Volume 166, No. 135 covering the 2nd Session of the 116th Congress (2019 - 2020) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“Nomination of Derek Kan (Executive Session)” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Senate section on pages S4604-S4605 on July 30, 2020.
More than half of the Agency's employees are engineers, scientists and protection specialists. The Climate Reality Project, a global climate activist organization, accused Agency leadership in the last five years of undermining its main mission.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
Nomination of Derek Kan
Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I rise today to speak on the nomination of Derek Kan to serve as second in command at the Office of Management and Budget.
It is not every day that I stand here and endorse a nomination--a nominee--of a current President. So I don't want anybody to have a heart attack, but I do want to stand up and say that this is a good nomination. I wish we had more like him. I am pleased that at least we have this one today to consider.
Derek Kan served previously as Under Secretary for Transportation Policy at the Department of Transportation, where he served as a principal adviser to the Secretary and provided leadership in the development of policies at the Department.
I have a couple of quotes here from two of my Democratic colleagues that referenced his time at the Department of Transportation. One of our Democratic colleagues from here in the Senate said these words:
``Mr. Kan, from your time at the Department of Transportation, I know you to be a talented and thoughtful leader who can work collaboratively with Congress and others to find common ground.''
Think about those words: ``who can work collaboratively with Congress and others to find common ground.''
Another of our Democratic colleagues said of Derek Kan: ``Derek Kan is a serious, smart person and a vast improvement over the previously mentioned names.''
That is a quote. I will say it again: ``Derek Kan is a serious, smart person and a vast improvement over the previously mentioned names.''
Now, that is not damning with faint praise. That is, I think, praise. I think it is well earned, and I just wanted to share that with you.
He has been nominated to serve by this administration in a number of positions, and he has gotten the support of Democrats and Republicans--
not unanimous support. I wouldn't get unanimous support if I were nominated for something that came through here either--but he has gotten strong support, for the most part.
I was pleased to be able to vote in favor of his confirmation to this particular position. He was confirmed--at that time it was as the Department of Transportation Under Secretary, and I think he was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 7.
Prior to this appointment, Mr. Kan served on the Amtrak board of directors, and he was unanimously confirmed to that position by this same body. He doesn't know this, but he and I have something in common. We were both confirmed--I was sitting Governor of Delaware, but I was confirmed to serve as the lone Governor at the time on Amtrak's board of directors. And I was confirmed unanimously. Somehow that slipped through. But that is something that he and I share in common, and he understands well the importance of the capacity of rail service in this country--in this century.
Mr. Kan is also experienced as a policy adviser to our current majority leader and chief economist for the Senate Republican Policy Committee. To put it bluntly, I think he possesses the necessary qualifications and experience for this position.
I have the privilege of serving as the senior Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee with the Presiding Officer, and this committee has the responsibility for vetting individuals who have been nominated to serve at the Office of Management and Budget.
During the confirmation process, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Kan and getting to know him a little better and understanding better his goals for this important position. Mr. Kan clearly showed that he is intimately familiar with the issues that he would be tasked with managing at OMB, and he showed that he is willing to learn and work with others to ensure that he is doing everything he can to work productively on behalf of the American people
In fact, Mr. Kan committed to work collaboratively with Congress to help us fulfill our oversight role. This is a shared responsibility: oversight. We all need to be interested in oversight. You don't have to serve on a committee that is focused on oversight--the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. You don't have to serve on a permanent Senate subcommittee as Senator Rob Portman and I do--the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations--in order to be interested in oversight. You don't have to be elected to the U.S. Senate or to the House to be interested in oversight. This is something that we all should be interested in and all of us ought to be focused on, and we need to do it in a way that is collaborative so that we sort of marry our fortunes together and end up with the synergistic effect where the sum is greater than the parts thereof.
I was pleased with the words and the commitment he made to work collaboratively with all of us: Democrats and Republicans and our staffs. He also committed to working with the Government Accountability Office, GAO, to help them fulfill their critical oversight responsibilities.
I might add, GAO, which is our watchdog, does great work, as the Presiding Officer knows. They have been faced with an enormous undertaking, enormous challenges, with respect to the COVID-19 legislation we have passed and the need for resources to be able to do a good job in being the watchdog that we need.
I would just call on all of my colleagues to keep that in mind when we fashion the next COVID legislation and figure out how much money we need to provide for GAO to do the enormous job that is in front of them.
It is not often we get a nominee in this administration who is open to working with both sides here in the Congress and is understanding of the needs for the executive branch to be responsive to congressional oversight from this administration. In fact, Mr. Kan committed to responding to all oversight requests from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, including requests from Democratic Senators. He also committed to ensure that OMB responds to all requests from GAO.
I know these commitments ought to be standard operating procedure in our democracy, which is built on a system of checks and balances, but they certainly have not always been the case in this administration, especially for folks nominated to positions like the one he has been nominated for.
Mr. Kan's willingness to work with Congress and his clear qualifications to serve in this role are a welcome change in a Trump administration nominee that deserves to be recognized. For those reasons, I intend to support Derek Kan, who has been nominated for this important position at OMB. I urge my colleagues--Democrat, Republican, and an Independent or two--to do the same.
I have the privilege of serving as the senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee. In our oversight role there over the Environmental Protection Agency, we ask a lot of questions. We ask a lot of questions of that agency, the leaders of that agency.
We don't always get the responses that we need. In some cases we get the back of a hand--no response for days, weeks, months. In previous administrations, Democratic administrations where Republican Senators were maybe in the minority, they haven't always gotten the kind of response that they deserved either, but I think they have gotten better than we are getting in many cases right now when we try to get information out of EPA.
I think the sort of spirit that I sense and have observed in Derek Kan, we could use that spirit from some other folks who are serving in this administration and maybe keep him in mind when someday we have a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.
So this is a vote I think we are going to take in a very short while, and I hope, when people come here to vote, they will keep in mind some of the words I have said and some of the words I quoted from other Democratic Senators and find a way to vote yes in this case.
We will hold him up to high standards. I think if he gets confirmed--
and I think he will--that it is important that he continues to demonstrate the sort of values that I have found favorable in him today.
I just want to acknowledge that it is not every day a Democrat gets to hold the gavel at a committee hearing, and yesterday Senator Grassley had some other business; he had to come over and vote on the floor and take care of some other business. There was no other Republican to take the gavel and conduct the hearing, and he called on a Senator from Delaware to assume the gavel--take the gavel and pound us all the way to the finish line in yesterday's hearing.
My wife said to me last night: What was the highlight of the day? And I said that there were many highlights of the day yesterday, but that was probably No. 1
With that, I yield the floor to my friend from Iowa, Senator Chuck Grassley.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
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