Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

You know, a lot of us who spent time at home hoping that we would come back here and vote on a serious piece of legislation are disappointed here. This is not a serious piece of legislation. This is a piece of legislation that seems to be geared simply to give some people some cover for the upcoming elections.

If we had a serious piece of legislation that would provide for allowing us to exploit our own resources, it would allow States to share in the revenue generated by offshore drilling. Without allowing that, you simply guarantee that no State will opt in. So there is a lot of bait and switch here going on.

It seems that the only recycling in this is a familiar pattern of loading the bill up with a lot of items so you can get votes from here and there. For example, one of the spending programs is a National Consumer Awareness Program to educate the public on the environmental and energy benefits of public transportation. That's not a serious bill about our energy crisis. This seems to be a San Francisco bill with New York sensibilities.

And speaking of New York, there is a big fat item in for New York, about a $2 billion item which allows for the so-called Liberty Zone. This provision would allow New York City to keep $2 billion worth of the employers' share of payroll taxes to invest in transportation projects. That's a specific limited tax benefit for one entity here. That's an earmark by all definitions. And yet nobody has been able to explain--and we sought this morning, we sought all day to have somebody explain what that has to do with our energy future. Instead, it was just put in the bill to try to get a vote from here and there.

Again, this is not a serious piece of legislation. It is meant to provide political cover. It should be rejected. And, hopefully, as the moratorium goes off, we will get to really addressing our energy future.

Madam Speaker, as we commemorate the seventh anniversary of 9/11; we should know that there is a humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Caribbean, in particular, in the country of Cuba hit twice now, one by Gustav and then by Ike. The island is in dire straits, and the people there need our help. The problem is, currently the restrictions on travel and sending gift parcels are so extreme that Americans and family members of people in Cuba cannot help them.

I will be introducing legislation today to lift temporarily the restriction on gift parcels. Currently, gift parcels sent by family members to other family members in Cuba cannot even contain clothing, hygiene kits, or medical supplies, and that is simply wrong. We shouldn't have that restriction. It should be lifted, if not completely, at least temporarily.

Also, certain humanitarian licenses can be obtained now, but it takes a long time generally for that to happen. I would call on the Bush administration to expedite licensing of humanitarian groups, churches, and others who want to help the good people of Cuba.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

We didn't have to be here today. We could have acted more responsibly in 2005, when we reauthorized the highway bill. At that time, I heard a number of people, appropriators and others, stand up and say: We are authorizing more than we will have money for. We knew it at the time. Anybody who really looked at this knew that we were authorizing more than the highway trust fund contained for projects.

To make matters worse, and part of the reason we had far more than we could fund is we had over 6,300 earmarks in the highway bill. That is why this thing was so big. That accounted for about $24 billion of the highway bill.

Now, some of those projects, I grant you, would have been funded anyway in the highway bill. There were projects that a Member wanted that would have been funded out of that State's formula anyway. But there are a lot of projects that would not.

We all know about the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. That was part of this bill. But some of the lesser known things that are in this bill that have far too little to do with transportation, I would submit:

$16 million for the Bremerton Pedestrian Transportation Center in Washington State; $3 million for a parking garage in suburban Chicago; $3.5 million for pedestrian walkways and streetscaping in the village of Western Springs, Illinois; $3.5 million to improve the Pennsylvania Executive Mansion exhibit; $1.5 for the American Tobacco Trail in North Carolina; $800,000 for a transportation and heritage museum in Tennessee; $4 million for bike trails and park space in California; $1 million for the Please Touch Me Museum in Philadelphia; $1 million for the Blue Ridge Mountain Center in Virginia.

These are earmarks that are funded in this bill, part of the reason we are having to steal money from the general fund and fund back the highway trust fund, because we just went hog wild back in 2005.

Just a few examples of some others:

$2.75 million for renovations to the National Packard Museum in Ohio; $2.4 for the National Infantry Museum. Might be a good museum; probably shouldn't be funded out of the highway trust fund.

Yet, instead of going in and saying we are going to rescind these earmarks if they haven't been funded yet, some have, some haven't, we are saying we are going to take from the general fund. When you start doing that, you set a horrible precedent in this place, because we know the amount of logrolling that goes on in a highway bill. And if you don't have the natural ceiling that exists with the highway trust fund, where you say we can spend that much and no more; if you can say, well, when we run out, we will just go out and take from the general fund, then ``Katie bar the door,'' this place is going to be out of money sooner than you think. Because when you have this amount of money and you pass around the projects and you have so much buy-in, then very few will vote against that bill because their own projects are in it, and soon we are taking more and more money from the general fund.

We cannot start that process with this bill, and that is what this bill is doing. That is what this amendment is doing today. We have got to act more fiscally responsible.

Let me just go through a few more.

$1.2 million for the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. Now, might be a good museum, probably shouldn't be funded with your highway dollars. $500,000 for the Railroad Museum in Georgia; $200,000 for the Brooklyn Children's Museum.

If you are catching a theme here, there are a lot of museums funded in this bill, again, money that is coming out of the highway trust fund that we overburdened the highway trust fund with that we now have to get money from the general fund for.

One of the previous speakers said that there is a national consensus or that the Nation is united on this topic that we need to take from the general fund. I would say, where the Nation is united is that we have got to stop this earmarking process. And if we get to it next week, hopefully we will, the appropriation bill for the Department of Defense, you will see more of it, because that bill contains 1,200 earmarks. The bill that has been marked up in

the subcommittee of appropriations for defense, 1,200 earmarks.

