going to come to the committee to ask questions and the questions that i had today? >> i said we will have another hearing, and i'm not saying it's because we've got people from virginia and -- here in this room, but we're going to move that bill again, and we'll see what happens on the senate side, but i suggest you talk to the senate side because the state -- i think the state recognizes your state. miss tucker, do they recognize you, too? >> we have no mechanism for state recognition. we were honored in 1894 and recognized in 1986 so we're a de facto state recognition. >> i again, mr. weaver, you've been recognized by the state? >> yes, we have. >> and if you're recognized by the state, and i know the virginia tribes were, mr. moran specifically showed that to us, and i just think that the -- for some reason there's a shortage of wisdom in the interior department, and i still believe

my good colleagues that although it would take some time and effort, i think we have the opportunity trust-wise. we shouldn't transfer power to the executive branch. we've done it over and over in all different walks of our life and i think in this case because of the nation to nation trust authority we have to do a better job, and we're going to try to do that, you know. any other comments from any of the members. mr. lujan. >> mr. chairman, two quick questions. >> go ahead. >> mr. gabaldon, the -- one of the criteria of 25 cfr-83, 83.7g. it states that the petitioner demonstrates that neither the petitioner nor its members are the subject of a congressional legislation that has expressly terminated or forbidden the

federal relationship. >> i'm sorry. i didn't hear the question. >> section g states that the -- if you don't meet this criteria, there's no administrative relief. you don't have the opportunity to pursue something administratively. what this states is the criteria is the petitioner demonstrates that neither the petitioner nor its members are the subject of congressional legislation that has expressed -- that has expressly terminated or forbidden the federal relationship. would your tribe fall into that? you wouldn't meet that criteria? >> we don't meet the criteria because of the g. that's why we weren't able to use the petition process. >> i think that's important to note as we talk about this. some of the aspects associated with judicial i think recommendations from former assistant secretary and your pursuit that that may be one of the areas and it's important to note. because, you know, the tribe is in a situation where the land that is held and privately held and there's not public land in

that area, has that been talked about by the tribe at all? >> i'll tell you no land has been talked about by the tribe. the only land that we'd possibly seek from the federal government was blm land. that doesn't require any -- anything from the county because it's already in federal trust, so we weren't seeking land like the old reservation that's in private hands now. i will tell you in the beginning we did seek that land, and it was to make a statement to the federal government saying we want it back immediately. if you look at our first amended complaint, we had changed that because we understood that it -- it ruffled the feathers of the counties saying you need to go through the process. we're not denying the fact that we have to go through the process and we surely will, but right now it's not about land. it's about restoration, and it's always been about restoration. >> i appreciate that. thank you for the indulgence, mr. chairman. appreciate the clarification. >> any other questions.

>> if not, i want -- >> mr. chair, i'd like to just acknowledge or underscore what you said about congress' ability or power or authority to recognize. as of april 2011, according to the gao report, out of the 564 tribes that had been recognized, 530 of them were through congress, so i -- i trust the collective wisdom of the congress, and i appreciate the fact that the virginia tribes did gain recognition through the house, so, again, i'm very optimistic that the right thing will happen. >> and if i can be a little bit snide here, i prefer it going through this way and not through lawyers, and for those in the audience, if your hair is rising, good. i get very frustrated on the money that's spent on legal advice when it should be directly and not money but the petition to the congress, and i

have a couple of lawyers sitting here so i have to be careful, but i just -- i watch it every day, and it's a great industry that very frankly produces nothing. it absorbs money, and that's a terrible thing. a short comment and i'll adjourn this. go ahead. >> my short comment is the lawyer that we're using is very helpful, and he did a lot of it pro bono. >> he must be an angel. there must be damn few of them. >> there's few of them. >> this meeting's adjourned. you're watching c-span3 this morning.

coming up, proposals to reform the u.k. welfare system followed by discussion on the effectiveness of foreign aid. a little bit later we'll show you remarks from tea party activist c.l. bryant and then ellen ochoa. this past week with congress on break, we've been featuring some of american history tv's weekend programs in prime time here on c-span3. tonight we look at african-americans resistance to slavery starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern the life and escape of former slave robert smalls who served south carolina in the u.s. house of representatives. at 10:00 p.m. eastern, vanderbilt professor details how fugitive slaves planned executed escapes to canada, mexico and the caribbean. american history tv in prime time tonight on c-span3. and on c-span2, we've been featuring some of book tv's weekend programs in prime time.

