, trust me, they are not talking about vaccines for whatever. on any given day, the entire singapore government can be thinking about how we better teach fractions to third

graders. i exaggerate. but that is what they are thinking about every day. they start their day by thinking how do i take this crowbar and stick it into the wheel of the other party and other to bollocks them up for that next cycle on c-span or cnn and. that is how we start our day. it means you can never get optimal solutions. you only have suboptimal solutions. how long do we remain the greatest country when all we can do is produce about to pull out comes -- suboptimal outcomes? host: a headline about the protests taking place in spain, israel, india, and it quotes by 27-year-old woman saying our generation feels that voting is worthless. guest: voting is not worthless if you have the right candidate

for whom to vote. we have a chapter called "shock therapy," this says that in order to get the political system on stock, we need a shot from the outside. we put forward an independent candidate with a platform of responding seriously to the challenges that we face. but another point worth making -- we're not going to get out of this fix with one policy or congress or president or one presidential term. this is a long-term challenge. we have to understand our circumstances. we have to ask ourselves the question that tom post -- what world are we living in? we would be a lot better off at the people in that building would ask themselves that question every day. but ultimately we each use them and therefore we have to ask ourselves that question. host: margaret from connecticut. caller: all like to ask about the policy of outsourcing.

i saw on cnbc a documentary on the production of the boeing streamliner -- dreamliner. a senior that in 2001, engineer warned against outsourcing up to 70% of this project. he warned that things would not go well. it seemed that virtually everything happened as he predicted. they have several boeing upper management on the documentary. there were so many problems, they admitted damage to their reputation, they needed to build a plant costing $1 billion just to solve the problems that came along, and like a said, a lot of parts to not work out coming from some entities -- different sources around the world. there were three years behind in the production. and japanese customers weren't happy about that.

they got up to a 50% discount. they all seemed to say at this policy of outsourcing to not work. it seems it could produce good american jobs in manufacturing. if a company like boeing had a problem with outsourcing, what you think the future policy of outsourcing for corporations should be? guest: an important point and a good question. in the last decade, a lot of companies have experimented with outsourcing. some have found that it worked for them and they continue to do it. you're at all ipod is assembled in china and i do not think that that would change. other companies have discovered it has not worked as well as they wanted. they are brought those jobs back. -- they have brought those jobs back. it will not be one size fits all. but the most important question we should focus on, and i am

glad that you ask it, is another big shift in the globalization, the term made in america or germany or china is really on its way out. the new term in the business world is made in the world. made in the world. the head of the trade organization uses that. designing and here, manufacturing and in hong kong, that is over with. it is designed ever wear, made everywhere, sold everywhere. even at outsourcing is no longer -- we send it out and it comes back and, we have leapfrogged that now. it is not outsourcing. it is made everywhere, designed everywhere, sold everywhere. host: a republican from texas. caller: thank you for c-span. i am tired of being treated like

a blob of goop, only good as a monthly payment. my question is, is there enough to go around for everybody? can we work together as individuals and looking out for the success of each other? it is a waste of time to listen to some of the comments that i hear from the young people today. they are being distorted in the way that they can work together with each other. host: michael mandelbaum. guest: we need a minimal level of cooperation to do what is necessary for our prosperity. we have to arrive at a formula for deficit reduction. otherwise, that deficit will be there for life. but everyone has to sacrifice, and neither of the political parties has the proper formula.

there has to be reduction in spending including some modifications to our entitlement programs, sells a security and medicare. and anyone who says that you can never touch these programs is not being serious. but at the same time, we have to find more revenue, whether by modestly increasing marginal taxation rates, or as we believe, having wholesale tax reform and eliminate some loopholes and especially an energy tax which would the world of good. but we have to have more revenue, and anyone who says we can never raise taxes is not being serious. and in addition, and we make this especially in "that used to be us," we have to spend more money on our historical formula. we have to invest in research and development and much more in infrastructure. we need cooperation, we need compromise on this issue and

other issues. and if we do not get it, we will continue our decline. host: john is in massachusetts, an independent caller. caller: no one is blaming our politicians for anything. if you talk about that complicity of the politicians, who in this country has all these policies benefit? the rich and the corporation. the blue-collar worker and everyone else gets poorer and poorer. guest: a very poignant question and a very serious question, one we deal with in the book. i wish we had a simple answer. i wish we had a pleasant answer. one chapter talks about this

world, when you have access to all of the robots and software, and not just cheap labor, but cheap genius, fall whole global curve has risen. what is average before will not return average wages them. i now have a robot camera instead of a regular cameramen. as the caller indicated, it is putting huge stress on everybody. you might think, you are in new york times columnist. let me tell you about my life. i inherited james reston's office at the "new york times," agreed journalists. people used to come to the office back in the 1960's and said, i wonder what my seven competitors will right. and he probably knew all seven.

i did the same thing. i come to the office and ask, i wonder what my 70 million competitors are going to write today. how wonder what the people on twitter are going to write. if i write about india, i come in on sunday morning, you could have in front of you the " hindustan times," and we have but tweaked here -- we all have of our game. i wish there was an easy answer. polls are gone. in this world, there are many more opportunities and for people or entrepreneur, i can start a multinational almost overnight with almost no capital. if i have a great idea, i can go to taiwan and get a cheap manufacture, cut amazon and get

distribution, and get my accountant. those are all commodities. if i have an idea, i can do that. unfortunately the down side is that we all are going to have to be a little more entrepreneurial. michael and i are fuddy-duddies. we are retiring baby boomers. we had to find a job when we graduated from college. today they will have to invent a job. host: most of what you have written about in the past as foreign policy. had you come together and decide to write this book? how was it different from what you have done in the past? guest: we've been friends for 20 years and we talked frequently about foreign policy. but over the last couple of years, we discover that no matter the subject that our conversation began, it always came back to the condition of the united states. we concluded that the condition of the united states and the

need for american renewal is the most important foreign-policy issue for the united states and the most international issue in the world. the world depends heavily on the united states. we are the 10th pole that holds up the tent of the international system. that kind of role that the united states plays in the world, we both believe, is unprecedentedly constructed. it requires a vibrant united states in order to sustain that role. if we do not solve our problems and meet our challenges, we will not have the resources or the political will to continue our global role, which means so much for global stability and prosperity. when people say, why did you not write another book about our policy, our answer is that this book is about farm policy. host: thomas friedman, how does this differ from your past books?