I took a look at it just to see. It is very difficult to see where the money is and where it is going, but one thing we could see is what we see in every bill that contains a lot of earmarks: A disproportionate number of the earmarks are going to those who chair committees, those in leadership positions, or those who are on the Appropriations Committee.

In fact, 1,200 earmarks, as I mentioned. Of these 1,200, more than 560 are associated with appropriators and members of leadership. That is a staggering 45 percent of the earmarks included in the committee print. That is not uncommon; that is what called the spoil system, and that is why it is unlikely that we will be able to stop this amendment today.

Please, let's be fiscally responsible.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, we'll actually hear about this bill for just a minute at least before I talk about energy. But, no, I do have a serious amendment here that simply clarifies that nothing in this bill is meant to authorize appropriations for the new unit of the Wild and Scenic Rivers System.

The bill before us today authorizes a study to determine if the Missisquoi and Trout Rivers in Vermont are eligible to be designated wild and scenic rivers. Now, rivers designated as wild and scenic are managed by a number of Department of the Interior agencies, including the National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

However, if you ask CRS about this, these four agencies have a combined maintenance backlog of between 14 and $22 billion. That is between 14 and $22 billion. And so we are going to be doing a study of another river, a study that often precedes designation. I think that is the purpose of this study, that will then put this river under the Park Service's jurisdiction or the Interior Department, and these agencies will have to manage it. We're adding to a backlog of between 14 and $22 billion. We shouldn't continue to do this. We can't continue to do this. We have parks in my State and everywhere else that have maintenance needs, that have staffing needs, that have needs that are going unmet, and we're going about just adding more to it, without seeking a funding source or anything else. We're simply adding more obligations to the Park Service, and we can't do that.

This amendment simply says that nothing in this authorization implies this appropriation will follow. Again, if an appropriation does follow, we are taking from the existing wild and scenic rivers or other designations that our Interior Department has to manage.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for accepting the amendment, and I thank the Chair.

Now, let me say a few words about energy, since everybody else has. I didn't plan to when I came down here, but I have to say that Republicans will charge, with some justification, that the Democrats have been in charge for the last 2 years and have failed to pass significant substantial energy legislation. Democrats will charge, with some justification, that the Republicans have been in charge for a number of years and failed to do so.

We blamed the Senate. We didn't have 60 votes in the Senate. The Democrats can do the same at this point.

But here we are today, and we can't continue to look back and say we should have done something before, because we are here today and people are asking, why aren't you passing something? With justification, I might add.

Now, one of the speakers mentioned that what the Republicans were proposing was more like a Fred Flintstone bill of some type. And I would have to ask that same speaker how she plans to get home tonight. Unless she has a Flintstone mobile, she's probably riding in something that is powered by gas, maybe a hybrid, unlikely that it's electricity. In fact, less than 1 percent of our current energy needs in this country are produced by solar, which she talked about. Less than 1 percent is produced by wind.

Now, in our plan it has plans for increased solar and wind. But if you doubled, if you tripled, if you quadrupled, quintupled, do whatever you want, to solar and wind for a number of years, we are going to rely on our traditional

energy sources. And so it makes sense that, while we are searching for the next big thing, while we wait for a hydrogen economy, or while we wait for wind and solar to really come on-line, or something else that we may not even know of, we have to use the resources that we have.

So nobody on this side is really saying drill and drill only. We're saying it has to be part of the mix and it has to be all of the above.

So there's plenty of blame to go around. I myself have not voted for one energy bill since I've been here in the past 8 years because I thought that some of them were too subsidy-laden. I didn't think that they really, really allowed us, in a free market way, to go out and use our resources.

But going forward, this is what we've got to look at; what are we going to do going forward. It doesn't do anybody any good to say well, the Democrats didn't do anything, or the Republicans didn't. We're here today, and it's time to do something on this.

Again, I thank the chairman of the subcommittee and appreciate him accepting this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

This week, the Senate is expected to approve an $8 billion bailout of the highway trust fund. We already passed that in the House here in July, and at that time, myself and 36 other Members opposed it. At the time, we were backed by both the administration and by the Secretary of Transportation.

For years, Congress has known that the highway trust fund was losing its purchasing power. The Federal law gas tax of 18.4 cents has not been increased since 1993, and high fuel efficiency standards have meant fewer fill-ups. Then, of course, earlier this summer, fewer vacations were taken; fewer miles were driven. That means less money for the highway trust fund, but this concern has gone back for years. In fact, when we did the 2005 highway bill, there were many who stood up and who said we're authorizing more projects, more funding than we will have in the highway trust fund, but what did we do? We didn't take any action to solve the problem. Instead, we more than tripled the number of earmarks in SAFETEA-LU, which was the last highway authorization program that we did in 2005 for the 5-year period that we're now in.

So here we are 3\1/2\ years later, just a year before our next reauthorization, and we're out of money to cover the projects that we've authorized, but contrary to the example we've seen throughout this Congress, a bailout shouldn't be the answer to every shortfall. No effort, for example, has been made to rescind any of the 6,300 earmarks that were in the highway trust fund, of course, the most famous of which was the bridge to nowhere. That money was rescinded or at least the authorization to spend on that project was taken away by the Congress, but we've made no effort on any of the other 6,300 earmarks in the bill. We need to do so.