tonight our conversation with pulitzer prize winner and bestselling novelist anna quindlen. >> we have pulled in for the refueling that morning around 9:30. we had more of the ship to appear in the harbor. >> the events surrounding al qaeda's october 2000 attack that left 17 dead and 37 injured. >> i was turned back to my desk doing routine paperwork when at 11:18 in the morning there was a thunderous explosion. you could feel all 505 feet and 184 tons of destroyer thrust up and to the right. it seemed like we hanged in the air. we came back down in the water. lights went out. ceiling tiles came and popped out. everything on my desk lifted up a foot and slammed down. i put myself in a brace position

until the ship stopped moving and i could stand up. >> more with author kirk lippold sunday at 8:00 on c-span's q & a. >> the british secretary of state for work and pensions recently became the first sitting foreign secretary to appear before the house ways and means committee for nontrade related matters. they discussed with members proposals to reform the u.k. welfare system. the joint hearing's focus was whether it discouraging work. this is about two hours. >> good morning, everybody. welcome to today's joint review of how welfare and tax benefits can discourage work. before we begin with our regular session today, with opening statements, i would like to recognize a very special guest who is in washington, d.c. ian duncan smith, secretary of state for work and pensions for

the united kingdom. we're appreciative he's been able to adjust his schedule to join us today for a few minutes. the united kingdom is undertaking significant reforms to its tax benefit programs and reduce marginal tax rates. so that work always pays. this is an issue that i've cared about for many years. we've been watching closely many of the developments in great britain as these reforms have been undertaken in a bipartisan manner and he's agreed to share with us information about these recent reforms in the uk, which will be useful as we consider the effectiveness of our own program. mr. secretary, we did a little digging through our archives, and we're not able to find another example of a sitting foreign secretary appearing before the ways and means committee on non-trade matters. so this is a historic occasion. honored to have you join us today and please proceed with your statement.

>> mr. chairman, thank you very much indeed. it's a pleasure to be here and rather satisfying in the surroundings. i'm used to doing my answering across the dispatch box and the house of commons being screamed and shouted at. by most of the others on the other side most within arm's reach. so i'm anticipating that not to happen here necessarily. but if it does i hope i will be able to handle it. what we're trying to do in the uk is much the same as anywhere else, trying to figure out what's been going out with a system that set out to try to help people become independent that traps them now in a form of dependency. we saw spending on welfare interestingly rise by 40% under the last government at a time prior to the recession, though during a period of growth the economy was growing but we were seeing welfare grow, which seems to be rather peculiar.

what we saw here was a growing level of people who didn't work. a very large number were out of the environment of work and that to my mind causes problems. it's not just have to take people off of benefits. anybody can do that. the question you have is where do those costs then go? because they don't disappear. by that i mean, for example, even if you don't pay people benefits, you end up with a creative underclass that becomes very expensive in other ways. we saw our policing bill rise by over 50% during the course of the last government. this is where most of your serious health concerns exist amongst the same underclass. they are the biggest drawer on health care and the most likely group to be recording almost

every kind of sickness you can imagine. and last of all, education is deeply disrupted by people from that underclass who themselves have no expectation or anticipation of proceeding. so handling and changing this is not just about reducing the welfare bill, but reducing other costs from having a group like this. so we've chosen to look at the entrapment principle. the welfare system you set up, does it free people or trap them? what we believe the system is so complex, with so many different benefits being drawn from people as they go into work at different rates as they go up hours toward full-time work. some are gross. some are net. it's almost impossible for the benefit recipient to calculate how much they would have in their pocket after the

withdrawals. and in some cases, they're losing up to 95 pence every pound. that means basically they get four or five pence out of every hour they work. not much of an incentive and often very difficult to understand they're better off or worse off. they assume hugely that it's not worth the effort, so they don't make the effort. so the system doesn't incentivize people to do the right thing. it actually does the woer. a lot of the shift of money made it worse. it takes them away at one single rate at every hour. so every hour you work, it will come off in our case 65%. that can be adjusted. it's about investing or withdrawing money. so that simplifies your understanding of benefits. it's critical in two regards.