guest: i have never written another book with another person and i found it was quite fun. two heads are better than one. they're really help contribute to the book. we wrote it for the reasons that michael said, we discovered that america, its vigor and vitality, are really at the biggest questions of the world today. if we do not get this right, greta, your kids will not just grow up in a different america. they will grow and a different world. we have -- we are at an important juncture right now. host: from your book. how you quantify 50%?

guest: let's use a simple one that people are familiar with. the old debt and deficit fight. i'm not even sure that we reached 50% in the conclusion of that. we know what we need to do. we need some short-term stimulus and invest in infrastructure. we could easily dip into another recession. we need the short-term stimulus. the second thing that we need is long-term spending cuts. we have made promises to the next generation we cannot keep. and if you'd do just the stimulus and not a long-term fiscal work to get our budget in balance, are you going -- i tell you what i will do with my stimulus. i will put it into gold. i will go into mattress' warehouse and buy a new mattress. i have no confidence to spend

my stimulus except on cereal and milk. we need to do both together. in the long run, we also need to invest in those pillars of our success. we know that. but that, and amy dog's breakfast that came out of that budget debate. does anyone think -- they say in the middle east that that camera was up -- a camel was a horse designed by committee. it is not going to solve our problems. host: michael mandelbaum, a member of the tea party rights in the "usa today" editorial pages that we will not back down. we were sent to washington to change the status quo. and that every federal dollar is worth fighting for. guest: we certainly need deficit reduction and spending cuts. to the extent that the tea party has put that on the national

agenda, that is a good thing. the that's not the only thing we need to do. we won't be able to have a vigorous, vibe rant market economy which we need for prosperity without a safety net. it will be too risky and dangerous and people will simply refuse to sustain that system, so we've got to have revenue increases and what is necessary for our future prosperity as well. i don't know representative walsh, and i haven't had a chance to read what he said, but i will respond in this way, he and all of his colleagues were sent to washington to solve the nation's problems, and their responsibility so identify their problems and

find solutions to them, and so far each of the two parties has only found at best a partial solution, and that won't get it done. >> we're talking to thomas and michael mandelbaum. we're discussing their book "that used to be us." caller from cleveland, ohio? caller: yes. i live in cleveland. i'm a 70-year-old lifetime democrat. you guys can tout your book all you want, but you missed the point in your talks this morning. the main problem is exports. we export millions and tons of raw materials, which takes minimal amount of people to get into the exports, and we import the finished products that are made by these raw materials

that takes thousands and thousands and thousands of people. host: all right. so we're sending all the jobs overseas. guest: until last year we were the world's largest manufacturing power in terms of total value of manufacturing. just in this last 12 months china leapt ahead of us. but here's the problem. china exports the same dollar value we do roughly with 110 million people and we do it with about 11 million people. so we're high-end manufacturing, but the -- we're super productive, but it's the opposite of what the caller is saying. we're designing the products here, the ipods and then we're having it assembled and manufactured abroad and there

the caller has a point. how do we not just design things here but manufacture them at scale here? and that's something that will require a real strategy to do but we're not here exporting raw materials and importing the finished product. we're importing tennis shoes and t-shirt. they are importing technology and that. host: good morning in san diego. guest: isn't it early in san diego? what are you doing up so early, honey? caller: my nights and days are turned around. anyway, we're the people on the street here, and i respect your education and what you're talking about tremendously. the problems we see here in our community, which you know, you hear about it across the country.

we see people here who are unemployed, underemployed, but there's a cash flow here that's incredible. you go to the local market and you see individuals with lots of cash and they are doing a lot of the oh, housekeeping and what have you. and actually, i have a neighbor who is renting a house out, and there's like three families living in it now. and we were offered gee, we do carpentry and this and that, and they are a wonderful family that moved in, but what we see here is we see our education in the state of california has plummeted to the bottom. we see people are pushed out of schools because of their age. they have aged out of the system. got to move them on. more children coming in. we see kids coming here from over the border, and i'm not knocking them, because they really attempt to get the

education they need so that they can do for their families what the rest of us wanted to do years and years ago. host: so gloria, do you see an immigration problem? caller: i see that but also a huge welfare system that has gotten so out of control. we just had our tax dollars driven into our little sidewalks here so people are not tumbling out into the street. host: either one of you have a comment on that? guest: i'm a native californian and i grew up when california was the golden state and the things that have happened to california over the last four decades are tragic, and one of the points we made in "that used to be us," california could be the future, the future of the whole country if we don't seriously start addressing our challenges. we have a jobs problem in our country. it's a short-term problem.

we need hope to get people back to work but even as we have over 9% unemployed, we have jobs customers can't fill because they can't find people with the qualificationings for highly skilled jobs. the burden of that problem rests on our system of education. that's why a huge part of "that used to be us" is about our system of education. because that is the key to sour economic future. one of the points we make is that we've got to trays people who are at the lowest end of the educational achievement spectrum at least to the average. because these days, if you don't have a good high school education, plus something else, vocationalnal or military or some college, you're not going to be able to make a living. that's the result of the global realization. the people the caller sees on

the streets in san diego and that we see on the streets all over the country are people who don't have the education that's necessary really to survive in the 21st century, and that is a huge challenge for us. guest: unemployment for people with a college degree is significantly lower if -- education is still your best ticket out. host: fript michigan, good morning. caller: good morning. i'm taking that book from a different perspective, "that used to be us." and we used to be our unto the lord, god, jesus, but now we've gotten away from that. you're talking about china. china is on top for a little bit. but we'll get back to christ and god. we're not going to -- because god made -- and he tears them down. so the point of "that used to be us," we used to be a godly nation. we've gotten away from that.