The Secretary of Transportation had indicated earlier this summer that, if we were to take funding from the earmarks that have not yet been funded in the bill, it could relieve the pressure that we now have on the highway trust fund, but we haven't done it. Instead, we're simply saying go ahead and fund all of those transportation museums and all of those projects that have very little or nothing to do with moving people. We're saying go ahead and fund them. We'll just take the money from the Treasury now instead of from the highway trust fund. That is a very, very dangerous precedent to set. Whenever you load up a bill with 6,300 earmarks, the process of logrolling takes effect. That's why you only had, I believe, eight votes against the highway bill back in 2005 and, I think, only three votes against it in the Senate. It's because, if you lard it up enough and if you have enough buy-in, very few people will vote against it or will oppose it.

If you start taking money from the general fund and if you don't have any kind of ceiling that was provided at least by the highway trust fund, then Katy Bar the door when it comes to spending. There's no ceiling. There's no discipline. We can not get in this position where we're robbing from the general fund to fund highway projects delineated by Members of Congress but

earmarked by Members of Congress, because there will simply be no discipline on the process.

So I would urge the President to take the position that we shouldn't take money from the general fund, to veto this legislation when it comes, and I would urge the House as we prepare to reauthorize the highway bill just a year from now to take a different approach--to look at public-private partnerships and other methods--so we simply don't get in the position where we have thousands and thousands and thousands of earmarks that mean we have a bill that we can't fund and where we will again be robbing from the general fund to fund these projects.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment is noncontroversial. I assume it will be accepted by the other side. It's similar to an amendment that was offered earlier this year on an unrelated bill.

The amendment simply seeks to ensure that the competitive grant program established and authorized by this bill does not become a vehicle to be earmarked later. I am not alleging that there are any earmarks in this bill; there are not. There's simply a competitive grant program established.

My fear is that later on that this grant--that is a competitive grant and it was based on merit for those who apply--will be later earmarked, as has happened in other legislation.

My amendment to H.R. 1338, The Paycheck Fairness Act is a common sense amendment that would simply prohibit the earmarking of funds authorized by this bill for a new grant program.

In section five of the legislation, a new grant program is created to carry out programs to train girls and women in negotiating tactics.

This new grant program is explicitly authorized in the legislation to make grants on a competitive basis to eligible entities. I offer this amendment simply as a precaution in order to avoid future earmarking.

Earlier this year, a similar amendment was approved by the House of Representatives during consideration of the Beach Act of 2007 by a vote of 263 to 117.

When it comes to earmarking, the message is clear: just because Congress hasn't earmarked an account or a grant program before doesn't mean we won't in the future. My amendment makes no substantive change to the grant program included in the legislation and is simply offered as a safeguard against future earmarking.

Judging by the nearly four and a half billion dollars worth of earmarks that have been reported out of the Committee on Appropriations this summer, it appears that, even with all the talk of earmark reform this year, it's business as usual.

Unfortunately, when it comes to earmarking, business as usual means Congressional earmarks showing up in programs and accounts that never used to have them.

The worst example of this is the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill.

Kept relatively earmark-free from its inception in order to keep politics out of spending decisions, the earmarking truce was broken when the 2008 omnibus spending bill contained 128 earmarks worth more than $400 million in Homeland Security funding.

Included were 95 earmarks for the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program, a competitive grant program with a 70-page guidance document for grant applicants that had not previously been earmarked.

If the Fiscal Year 2009 Homeland Security appropriations bill approved by committee becomes law, then the earmarking of the Pre- Disaster Mitigation Program will continue with nearly 25 million dollars, or one third of the program funds, already having been spent by Members earmarking funds for their own districts.

Emergency Operations Centers funding is another example of earmarks encroaching into a previously non-earmarked program.

Created last year by Congress, fifteen million earmark-free dollars were appropriated, to be awarded through a formula-based grant program for the ``equipping, upgrading, and constructing of Emergency Operations Centers.''

This year's Homeland Security appropriations bill proposes increasing Emergency Operations Center funding to 35 million dollars--but also would earmark nearly sixty percent of this funding by including 34 earmarks worth more than 21 million dollars.

Unfortunately, these examples of earmarking competitive programs are not lone cases. Another example is a program funded through the Department of Housing and Urban Development called the Economic Development Initiative.

This program started in 1994 as a competitive program with strict selection-based criteria to assist with low-income housing and neighborhood development. Over time, the program became a prime target for earmarkers and, by 2000, the competitive program was not funded and the program was entirely made up of earmarks.

A similar story can be told about the Byrne Discretionary Grant program. This program was established in 2006 as a competitive grant program where awards are to be evaluated by a peer review system and other review processes. Allegedly, the program has remained that way, however, the agency that administers the program still calls it a competitive program but the account was heavily earmarked last year and it appears that earmarking has been adopted as the standard operating practice.

In fact, should the Commerce Justice and Science Committee Report approved by the Appropriations become law, there will be 280 earmarks for the Byrne Discretionary Grant account, alone.

The message is clear: just because we haven't earmarked an account or a grant program before doesn't mean we won't in the future.

With few opportunity this session to deal directly with the broken earmarking process, the least we can do is explicitly prohibit earmarks in programs or accounts that provide funding on a formula or competitive basis.

