Mike Thompson: “I would like to directly respond to the Senator from Nebraska. As I understand his point, it is that his compromise…”

“I would like to directly respond to the Senator from Nebraska. As I understand his point, it is that his compromise, which is looked upon as the bipartisan compromise because a Republican has joined in it--what Senator Gramm's efforts have done, along with Senator Miller, apparently is not looked upon as a bipartisan compromise, even though a Democrat has joined in that; that is just a matter of terminology--the Nelson compromise purports to give the President flexibility because it gives the President flexibility that the IRS has. He is absolutely right. The IRS has been mentioned in conjunction with this debate as one of those agencies where we have given the President flexibility. What the Senator fails to point out is that also a part of that debate has been the discussion of other agencies where we have given the President much more flexibility than we have given the IRS. The flexibility we gave the IRS was hotly contested and hotly debated, but the IRS had so many problems. They had spent billions of dollars trying to get their computers to talk to each other. We had hearings about their problems. This is one agency now. This is just one organization. Because of all the difficulties they had, we decided to give them flexibility with regard to pay, hiring, and some other items. But as a part of that, there was a procedure that required negotiation with the employees union.”