so bank on that. guest: well, we don't really say too much about religious faith. in fact we don't say anything about it in this book, and religious faith is an important thing and important in the united states. but i would mention one old saying in which most americans are familiar, which i think is relevant to the theme of this book and relevant to american renewel and that is god helps those who help themselves. host: the united nations meets again tie discuss the bid by palace for statehood. we're going to have live coverage of that starting at :30 a.m. eastern time in about 20 minutes. tom, i wanted to get your thoughts on what palestinians are trying to do here? guest: they want to get recognized as an independent state and use that as a over

there pressure into negotiations. i don't think it's going to work. i understand their frustration, why they are doing it. if there's one thing i have learned, it's that in any of these norningses, the person who wins and gets what they want is the person who has the israeli public on their side. because ultimately it's about israeli having to give something back. when anwar sadat got his republic on his side, he got the west bank in principle back. right now we have to look and ask the question why is -- it has to do in part with the fact that israel did withdraw from gaza and got rockets in return and the is rail annual prime minister made sweeping offer to the palestinian leader mahmoud

abbas. and really didn't get a vigorous response. it has to do a little bit with netanyahu with his draw backs, in my opinion considerable, they gave them things and the israelis only showed up at the last minute. the israeli sentiment is inin an effort. you can say netanyahu doesn't want to negotiate, but unless you can say they are really for a secure peace, i don't see anything happening. and there's a lot more israel could do, as i wrote this morning. so i think israel should do another settlements freeze. test the palace. stpwhinet what's the span of a 10-month freeze if you can bring about a peace agreement?

i think nothing is going to come out of this that's good, and that's sad. host: let's go dc ..michigan. caller: good morning. the reason i was calling is i think that they need to hold these politicians accountable. let it be democrat or republicans to see what people is actually taking money from these lobbyists and selling america out. and i think that they really need to put politicians' feet to the fair to. host: let's stick to the point. michael mandelbaum. we >> our viewers to talk about how to fix washington. if you think it's broken, how du you fix it?ou front page of "usa today" asks that question. one caller says you've got to get the money out of it.

lobbies have too much influence. >> guest: lobbyists are a problem. these trends have gone much further than ever before, but we have to be real iic, we're never going to exclude politics,cs. especially from a democracy. pr the four major challenges we outline in "that used to be us." such a candidate would not be elected. but if that candidate did appreciably well as well has the they did in previous years, that would send a signal in the two major parties and create incentives for both parties to move to the center and it would mean that whichever candidate was elected, would have a powerful incentive to adopt some of the program of the

independent candidate nord get that candidate's voters in the next presidential election. we think in short that the political system needs some shock therapy and the proposal that we make is perhaps not the only proposal, and but we think one well worth considering is an independent candidate for president next year. >> you give me an insight sfwoof c-span program run every night. and looking at those who ran and lost but changed political history nonetheless. ross pro-, you referred to his bid in 196. george mcgovern and going back to henry clay. so fur interested in that. tune in 8:00 p.m. friday night and go to journal@c-span.org you can find a the contender's series. and next republican in kyi. caller: goofpblgt i had 10

quick questions for your guests if they don't mind. i eye agree with the potential for entrepreneurship everywhere. but the first question was when they spoke about little to no availability of capital with entrepreneurship. what's the best way to go about that? and the second question is what are the three most importantly rules or guidelines or steps to entrepreneurship in their snn thank you. guest: well, it's a really good question. the point i was making to the caller, and we actually profile companies in the book who demonstrate this, that if you leverage global zphation i.t. now, you can actually access talent and markets and suppliers more cheaply and easier than ever, but it's not free. people that start up things have having trouble to get access to capital to grow.

that's something we need really be thinking about. i would be for a tax cut on capital gains saying if you fund a successful startup, you pay no capital gains. at the same time we have to remember we cannot bail our way out of this crisis. we have to invent our way out of this crisis ultimately. we have to invent zwhroobs make people more healthy, educated and comfortable and more scumplete host: wright today, every job requires an entrepreneur. what we can do and absolutely must do is knock down all hurdles that create disincentive for business. >> yes. guest: that's true, and we say in our book, "that used to be us" we need more regulation. we surely needed more regulation of that in our book. it cost us $12 trillion of --

in wealth but we have a huge thicket of regulations that make it hard for people who want to start new businesses and we've got prune that away, because new businesses are where the jobs are going to come from. so we have to encourage entrepreneurship in every way we can. host: >> in a few moments, a hearing on wartime contracting. and a little less than two hours, a briefing on new food safety inspections. and then we'll re-air the washington journal segment with authors thomas friedman and michael mandelbaum on their new book on the economy. on washington journal tomorrow morning, we'll talk about politics and the economy with jonathan cowan, president of third way. cliff guffey, president of the

american postal workers' union, discusses the future of the postal service. and we'll look at the debate over environmental regulations with national journal correspondent coral davenport. washington journal is live on c-span every day at 7 a.m. eastern. >> on october 3rd the supreme court will start hearing oral arguments on whether states can be sued for failing to pay the required rate set by the medicaid act. this saturday hear a similar case arguing that states can't be sued by private parties to enforce medicaid compliance supporting virginia governor wilder, future chief justice john roberts. >> it may be helpful at this point to return to the language of the statute. that language specifies that a state medicaid plan must provide for the payment of rates which the state finds and makes assurances satisfactory to the secretary. >> listen to c-span radio and washington, d.c. at 90.1 fm,

nationwide on xm satellite channel 119 and online at c-span radio.org. now get regular updates of what's on the c-span networks with c-span now on twitter. quick program information including which events are live and links to help you watch. it's easy to sign up, just go to twitter.com/c-span now. and then hit follow. the latest information on what to watch on c-span, c-span2 and c-span3 now on twitter. now, a senate homeland security committee hearing on waste and fraud in wartime contracting. witnesses include members of the commission looking into contracting in iraq and afghanistan. the commission's final report in august found that the $60 billion in contracting waste and fraud. this part of the hearing is a little less than two hours.

>> good afternoon. the hearing will come to order. let me start by welcoming the members of the commission on wartime contracting in iraq and afghanistan and, of course, our colleague, senator mccaskill and senator webb. i'm going to put my whole statement in the record and just draw briefly from it in deference to senator collins who has an appropriations meeting she has to go to and to our two colleagues. the commission on wartime contracting was created by legislation sponsored by senator claire mccaskill and senator jim webb to investigate our reconstruction efforts in iraq and afghanistan. last month the commission issued its final, and i would say to me, very disturbing report. because it says that at least 31 billion and maybe as much as $60 billion have been squandered in waste, fraud and abuse in iraq

and afghanistan over the past ten years. and those are, obviously, 31 to 60 billion taxpayer dollars. i supported the wars in iraq and afghanistan, i still do. i support the aggressive rebuilding efforts in both these nations, and i still do. but, but -- and, of course, i believe that the ultimate waste of money and of the service and sacrifice made by our men and women in uniform would be to walk away and let iraq and afghanistan fall back into the hands of dictators and/or islamic fanatics. but that's not only no excuse, but even more reason why i'm so upset by the findings of the commission which are, basically, how sloppy and irresponsible so much of the spending was. some of the examples that particularly drove up by blood pressure, and i didn't have