I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment.

With that, I would like to ask if this amendment will be accepted by the other side and reserve the balance of my time.

Let me just comment and thank the majority for accepting this and also thank the Rules Committee for making this amendment in order. I've offered this same amendment on a number of authorization bills over the past couple of months, and it has not been made in order. So I appreciate the fact, and whatever influence the gentleman from California had on the Rules Committee to make this important amendment in order, I appreciate.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, this is really a simple amendment. It simply says that all earmarks in this bill will be taken out. This is consistent with the Republican budget that was passed. So I'd remind my colleagues on this side of the aisle that you have already voted, in essence, for this amendment. We passed a budget which said that we should have a moratorium on earmarks this year. That's what this amendment would do with regard to this bill. It would simply say that there would be no earmarks, Republican or Democratic, for this legislation. Now, supporters of earmarks will often say that this will lead to a more Democratic allocation of Federal resources and funds, but I'd like to draw your attention to a chart here.

This is the MilCon bill that we're looking at right here. If you took the dollar amount of the earmarks in this legislation, which is just north of $600 million, and spread it evenly across all House districts, it would mean about $1.4 million across each district in this country, but that, obviously, is not what we have in this legislation.

If you'll look, the majority leadership is associated with an average of $6.2 million in earmarks in this legislation. That's about four times the average of rank-and-file Members in the House. Vulnerable Members, so-called vulnerables, identified by each party receive $7.7 million, or associated with that much, in earmarks. That is, I think, four or five times more than the rank-and-file Member. If you're on the Appropriations Committee, you get about $10.5 million. Now, that's about, I think, seven times as much as a rank-and-file Member in this body will get.

So I guess you could make the argument or try to make the argument that those military installations or those facilities across this country that happen to be in districts represented by an appropriator are more needy or are somehow in greater need of Federal funds than those facilities located in rank-and-file Members' districts. I don't think you could make that argument with a straight face. You simply can't. This is consistent with bill after bill after bill.

Unfortunately, this is likely to be the only appropriations bill that we have this session. We're not likely to get to the others, so this is our only chance to actually speak up and say that we know that this process isn't working very well and that we have to fix it.

There has been a lot of talk about earmark reform over the last couple of years, as well there should have been, both when we have controlled this body and when those across the aisle have controlled it, but very little has changed, and this chart shows it. Very little has changed. It is very much a spoil system. It's not a system where-- I'm sure we'll be told in just a few minutes--these earmarks were vetted by the Pentagon and that this is a different process than we have for other bills, but let me tell you:

Did the Pentagon vet this process and say, ``You know, we think that those who are in appropriators' districts deserve seven times more than those who are in a rank-and-file district''? I don't think the Pentagon went through that vetting process.

Now, if we don't like the way that the administration and the Pentagon award Federal grants--and I agree there may be problems with it--let's exercise the oversight that we're supposed to exercise in this body. Under article I, we have the power of the purse, and we should conduct oversight, but simply saying ``we don't like the way the administration allocates funds, so we're going to pile on 130 earmarks in this bill, as skewed as the allocation will be, and somehow we'll fix it'' is not an appropriate way to do it, and we know it. We know that this process is broken. Yet we're continuing this year, just like in other years, and we can't continue to go on.

Let me just bring that chart out again. Again, what we have is, if the money were to be spread out among districts, it would be about an allocation of $1.4 million. Instead, we have up here those facilities in appropriators' districts that receive seven times more than others. That's simply not right. There is no way you can make with a straight face an argument that those districts, that those facilities in those districts, somehow need more Federal funds. There is no way with a straight face you can make the argument that this hasn't become a spoil system where we're doling out by favor to just those who are in a powerful position. That's what this process has become, and we should stand up today and say, by golly, we're going to fix it, that we're going to do something different for a change, that we're going to vote until we can fix this process, until we can say we have a sound process where these earmarks are vetted either in the Appropriations Committee or elsewhere, and that we're just not going to continue with this anymore.

Let me tell you that this institution has had as its hallmark over the centuries the process of authorization, appropriation and oversight. We have short-circuited that process with earmarking, the contemporary practice of earmarking in particular. So we do too little authorizing, very little oversight and simply too much appropriating. When you deal with, as the Appropriations Committee did last year, I think, 36,000 earmark requests, there is absolutely no way that this body can adequately vet those earmark requests, let alone exercise oversight over the rest of the Federal budget as is our purview and as we should be doing.

So I would appeal to the Members both on this side and on the other side of the aisle. Let's fix this system before we go on. A great way to do it is to say let's adopt this amendment and say we'll have no earmarks in this bill this year until we can come up with a better process.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the words that have been spoken. I appreciate the passion of those who are defending the bill as it is.

And let me just say this is not my favorite bill to come and propose earmark amendments to. Not at all. But this is the only chance we have got. I'd love to come here with Labor-HHS. I'm glad that the chairman of the Appropriations Committee mentioned that there are a couple of bills where earmarks are legitimate, but maybe for the rest they're not. I have heard him say before that when he left as chairman in 1994, there were no earmarks in the Labor-HHS bill; yet today I think last year there were close to 2,000. There were a couple of years, I know, and we are not breaking that trend very much. And we are likely to see that again later this year, but we won't have an opportunity to come to the floor and debate that. It's likely to be stuffed into an omnibus bill and we take it or leave it with no vetting whatsoever. At least here we have a chance on one bill to point out the flaws in the system, and the flaws I pointed out.