one, the marginal reduction rates are dealt by that single flat taper. the other bit, which is the participation tax rate, that is the moment you enter work. that's the critical bit. people that have been out of work generationally, you need to get them across that threshold. number one. after, that keeping them in work is critical, as well. but keep that cliff edge very low indeed. going across is very easy. so that decision economically makes sense. so you're better off in work always than on benefits. secondly, we have a work program which is derisking government,

but making sure it does what we need it to do. so we hand to the voluntary sector, those that have been difficult to get into work. i don't care what they do. it's not my problem. i simply pay them only after they've got somebody in to work. it's a payment by result system. there we pay them six months after somebody has been in work. so they don't receive their money until six months, so they need to keep them in work. that is really critical. easy to get somebody into work, very difficult to hold them in work. you need to hold them in work because only then do they get what i call the work habit. once they got the work habit, they'll satisfy that thereafter. so six months, nine months, a year, even up to 18 months even in the case of the most disabled. in other words the rewards lie further down the chain for them which means they have to work with people even after they got them into work. and the lack of risk is basically they get paid only after they do the job and we calculate that by how much we save on benefits and how much we can pay them. it's a straight crossover in

money. the third area of our reforms is looking at sickness benefits and disability. we had a massive problem. a huge number of people were trapped on two benefits, particularly one called incapacity benefit. we had some people on these not seen by anybody for up to ten years. if you had a problem, you certainly have a big problem ten years later. so you get worse, not better. so what we've now done is reviewing all of those, moving them on to a new benefit or moving them back to work. the assessment is around about 10,000, 11,000 cases a week. and we're finding something in the order of over a third recessing that were not fit for work and going straight back to work. they'll go to the work program.

just a wit more than that are going to the middle bit of this new benefit, which is you'll be able to get to work. the expectation is you'll be available for work. and the third group, about a third is a group that the expectations are that you are genuinely too sick. and we'll check on people to make sure they are better and getting them back to work. before, we never had a constant check on them. the other is a disability benefit, which is about your mobility and your care reforming that because it got too wide, mostly through judicial review where the judges have widened the case law. so we've tightened that back up to make sure the money goes to those that really need the money. that's not work related. you can receive that in or out of work. now we can work with people to make sure they get back to work. and the most disabled are able

to work which is what they really want. they don't want to be trapped out of work. those are the main things that we're doing. >> with addressing processes and quite a bit of it is unknown. i mean, for me it's ironic having you here. i went to the british parachute school 30 years ago. one of the more interesting aspects was having to jump out of a balloon to find out if the parachute worked. it was the lodge longest opening time i ever had. we're glad to see you take the first jump. as we face these challenges, unemployment rates are elevated, fewer people are looking for work. there's increasing family breakdown that leads to social problems and financial cost that

you alluded to that you're dealing with in your own jurisdiction and it's critical that we develop approaches to integrate our processes and more effectively serve people, an issue i've cared about, having grown up in a single parent home and was on the form of assistance as a child, as well. not meeting my father until i was in the army for seven years. i'm very interested in how you bring people over or avoiding this cliff of falling off when they want to go back to work and they find disincentives. i was wondering how you can elaborate on unemployment and work, family breakdown, and the need for budgetary discipline, and i understand wage data is playing a key in this reform. i was wonder if you could comment briefly on how it is being designed to use and operate this new system.

[ inaudible ] it is not a relat that's the key. it's what leads you to the position of being unable to earn money for yourself as a household and those are the things like family breakdown, failed education, debt, drug and alcohol abuse and your dependence oat states and those areas need to be wound in to any kind of assessment because your lifestyle usually has a bearing on what's likely to happen to you. we, therefore, need to do a lot more in advance about dysfunctional family life which exists in many of these areas and early intervention has got to be the key to this to put particularly young, dysfunctional moms right so their kids are right early on and second, to look at families on the edge of breakdown. so we're now investing money

into helping support from mostly the voluntary sector to help stabilize families before they break down rather than spend the huge sums we do picking up the pieces afterwards. it is estimated over 20 plus billion pounds a year we spend on the after-effects of breakdown where it's known if you put a bit of money into this you can restabilize families on the edge and don't break down or the children will benefit and that's a huge shift to focus solely breakdown rather than dealing with the aftereffects of it. on how the system works in terms of employment, the reality that we have here is right now we know what these static levels are for benefit. so what we're simply saying is that as people go in from benefit into work, that the levels that they achieve in work for each hour should mean that their income is higher through that work process and demonstrably higher than it is when they're on benefits. so the universal credit is

interesting because by and large it shifts some of the money down to the bottom end, that is to say the early hours because we think that going into work is the biggest issue and then moving up the hours is the secondary issue. important? i know they're marginal deduction rates and the participation tax rate, we need to get that right down so that they're always on an upward curve in income and that starts, literally at our number one. that will hugely benefit lone parents who we want to go to work because we think it's good for them and their children after a certain point quite rightly that the children realize that work is part of life and a part of your future and they see somebody from that household working. single parent household, it has to be them or a two-person household, one of them. that needs to pay and to keep them in work that's important. that's how the economics of this work which is as they get paid