medication nearby so it was particularly harmful, u.s. tax dollars paid $30 million to taxpayers for $300 million to build a power plant in kabul, afghanistan, that would supply the city with electricity around the clock. the whole idea build it and they will come, but the afghan government couldn't afford the fuel to run the pack and instead contracted to buy electricity from uzbekistan at a fraction of the price. and the power plant built with $300 million american dollars is now just an expensive back-up generator. another one that i thought was particularly outrageous was that $40 million of our money went to build a prison in diyala province in iraq that the iraqis said they didn't want and ultimately refused to take possession of. project was not only never completed, it was abandoned with $1.2 million worth of materials

left at the site. so the commission report tells us. much of the waste identified by the commission stems from a lack of competition which, of course, should be the cornerstone of government contracting. i will say that, finally, that perhaps my greatest frustration reading the commission's report is a general one which is that the underlying problems it identifies are not problems of first instance for us. we, in various ways we have seen these kinds of problems for years. and, in fact, at different time we've enacted as congress has enacted reforms legislatively that were supposed to address these problems. and yet here comes this commission report showing that billions of dollars, nonetheless, were wasted. so my response to the report is

to thank the commissioners who we'll hear from next for their extraordinary work here, and also to see if we can't together find a way not to -- not because we're too experienced, unfortunately, believe we can stop all waste and fraud forever, but we could sure do a damn better job than we're doing now, and i hope together we can find some ways based on this report to help make that happen. senator collins. >> thank you, mr. chairman. let me join the chairman in thanking the commission members for their report and the two authors of the legislation that established the commission. along with senator mccaskill and senator webb, i testified at the very first hearing of the commission on wartime contracting. at that time i noted that there

are four categories of problems that lead to contingency contracting failures. first, unclear and evolving contract requirements. second, poor management including an inadequate number of skilled contracting personnel. third, an unstable security environment. and, fourth, a lack of commitment by the host government officials to the reconstruction of their own country. unfortunately, the commission has documented all of these problems and more in our nation's wartime contracting efforts. it is especially troubling that our operations in iraq and afghanistan have been plagued by such a high level of waste, fraud and abuse. some of the examples are almost

too astonishing to believe. for example, a july 2011 report by the special inspector general found that a dod contractor was charging $900 for a control switch that was worth a mere $7. in some cases the ig found contractors overbilling the government with markups ranging from 2300% to more than 12,000%. now, i think we all understand that when you're contracting in this environment, there is going to be some kind of premium, but this was absurd. one solution to this problem is the establishment of a professional acquisition cadre. that's why i authored an amendment to the fiscal year

2009 defense be authorization -- defense authorization bill to create a contingency contracting corps. this year i've introduced two bills designed to further strengthen the government's acquisition work force, the federal acquisition improvement act and the federal acquisition work force improvement act. i want to emphasize a point that was raised by one of the commissioners at a recent briefing about the report. congress should either enhance and improve the acquisition work force to handle these types of massive contingency operations, or we should rethink whether or not we want to run these massive operations. we simply can't justify doing major contracting without the necessary supporting work force as the findings of the commission's report highlight today. this is the point that i think

often gets lost in the discussion of contingency contracting. the billions spent for development in big infrastructure contracting were invested in order to support counterinsurgency efforts by winning the hearts and minds of the population and by establishing security. but with so many disappointing results, congress should ask are we fulfilling our obligations to the american taxpayers who are footing the bill for these projects? and should we really be surprised at the problems arising from attempts to run major development programs and embark on large infrastructure construction while we're in the middle of a war zone? the past ten years have taught us that we need to spend more time focusing on these broader questions before we get into

another contingency operation if we hope to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. as i stated at the very first commission hearing, how well we execute wartime contracting helps to determine how well we build the peace. in my view, we can and must do better. again, i want to thank the chairman for convening this hearing and apologize to our witnesses that i do have to leave shortly for an appropriations markup. thank you. >> thanks, senator collins. we understand very well. thanks to senator mccaskill and senator webb for being here. it actually was the problems with wartime contracting which were part of the reason, um, why we created a special subcommittee of this committee to oversee federal contracting and why i asked senator mccaskill to be the chair of it, and she's done a great job. senator collins was ranking on

it for a while followed by senator brown and senator portman, but you've remained right there at the helm with great effect for the committee and for the country, so i thank you for that, and i look forward to your testimony and then senator webb's. >> thank you very much, mr. chairman. i want to thank both you and the ranking member for all the work you have done to improve contracting practices. you've been at this for much longer than either senator webb or i have been in the senate, and i want to acknowledge your work particularly senator collins deserves a great deal of recognition for all of her work in terms of acquisition personnel. it is so easy for us just to gloss over as we try to make the federal government smaller. it's so easy for us just to say, well, everything needs to be smaller. well, no, it doesn't. there's a few areas that can't be smaller. senator coburn and i talked this morning about the importance of fully funding gao, that our eyes and ears in terms of waste and fraud throughout government, and clearly the acquisition personnel, the at to teen of

that work force has been a major contributor to the problems we're seeing. more than four years ago, senator webb and i began to advocate for the creation of the wartime contracting commission. at the time i was inspired by missouri's own harry truman who as a senator headed a committee that investigated and uncovered millions of dollars of war profiteering, fraud and wasteful spending in world war ii. senator webb and i greed we needed a new investigatory body to honor the truman committee, to protect our tax dollars and bring better accountability to the way we do business while at war. you know, we use the cliche saying, well, they would spin in their grave, or they would turn over in their grave. harry truman, um, has been spinning for some time now, and he would be astounded at what this commission found. it is shocking that the commission has, in fact, validated, um, in many ways our worst concerns about the way contracting was ongoing in

contingency. it is disgusting to think that nearly a third of the billions and billions we spent on contracting was wasted or used for fraud. frankly, i really believe that estimate is very, very conservative. and it doesn't even begin to include the money wasted on projects that can't be sustained. very similar to the kabul power plant that you referenced in your opening statement, mr. chairman. i would like to take the opportunity to adjust one more anecdote that confirms how serious the problem is. shortly after i came to the senate, i took a trip to kuwait and iraq on contracting oversight. i asked not to see what most senators went when they went to theater, but i just wanted to focus on the way we were overseeing contracts. i particularly wanted to hone in on the logistical support contract that had been the subject already of a lot of negative headlines about the way we'd done business. it was a massive cost-plus