The gentleman from Texas made a great point. He said that not all wisdom resides with the executive, that somebody in a basement somewhere in some Federal office hasn't had some epiphany about how to spend money. I accept that completely. But it stands to reason as well that some lowly rank-and-file Member who is getting an average of $1.4 million in this bill doesn't have any less knowledge than a vulnerable Member, a Member who is in a swing district, in a tough district, in a tough race. Does that somehow imbue you with some knowledge about how much money would be spent in the MilCon bill or if you're on the Appropriations Committee? And it may not be. These numbers may be off a little. I accept that. It's not perfect. But how in the world with a straight face can you say this is not a spoils system, this has not become a spoils system?

I yield to the gentleman.

I am so glad he mentioned that. That may be the case. I'm not sure. That may well be.

My largest complaint with the earmark process is not what we spent in the waste in some bills, maybe not in this one, maybe in others, a lot in others. My biggest complaint has always been with the earmark process; that we, as Members of Congress, give up our authority under article I because we ignore, with our zeal to earmark 2 percent or 1 percent of the Federal budget, we have basically called a truce with the administration saying we will ignore your willy-nilly spending if you ignore ours.

So we let bills like the Department of Homeland Security bill, $32 billion, very little of it earmarked, but so much of it wasted because we are so intent on earmarking our little portion that we just don't do the oversight that we're supposed to do under article I, and you can look at empirically, anecdotally, any way you look at it.

I commissioned the GAO awhile ago to look at the Appropriations Committee, since 1994, since the contemporary practice of earmarking really got started, under Republicans. I concede that. And if you look at the number of witnesses called, the number of hearings held, any way you slice it or dice it, we aren't doing the oversight that we once did, since the contemporary practice of earmarking started. And I would submit that that's true across the board. But if you look specifically at this bill, there is no way that you can say that this isn't a spoils system.

When facilities residing in appropriators' districts get about seven times as much. Maybe it's six. Maybe it's five. Maybe it's eight. But with that kind of average, something is wrong. And that's what we are saying here. We have got to fix this system. We should fix it before we move on.

I appreciate the gentleman from California (Mr. Campbell) for the work that he has done and for cosponsoring this amendment and for those who have spoken on it. And I would just say again this is our only chance. This looks like this is it for the year to actually have a voice on earmarks and to say enough is enough, it's time to change the process.

So I urge my colleagues to accept the amendment, and I appreciate the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Offered By: Mr. Flake

Amendment No. 4: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following:

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

This Congress, more than anything else, I think is being defined as the ``bailout Congress.'' We're going to be bailing out the housing industry to the tune of billions and billions and billions of dollars later today. And before we get to that, we're going to be bailing out the highway trust fund to the tune of $8 billion.

Let me just remind Members that the TEA-LU, the last highway authorization bill, the bill with the infamous Bridge to Nowhere in it, contains 6,300 earmarks. Many of these earmarks were for museums, bypasses, trollies, parking facilities, landscaping, recreational facilities, highway beautification, street scaping, hiking trails and visitor centers. Billions and billions of dollars went to these items. And yet we are going to be taking $8 billion from the highway trust fund. If you start doing that, Katy bar the door on projects like these that have run rampant already and will continue to.

Now we have billions of dollars that have been unobligated, that have not yet been obligated. We should take that funding from those earmarks, from many of those 6,300 earmarks that have not been obligated, and apply it to this funding shortfall instead of robbing the general fund. Once we start robbing the general fund for these projects, Katy bar the door. We simply won't stop. This is a bad thing to do. We shouldn't reauthorize this.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, the famed economist Milton Friedman once said that the government's solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem itself. I think that that is certainly applicable here today.

When we had the housing bill up for debate a few months ago, I had a bit of a dialogue with the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. I had mentioned that he had appropriately and often excoriated Republicans when we would lavish corporate subsidies on private interests there, when we didn't live up to our belief in the principle of capitalism. I think that was sometimes deserving.

But here is a gentleman that certainly understands the free market and understands that this bill has moral hazard written all over it. We are pretending to chain a monster here, and we are, instead, letting that monster loose.

The competitive advantages that Freddie and Fannie have had over the past several years, with an implicit government guarantee, which many people have tried to tell us who have wanted GSE reform for so long did not really exist, that taxpayers were really not on the hook. Well, that implicit guarantee today is made explicit.

Can you imagine the competitive advantage going forward that Fannie and Freddie will have over their competitors when you have an explicit guarantee rather than an implicit guarantee? This is simply the wrong way to go. If we wanted to tailor something that dealt with GSEs, both with ensuring that they are solvent but making sure that the taxpayers aren't put in this position again, that would be one thing. This bill does not do that. We are unchaining a monster here, and we are making the situation far worse.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to highlight an earmark in the fiscal 2009 Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. Now, the reason I'm having to do this is that it looks like we won't even be considering this bill on the floor, and therefore, it may be that all of the earmarks, the hundreds of earmarks that were approved in the committee for that bill, may be dumped into the bill, just air-dropped into the bill, at the last minute without even being considered by the House. That's simply not right.

This earmark is for the Kentucky-based National Institute for Hometown Security. When I came across this earmark, I was surprised at the dollar amount. In fact, it was the second largest earmark requested by an individual in the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill. Now, I would submit that spending like this pushes the Federal Treasury threat level past orange, or high risk, right into the red zone, or severe category.