the withdrawals are lower, particularly in the early set, and you do that by what i call disregard. as they enter work, each category of person, will have an amount of their income disregarded before the taper. so they can earn so much and a very disabled person will have a bigger disregard than the taper. someone who is able-bodied and young will have a small disregard and it will have a disregard slightly bigger than that and the taper is bigger than everybody and the disregard evaluates what your particular level of need will have that income work for you and that's where most of the money is therefore concentrated on the investment and it then takes it up the chain and this will allow us to make the in-work conditionality. >> thank you very much, mr. secretary. i would like to recognize my friend and the ranking member of the human resources subcommittee from texas. >> thank you.

as i understand it, this universal credit is a new approach that you're just beginning to pilot or implement. >> that is true. that is correct. we are due to start that in -- it goes live in october next year. we are building a new software system and everything else and we're doing some early, advance work on it starting in april next year in key area, not trialing it, but running it out early in some key areas to see what the glitches are. >> is the goal, once you resolve any of those glitches to have uniformity across the country so you wouldn't have a different policy in wales from greater london or in greater london from northern ireland? >> not in terms of the basic structure of this, no, but how it's delivered later on it could be a very localized delivery. it's not -- right now we'll issue doing it as a national delivery and then we're open for discussion about whether that can actually be localized to a much more local level. the key to this benefit, by the

way, is that we also have to change the way we report on taxation. so alongside this is a big change to create what's called a real time information system on our tax base. so now what happens is because as someone goes to work under the present system, the tax authorities assume they earn so much money because that's the prediction. we know in part-time work that hours change so it's not the same. so you're expected as an individual to report your hours change back to the authority so they can readjust your support to the tax credit as it exists at the moment. the problem is you're coming from a group that really doesn't like authority very much and doesn't understand it and gets confused and you forget to do this, so they go on to pay you too much money over the year. at the end of the year they turn around and say you overpaid and you're dealing with a group that spends every penny that you give

them immediately. what the real time information system will do with universal credit is every month we reconcile. if your hours change we don't even ned you to tell us because the business reports that in the immediate report and then it just adjusts automatically. so now we say hold on, we're down last month and we'll adjust the payments this month. >> are your projections that overall this will cost more to your national treasury to have this universal credit or less. >> we are investing in it, but once it's in, you will more than save that money back because the two key features and the first is the point i was making. huge levels of error that are costing billions in the system that will be eradicated. >> how much more are you investing over the short term? >> over the three to four-year period we're averaging 2 billion a year of investment and once that bedded in, after that that's where you'll start and you'll be making your returns immediately and we'll more than offset even as we're bringing it

in through the savings we make through what exists in the present system. one of the obstacles that we found in this country to people moving freely from one job to another are moving from a job to setting up a small business is the lack of access to health insurance. is it your feeling that access to health insurance in the u.k. is helpful to promoting employment. >> ours is fundamentally different from what you have. >> yes, it is. >> we have the national health service and therefore everyone gets access free at the point of delivery. >> you don't have any barrier to employment from people being locked into an insurance policy at one job and fear of losing it if they move to another. >> people do have private insurance, but i don't think it plays anything like the part it would play here because of the level of the health care. i'm not entering an argument

about whether you should have anything similar here. >> what we have and what has been adopted here is very dissimil dissimilar, but it does reduce that job lock and when we were considering it, one of your european parliamentarians was on fox news telling us what a horrible system it was, and he was repudiated by prime minister cam onwho referred to your services as a great national institution. is it still a great national institution in the uk? >> yes. a big change is taking place and there are big reforms in place to make sure the people get what they need. overall, we spend less money on health care than you do over here. >> with the concept of reform, not just -- but not with repeal so that we have access to health insurance for our workers here and thank you for your testimony. >> i thank the gentleman. the chairman of the oversight

subcommittee. >> thank you, chairman davis. welcome. it's great to see you here today and we appreciate the tremendous work you all are doing to reform the complex systems in the uk. to really align the incentives and to make sure that work actually pays and that those receiving benefits will understand that crossing that threshold to get to work is where they need to go and of course, how do you keep them in employment. i want to focus on a slightly different part of what you were doing with reforms and i think it is called the work program and the system of delivering employment services to these individuals. >> yea. >> as you restructured the benefits and the structure of the welfare benefits and tax benefit, you're also looking at your delivery system for these benefits and my understanding is you have ways to leverage