contract, noncompete, that was supposed to provide all of the logistical support for our men and women that were serving us in iraq. i sat in a small room in a building on the outskirts of baghdad while many, many people in the room had lots of rank and were military, one woman who was a civilian clearly was the knowledgeable one about the log cap contract. it was an awkward set of questions and answers because, clearly, i was asking very tough questions. i could not for the life of me understand how this thing had gotten so out of control. the moment i will never forget as long as i live is when i began to feel, you know, when you're pounding a witness on the stand as a prosecutor, you know when you need to let up. sometimes you do, sometimes i didn't. i kind of knew i needed to give this woman a wreak because, you know, all these guy guys were sitting in the room, and men and women were sitting in the room, and she was really being called on the carpet, so she had a bar graph and the requisite

powerpoint that is required in every military briefing. there was a bar graph that showed the expenditures on the logcap contract, and it had started out in a number, i can't recall now, but in the billions and billions and billions. and the next year it had dropped two or three billion. and be then it had kind of leveled out. so i'm trying to throw her a bone. and i said, would you mind telling me, how did you get the costs town the second year? as god is my witness, she looked at me and said, i have no idea, it was a fluke. at that moment i knew that this was something that had gone terribly bad in terms of contracting oversight. the commission's report and recommendations go to the heart of how we got into this mess, how we got to a place in iraq where we were spending billions without a clue as to where it was going. i applaud the commission for their thorough, comprehensive and bipartisan review and for the tremendous contribution that they've made to our understanding of these problems. we must know why we are

contracting, who we contract with and what we are

>> we can't build things for countries that they cannot afford to operate. we can't build things for countries in a security environment that they are just going to be blown up after we have used countless, countless billions of dollars of america's hard earned taxpayer money. because of the commission's recommendations, we'll require fundamental changes to the way government operates. i'm planning to introduce comprehensive legislation this year. i'm working closely with senator webb on this legislation and look forward to working with the members of this committee as well. as one of the generals said to me when i was in iraq, you know, so much of what we're seeing on this trip in terms of mistakes

were also made in bosnia. and by the way, we did a lessons learned after boss be any ya -- bosnia, except there's one problem: we didn't learn 'em. they forgot to learn the lesson. if commission's report becomes one more report sitting on someone's book shelf, then we have failed as a congress, and we have failed our military and the people of this great nation. this is our chance, this is our chance to tell the american people that the government can spend their money wisely, hold people accountable who are entrusted with contracting in contingencies and make sure that the men and women in the military and civilian agencies get what they need to do their job. we cannot waste millions through fraud, abuse and mismanagement. we cannot outsource gaps and war planning to be done on the cheap. we cannot repeat these mistakes again. thank you so much for your opportunity, the opportunity to testify today, i do want to commend my colleague, senator webb. um, this would not have gotten through the senate, frankly,

without the cooperation of the chairman and the ranking member and the hard work of senator webb. i think we've got something really good here if we don't take our eye off the ball. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, senator mccaskill, for that excellent testimony. i was struck by your reference to president truman wherever he may be today. i know you're keeping that alive. it struck me that if we could go and interview him about this commission report and then release the transcript, we would have to delete several exhetives. >> in fact, i'm really -- expletives. >> in fact, i need to say for harry truman, this makes me god damn mad. [laughter] >> i knew you wouldn't let me down. senator webb, thanks for being here. >> thank you, mr. chairman. and be senator collins and a special thanks to senator collins for her continuous involvement with this commission as it went through the hearings process and other members of the committee. purpose of this hearing is to

allow the commission members to testify before you and to allow you to have an interchange with them, so i would like to, first, say i have a longer written statement which i would ask be entered into the record and would like to summarize some of my comments from that at this time. >> without objection. >> i'd like to express my thanks to the commission members, particularly the co-chairs, michael tebow and former congressman chris shays, a number of their fellow commissioners and professional staff are here today. they did an an exemplary job. we talk in the senate and in the congress about presidential commissions and sometimes with a great deal of kept sit. but i think this -- skepticism, but i think this commission demonstrates the way these commissions should work. it was bipartisan, it was independent, it was high energy, it was composed of highly qualified people who were brought in for a specific period of time, and it's going to be

sunsetted in a very short period of time having brought these observations and recommendations before the senate. when i came to the senate in '07, one of the real eye openers for me as a member of the senate formulations committee was a hearing in which the department of state was testifying about $32 billion in funding for programs for iraq reconstruction projects, and i asked the government witness to provide the committee a list of the contracts that had been let, the amount of the contracts, a description of what the contracts were supposed to do and what the results were. and they couldn't provide us that list. we went back and forth for months. and they were not able to provide us that kind of information. as someone who spent five years in the pent gone and -- pentagon -- one as a marine and four as an executive, it was very clear to me that something was fundamentally wrong with the

way that contracts for infrastructure reconstruction, wartime support and security programs were being put into place in iraq and afghanistan after 9/11. most of the companies who undertook these contracts were good companies, and i think this commission was very careful to mention that in its report. and they were doing a great deal of good work. but there were also a series of major structural, procedural and leadership deficiencies in terms of the way that wartime contracting processes were supposed to be undertaken. you could look at the dynamics of what was going on particularly in iraq at that time and know that it wasn't out of the question to say that even then billions of dollars were being exposed to waste, fraud and abuse for a wide variety of reasons. and after many discussions with senator mccaskill who has great technical experience brought with her, great technical experience with her to

the senate and who had expressed similar concerns as you just heard, we introduced legislation that led to the establishment of this commission. we had to give on some areas that we believed in strongly such as retroactive accountability of some of the abuses that had taken place. we didn't get that provision. we weren't able to empower the commission with subpoena authority, but following close consultation with both members of the parties, we were successful in having this legislation enacted that put the commission into place, and we achieved a consensus that the commission would be independent, bipartisan, energetic, and it would come to us with the types of recommendations that might prevent the recurrence of these systemic problems and abuses in the future. and i commend the people on this commission for the intensive effort that they have put into satisfying this statutory mandate. they went to extraordinary lengths here in the united states as well as in iraq and