According to the Web site of the earmark recipient, the institute sponsor suggested organizing the higher education institutions of Kentucky to more effectively compete for research funds and projects aimed at improving homeland security. It appears that the purpose of the consortium and of the institute is to make Kentucky better at receiving Federal funds, arguably an admirable purpose. It's simply too bad that it's paid for with Federal funds.

The institute goes on to say that the institute is designed to help develop new technologies and devices that commercialize them. Now, with taxpayers shouldering over $5 trillion in Federal debt, why do we need to fund programs for the benefit of commercializing products?

This institute was created in 2004. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency which is charged with overseeing this, the Department has never requested funds for the National Institute for Hometown Security. Why are we doing this through an earmark?

I must ask the question: Would this institute exist in the first place if select members of a powerful committee did not direct the spending for it?

Since receiving its first earmark, the institute has received more than $60 million in Federal earmarks, including $12 million in 2005, $20 million in 2006, $20 million in 2007, $11 million in 2008. If this earmark is approved, the institute will have received $74 million in earmark funding. For what? What has the center produced or achieved that can possibly be worth this kind of money? Will we continue to earmark for this institute indefinitely?

I am certain, if I had the opportunity to challenge this earmark on the House floor during regular order, the sponsor might be glad to highlight what he believes the institute's achievements are. My response would simply be: If this institute is so important, if it's so needed for the Department of Homeland Security, why do you have to earmark funding for it? Why doesn't the Department seek its own funding and say this is a vital institute? ``We ought to provide funding within the budget. We're going to request it.'' No. The money has to be earmarked by an appropriator.

In 2005, a Washington Post story provided details on the institute. It indicated that the sponsor of the earmark has, as a senior appropriator, ``encouraged contractors to move into his district and has announced millions of dollars in antiterrorism research at Kentucky colleges and universities.''

That same article highlighted the sponsor's having taken credit for $206 million in homeland security research-related funding for the State. The Post article indicated: ``So much Federal money for high- tech homeland security projects has flowed to southeastern Kentucky, that those who are there have taken to calling it `Silicon Holler' with the institute and the university consortium at the heart of it.''

I would submit that handling this funding in any other way than through earmarks might put a damper on what appears to be a spoil system where certain powerful Members are able to shower their districts with taxpayer dollars. If we had regular order and a regular authorization-appropriation oversight process, we wouldn't be earmarking funds like this.

I would inquire also as to what, if any, oversight the Appropriations Committee has undertaken to ensure that the $60 million that has already been given to the institute was worthwhile and why an additional $11 million is warranted.

I would submit also that, when taxpayers send their dollars to Washington, they expect more than an earmarking system that is absent real oversight and that seems to just give the keys to the Treasury to a few powerful appropriators.

Mr. Speaker, I will soon be circulating a letter to Speaker Pelosi and to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Mr. Obey, asking them to ensure that if we don't have regular order and if we don't go through the appropriations process that we not air-drop earmarks into an omnibus bill when this body has not had a chance to even see them, let alone to adequately vet them.

I urge my colleagues to do better with the taxpayers' money. We should be better stewards. We have a time-honored process in this body of authorization, appropriation and oversight

that we have been ignoring for years, and the taxpayers are the worse for it. We cannot continue to do that. This institution is a better body than that, and we ought to give more respect to it.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule. I understand there was an amendment adopted in committee that struck all of the earmarks in the bill. I applaud this. It's a great day when we decide that the Intelligence Authorization Bill is not the place to put secretive earmarks. So that was, indeed, a good thing.

I should also mention that the committee also prohibited $39 million from going from the National Drug Intelligence Center. This is a center that has been in need of closing down for years. The administration says that the NDIC has proven ineffective in achieving its assigned mission. Yet it still receives money every year, not because it's effective, not because it does anything that the other drug centers do--there are some 19 of them, I believe, that are already in existence, and it simply duplicates some of those efforts--but because there is a powerful appropriator who continues to make sure that that center is funded.

What I wanted to do was to have an amendment here where we could make certain that the NDIC was not funded in any portion of this bill, not just the earmarks in the unclassified version, but to make sure that funding did not go again to the NDIC. That amendment was not allowed.

We really need to tighten this up, Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned. This is a center that the administration has said for years needs to be closed. We know it. The administration knows it. Yet we have a powerful appropriator who ensures that money continues to flow, not because the Nation needs it but simply because we can do it, and that's not a good enough reason.

So I would urge us to reject the rule and to come back with a rule that allows meaningful amendments to be debated here.

I will speak for a minute and then refer to a few charts.

Today, Mr. Speaker, I rise to draw attention to earmarks contained in the Homeland Security appropriations bill. We may not even have any appropriations bills on the floor this year. What may happen is that we will simply do a continuing resolution in September and then sometime in January do a big omnibus bill, and all of the earmarks, the thousands and thousands and thousands of earmarks that have been put into the bills through the appropriations process that have never been to the floor, will simply be approved with one vote. So it behooves us to do what we can to actually highlight what some of these earmarks are. Now, we know some of the earmarks that are in the Homeland Security bill, and we hope that it comes to the floor. It likely will not, so we'll talk about one of them here.