afghanistan. twenty-five public hearing, full transparency. today's final report was preceded by two interim reports and five special reports, and i wanted to come here and express my appreciation personally for all the work that they have put into this effort. thank you very much, mr. chairman. >> thank you very much, senator webb, for taking the time to be here and for your excellent remarks. we thank both of you for being here. i think we'll move on right now to the members of the commission. and so i'd call the members of the commission to the witness table at this time. [inaudible conversations] [background sounds] >> i gather that, unfortunately, michael tebow, co-chair of the commission, cannot be here. as you all know, former deputy

director of the defense contract audit agency and worked very hard on the report. i am delighted that mr. thibault's co-chair is here today, my dear friend and former colleague from connecticut in the house, chris shays, who served during his time here as a senior member of the house oversight and government reform financial services committee and on the homeland security committee and had a particular interest in this kind of matter which is to say protecting taxpayer dollars. we also have, um, with us clark err visible, robert henke, is it -- you say schinasi? schinasi. charles tiefer and dov zakheim who is no stranger to us because of his time in the department of defense. ms. schinasi, i gather you've been voted the spokesperson. >> yes, that's correct. >> thank you all for the extraordinary work you did here. and i join my colleagues, the

creators of the commission, senators mccaskill and webb, in thanking you for hard work and, really, an excellent report that gives us a road map forward. it's all yours. >> thank you. thank you, chairman lieberman, for, um, inviting us today and members of the committee to give us an opportunity to talk about the work that we have done. as you mentioned, i am katherine schinasi, a member of the commission, and i am presenting this statement on behalf of the commission's co-chairs, christopher shays and michael thibault, and my fellow commissioners, clarke kent ervin, robert henke, charles tiefer and dov zakheim and grant greene who, unfortunately, could not be with us. if i may, i'd like to summarize my statement and submit the full statement for the record as well as a copy of our final commission report. >> without objection. thank you. >> thank you. it's fitting that this committee should be the first to hold a hearing on our final report as the senate rules give you the unique authority to inquire into

the efficiency, economy and effectiveness of all agencies and departments of the government. including the organization of congress and the executive branch. the solutions to contingency contracting problems that we have reported require a whole of government approach. we also believe the need for change is urgent, and let me give you several reasons why. first, reforms can still save money in iraq and afghanistan. avoid unintended consequences and improve the outcomes there. because, ironically, even as the u.s. draws down its troops in iraq, the state department is poised to hire thousands of new contractors there. second, new contingencies in whatever form they take will occur. one has only to remember how quickly u.s. involvement in libya arose to recognize that the odds are in favor of some type of future operations. and the agencies have acknowledged that they cannot mount and sustain large

operations without contract support. third, although the u.s. government has officially considered contractors to be part of the total force available for contingency operations for at least the last 20 years, the federal government went into afghanistan and iraq unprepared to manage and oversee the thousands of contracts and contractors that they relied upon there. even though some improvements have been made by the agencies involved, a decade later the government remains unable to answer that it is getting value for the contract dollars spent. and unable to provide fully effective interagency planning, coordination, management and oversight of contingency contracting. the wasted dollars are significant. as you pointed out in your opening, the commission estimates that at least $31 billion and possibly as much as $60 billion of the $206 billion to be spent on contracts and grants in iraq and afghanistan

has been wasted. and many billions more will likely turn into waste if the host governments cannot or will not sustain u.s.-funded programs and projects. we believe that failure to enact powerful reforms now will simply insure that new cycles of waste and fraud will accompany the response to the next contingency. and we also believe that these reforms could have wider benefits. in our work on iraq and afghanistan, we found problems similar to those in peacetime contracting environments and in other contingencies. this committee in particular will recognize many of the problems we discovered are similar to those that were contained in your 2006 report on hurricane katrina. and some of those are poor planning, limited or no competition, weak management of performance and insufficient recovery of overbillings and unsupported costs. the wartime environment brings additional complications which

we address in our recommendations. for example, limited legal jurisdiction over foreign contractors and limited deploy ability of federal civilian oversight personnel into theater. if i had to give you just one bottom line, it would be that the wasteful contract outcomes in iraq and afghanistan demonstrate that our government has not recognized that its dependence on private contractors, especially for services, is important enough to effectively plan for and execute those acquisitions. the commission has concluded that the problems, however, are multifaceted and need to be attacked on many levels. first is holding contractors accountable. federal statutes and regulations provide ways to protect the government against bad contractors and impose accountability on them including suspension and debarment from obtaining future contracts as well as civil and criminal penalties for misconduct. unfortunately, we found that

these mechanisms are often not vigorously applied and enforced. and incentives to con train waste are -- constrain waste are often not in place. the commission's research has shown, for example, that inadequate business systems create extra work and deny the government of, um, insight and knowledge on costs that we are being charged for the work done. fraud may go unprosecuted, recommendations for suspension and debarment go unimplemented, and past performance reviews often go unrecorded. one important check on contractor overcharges is the defense contract audit agency. currently dcaa has a backlog of nearly $600 billion which by some accounts could reach $1 trillion by 2015 is not addressed -- if not addressed. the dcaa has reported a five to one return on investment, that is five for every dollar

invested in dcaa, the government recovers $5, and we would say that's a pretty important investment to keep in mind when we're thinking about how the fix these problems. the government hases also been remisin promoting competition. although exigent circumstances may require sole-source or limited competition rewards in early phases of a conflict, a decade into an operation the multibillion dollar task orders that are being written with no breakout or recompetition of the base contract just defies belief. our report contains relations to bolster competition, improve recording and use of past performance data, expand u.s. civil jurisdiction as part of contract award, require official approval of significant subcontracting overseas. the second level we would attack is holding the government itself more accountable. both for the decision to use a contractor in the first place and for the subsequent results. even when the government has

sufficient policies in place, effective practices which range from planning and requirements definition to providing adequate oversight of performance and coordinating interagency activities are lacking. defense, state and usaid, the three principle agencies involve inside iraq and afghanistan operations have much work remaining to be done. we have recommended developing, for example, deployable acquisition cadres. elevating the position of agencies for acquisition officers and creating a new contingency contracting direct rate at the pentagon's joint staff where the broad range of contracting activities is currently treated as a subset of 40 gistics. contracting -- logistics. contracting has gotten to be much more. considering this committee's broad and interdepartmental mandate, i would call special attention to two recommendations embodying a whole-of-government