Mr. Speaker, there is in the Homeland Security bill something called the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program. Now, this has not traditionally been earmarked in the Homeland Security bill. It only started last year. Last year and this year, we have earmarked some $75 million total for this account. Now, in this account, some $500,000 was earmarked for Westchester and Rockland Counties in New York for pre-disaster mitigation earmarks. This comes on the heels of the same counties getting about $1 million last year.

Now, New York State has its share of disasters. I think there were 21 Presidential disaster declarations over the past 10 years, but there were just as many in other States, other States that had to go through the regular process whereby grants were awarded on the basis of merit rather than on the basis of: Do we have an appropriator? Do we have a high-level Member of leadership who can get us an earmark for some of these programs?

For example, in parts of Oklahoma, they had 20 disaster areas declared in the last 10 years. Yet Oklahoma hasn't received a dime in earmark funding in this bill. They must not have an appropriator here.

We often endlessly hear that Members of Congress know their districts better than some faceless bureaucrat; that's why they've got to earmark, but let me ask: Does a member of the Appropriations Committee or a Member of leadership know his district better than a rank and file Member? Because the former are getting most of the earmarks at the expense of the latter.

Let me refer to this chart. On this chart, in the last 2 years, for pre-disaster mitigation earmarks in the Homeland Security bill, rank and file Members have gotten about 37 percent of the earmarks. Here, appropriators and other highly ranked Members have gotten 63 percent. Of the $75 million total, 63 percent of the earmarks are received by just 27 percent of the Members in this body.

Now, again, do those 27 percent know their districts better than others? I would suggest not. It's just that they're in a position to get these earmarks. So all of this hifalutin language about, you know, ``we know our districts'' means just this: ``I'm in a position to get money for my district at the expense of others whether or not there's a Federal nexus, whether or not there's a real need.''

Let me just point out that, in terms of Westchester and Rockland Counties, out of all of the thousands of counties in the country, only 11 were wealthier than Westchester County in New York. Does Westchester County really need $500,000 in pre-disaster mitigation earmarks at the expense of some poor county somewhere else in the country? This earmarking, as we all know, has gotten completely, completely out of control.

Let me just go to a couple of other charts. One of the other often used justifications for earmarks is that we as the legislative branch have the power of the purse. Article I gives us the power of the purse. That is certainly true. That is often taken as justification for doing the earmarking that we currently do, for the contemporary practice of earmarking. Well, at my request, I asked CRS to actually look and see what the Appropriations Committee has been doing over the past several years as the practice of earmarking has really grown.

As you can see, from the 104th Congress to the 109th Congress, this is the line here. This is earmarking. We've gone from about 1,500 earmarks up to nearly 10,000 just on this chart, but when you look at the number of witnesses called before the Appropriations Committee for a hearing to actually look at what we're spending, that line goes down. That line is in the blue.

So what we're seeing is that, as earmarking has grown, real oversight has declined any way you look at it. If you want to look at numbers of witnesses, some people will say, well, you can't tell everything from that. I concede that.

So let's look at the number of days of hearings. Here in the blue, from the 104th Congress to the 109th, we've had a decline in the number of days of hearings, yet a huge increase in earmarking.

Keep in mind that another justification for earmarking is people will say, well, that only represents about 2 percent of the Federal budget. We ought to really worry about the rest of the budget, not just earmarking. Well, that's true. We should worry about the rest of the budget, but because of earmarking, we simply aren't.

Now, I would suggest the reason that there are fewer days of hearings and that the reason the number of witnesses has declined and that also the number of survey and investigation staff reports has declined as earmarks have grown is we simply don't have the time or the resources or the inclination, frankly, on the Appropriations Committee to actually do real oversight.

So, for getting just a couple percentage points of all of the Federal spending designated to earmarks, we really give up the power of the purse that we have. That's why we've seen other spending, all discretionary spending, grow by leaps and bounds as we've had earmarking go up; we simply don't look at the rest of the spending.

We all know that the party that is now in the majority has made a lot of hay over the past couple of years that, in this Congress, there was a culture of corruption. If that were the case, certainly earmarks were the currency of corruption. That continues. It simply opens up too many opportunities when Members of Congress can without real oversight write checks to people from home, either to campaign contributors or to constituent groups or to anybody. Unless we really come on the floor and do real oversight, this is going to happen. When you have a process like it looks like we're going to have this year where we don't even have appropriations bills on the floor where we can challenge these earmarks, these earmarks go unchallenged.

That, Mr. Speaker, I think, is certainly unacceptable. This body deserves better. We have a great and storied institution here, and we have a time-honored process of authorization, appropriation and oversight. We have skirted that for the past several years. Those in power now might point out, from the 104th Congress to the 109th, that was all under Republican rule. That is true. But the trend has not changed since we've had the new majority.

Mr. Speaker, every year now we hear a lot of high-minded rhetoric about earmarks and how earmarks represent Congress' Article I authority, that we earmark in Congress because we have the power of the purse and we are simply exercising that power.

But the reality belies that claim. Let me talk about one earmark tonight that will give just an example of how this high-minded rhetoric that we often hear is so wrong.

We may not even get appropriation bills on the floor this year. We may not have any. It may be that we simply do a continuing resolution to fund appropriations for the next fiscal year; and then in January have a big omnibus bill and all of the earmarks, the thousands that have been put as part of the bill that we haven't even seen on the House floor, will be dumped into the bill.