approach that will improve efficiency and effectiveness in contracting. the first is to establish a dual-headed position for an official to serve both in the office of management and budget and participate in national security council deliberations. such a position would promote better visibility, coordination, budget guy dance and strategic direction for contingency contracting. currently, national security decisions are not informed by resource implications generally. and that's particularly troubling and distortive in this context because contractors are considered to be a free resource. the second is to create, the second recommendation of an interagency nature is to create a permanent inspector general with a small but deployable and expandable staff that can provide interdepartmental oversight from the outset of a contingency. the special igs have done some important work, but they have been hampered by their limited

jurisdictions and their costly start-ups. finally, our commission closes its doors in just nine days. our organization disappears, but the problems it has chronicled will not. action and in some cases appropriations will be required to implement these reforms. sustained attention will be essential to insure that compliance extends to institutionalizing reforms and changing organizational cultures. that's really the gist of it. institutionalizing these reforms and changing the cultures. that is why our final recommendation includes periodic reporting to the congress on the pace and results of the form -- reform initiatives. in closing, i believe that the commission's work has demonstrated that contracting reform is an essential, not a luxury good. whatever form it takes, there will be a next contingency, and contractors will take part. planning now and putting the necessary structures in place will greatly increase the

likelihood of having better options and making better choices. and that concludes our formal statement. my colleagues and i would be happy to take your questions. >> thanks very much for that excellent beginning. we'll do seven-minute rounds of questioning. um, i wanted to ask you whether the contracting process be, in your view, improved over the years of our involvement in afghanistan and iraq. in other words, based on some of the things that are implicit in your report, but certainly in other ig reports and our own observations you could say, i suppose, or argue that some of the early waste resulted from, um, basically, the lack of planning and the rush to do it. andal the rapidly -- and also the rapidly shifting governance structure during reconstruction. but i wonder, in your investigation did you find any

dividing lines between different stages of the wars and reconstruction? many and, obviously, i'm looking to see whether there was improvement and particularly whether we talked about lessons learned from bosnia. did we learn any lessons in afghanistan that we applied in iraq or in iraq that we applied in afghanistan went on longer? i don't have a particular choice of commission members, so i'll leave it to you all to decide who feels best able to answer each question. >> let me just jump in for this first one to thank you, mr. chairman, and the members for allowing the full commissioners to attend because each of us is more than qualified to answer any of your questions. i think the simple answer is, yes, there was a notice blg improvement. noticeable improvement. but contracting became the default option, and we just did too much, too quickly. and when you have an emergency

supplemental, it's not part of the regular budget. it ends, it's almost like a free thing to draw money on. so we just grew too fast. and then we didn't change after the first year. you've got a time where you say you can't keep doing it the way you were doing it, and we kept doing it the way we were doing it. >> and if you had to give a reason why, why did we keep doing it the way we were doing it? even though people right there must have known it wasn't really working. >> it's an easy option to just keep relying on contractors. and when you have a contractor who's performing even if they're very, very, very expensive, you just want to keep going the way you're going. >> because they're doing the job? >> they're doing their job, but at an extraordinarily high -- >> great height. >> just quickly, having 15 people maintain electricity on a base when only three are being used, and they end up having so much free time that they decide

to build themselves a clubhouse. they're working 12-hour days, and only three are working. and we did that for years. >> and nobody blew the whistle. i mean, it was pretty obvious that that was happening. let me pick up on the phrase you used because you warn about the use of contractors as the default option in iraq and afghanistan. because, i presume, the government felt it lacked the ability to perform the capability and people they had working for them to perform many of these jobs. um, use of private security contractors and use of contractors to oversee other contractors are two examples of what you referred to as the default option. and i agree. um, what are some of the other, um, responsibility categories or functional categories that in your opinion have too often been placed in the hands of

contractors, um, in the work that you do? ms. schinasi. >> i would look next at training, frankly. >> training? >> yeah. to see -- because that is a function we have almost totally outsourced to private companies. >> i would also add -- >> mr. zakheim? >> i'd add, senator, if you look at aid in particular, that is an agency that year ago did it own work, frankly. it has becomal contract management agency -- become a contract management agency, and rajiv shah admits it and is trying to change it. but over the last decade they have, essentially, farmed out everything including, sometimes, managing the contracts. >> yeah. that's right. hire contractors to watch the contractors. we talked about that this morning on a bill we did on a markup -- a markup of a bill on

homeland security, and, of course, this is not only in the war zones this happens, although the financial implications in the war zones was so high. so now i'm going to ask you because you had some hands-on experience in the department of defense, um, what can we do to stop this? maybe i should ask, first, i presume what you're saying is you think we're overusing private contracts to fulfill government functions. >> i think we're all saying that, yes, sir. >> so, um, how do we draw the line? when do we decide that something really should be done by a full-time federal employee? >> well, the standard answer is if it's inherently governmental. >> right. >> that is to say it's something that the government should be doing. well, we write in our report, and we all felt very strongly about this, is that that's not really the right measure in a war zone. and the reason is it may be that there are some tasks like, say, involving private security that

in theory a contractor could do. but in practice maybe it involves security issues, you know, contractors that might fire too quickly or feel they're being attacked or bribery or corruption. we have a photograph in our study in our report, rather, of a bill, an invote that an -- invoice that an afghan insurgent group actually handed to a subcontractor, essentially saying if you want protection, here's the number to call. so there are going to be circumstances where the theory of inherently governmental doesn't fit. and so we felt that the measure should be risk. what are we risking here? and there will be cases where it clearly is not in the interest to have government to have a private entity taking on risks. >> so what are the risks? in other words, how do you define risk in this case? >> well, you could define risk, for example, if it's a very serious combat zone and you run the risk that maybe the contractors will be attacked or,

alternatively, will attack first because they think they're being attacked. >> right. so final question because my time's running out, you've been inside. this is, seems like -- i mean, a question that a senator shouldn't be asking, but i'm interested in your answer. why, why are we using so many private contractors to fulfill governmental respondents not only -- responsibilities not only here, in the area that you covered, but we recently heard testimony about the number of people working for the department of homeland security under contract. it's as many be as the regular, just about as many as the regular employees of the department. @really stunning -- it's really stunning. >> well, one of the reasons, frankly, and we allude to some of that in our reports, training. our people just aren't -- our civilians just aren't trained. you can get a degree and go into government and never have to take another course again. well, if you want to keep up with things, you hire somebody else to do it for you because you can't do it yourself.

so that's one reason. another reason is that we cut back, it wasn't so much that we had too many contractors in some circumstances, we had nobody to manage and oversee them. and that was because in the 1990s we cut back very seriously on just those kinds of people. so it varies with the circumstances. some cases we had just people doing jobs the government should have been doing, in other cases we didn't have the government people to oversee those doing the job. >> could i just make sure that we're clear -- >> yes. >> -- literally half of the personnel in theater are contractors. and there's a tremendous imbalance with a number of civil servants there that are there. and we didn't really address that the way we might have liked to have. but you have defense contractors and civil servants down here, and we seem to have to pay the civil servants a lot of money to want to go into theater. and i just want to make sure that we're also clear that when we talk about inherently governmental, if it clearly

isn't governmental, the government shouldn't do it. but when we say it's not inherently governmental, the government still maybe should be doing it. >> gotcha. my time's up. obviously, i'm sure we'll come back and ask you if contracts are cheaper which is one of the arguments as well. senators, as is the custom of our committee to be called in order of appearance, senators mccaskill, tester, coburn, levin and carper. senator mccaskill. >> well, i don't know where to start. there's so many things i'd like to talk about with all of you. first of all, let me once again say thank you. i'm not sure that america understands the kind of expertise that i have sitting in front of me. and, um, all of you brought to this work unique backgrounds that made the combination of your efforts so powerful. and i will tell you i will not rest as long as i'm here until we get this work done. so i don't want you to think that the time you have spent and

the effort you have made -- and i will tell you i'm proud that you're shutting down in seven days because one of the arguments existence the legislation was, well, we never start one of these things -- in fact, i think dr. coburn has made this argument a few times, that we start these kinds of things, and they never end. so i think you've done great work -- >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> i get that. i get that, dr. coburn. we have not stopped asmany of them as we should, but i'm very proud of the work you have done. um, i want to talk about something that i mentioned and you mentioned in your report, but i think it's something we need to flush out for this committee, and that's contractors being summit to the jurisdiction of the -- subject to the jurisdiction of the united states of america. heartbreaking incident in iraq that i'm sure you all are aware of where the negligence of one of our contractors killed one of our soldiers. and, um, in trying to find justice for that family, the contractor avoided the jurisdiction of the united

states, and the most insulting thing about it was he then got another -- that company then got another contract. with our government. after they had used the fact that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of our country as a way to avoid justice for this man's family, we then decided we should sign up again with them. by the way, they are now accused of also doing business with iran. um, so there's also some sanctions that need to be put in place as it relates to that. but talk, one of you, please, talk about the importance of anybody who wants to do business with the united states, and what are the arguments on the other side and why has the military been so reluctant to embrace this requirement. >> may i start that? >> go for it. >> senator, as you know, one of the huge issues that we've dealt with during the course of the commission in particular is the lack of visibility with regard to subcontractors.

and this look -- lack of being subject to jurisdiction is our regulation for condition of being awarded the contract by the prime contract that contractors summit themselves by virtue of the contract to u.s. jurisdiction. quite frankly, i cannot think of a contrary argument. this is american taxpayer money and, therefore, the american taxpayer is,s has a right to demand this level of accountability. >> senator, if i can expand on that answer. um, and i do want to mention the bill which, that you mentioned which has been nicknamed the rocky bare gone that bill -- >> right. >> shined a light into what is a complicated area to figure out how to deal with it, so it was helpful to us. we -- let me mention two examples. one is that mihm mihm, one is first kuwaiti in what our hearings found and our missions was complete irresponsibility, that is lack of responsibility

by foreign contractors and especially subcontractors as commissioner ervin said. , the amimim came in front of a hearing of ours, and they basically laughed in our face. they said, go away, we're not going to give you records, we weren't required to give them to dca, we're not required to give them to you on a subject called taints subcontracts. first kuwaiti which owed $124 million according to the state department ig, it's not paying. it's continuing to get contracts from it. t not paying. it's not paying. the argument that was put on the other side was that if you require foreign contractors to submit to jurisdiction, you will, therefore, lose competition out. i leave it to you to know if that's a likely prospect. >> well, um, at a minimum, um, should we be thinking about legislation that says to the united states government if someone has done business with

us and owes us money and there e a foreign contractor, then that should equal suspension and debarment? >> that would be, commissioner shays was something of a pioneer in strengthening the suspension debarment tool, and that would be a good use of it, yes. >> why -- what is it, and thank you so much, congressman, for taking this assignment. a lot of people were vying for your talents at the moment you decided to step up and help us here, and i'm really, um, so glad you did. tell me why you think it has been beyond trus traiting to me -- frustrating to me that not only are these guys not doing work under a contract, they are then getting performance bonuses instead of suspension or debarment? >> well, the real expert is right here in the commission. um, we, the one area we backed off a little bit was automatic suspensions. we do think that in the end

there are other factors that need to come in play. but it's very clear that contractors don't think they pay a penalty. and one way they don't think they pay a penalty is that they're not going to get replaced because the process takes so long. so they're going to still be around for a year, and it's one of the reasons that we recommended there should be a special cadre of government people, now i'm talking civil servants, what can come in and guard an embassy, and guard a facility, do something the contractors were doing. get 'em out right away and just bring in government people to replace them. i think that would do wonders, and that's one of our representations. >> so it's almost -- recommendations. >> it almost goes under the category we can screw up because they're stuck with us, because we're in a contingency, and they have got no backup. >> you've got it. >> and so if we could, um, convince the military concern we have redundancy as a system, and

almost everything in national security. but we have no redundancy systems in contracting. and i think you've hit the nail on the head, that this has not been a priority for the military, and we would never think of not having a redundancy in some of the core military funks that relate to the mission, and contracting has become one of those. thank you very much, mr. chairman. >> thank you, senator mccaskill. senator tester. >> yeah, thank you, mr. chairman. i want to thank senator mccaskill and senator webb for testifying before. this is a critical issue. um, i haven't decided whether i need more blood pressure medicine or a bot bottle of brown liquor to take care of this problem. >> both. >> yeah, probably. you're probably right. >> not at the same time though. >> you know, the issue of private contracting, i can't help to think didn't come out of the whole privatization of government thing from a decade or so ago, and we can see where that's got us. it's unfortunate senator webb