So all we can do, I guess, is come to the floor in a forum like this when we are not even officially challenging the earmarks, but to highlight what a waste some of these earmarks are.

This earmark that I want to talk about tonight is $200,000 in funding for the Advantage West Economic Development Group's Certified Entrepreneurial Community Program in North Carolina. There are a number of earmarks similar to this in the Labor-HHS bill which we won't see later this year. These are funds set aside for economic development, business incubators and workforce programs.

I would never argue, nor would any of us in our campaign literature, that this is a proper role and function of government. Yet we see time and again earmark after earmark to fund these kinds of programs.

This is not the first time I have challenged an earmark for this specific group. In fact, last year I came to the floor and argued that this group need not have Federal funds to carry out its objective. I say this because Advantage West Economic Development Group's Website has a long list of corporate sponsors, including BB&T, BellSouth, Qualcomm, Sprint, UBS, Verizon and Wachovia. In addition to more than 80 corporate sponsors listed, the group also counts the National Park Service, National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Commerce as ``funding partners.''

On top of that, the group received a $282,000 earmark in last year's appropriation bill.

So why in the world, Mr. Speaker, with so much financial support coming here should this group receive an additional subsidy? It simply makes no sense at all.

I think that we ought to mention here, as was mentioned in the July 9 issue of Roll Call, that we often hear that earmarks are given out because Members know their districts much better than faceless bureaucrats in some department.

But why is it, then, if there is such a noble purpose for earmarks, and the Members are simply knowing their district and getting these districts, why is

there such a disproportionate allocation of earmarks? Why are so many going to leadership or so-called vulnerable Members on one side.

Why are earmarks given out to Members who are at risk of losing their election? According to a Roll Call article just a few days ago, it said that ``Sixteen Democrats in the `Frontline' program, aimed at protecting the 29 most vulnerable House Democrats, secured $810,000 worth of earmarks each'' in the Labor-HHS bill. This is not a one-sided effort. It's not just the Democrats, it's my party as well.

The article went on to say, ``Among the 23 Republican incumbents participating in the `Regain Our Majority Program' this cycle, 14 secured $900,000 or more in the Labor-HHS bill.

``Twelve of those--the Republicans pulled down $1 million or more in the CJS bill, with 8 of them securing $1.5 million each.''

Again, why is it, after we hear all this lofty rhetoric about earmarks, because we know our constituents best, why is it that the only ones that really know their constituents best are those who are at risk of not being re-elected back to this body? It simply doesn't make sense. It cheapens this institution. We are a better institution than that, and we should, we should respect this institution more than that and respect taxpayers' money more than that.

Also, another reason that's often given for earmarks is that we need to provide oversight. Earmarking is a way to provide oversight, because, after all, we know better than those bureaucrats on how to spend money.

I asked the Congressional Research Service to do a little research to see where the actual oversight in Congress has gone since the contemporary practice of earmarking has really started in the mid- 1990s. If you look at the 104th Congress, we just had--not very many earmarks. By the time we got to the 109th Congress, we were up around, I think, the final numbers were about 15,000 earmarks. Yet the oversight hearings actually go down. That's not a legitimate reason for earmarking.

Madam Speaker, today, the House will take up an extension of the Federal Aviation Administration's authorization. Unfortunately, this bill is more than it seems. It contains an $8 billion bailout for the Highway Trust Fund. Now, for years, we've known that the Highway Trust Fund didn't have sufficient money, that it was losing its purchasing power. In fact, that was a concern going into the 2005 highway bill reauthorization. But what did we do?

We not only took no action to shore it up or to do things differently; we approved more than three times as many earmarks as there were in the last highway reauthorization. So now, here we are 3 years later, about a year before our next reauthorization, and we're out of money to cover the projects that we've authorized.

Now, I would submit that the action contained in this bill is the most irresponsible thing we can do. We're transferring $8 billion from the general fund into the Highway Trust Fund. As we've known, as we've seen, when Members have the ability to earmark funds from an account, they do so. We did so to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in the highway authorization bill the last time, including the bridge to nowhere and 6,300 other earmarks. If we move additional moneys from the general fund into the Highway Trust Fund, then Katy bar the door when it comes to spending. We simply cannot keep a lid on it.

I'm just wondering: When are we going to take up the tough choices? It seems like every time we come to a point when we simply don't have money in the account we simply increase the deficit more and more. We're finding the easy way out. There are options available to us. I will offer amendments wherever I can to take money from the earmarks that haven't been spent, money that we know is not priority spending, and shore up the Highway Trust Fund so that we don't have to move general fund moneys into this account. We simply can't do that. We can't start the process of taking general fund moneys and shoring up the Highway Trust Fund when we know that we can't control our spending appetite when it comes to earmarks. I urge my colleagues to oppose this irresponsible bailout.

Another thing that is objectionable: We're doing this on the suspension calendar. That's my understanding today. The suspension calendar is meant as a vehicle to name post offices or to honor sports teams or to do things that are noncontroversial. Yet here we're transferring $8 billion from the general fund to bail out the Highway Trust Fund. Under rules of suspension, that simply doesn't seem right. That is not responsible legislating. It wouldn't be responsible if Republicans did it in the majority. It's not responsible when Democrats do it.

I urge my colleagues to oppose it. Let's find time to actually take a stand for the taxpayers and say enough is enough. We cannot continue to spend money this way.